Little Miss Giggles

Building Walls

18/12/2009 at 11:18 am | In All-things God, Speeches | Leave a Comment

A few months back I gave the children’s talk up the front of Church, and although my lesson on Nehemiah was aimed at three to seven year olds, I think there are lots of lessons we can learn from him as well. Unjustly overlooked, Nehemiah was an amazing person with awesome character!

Nehemiah was obedient. He knew God had put something on his heart (that is to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem and the well being of the people of Israel). He was determined to obey God. It meant he had to leave his well-paying cup bearer job in Persia to fulfill a seemingly impossible task back in Jerusalem.

Nehemiah was also courageous because he was faced with many problems that threatened to thwart his plans. First of all he lacked resources (the time and the people) to build the wall. The Jews had been captives to the Persians and Babylonians for 70 years and although they were now free to go back to their home land many still remained. This means that Jerusalem had practically no-one living there for such a long time. Nehemiah also needed some good quality materials for his project – where were they going to come from? The Persian King had given Nehemiah thirteen years to rebuild the wall before he had to come back to his court. Even with thirteen years, Nehemiah was going to be pushing it! Then the final straw – Sanballat the Horonite was on the verge of declaring war!

Despite the odds Nehemiah had a plan. After praying to God and seeking His protection and strength, Nehemiah had every man available simply rebuild the wall outside his own house. That was it. Sounds pretty simple, hey? Yet because that is what each family did and because God was on their side, they finished that incredible wall in a record of 52 days. In other words, they built a three-chariot wide, enormous wall in less than two months! (See Nehemiah 6:15)

Every time we read a Bible story, there is something we can learn from it. From Nehemiah’s story we can learn that there is an enemy trying to get into our heart; except instead of being called Sanballat, his name is Sin. As sinners, we let sin get into our heart, but when we decide to follow Christ we need to build ourselves a wall against sin. If we focus on building ourselves a wall around our heart, just focusing on our own heart, we can stand firm against the battle and be prepared to do whatever God has in store for us.

So how are you going to build a wall? That answer will lie when you click the ‘comment’ button and share how you do it.

Originally posted at Growing in Grace Online. Slightly altered from the original post.

Black and white image edited by me from our trusty History through the Ages CD ROM

Me and Organisationalism

11/12/2009 at 2:37 pm | In Organizing | 1 Comment
Tags: cleaning, Organizing, The weather, Work

As I was blitzing today, I found a small magazine from Howards Storage World, with this section of the ad on the back. Delighted am I! This makes me smile, and reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by the poetical Winnie-the-Pooh:

“Organization is what you do before you do something so that when you do it it’s not all muddled up.”

I quote this at every chance I get!

Today we spent the morning shopping for the weekend and cleaning up the house. I planned to clean our dirty windows, but when the start of a near 21mls of rain literally pelted down, I temporarily dismissed the idea. Hopefully Mum or I will get them clean during the weekend. When close family friends of ours left this week, we were blessed with their dryer, which means no more mere survival of clothes during the wet, when the rain is constantly pouring and the sky has turned gray. Yippee!!

Which reminds me, I will have to post sometime about Josh’s desk clean up renovation-event. Paper lay everywhere, in all directions, without any sense of purpose or order – until I volunteered to change that for him, as he obviously wasn’t in to much hurry to change it! Here’s a preview:

So without further adue, I leave you to continue my pursuit of a blitzed and clean house! (and you can rest assured that I will post about blitzing one of these days!)

My Mum and Dad

02/12/2009 at 12:52 pm | In Our family, photos | 3 Comments
Tags: Dad, Mum, photos

“…The glory of children are their parents.”

- Proverbs 17:6b

So We Don’t Have to Work

28/11/2009 at 9:18 am | In All-things God, Reading | 4 Comments
Tags: farm, God, Little House books, Reading, technology, The good ole days, Work

“Almanzo asked Father why he did not hire the machine that did threshing. Three men had brought it into the country last fall, and Father had gone to see it. It would thresh a man’s whole grain crop in a couple of days.

‘That’s a lazy man’s way to thresh,’ Father said. ‘Haste makes waste, but a lazy man’d rather get his work done fast than do it himself. That machine chews up all the straw till it’s not fit to feed stock, and it scatters grain around and wastes it.

‘ All it saves is time son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?”

- Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, pages 307/308

After reading the book Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder recently, I came away with a renewed realization of the work ethic from her time (late 1800’s). In my world, I have many labour-saving devices and luxuries right at my fingertips – literally! Right at this moment I hear the click of the laptop’s keyboard; without computers schoolwork would take much longer. Phones allow us to call our friends at any given moment – today it is a common piece of household furniture; in their time, you were envied to have such a comfort, if you knew what it actually was. Food processors, mobile phones, fridges, freezers, microwaves, the TV, and ATM’s are all part of our zooming, moving world, and yet, thousands of people, the ancestors of our families and our countries, lived and thrived without these comforts.

Today, are we so focused on saving time so we don’t have to work that we don’t want to work? In Almanzo’s time (the main character in Farmer Boy), his father taught him that work is healthy and good, and is, as a farmer, what you do. Working is how you spend your days, from before sunup until after sundown. A man or woman who puts in a hard and full days’ work has nothing to be ashamed of.

I want to be a person who is diligent, responsible and has a hard work ethic; willing to get my hands dirty and get tired from working. God intended us to fill our days with work (Genesis 2:15). Are we running away from it?

How To Clean Stuff!

23/11/2009 at 6:48 pm | In Announcements, events, links, cleaning | 4 Comments

Today Mum sent me an email, titled, ‘You’ve got to check this out; you’ll be in heaven!” I opened the email, unsure as to what the email contained (with a title like that, you never know). I was pleasantly surprised to find this link…

http://www.howtocleanstuff.net

I am looking forward to checking this out more and having it as a resource. I used their search engine to search for ‘CD’s’ and it came up with four different posts on CD’s; I checked one out about scratched CD’s - who would have thought peanut butter would help of all things?!

We have several a lot of CD”s from a friend who moved away which we aren’t raving about, so I think I’ll try out the {smooth!} peanut butter idea on them before moving on to more precious ones! Sounds impressive to me – go check it out!

Have you tried any great home cleaning remedies lately? How have they worked out for you? If you have a problem, check out how to clean stuff; it might just hold the answer to your predicament!

I wish I had a mango!

18/11/2009 at 6:45 pm | In My life, photos | 6 Comments
Tags: Dad, Daniel, Family projects, farm, Josh, Mangoes, Me, Nomi, photos

Mango season is just about finished up here. Our farm has roughly 100 mango trees on it, so we pick a lot of mangoes each year, to eat, give away to friends, eat, dehydrate, eat and freeze to last us the rest of the year! This year we also sent some down to poor mango-deprived sellers in Perth, which is something us kids had never been involved in much before. It meant careful picking and sorting (sellers don’t want stained mangoes – if it were me I wouldn’t care – just give me the inside fruit!), cutting the stem to a centimeter long, polishing them with a cloth and packing into boxes on time to be driven down to Perth. Because we sent down 1 1/2 pallets of mangoes, as well as enough for us, we picked more than our normal amount.

In fact, Joshua reckons we picked… 1500 mangoes! That’s one thousand, five hundred mangoes; fiteen hundred!

It would appear that I am such a good catch that I can catch with my eyes closed.

We use long cutters to get the mangoes right up the top

Watch how it’s done!

The pro with over fifteen years experience on mango picking

Sometimes we get up high on the inside of the tree – just as Joshua is doing.
I’m below catching!

Cleaning and cutting the stems off the mangoes we packed to send down to Perth

It Would Be Total Chaos

15/11/2009 at 9:35 am | In Speeches | 2 Comments

The whole confusion started when a Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, asked, “’Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’ …

` I believe I can guess that,’ Alice [decided] aloud.

`Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?’ said the March Hare.

`Exactly so,’ said Alice.

`Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.

`I do,’ Alice hastily replied; `at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.’

`Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’

`You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, `that “I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”!’

`You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that “I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as “I sleep when I breathe”!’”

George Bernard Shaw, a play writer, critic and political activist, mentioned of the Bible: “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.” At first glance it sounds as confusing as Alice’s conversation with the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse, but upon reflection is a statement worth analyzing. Basically Shaw believed that the Bible was not an authority, but could be changed to build whatever man wanted to believe. Saying such a thing of the Bible, the foundation of my Christian faith, deserves close examination before tolerating a statement with so many consequences.

Luke chapter four tells us the story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan. After trying two times to persuade Jesus to submit to him, Satan uses Psalm 91:11 and 12 to tempt Jesus into jumping off a cliff, knowing that God would send his angels to protect Jesus, even though that wasn’t what the Psalmist was actually meaning. Unfortunately for Satan Jesus didn’t fall for the trick, because He knew that the Psalmists real meaning in that chapter was that God would protect those who love Him, which is exactly what God was doing for Jesus at that time. From this story we can learn that twisting the scriptures out of context is wrong, because it does not line up with what God has already written and established to true for all time..

Similarly, we cannot change the Bible to suit our needs because as author and ultimate authority over the world, God has established the way we are to live in the Bible. If we could change the Bible, there would be no rules or law, and there would be no right or wrong, for it is in the Bible where we learn to discern these things, and we could simply mix and match the Bible to please the itching desires of our sinful nature.

Our old pastor once told the story of a man who opened the Bible to a random place, and randomly picked a verse. He came up with ‘Judas went and hung himself’. Hoping for a more pleasant conclusion, he once again randomly selected a verse and looking down at it, read, “Go therefore and do likewise”.

Obviously, God doesn’t want us to commit suicide, for the very reason Jesus died was so that we didn’t have to carry the burden of our sin and can have hope. It is a contradiction! If we could mix n match the Bible, the Bible would support complete destruction and utter havoc, allowing us to hate and murder one another. As a holy God of love and peace, He simply cannot allow those things into His will for us, therefore the theory of random Biblical study, fails.

As Christians, we are sinners, saved only by grace. We have stepped out of the darkness and into the light, trading our filthy rags for beautiful robes. Through our new love for God, we choose to learn how God would have us live. Several times the Bible says that God uses the Bible to teach and correct us, which consequently means we no longer adhere to today’s’ sinful standard, but God’s high expectations and love. Galatians 5:16 and 17 says:

“Therefore, live by the Spirit, and you shall not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit to what is contrary to the sinful nature…”

The Holy Spirit shows us the way to live through the Bible. Dig through it; you’ll find many commands and instructions on how to live your life as a Christian not as a sinful creature. For if we love the Lord, we will want His will for us, as Keith Green once sung.

In conclusion, God has written the Bible, establishing the way for Christians to live out day by day. If man could change them, utter destruction would rule the world. As it is, man can’t change the Word and follow Christ – we can only listen, and obey.

Medium Adult!

13/11/2009 at 12:59 pm | In My life | 1 Comment

Recently I was swimming at a friends’ 8^th birthday party. While looking after a little girl in the pool, she piped up and assured me:

“Mummy said you can look after me because you are a medium adult!”

Too cute!

So much time, so little to do

07/11/2009 at 11:39 am | In Organizing | 1 Comment

Time.

I have a love/hate relationship for this thing. When it comes right down to it, time is the amount of space we have to do something in our life. In a sense, it is our life. So I ask the question:

What am I gonna do with it?!

Can you echo Garfield’s’ words in his movie:

So much time, so little to do…

Yeah right!

For many, it is more like the classical line predicts: “so much to do, so little time!” Dashing from activity to activity, trying to juggle everything rationally, struggling to find a break in between.

Perhaps you have everything under control, or can keep on top of everything.

Or maybe, like me, you have so many things you want to do, but don’t know the best way to go about it efficiently. Books to read, crafts to create, articles to write, recipes to master, blogs to explore, school to finish, letters to compose, commitments to attend to, family to spend time with … how does one fit them all in?

This is where you all come in. How do you manage your time? What course of action do you take to:

Get everything done with the least amount of stress
Stay flexible
Be efficient
Prioritise
Have time to invest in others

Or are you all in the same boat as I am?

The Truth-Turned Excuse

04/11/2009 at 4:01 pm | In All-things God, Quotes, Reading | 2 Comments

…There is that other fabulous excuse that absolutely ends all quests or expectations for holiness: “Christians’ aren’t perfect… just forgiven!” What we’re saying by this fabulous piece of prose is, “You cannot trust your teenage daughter with my Christian son. You’d better keep your eye on him. He’s not safe. He’s just forgiven!”

- Keith Green, excerpt from the article, What’s Wrong with the Gospel?, excerpted from Melody Green’s book, No Compromise: The Life Story of Keith Green