“…the pleasure of pleasing someone I respected greatly whom it was my God-given duty to please. I had not been pandering. I hadn’t done the work primarily to please him, or I wouldn’t have pleased him; but when I did, and when he named the reason specifically—what a God-given joy.” - Mark Ward
“His script initially calls for sacrifice, but ultimately requires none—…Whatever God asked from me, He has replaced with Himself. Whatever God has seemingly ‘required’ in hindsight pales in comparison to what God has restored.” Some things I have learned about Jesus and His script
The month of Thanksgiving is upon us! Let us take some time today to reflect upon its meaning, beginning with this great passage of Scripture from Psalm 116 (NKJV):
For You have delivered my soul from death,
My eyes from tears,
And my feet from falling.
I will walk before the Lord
In the land of the living.
I believed, therefore I spoke,
“I am greatly afflicted.”
I said in my haste,
“All men are liars.”
What shall I render to the Lord
For all His benefits toward me?
I will take up the cup of salvation,
And call upon the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord
Now in the presence of all His people (NKJV, Ps. 116:8-14).
“It is God’s grace that you can be industrious instead of idle. Flavel says, ‘Sin brought in sweat, but now not to sweat increases sin. He that lives idly cannot live honestly.’” Challies
In our cynical time when it’s fashionable to bash the establishment whether it’s the church or state, I found this 2011 interview refreshing. In it, Scott Simon talks with Alexendra Pelosi about her documentary chronicling the lives of new citizens. It’s called Citizen USA: A 50 State Road Trip.
Nearly a million people become US citizens each year and for many of them, it’s the path to a better life. But surprisingly a better life often is defined by the little things– walking down safe streets, available, inexpensive food, and the ability to work hard to build a better future for your family. The very things we take for granted. Here are a couple quotes:
For me, it’s, you know, I can take my family around the block for a walk with a stroller and I don’t have to be worried about being hijacked. Sometimes you forget that every day’s a blessing. You wake up and it’s a gift.
I love it because you just dial the number [911] and then they come right away for your rescue.
I’m slowly emerging from what we in polite society call a head cold from the place of eternal perdition. It’s been 7-10 days of full-out and complete battle against invisible forces, armed in one hand with a box of kleenex and in the other with a fistful of vitamin C—and goodness knows what I took in the middle of the night in my congestion-induced haze.
It’s been rough.
Apparently we’ve been passing it around as a family for several weeks now (this is the third Sunday I’ve been home with little ones) and, while at first it contented itself with drippy noses and whiny coughs, it finally conspired into one massive onslaught. Fever, congestion, watery eyes, coughing—the works.
As you can imagine, when mama’s been transformed into a walking ball of germs, it can take a toll on family life. And while I know we ate last week, I have only vague memories of chicken curry and pasta. What form or shape they took, well…your guess is as good as mine. My mind’s been cluttered too, and the normally lucid conversations with my husband have been reduced to grunts and a universal absence of antecedents.
by Jason Stover
It’s the little things on a foreign field that begin to eat away at your psyche. In our area of Poland, all meat is bought and sold over the counter from the butcher, so grabbing a package from the freezer section is out of the question. Therefore, every two or three days, my wife and I are reminded of our status in the language as we struggle to communicate what 
kind of meat we would like and how much we want.
A few years ago, I gave sewing lessons to two different teenage girls. The first girl was eager to learn, and she was a joy to teach. When her first sewing project was finished, she presented me with a $20 gift card to a fabric store. The second girl did not like sewing very much and was always trying to weasel me into ironing her project or finishing the edges for her. While she sewed, we would talk about her struggles at home and school. I was not sure she was learning very much about sewing, but I knew that the time I was spending with her was making a difference in her life.
To All Ye Pilgrims: Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as He has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience; now, I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November ye 29th of the year of our Lord one thousand
