photo:freedigitalphotos.net-Stuart Miles

As you may be able to tell by my disappearance from the blog recently, I’m working on my house!

This week’s project has been to clear out my fabric/craft room.

Considering that I am a fabriholic/hoarder, this major job that I have been putting off for forever has now been forced on me.  I need some rooms to look really good.  This second worst room of the house HAD to be attacked!  I don’t have the courage yet to work on the study.

But back to the craft room…I have lots of storage there for my fabric, even with that, I had piles of fabric and half-finished projects piled on the bed there…oh yes, and on the floor too!  I told you, it was a mess!  I haven’t needed the bed for company recently.

Now, this gigantic mess is spread all over my family room with all the fabric pulled out of the storage containers.  Slowly, it is getting resorted or tossed, and put away.  The danger of tripping and breaking large bones in the family room is nearly over.

In between my cleaning, sorting and dumping, I’ve been reading a few articles here and there.  Now you know why I’m not finished yet!  They are on a variety of different topics, but I’ll give you the links and you can head over and read them.  Meanwhile, I’ll  continue sorting…until I head for work this afternoon.

I hope your January is going well.  When it comes to weather, ours is just plain weird!  We tend to have a few lovely warmish days…even up to 70.  Then a front comes in with freezing rain, or cold weather and we…freeze!  This crazy weather is the kind that causes lots of people to get sick.  So far, we have been very fortunate.

First Article–This one is by Katherine Nielson.  It is one of the few articles re the killing in Newtown, CT  that I found to be strangely comforting and dealing with what actually happened

rather than a jumping off point for making political points or strident commentary on our society.

There is a place for that I’m sure, but I felt that this article talked about the actual grief rather than presenting a knee jerk reaction of anger and wanting to fix it right away with policies that might not actually deal with the real causes of the problem.  I understand that desire in the face of something so evil, but making more rules hasn’t ever seemed to fix problems of this sort.

It is sad that so often our christian community is just as “knee-jerk” as our culture is.  The culture talks about guns, so we get sucked into the argument.  Funny, I thought christians were supposed to be salt and light.  I thought we were supposed to frame discussions, not let the world decide them for us.  I digress I guess.

As a culture, we are extremely uncomfortable with grief.  Just stopping for a time and grieving, feeling the pain of it for ourselves and the tremendous loss for the parents and that small community.  We want to rush on to closure.

Grief isn’t one of those things that works that way.  We must stop at some point and deal with it thoughtfully.  My observation is that this is not only a problem for the non-christians in our culture, but for christians too…I lump myself among this group.  We don’t want to stop.  We don’t like to feel pain or be sad.

We don’t like to think about the many things that are wrong in our world.  We prefer to make more rules for people  to obey…or break.  Because it makes us feel better.  We did something about the problem.  We passed another law.  Was it effective?  Did it touch any area that was basic to the problem?  We almost don’t care.  We want to have closure too.  We want to wrap up the problem, put it in a box and be done with it!

But I digress.  Kathleen’s article is a good one.

The next article, written by Arranged by GOD, a new bloggy friend, is about change.

She has experienced it (there are some interesting true stories on her blog including what she learned shortly after she married regarding her husband’s attitude toward Christmas!) and is dealing with how to follow up with change, how quickly to expose its need, how rapidly to bring it about…

I appreciate her attitude, her trust in GOD’s providence, but her growing realization that she needs to be part of the solution as well.

By the way,  I think a leviathon is something akin to a whale.

The final article written by my daughter Dawn Sparks about a fellow missionary

who died suddenly in early January after complications from tripping off a curb.  It gives insight into spiritual mothering as well.

It’s hard to believe, but even missionaries need spiritual mothers.  They lost a lot when Cindie died.  For older and younger women, listen to what she tells you about what constitutes spiritual mothering.  It may not be as complicated as you think.