Saturday's thoughts

1) I was only in attendance for our womens study for a short time today before leaving for a funeral. We usually start by discussing anything from the weeks homework if they did it that struck them personally, or they wanted to talk about. One of the women just really opened up about how she has come to the place she is now in life from where she was in the thick of struggling.. It is just a wonder to hear how there are so many parts of our lives we don't notice at the time that God is orchestrating for our good while we are in the midst of the storm raging..... It often gets missed. And yet to hear her now in a place of healing and being restored for the "more" that God intended her life to be about. No longer on the detour we took however long ago it happened. As we meet with each other weekly, this is what God designed us to be, in relationship with others to either spur them on or to be the one who is getting spurred on. If you don't find yourself in a relationship throughout your life with other women, I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and to initiate it by just asking someone. Or take those relationships you are in, to the depths of meaningful. The woman I spoke of at the top of the paragraph, happened to come up to me to thank me for some thing I had said a couple weeks earlier and I asked her if she had heard about the study we do on Saturdays... gave her a flyer and said "we'd love to have you" and she has shown up each week.. God is good.

2) At mid morning I attended the funeral of a woman Betty Jones, who I worked with at UPS probably for about 4 years together, meeting 2-4 years after I started there. She was a woman in her 50's who was just a beautiful woman inside and out. I was the edgy coworker and young mom... We shared an office after I spelled her while she was out for surgery leave. She loved her husband Charlie and her three growing kids dearly Janet, Julie and Jay. Charlie died in 1990 of a heart attack after many years of heart troubles.. She was heartbroken but carried on, and than she moved her assignment into another building and we lost track for the most part. There were the occasional lunch dates of UPS women, and she had a "big" birthday party that I attended. But what you walked away from in knowing Betty is that she was genuine, sincere, joyful and a friend for life. So today was indeed a celebration of the life she led, the family and friends that she cared deeply for. I loved how the pastor put it before he closed, she now is in the arms of her Lord and Savior and again holding her beloved husband Charlie and infant daughter Jen, and infant grandson Aaron, but that if Betty could come back for one minute and share one last thing with us it would be this about the week since she passed from this life..... "know Jesus as your savior because what I've seen in the last week is more amazing than I ever dreamed or imagined".

3) When I came home, Greg and Shane had done the yard work and the trimming of the birds of paradise along the driveway which were getting out of hand in width. The picture here is the azalea tree we planted about a year ago before Shanes graduation party. It started to really lay out the blooms a couple of weeks ago and is a great sign of the spring that is in the air. The third photo is of the Martha Washington geraniums... The plantars have all really taken off with the right mixture of sunshine and rainshowers to nurture there needs. I have about five gerber daisies still sitting in there pots that I have yet to plant somewhere one of these afternoons.