A Bleak and Cranky February Hodgepodge

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Note to Joyce:  Thank you for your dedication to the Wednesday Hodgepodge. Please don't take my cranky answers personally. xo

1. Where do you go when you need some inspiration?

Scripture. Prayer. Music. Books. Wine.

The books pictured are a small sampling. The music that inspires me ranges from John Rutter (96%) to Bing Crosby to James Taylor.

2. What's under your bed?

Not a thing, except carpet. Or is that supposed to be a metaphor?

Another bleak Wisconsin winter landscape

Last week, on the way home from Madison

We're in the February dreariness.

3. Thursday, February 22nd is National Chili Day, National Margarita Day, and National Cook a Sweet Potato Day. Of the three which would you most like to celebrate? Is that likely?

Who makes up this stuff anyway? I don't celebrate any of these 'national-fill-in-the-blank days,' but I would most likely bake a sweet potato. There are four of them sitting on the kitchen counter.

4. What are you 'snowed under' with right now?

Snow. Just snow. And plenty of it.

5. Tell us three to five things that make you feel balanced?

I think feeling balanced is highly overrated. Besides, if you live where winter takes up half the calendar year, it's difficult to imagine feeling balanced. And if I sound cranky, I promise it will get better once the gray days leave and color is restored to the landscape.

What May looks like, most years.

What May looked like in 2013

Blizzard=18"

6. Insert your own random thought here.

XOXO

Really, it's just February. In January we're still riding the wave of Christmas, and it's usually very sunny (though beastly cold). I love sunny. And in March, although it's two months yet before the flowers poke through the soil, the daylight is longer and the temps are working their way upward, which usually means the roads are clear for taking walks. There's just something so tough about getting through February. Snowy, bleak, miserable, gray February. Good thing it's the shortest month, because it seems like the longest. And I know I'm not the only one suffering from February blues. Feel free to complain in a comment. :-)

But there is one good thing about February:

Daughter #1

Happy Birthday! (next week)

***

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InSPIREd Sunday

 Westby Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
'the vanilla church'

I'm eager to share the passage (below) from a book I've just read, but first I must explain about the vanilla and chocolate churches of Westby, WI. There are several Lutheran churches in town, but this blond 'vanilla' one is part of a larger congregation made up of this church in town and its sister church, 'the chocolate church' out in the country (see photo below.)

Okay, to set you up for the passage from the book, the author is talking about Roman times, although the practice of self-promotion, tooting one's own horn, is alive and well today.

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"It was good to be king. The way of the hero exalted many wonderful qualities: courage and excellence and persistence, overcoming obstacles, self-discipline, and self-mastery. But humility was not an admired quality. It was not considered desirable. What was desirable was greatness.

"Historian Robin Lane Fox wrote, 'Among pagan authors, humility had almost never been a term of commendation. It belonged with ignoble and abject characters...The humble belonged with the abject, the mean, the unworthy.'

"But another way was emerging.

"A poor rabbi, who never wrote, The Deeds of the Divine Carpenter, said to his friends, 'You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people and officials flaunt their authority over those under them.'

"No Roman would have been offended by this observation of Jesus. The whole point of making it to the top of the pecking order was to peck. But what Jesus said next would offend:

"'Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be your slave - just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.'

"This is what might be called 'the way of the saint.'"

From Who is This Man? by John Ortberg

Westby Coon Prairie Lutheran Church

'the chocolate church'

 "Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.

"Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that 

JESUS IS LORD

to the glory of God the Father."

Philippians 2:6-11 

Have a blessed Lord's Day, friends!

Linking to InSPIREd Sunday

and Roses of Inspiration