Bippity-boppity-blog thoughts to carry you through the weekend…
We see mountains,
God sees molehills.
We see problems,
God sees opportunities
We see challenges,
God sees a miracle
in the making!
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows!
~Walt Whitman
May I never miss a rainbow or a sunset because I’m looking down!
~ Sara June Parker
hugs n’ weekend blessings worth looking up for!
We are mid-way into November and the normal “Brrrrrrr!” most of our local hometown residents should be exclaiming is no where in sight. (Yet!) But the traditional hustle-bustle of preparing for the Winter Season is everywhere! Snow-stakes are being installed and Christmas lights hung (ready for the annual Thanksgiving Day lighting,) and you can find bags of Snow Salt in every hardware store displayed proudly at the check-out counters.
November for me is an annual cleaning of closets, office-folders & such. It is an opportunity to de-clutter and begin the preparation for starting a New Year with a clean slate! So yesterday found me going through my office folder labeled “TO DO,” which contained scribbled messages of ‘this & that’ stuff I hoped TO DO during the course of this past year. I was happy with the small amount of remaining projects needing completion before the hustle-bustle of the holidays rolled in: one more crocheted wedding blanket to complete for a very special December Wedding, a shepherd & sheep yard project that’s been swirl-twirling through my creative mind, and organizing a….well, sshhhhh– I cannot say because…it’s a secret!
And there was one little note, scratchily-scribbled on a piece of bubble-gum pink paper reminding me to make a visit to our local Catholic Gift Shop for a gift Dan & I hoped to donate to a special organization.
When I stopped in to the Catholic Shop today I had no idea that not only would I be able to toss the TO DO note in the waste-basket once I made the necessary purchase, but with the twinkling of a surprise I also happily discovered I could cross off an item from my Bucket List to boot! Alas, God had heard a spoken desire I’d made many moons ago!
Lo & behold with every person I came upon within the shop they personally greeted me by name! Who’d have thunk that this would be the place that “EVERYBODY KNOWS MY NAME…AND THEY’RE ALWAYS GLAD I CAME!” 
God is so funny how he wraps up our wishes sometimes, isn’t he? He knew I’d hoped for & needed a place that felt like a homecoming...and He delivered in a way I hadn’t quite expected but deliver it He did in a far better way! (I guess God was keeping a secret too!)
And so began my 3hugs&blessings for the Week:
(All that’s left now is to make a fresh new folder…TO DO it all!!)
hugs n’ may you find 3 bubble-gum pink surprise blessings too!
My Sunday Reblog (as part of the NaBloPoMo challenge,) comes from one of my blogging HEROs!! I discovered Bill during my first Blogging101 course through WordPress. Bill was kind enough to “Like” one of my posts and moved by this stranger’s extreme kindness & encouraging words to me, I looked into his site as well. It has been a blog-loving-affair ever since!!! I cannot get to his site fast enough once I’ve received a notification of a recent post and I know when you go there you too will immediately understand why!
In late October of 1996, just weeks after his 36th birthday, Bill was diagnosed with a terminal disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. (ALS or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” after the famous New York Yankee’s player who brought this Disease to the public light in a very poignant way.)
Bill’s motive for starting his blog is to pass along some of the lessons he has learned through the course of this trial and hopefully help others avoid some of the detrimental (hope-stealing) mistakes he has made. These are important lessons for all of us to learn because, as Bill points out, “If you’re not going through a trial now, a trial is coming. I know that’s not good news, but it’s the truth. But, as I hope to show, we don’t have to fear trials because God can handle anything that this life throws our way and we can handle them too if we see the trials through the eyes of Christ!”
I am rebloging today one of my favorite posts from Bill and I just know if you take time to read it too you will be just like me & the other 2,700+ believers…in Bill’s Unshakable Hope!
Some might be disappointed, but this is not one of those quizzes like I see posted on Facebook. (There actually is one of those quizzes with this same title, but I didn’t take it because I was afraid that the results would show that I was Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree).
Ten or twelve years ago, let’s just say eleven, Mary and I were shopping at Home Depot. After finishing our shopping in the store, we wandered out to the garden department to look for some small trees. It was November, and most of the plants were marked down because they were making room for Christmas trees.
Mary got hung up looking at wreathes and other boring items, so I cruised my wheelchair over to go look at trees. As it turned out, there were not many trees left, and I didn’t see anything I was interested in. Just when I was…
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hugsnblessings 