Christmas in July (and all year round!)

It says a lot about life, when you are so busy that you've not been able to exchange Christmas gifts with a friend until the middle of July!

My gift to my friend was a tin of really nice cookies (I hope they are still nice - and worth waiting for - after seven months), along with some home-made greeting cards.

Her gift to me was well worth waiting for:

She knows I love birds, and especially cardinals, and these are kind of cute: - but her gift means more to me than just that.

I've been thinking and praying a lot about JOY recently. Sometimes, in the midst of a busy and somewhat stressful life, JOY can be a bit elusive. I have made it a priority to seek out JOY and and put it into practice as much as I can.

Someone has said that happiness is dependent on our outward circumstances, whereas JOY flows from the life of Jesus within us.

I think that's why, even though we can be pretty 'down-in-the-dumps' sometimes, there can still be song, a hymn, or a chorus flowing through our heart and making its presence known in our mind. Even as I write this, there's a little Hillsong Kids chorus running 'round in my head:

Never give up, 'cause He's always there

Never give up, anytime, anywhere

Never give up, 'cause He's always there -

remember God is always by your side!

I have determined to stop and listen for a song that's running 'round in my head and heart, when I am a little down. Especially so that I can give expression to it by singing it out loud (well, maybe not in public -- but I can still hum it!) ...and allow the JOY of Jesus to well up from within. I've said before on this blog that I may have to grow old, but I don't have to be old and grumpy!

So, although this gift is a little tacky (I can say that, as my friend is completely computer illiterate and will never read this!), and although it is a Christmas decoration, it is going to stay out on display, in my office, all year round.

Do you have a Christmas decoration that stays up all year round?

From Generation to Generation

Thirty-six years ago, my sister published her first book --

a book of prayers for boys:

She sent a copy to my son, Kevin, who was eight years old at the time. He's 44 this year!

This is what she wrote in the flyleaf in 1973:

Her prayer was answered!

This year, my sister had the book updated and reprinted:

Kevin now has a son, Boyd, who has just turned 12. Chris really wanted to have his photo on the new cover of the book, but the publisher resisted.

She did, however, recently send Boyd a copy of the book, with this inscription in the flyleaf:

I pray that Boyd will always follow in his daddy's footsteps and make Jesus the most important person in his life!

Here's one of my favourite prayers from the book:

Man-Made Brain

Computers are marvellous things, Lord.

I love playing all kinds of games on them,

looking up strange facts and answers to questions.

I love to push buttons, play on the keys

and see all the exciting graphics.

Computers can do just about anything,

they're almost human.

But that's the really marvelous thing, Lord;

to think that you made man

with such a brain

that he can almost make a brain himself!

Thank you, Chris, for a great little book!

And thanks for sending it to my boys!

This is God Speaking....

A few years back, billboards bearing "messages from God" appeared along American highways. Those arch one-liners were commissioned anonymously and conceived by Charlie Robb, former creative director for the Smith Agency in Fort Lauderdale.

Some sample messages, each signed, simply, "God":



Loved the wedding. Invite me to the marriage.

Will the road you're on get you to my place?

That "love thy neighbor" thing -- I meant it.

Do you have any idea where you're going?

Follow me.

Keep using my name in vain, I'll make rush hour longer.

Need a marriage counsellor? I'm available.

I don't question your existence.

What part of "thou shalt not" did you not understand?

We need to talk.

Don't make me come down there.

(Tom Kuntz in The New York Times

Can you think of others you'd add, if you were God?

Three Men in a Boat...

(To Say Nothing of the Dog!)

Well, many thanks to my hundreds of followers for all your comments :)

It seems it's not altogether easy to assess exactly what it is that makes us laugh.

In my research for the magazine article, I remembered something that, many decades ago, really made me laugh. Maybe you will get a chuckle out of it too:

But I want to share with you something that my British sense of humour really enjoys.

I am reading Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. Jerome wrote it in 1889. I've probably read it three times in my life -- that's a lot, considering I rarely read a fiction book more than once.

Here's the introduction:

...a merry, but scandalously lazy band of well-to-do young men -- and a plucky and rather world-weary fox terrier named Montmorency -- (decide to take) an idyllic cruise along the River Thames.

Feeling seedy, muses one of them dreamily, "What we want is rest." What they find instead is one hapless catastrophe after another.

Soggy weather, humiliating dunkings, the irritating behavior of small boats, and the "contrariness of teakettles" are just a few of the barbarisms our genteel heroes are forced to endure. But to which a delighted reader can only sing, Hooray!

But it's a passage about Montmorency the dog I'd like you to read:

To look at Montmorency you would imagine he was an angel sent upon the earth - for some reason withheld from mankind - in the shape of a small fox terrier.

There is a sort of Oh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how-I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and-nobler expression about Montmorency that has been know to bring tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen.

(At first) I used to sit down and look at him, as he sat on the rug and looked up at me, and think: "Oh, that dog will never live. He will be snatched up to the bright skies in a chariot, that's what will happen to him."

But, when I had paid for about a dozen chickens he had killed; and dragged him, growling and kicking by the scruff of his neck, out of a hundred and fourteen street fights; had had a dead cat brought round for my inspection by an irate female who called me a murderer; and had been summoned by the man next door but one for having a ferocious dog at large that had kept him pinned up in his own toolshed, afraid to venture his nose outside the door for over two hours on a cold night; and had learned that the gardener, unknown to myself, had won thirty shillings by backing him to kill rats against time, then I began to think that maybe they'd let him remain on earth for a bit longer after all.

If you've never read Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), I can only encourage you to get a copy. If you don't have much to laugh about, this book will change everything!

Laughing Out Loud

I've been given an assignment --

to write about laughter.

I've got some great ideas in mind -- but I thought you might like to help me.

First -- what makes you laugh?

Is it listening to a good joke?

Hearing from a special friend?

Being with someone you love?

Watching a sitcom together?

Or seeing your favourite team win?

Do you laugh when someone tickles you?!

I'd really like to hear about what makes YOU laugh!

(or -- maybe you don't laugh very much)

Secret Diaries

I've been reading this book recently:

It is an incredibly moving volume of stories recorded by children who experienced unimaginable horrors. They are 'tales of fear and courage, of tragedy and transcendence.'

What I found interesting was that many of these children had a sense that they were putting their experiences on paper expecting that someone, somewhere, at some time, would read them -- even though many of these children were also convinced that they would not live beyond their childhood years because of the horrors they were enduring (and many of them didn't).

It is, indeed, quite remarkable to read how their diaries, written industriously on scraps of paper, in the covers or down the margins of old books, well-hidden from enemy eyes, were somehow discovered, preserved, and ultimately published in some form or another, decades later.

I have learned so much from the remarkable wisdom expressed in these diaries - about human nature (both the good and the evil), about how children process and survive terrible trauma, about being thankful for life and wanting to make the most of it while I can, about the enduring element of faith.

More than anything, I want my grandchildren to read these diaries, so that they can learn by them. My grandchildren -- who want for nothing, who have no comprehension of hardship, never mind of living in ghettos, being chased down by Nazis and seeing their parents shot to death, or of hiding in bomb shelters and wearing gas masks, or of dying gruesome deaths -- need to read about what other children have lived through and be thankful that they haven't.

Maybe they need to read these diaries in preparation of what lies ahead for them in this world. I don't know. I just know they need to read them.

I keep a journal....have done for about 15 years. I don't write in it daily, but what goes into it comes from the deepest part of me. So it's not something I would ever want anyone to read while I am alive.

But I can't help having this overwhelming feeling, every time I write in it, that there will come a day, long after I'm gone, that someone, somewhere, will be reading what I've written and will benefit greatly by it.

How about you? Do you keep a journal? What do you write in it?

Do you have a sense that maybe you are writing for a future generation? That sometime in the future, after you are gone, someone will read it and be grateful for what you have written?

HOW MANY OF THESE 100 BOOKS HAVE YOU READ?

I came across an interesting site today called LibraryThing.

You might like to join; I probably will. I'd sure rather do this than Facebook (books are much less demanding and far more entertaining).

{Update: I joined this evening. Looking forward to all this site has to offer!}

There I found this interesting post and wanted to share it with you.

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed here:

How many of these books have YOU read?

I have marked in bold the ones I have read

in italics the ones I am in the process of reading,

and in blue the ones where I have only seen the movie.

Recently I have determined to read more of the 'classics' -- But I can see by this list that I have a long way yet to go!

Why don't you copy and paste the list into your comment, and in some way mark those you've already read, the ones you are in the process of reading, and the ones you've only seen as a movie -- so we can compare with each other.

Then, go here to check out the site and see how over 50 others responded on the site...makes for interesting reading in itself!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read some, but not others...

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt.

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

That makes 23 I've read; 1 I am in the process of reading and I have seen 4 as movies. I think the BBC was quite incorrect in their assesment.

How about you??