I had written earlier about our waiting for the birds to begin to show up at our kitchen window feeder and boy have they come. We now regularly feed 30 or more birds and a grown variety of species. We also have three very hungry squirrels who show up occasionally to entertain us.
Here are a few pictures of our feathered friends!
I just finished listening to Francis Chan’s Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God for the second time. I read it first a few years ago while we were home visiting from Turkey.
Now we have returned permanently and it was just the book I needed to remind me of what I want to be important in my life.
I’ve always really enjoyed Francis Chan. I listened to his sermons on iTunes and have shared his Balance Beam video countless times.
Chan is decidedly a Jesus follower and this book is written to the church in America, those who would call themselves evangelicals and Christians.
He is a straight shooter and a hard hitter. He reads the Bible and when he comes across a command, he obeys it.
Chan’s writing style is much like he preaches. He weaves personal experience with the scripture of the Bible in a way that is easy to follow and compelling.
Crazy Love is a challenging read. Chan’s conversational writing is easy to digest but he keeps coming back to these points that we seem so often to rationalize in our lives as followers of Christ.
Chan calls us again and again to step out of our comfortable, highly managed lives and into a life of discipleship.
“But God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn’t come through.”
This is one book I would buy for friends and would like to read with our Sunday school class at church. We need to be shaken up at times.
Crazy Love will do that!
>>Click here to get your copy of Crazy Love. <<
Here are a few quotes from the book:
Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.”
Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
It is true that God may have called you to be exactly where you are. But, it is absolutely vital to grasp that he didn’t call you there so you could settle in and live your life in comfort and superficial peace.”
…when we love God, we naturally run to Him-frequently and zealously. Jesus didn’t command that we have a regular time with Him each day. Rather, He tells us to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ He called this the ‘first and greatest commandment’ (Matt. 22:37-38). The results are intimate prayer and study of His Word. Our motivation changes from guilt to love.”
This book is written for those who want more Jesus. It is for those who are bored with what American Christianity offers. It is for those who don’t want to plateau, those who would rather die before their convictions do.”
Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples
Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit
Erasing Hell: What God Said About Eternity and What We Made Up
*All links to the books in this post are affiliate links. While the price won’t change for you, you will be helping me out by purchasing products through these links. If you do so, Thank You!
Do they tire of ceaseless sitting,
of knowing their created purpose –
hauling loads –
yet remaining unused, unmoved,
unhitched from the engine that will move them?
Have they seen the schedule,
the timetable of upcoming action?
And do they know – in their waiting –
the calling that awaits?
Waiting without knowing –
a most difficult task.
4/22/2013
I have recently been working to create an online course to teach independent, self-directed language learning. It’ll be a big project and I hope to have it up and running by the end of April.
In order to cut my teeth on the whole idea of course creation I decided to make a smaller course first. This course, called Master Your Time, is all about getting more from your busy days.
You can try it out free for a time here: https://www.udemy.com/master-your-time/
Here’s the promotional video I made for the course.
It is a grey, windswept and cold day with intermittent flurries breaking forth here and there, not so gentle reminders that winter’s grip remains still. I’ve been hoping for spring, for a warming of days and a thawing of the ground, but it has not yet come.
Today we traveled over to our old town, Freeman, for the annual event that is Schmechfest. For a small town it is an amazing event, held on the Freeman Academy campus and featuring a yearly musical and the Schmechfest meal, a smorgasbord sampling of German Mennonite food. This year’s musical, Fiddler on the Roof, is once again being hailed as a masterpiece for a small town to put on.
One of the more important stops while taking in Schmechfest is at the German Sausage making presentation. Not only can you watch them pack intestines with sausage, you can pick up some the best tasting and freshest sausage around, you can get it for a really affordable price. In the same building you can get delicious sweets like New Years Cookies and Rosetts – you’ll just have to come down next year to see what those are.
The idea that a town the size of Freeman can put on such amazing musicals year after year is truly remarkable. There are few in the area who haven’t at one time or another been a part of a Schmechfest show. This year Fiddler is getting the rave reviews that all shows get. I was able to write the review for Cinderella a few years back – that was a fun challenge. While each years production does happen in a small town, the quality of the productions are far from small town.
Schmechfest means festival of tasting and this is one area that – for fifty five years now – Schmechfest really shines. There is so much food and so much of it is so good. I was able to serve coffee at the first evening’s meal and enjoyed seeing nearly 1,000 happy and well fed people eat family style.
Schmechfest happens over two consecutive weekends each spring. It will happen again next year, the third and fourth weekends in March.
Mark your calendars!
In Turkey we enjoyed staying at pansyons – youth hostels of a sort that are widely available as you travel from town to town. These inexpensive hotels attract all sorts of budget travelers and are known more for their common rooms and shared kitchens than for their comfortable beds. And I suppose it is this focus on creating interactions that always attracted us to stay at pansyons. We’ve met people from all over the world traveling around Turkey and it always fun to hear stories and to learn a bit more about other countries.
Back in the U.S., travel has afforded us once again the pleasure and economy of camping. KOA’s seem to be our campground of choice as we get back into camping with our kids. On a recent road trip down to Arizona in February, it was too cold to camp and so we needed to most likely stay at a motel.
But I didn’t want to stay at some generic motel where everyone retreats to their room to watch TV. I wanted the pansyon experience. And so I began googling for youth hostels. I didn’t even know if a youth hostel would take us because we have kids but I thought it was worth a try.
I found the Route 66 Hostel in Albuquerque and called to see if they had room for us. They had one family room and it was available. The price – $43.00 – was a lot cheaper than the many motels in the area and came without all the disturbing customer reviews. $60 for a hotel room seems likely to get you dirty sheets, a drug deal or two and front row seats to the fight that goes on in the neighboring room.
The Route 66 Hostel on the other hand was in an old two story home in the heart of historic old Albuquerque. The gentlemen at the front desk were both extremely helpful and friendly. The beds were comfortable, the room large, and the whole experience quite pleasant. Breakfast was included in the price though we had to make our own. We had toast and eggs enjoyed with coffee and orange juice. We did have to clean up our own dishes but that was done over conversation with a nice lady from Germany who was traveling around the southwest.
For the price, Route 66 Hostel was an immensely better experience than the average motel ever could have been. If you are ever passing through Albuquerque, be sure and stop in for a stay.
Learn More about Route 66 Hostel: http://www.rt66hostel.com
Contact Information:
1012 Central Ave. SW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102
Phone: (505) 247-1813
We are waiting for the birds.
Last week we put out a bird feeder. I suppose we put up a bird feeder is a more apt description as this first feeder is a small, window mounted feeder that now hangs just above our kitchen table. So far the suction cups have held it well though we have not yet had any visitors. It takes time though I think our neighborhood will soon bring our feathered friends for a meal.
I have been putting up bird feeder since I was sixteen. I love the idea of having birds around and look forward to creating a thriving habitat for song birds in our yard. When the ground thaws I’ll put a post in for another feeder or two and then put out a birdbath as well.
For now, our window feeder – plus the handfuls of seed I throw out on the ground – will have to do. And we’ll continue to await the arrival of our first visitor.
We have now found ourselves moved into a new home. Our house sitting arrangement was an amazing blessing and served us well for the last six months but we are ready to begin settling a bit more.
We are renting for now. Perhaps we will buy this house and settle here for good . . . at least for now.
Settling for good sounds a little too presumptuous for us though we would like to settle for a while at least.
The new house is filled with memories as it was Consuelo’s grandparents house for the last fifteen years. This has been both a tremendous blessing – it really feels like home, and a bit more complicated – every change we make it a change to those same memories.
But it is good for now. With just two bedrooms the kids now have to share a room for the first time in a while. So far so good, but at some point in the future it would be nice to have another bedroom. The house hasn’t been updated in probably 20+ years and so there are a lot of little projects that all need to get taken care of if we buy it.
But we like it. It’s cozy and feels like a home we could grow into.
One of the most exciting prospects of being back in the states is to be able to garden once again. I saw a great TED video yesterday and the speaker, Ron Finley said, “Growing your own food is like printing your own money.” That is of course just one of the benefits of gardening, but a big one.
I mostly love gardening for the chance to work with my hands and grow things but I’ve looked forward to it ever since we returned last summer. It is still below freezing here, but we both have the bug and have all of our seeds and our seed potatoes are on their way.
On another note, we checked out an interesting movie from the library yesterday called No Impact Man. The movie is a documentary fill sharing the story of a man, his wife and young child’s quest to live for one complete year in New York city with zero carbon footprint. It was an experiment to see what they could live without: no car, no elevator to get to their 9th floor apartment, eating only food grown within 150 miles of the city, no trash, no coffee and a lot more.
The film asks some interesting and no important questions and pushes the limits of what it means to live a sustainable, no impact life. I think there are a lot of great takeaways from the film and it has certainly given me much to think about. I certainly don’t agree with all the reasons behind what Colin Beaven does but I think there are more than a few lessons to learn from his experiment.
You can follow along with No Impact Man at his blog HERE.
[The link above to No Impact Man, the movie is an affiliate link.]
Cobbled Together 