A Happy Monday

Kaleb got himself up and out the door this morning in plenty of time to take the bus to school.  The house was so still and quiet afterwards that Kory and I were both able to have a time of Bible study and prayer.  It was heaven.

The forecast was for rain so I kept expecting a downpour, but it didn’t come until tonight.  We knew we were on thin ice with the cloud cover, so we decided to go climb a mountain while we could.  We both have had cabin fever lately and yesterday’s outing to the beach made us realize just how little we’ve been getting out lately.

There’s a mountain we can see from our condo that’s only a few minutes drive to get to it, so we decided to hike up there and just take in the view.  We’ve been to the top of it a few times, but we decided to take a new trail to get there – just to stir things up a bit. (Our condo is the far left building in the group of 3 similar looking brick buildings left of the massive shopping center in the middle.)

We were thrilled there were still some blueberries for the picking so we snacked on them the whole way up.  No one else was on the trail and we so enjoyed just being in the woods and seeing the view from on high.  It was cool to see our condo and all that surrounds it.

A small blue “sucker hole” opened up in the clouds so the sunshine acted like a strong beam of light and moved across the landscape, highlighting different areas while we stood and watched.  It was almost like God himself had a flashlight and was pointing out all he had created.  It was so very cool. (Photo below shows all the blueberry bushes in the woods - it's the undergrowth in the forests here.)

I didn’t have much time today to take a big hike or linger at the top since I’d volunteered my time to help cousin Kari make food for the Jesus Women meeting tonight at the Philadelphia Church.  They meet once a month and after the meeting they have “kvelds mat” (night food) in the café.  (Norwegian eat four meals a day.)  So I helped chop up vegetables for the fish soup that Kari made and that took the whole afternoon, since we were cooking for over a hundred people.

As I was leaving to go help Kari, Kaleb was just coming home from school, so I got the good report that he enjoyed the day, which was the best news I’ve had in a while.  They had wood shop today so he started on making a butter knife.  They also had chemistry and he was able to help his group understand the concepts that were explained in the handout.  He also had about two hours free to work on the book he’s writing so he was very pleased with his progress during that time.  He didn’t talk much about his social life there, but the fact he came home in a good mood was all I needed to see.  Whew.

Kory made dinner tonight, washed some dishes and that was about it for his day.  I’m thinking that I-pad is way too addicting for him as he often can’t tear himself away from it in order to do anything else, so nothing got done on our to-do list.  Oi. 

I was at church until 11pm, cleaning up dishes and helping in the kitchen after the meeting.  During the meeting the main speaker told us about a dream she had once where she was sleeping, and Jesus came and woke her up.  He took her by the hand and led her out to a beautiful place by the sea where he had a table all set up and decorated nice with two chairs for them to sit in and watch the sunrise together.  He just wanted to spend time with her and he’d prepared a special place for that.  But while she was waiting for the sun to rise, she heard some people in the distance talking about something so she went over to see what they were doing.  She got involved in their discussion and then realized the sun had come up and she had missed that moment with Jesus.  She ran back to see him, but he was gone and the table and chairs had been removed.  

I thought that was an incredible vision of what it’s like each and every day when we miss an opportunity to spend time with God.  That image hit me hard and it was something I needed to hear.  Time is so fleeting, but we choose how to use it.