Saturday mornings before dawn are pregnant with weekend possibilities. What shall I do with this time I'm afforded? Craft? Cook? Read? Nap? Anything is possible with the dawn's early rays still below the horizon and all is quiet.
Yesterday was a great day. On the way to work there is this one spot junction that always has beautiful sunrises,
and some days they are just spectacular,
There is a 4-way stop with an old timey (closed) General Store on one corner
A convenience store on the other, and the industrial park on the third. The Middle School is located here, some chicken houses, an engineering/electrical company, and fields. Even the industrial park is picturesque.
But on the fourth corner, ahhh, this is the one everyone loves. It is a canola field and when canola blooms it is gorgeous.
The field is atop a long, slow rise on all sides, so you get these dramatic cloud formations, with the "Christina's World" aspect of the old store and run-down house next to it.
You can see the local fascination with the location on this Flickr page. Many other photographers have stomped these fields to get just the right vantage point for the house, store, fields, and dramatic sky with clouds. An independent movie company recently filmed some sequences here. It's funny to see on Internet Movie Database "Filming locations, Comer Georgia". LOL.
Anyway, my day began with a dramatically painted sunrise over the field, gorgeous colors and silence except for dawn light breeze.
It was a good day, and finished sweetly at the end with songs.
I was on duty in a classroom, watching some kids who were going to line up for car riders. Their teacher had brought the bus riders to the bus line. During the five minute interim or so, we have some down time. On a Friday afternoon with five or 7 extra minutes to kill, until they left for home, it could get wild unless I engaged the kids in something. There were about twenty. As they sat on the rug, all packed up with their little bookbags on, these little first graders looked so cute. I said, "hey, boys and girls is there a song someone wants to sing?"
Some hands shot up, and I picked a boy I knew liked to sing and I knew he would remember the words. He stood and sang a song about Jesus.
A second girl wanted to sing and I let her because she is usually shy. She also sang a song about Jesus. All the kids looked at the singers and listened patiently and clapped approvingly when he and she were done. Then a third girl stood up and she sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It wasn't more than a few notes when one or two others began to sing, then a few more, and by the last line, all twenty children were warbling it out in their best little voices. It was as if I could see the notes in the air ascending to heaven with Jesus looking down and loving His children so much. Even the kids felt it too, their union of hearts and voices through song and a small sweet moment to end the week.
So my day began with a sunrise and ended with children singing, and all is well.
This weekend I plan to cook cream of carrot soup; roast cauliflower, potatoes and Hatch chili peppers; and make oatmeal/banana cookie bars. I also plan to nap. Of course, all those plans could be interrupted if the Lord returns. And that is more than all right by me.
7 comments:
What a sweet post, Elizabeth. I can just picture the children singing...isn't it wonderful to live in a place where the children know songs about the Lord Jesus?
I'd love to know how you ended up in Georgia.
We had friends in Maine that lived just a couple of miles from Christina's house. :)
Hi Grace To You
My move from Maine to Georgia wasn't that interesting of a story...after my conversion I finished establishing my newspaper and then sold it. For the previous ten years I'd traveled, looking for a warm place to live in the winters, intending to be a snowbird. Though I loved FL it was too hot in the summer, and I fell in love with the desert of West Texas. Visiting was fun but it was too foreign to my New England eyes to endure for the entire year forever. So when I was finally free and between careers, I picked GA because of Athens being a college city and the county where I live being rural, and the climate. It was the combined factors of climate, the low cost of living (compared to ME) and the distance from Maine (which I'd come to find extremely distasteful).
The Lord knew what he was doing, it is a bible-saturated place, though not AS much as people think. But way more than Maine, and that was a good thing for this new convert.
I've found living in the South to be a bit confusing as a believer because so much of the Christianity is cultural and it's hard to know if folks are really saved, so I was excited to move to Maine, where I thought we could be more effective witnesses. I wasn't counting on no one being interested in hearing about the Lord. I expect Colorado to be similar.
Although cultural Christianity is confusing, both for believers and non-believers alike, there is something to be said for a place that still, as a whole, has respect for Christianity at least.
I was just reading a Down East article about Maine accents and I'm curious to know...do you still have yours? Have you found yourself saying "y'all" yet? :) Every time I said that word in Maine I heard it in my own ears...weird.
Hi Grace To You,
I don't know what kind of accent I have, though I do have one and it stands out around here. I grew up in RI and worked hard to dampen the nasal RI/Brooklyn sounding accent, so much so that when I was teaching in the 80s and 90s kids wold ask me if I was from England. Nowadays I don't know how harsh my accent is, I've stopped working at it. Maybe it's come back some. But I do know I don't say 'y'all'. I never will. I am an interloper and would not dare to adopt local customs. It'd feel too intrusive. I still say 'you guys".
I can echo GTYs sentiments about no one being interested in things of the Lord. That's our experience where we are living. We have to just take it in stride, knowing that almost all, if not all, of our witnessing does not result in any salvations.
The sad part is that quite a number of churches in this area are all wanting to count "numbers" of converts, so many are going the "church growth movement" route... but that doesn't usually produce genuine believers. In fact in most cases, we do not believe that method works at all, because it's unbiblical. But since they are happy to see the pews full with people, they keep doing it, and count their success based on church attendance. We've told pastors in this area that spiritual growth can't be measured by numbers of people in the pews or cash in the plate. A church can be very faithful to God, and yet small in number, and poor.
-Carolyn
I can echo your "church growth movement" comment, Carolyn.
My grown son was saved on April 28 and we are praying for his wife to be saved. She grew up in a Baptist church and knows/believes enough to think she's saved, but her fruit says otherwise. However, she has been going to church with my son and this past Sunday he went forward after a strong gospel message. It's not clear to me why he did that because he has assurance of his salvation and plans to be baptized this coming weekend, but anyway, he went forward and his wife joined him. I'm not sure why she went forward either, but apparently the church assumed the 20 or so people that came forward wanted to be saved, which would be great, except all they did was put these people in a room, give them a paper to fill out with their names and phone numbers, and give them some kind of a workbook on Christianity. No one talked to them. I am so disappointed in this lost opportunity when my daughter-in-law may have been open to talking...I know the LORD is in control but I'm not sure people who shuttle lost souls around like cattle will be held blameless...they are causing much damage.
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