VINTAGE 4TH OF JULY

Since I am almost a vintage person, I thought it would be fun to post some vintage 4th of July pictures. So here they are. Independence Day has always been special to me and I love it that America's independence has been celebrated through the years.

The flag below has 48 stars. This is the kind of flag we saluted when I was in school.

Credit goes to Vintage Holiday Crafts. You might want to check it out. They have free clip art for Holidays. Here's the link: http://vintageholidaycrafts.com/category/patriotic/page/5/

Have a wonderful holiday.

My Spiritual Sundays post is on my other blog this week. http://char72.wordpress.com/

GOD'S PROTECTION

So many times we believe that if we are under God's protection, and we are, that we should be protected from all sorrows, sicknesses and - well - everything harmful to us. Reading Nancy Guthrie's book Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow, I ran across the following. It was meaningful to me and I believe it will speak to you as well. Nancy says there is something more important to Jesus than our bodily comfort and safety. Here is what she says about this.

Jesus knows we have a hard time grasping this more significant spiritual reality. Limited by these bodies and our earthly perspective, it is hard for us to imagine our eternal future and how the way we live now and what we believe now will impact that eternal reality. And so in our every day requests for safe travel and physical health, and in our more desperate prayers for healing or deliverance amid great difficulties, we try to apply to our bodies God's promises of protection that were intended for our souls. And when we do, we're often left disappointed.

When God doesn't seem to show up and protect us, we can quickly point the finger of blame, accusing him of falling down on the job. Until our value systems line up with his, until we value the eternal life of our souls more than the temporary life of our earthly bodies, we will continue to feel disappointment with God. 

God has not promised wholesale physical deliverance in this life for those who place their faith in him.  But he has promised to protect our souls for eternity. And really that is so much bigger, so much better.

I totally agree with the author about this. Everyone dies eventually. This morning we went to a memorial service for another member of our former church. Mac was 88 years old. His family was sad to see him go, but glad to know that he has joined his beloved wife who preceded him in death by several years. Yes, it is our souls that God protects for eternity, and I'm very glad of that.


We have so many people sharing with us on Spiritual Sundays now that it takes quite a while to visit all the links. I hope you will go there and visit as many as you can. You will be blessed. Here is the link: http://bloggerspirit.blogspot.com/

GOD IS A BIG GOD

Sunday is Father's Day. I was just thinking how children look up to their fathers, at least in most cases. They think their dad can do just about anything. To them he is a "big" man. When they grow up they see him in a more realistic light. Our earthly fathers may not be as "big" as we once thought, but our Heavenly Father never gets smaller. In fact, as we grow older we understand more and more how big and how powerful He is.


Charles Allen in his little book entitled All Things Are Possible Through Prayer, says the trouble with a lot of people is their God is too small. Many times they don't really believe that God can take care of them like He says He will. He tells the story of a man in New York who died at the age of seventy. As a young man he married and opened a little shop on a side street. He and his wife lived in a tiny apartment on the East side. Six mornings a week he would get up, eat his breakfast, walk to the subway station and ride to his work. All day long he spent in his shop. Because he never had another clerk, he carried his lunch from home and ate on the job.


At closing time he would catch the subway back, eat his supper and soon go to bed. He was never a strong man so he rested in bed every Sunday. For fifty years that was his routine and then he died. When that man said "My city," he meant a tiny apartment, a subway train, and a shop on a side street. He never saw the Metropolitan Museum, or rode to the top of the Empire State Building, or mingled with the crowds on Fifth Avenue. "My city" was for him a very limited experience.


Personally I don't want my God to be limited to a small area of my life like New York was limited in the life of that man.


Charles Allen goes on to ask the question: When you say "My God," what do you mean? For St. Paul, "My God" meant one great enough to cover his entire life -- great enough to supply his every need. (Philippians 4:19) 


Now the question is: How big is your God?


Please click HERE to go to our Spiritual Sundays blog for links to many inspirational posts.

Out of Sight

As I'm getting older, more and more of my relatives and friends are dying. I find it a little hard to use that word dying. Passing away comes to my mind before dying. However it is expressed, the fact is, they are leaving this life and we are not seeing them here any more during this lifetime. We miss them. We will be attending a memorial service for a member of our former church on Sunday afternoon. Brad was a friend. He was a computer expert and helped us get our very first computer years ago. We have sought his expertise in this field many times through the years. Now he is gone. We didn't see him very often. At least not lately. But we knew he was there and we knew how to get in touch with him.

Charles Spurgeon was a famous preacher in London who lived and died in the 1800's. I like his description of the Biblical view of death.

I'm standing on the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She's an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come down to mingle with each other. And then  I hear someone on my side saying, "There, she's gone."

Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is me, not in her.
And just at the moment when someone at my side says, "There, she's gone," there are other eyes watching her coming, and there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

 I love Spurgeon's description of death. I'm so thankful that Christ came and taught us how to live and how to die. I'm so grateful that He was willing to die and then be resurrected to conquer death. Because of His sacrifice, we have the assurance that we will also be resurrected never to die again. Why would anyone reject this wonderful gift and the one who gave it?

I hope you will visit our Spiritual Sundays blog and share with us there or read what others have shared there and be blessed.

NEW PROGRAM

Thought I was going to pay $5.00 for a new program I just downloaded. Guess what? It was on sale for 99¢. So what is this new program you ask? It's called iSplash. It's a Mac program so don't know if it is available for PC. So what does it do? It turns a color photo into black and white and then you can color in the part you want colored. The picture of me in the header picture is an example. I just colored my hat pink. The rest is black and white. (I did add a little sepia tone to the whole header.) Here's another example. This time I colored my blouse and left the rest black and white. (Faded frame added with another program called Flare.)

And the next one I just colored my necklace and top.

It just occurred to me this would be good to share for Pink Saturday. Maybe I will.

OK. So I decided I will share this for Pink Saturday and add another photo. This one is pink bougainvillea in our back yard growing by a palm tree. I just colored the pink part. 

The bracts (not blossoms) start out orange and then turn pink.

HAPPY PINK SATURDAY!

Thanks again to Beverly of How Sweet the Sound for hosting Pink Saturday each week.

MY SPIRITUAL SUNDAYS POST IS ON MY OTHER BLOG THIS WEEK: http://char72.wordpress.com/