This was posted on my friend Cindy’s blog today. Have you danced with Cinderella today? I danced with my Cinderella and both my Prince Charmings tonight (The king was away from the castle so when he comes back on his white steed I will snag him then). Don’t waste a moment… dance!
I have been on a bit of a blogging hiatus… after my birthday and all the WONDERFUL notes you sent me, I had to catch my breath! Thank you for your wonderful words of encouragement and love. You soothe my soul and your friendship means more to me that I can tell you….
I hardly have known what to write after the two terrible tragedies that have happened in Myanmar and China in the last weeks. It is so hard to get one’s mind to wrap around a tragedy this big. We know some people living in a city about 80 km from the epicenter of the China earthquake and it has made it more personal for us. We have known better how to pray for the people of China and some of the specific needs that God has been able to meet through them.
But today, my heart was broken even more when I learned of the tragedy in Steven Curtis Chapman’s family. Wednesday evening his youngest daughter (adopted from China) was killed when she was hit by a car driven by her brother.
For many reasons, this tragedy hits close to my heart. In my worst nightmare, I can relate to this kind of heartbreaking tragedy. I can wrap my mind around it, I see it in my minds eye. I cried buckets of tears when I read the news. And secondly, I wept for the help this wonderful family has done for our family through Shaohannah’s Hope, an adoption organization from whom we received a grant to help pay for Jadyn’s adoption.
So I hugged my daughter and my boys a little tighter tonight. I wept for Steven and Mary Beth Chapman and their family, I wept for the mothers and fathers who have lost children in China and Myranmar, I wept for the children who are left orphaned by these tragedies, and for all those who have lost loved ones. Their grief is incomparable.
May our great God, whose mysteries I can not begin understand, give them comfort and peace.
That’s right…Jenny’s not here. This is her husband and I’m hijacking her blog today to tell you it’s her birthday! I’ve shared my feelings about her over at journeytoalbania.com. Thanks!
Today I am blogging over at journeytoalbania.com.
Click here and read my thoughts about the journey of language learning.
A while back I wrote about the need to put my feelings on a leash. Managing them instead of letting them manage me. This continues to be a long, hard process.
Today I stumbled on this site, a collection of feelings from the net. The site searches blogs for sentences including the words “i feel” or “i am feeling”. It is a really incredible site and I was fascinated!
Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
What struck me the most as I browsed around was the overwhelming sense that we are a people overwhelmed by our feelings. It was like the scene from Bruce Almighty where Bruce (who has God’s power for a few days) is receiving thousands of incoming prayer requests that he is trying to answer. I can not imagine how our God, who hears and sees everything, can sort through the muck that we call our feelings. There are so many feelings out there! And we all bounce off of each other… touching, bumping, crashing into one another as we go. I know that some days, I am crying out for someone to recognize and acknowledge my feelings! But then I end up at that same place again, where I MUST a leash on those feelings, and call on the one who made me. Ever feel that way?
1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, [a] you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to [b] me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.
Grace for Today 