A beautiful sunny morning has greeted us. Cooler than yesterday but it seems the bottom will drop out on Saturday night. Cold temps and a hard freeze. This is the first ease into the morning day in a while. With appointments and such, guys coming over to give estimates on some work, I welcome the relaxed entrance into this day.
We voted for the first time as NC residents. Our voting place just down the road and we arrived when there was a bit of a lull. Pretty exciting, really. As we make our way through those firsts of feeling like with Roy here, finally at home. Poll workers were very nice and the whole process took about ten minutes leaving us time to trade out for the truck and go to Lowe's. Picked up a ladder and new numbers for our new trash can. Living the wildly exciting life! No, really.
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Preparing for a hurricane is different here than on the coast of Texas. Mostly rain and wind but the difference is the elevation that makes for landslides. A different perspective for sure than just flat land. Mike the Mower Man was here earlier this week mulching our leaves for us and getting some yard debris taken care of. We need to semi clean out the gutter on one side of the back porch so we will semi try to get some of that taken care of. We will do this before the rain hits this afternoon. We punted apple orchard trip and will push that to next week.
Last week I was talking to a friend here and she said who knew that ten years ago that you'd be here and living a totally different way of living than what you had been used to. She was correct. In fact Roy and I had talked about this very subject all through last week. Think it is due to the fact we are coming up to the one year anniversary of deciding to retire by the end of the year. Great decision in hindsight. Roy is much more relaxed, still focused, but not stressed. He would have been miserable in Houston and would have probably looked for contract work cause he wouldn't have enough around the house to keep him busy. Here, there is always a project or something that needs attention.
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The rain continues from the outer rain bands of Nichole. Think the heaviest rain is yet to come. A year ago today I was at Asheville Cardiology getting an echo and stress test. Glad a year later to be home to enjoy a rainy day. Today, I will begin writing out the lesson for Sunday. We are in Micah. In several weeks we begin the book of John. I've enjoyed teaching from the OT but ready for a change, although we are six months in John.
We successfully cleared out the gutter on the back porch. No one was hurt not even off balance one time. We made some crude clearing of the leaves out of the gutter by using a kid rake sideways.
At Tammy's getting my haircut, we got to talking about how easily it is to get inundated with volunteer jobs at small churches. I realized that part of a standard of M&G, talking about getting volunteered at church was coming true for Roy, better known as Ed in Mildred and Gertrude. I got so tickled thinking about that as well as telling stories of how we took real events that had happened in our lives and twisting them just enough for no one to really recognize who it might be. Last week in our lesson in Haggai, we looked at how we can spiritualize our reasons for not doing something...we sound good or so we think, but God knows. This week in Micah we are looking at the coming judgement for Israel and Judah and the bad leadership going on. Crooked politicians and priests that fleeced the poor people of the land and money. The theme of justice runs throughout Micah as well as the other minor prophets. A couple of years ago the theme to teach was idolatry. Guess this week's lesson is more like, don't let this happen to you kind of thing. As the priests took bribes and such, I can't help but think back to Kyle Lake's book on prayer and using the Lord's name in vain. We usually trend toward someone cussing but he wrote that we are the worst at using the Lord's name in vain with unneeded repetition in prayer as well as over using prayer to quiet a room, fill in time, cause we have always done it this way and my very favorite announcement prayer. One thing I remember Roy studying in 1999 as we drove to Nashville. He was joining the Stephen Ministry. The thought that prayer should be used to open and close a meeting or session was challenged and suggested other ways because you never want people to think that opening and closing a meeting as a sign that it's time to leave. Instead we need to know and experience that this is a sacred moment not the sign of a meeting being over.
I think the rain has finally let up a bit. We sure needed it and in our area we didn't get the big heavy rains that causes waterfalls in our back yard.
Also, I lost the Merry Christmas Darling contest this year with CourtneyS being the winner.
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