My Time at the Inn

                                      Dear Reader, There is one book that I forgot to add yesterday.  If you enjoy history, then you will enjoy Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub.  It is the true account of one Christmas Eve during World War I when the soldiers on both sides took a holiday.  They stopped fighting and had a truce. It began when German soldiers had Christmas trees and put small candles on them, and the British, French, and Belgian troops serenaded each other, and even the German troops joined in.  As the solemness of Christmas broke out among them, they broke bread, exchanged small gifts and stopped the awful war for one brief moment in time.  When the angry superiors ordered them to shoot each other, they shot their guns in the air instead.  The soldiers had...

Well, now that we have made it past Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the house is made festive with Christmas decorations, I thought it was time to take a good holiday book from off the shelf, put my feet up and do some serious Christmas reading!  Okay, so I don't have everything done.  I still have presents to finish making, shopping to begin, cookies to bake and cards to write, but what is Christmas without a good book to read? So here is my list of books that I love to read during the holiday season.  I hope you enjoy the list, and if you would like to comment and share with me the books you enjoy during the holiday season, please do share!  First on the list has to be the Bible! This goes without saying, but since some of my Readers are new, you may not know that the Bible has first place in my life.  The story from Luke 2 is most important.  When I was a child we never went off to bed until we had read the Christmas story from Luke.  I always wen...

Dear Readers, I wish you all a wonderful, blessed, and happy Thanksgiving Day.  I hope your year has been a blessed one. If you have had to endure trials this year, I pray they have made you stronger.  We can even be thankful in trials. As it says in James chapter one: "Knowing this that the trying of your faith worketh patience."  Trials shape who we are.  They can make us stronger as we rely on Christ, or they can appear to break us, and sometimes it when we think we are broken that we come out stronger than we ever were before. I thank my readers from other countries, for stopping by, and having a look at the little things I write.  I get encouragement knowing that you stop in and read.  If you would care to leave a comment for me, I would enjoy hearing from you. I have a little ceramic turkey that sits on my television cabinet that says, "Gobble til you Wobble", but I  know that today is not a day for simply stuffing ourselves and then running...

The United States of America has one holiday that is uniquely  ours: Thanksgiving Day.  John Bradford and 103 other passengers aboard the Mayflower landed at Cape Cod in 1620.  The long, ardorous journey presnented many diffculties.  They had to go a different route because of pirates, and a violent storm cracked a massive heavy beam on the ship.  The passengers had brought with them a giant heavy screw wi, and they used this to hold the ship together.  Seasickness brought troubles and some of the ship's crew tormented and troubled the passengers. In all the sickness, only one man died, and he had been one of the crew who had tormented the passengers in their sickness.  One young boy, John Howland, was swept overboard in one storm, but he held on to a rope and the crew pulled him back to saftey. What made these people risk it all to come to a strange land?  Freedom.  They wanted the freedom to worship God in the manner they chose and n...

Once upon a time in America, when someone immigrated to this country, that person was expected to learn the language.  If I were to move to Germany, I would be expected to learn and speak German. Now that does not sound to ludicrous does it?  After all, learning the language, means being able to communicate, right?  So, one would expect an employee of a store to speak the native language, right?  I expect too much. Today, I was in a hurry, and needed help finding where the cheesecloth could found in this particular store.  So I ask a worker, the worker did not understand one word that I spoke. I know some German, but I didn't know the German word for cheesecloth, and I had a feeling this person didn't know German any better, so I didn't go there. I tried French, another I language I know, and since it is similar to Spanish I thought that might work. Oh, I got a glimmer of hope from worker.  I was lead to a row of washcloths.  "Thank you," I say, and ...

Dealing with people who do not know how to do business frustrates me.  One of our sons is at a university in Texas.  In August we went with him to the bank and cosigned for him to get a student loan for one year.  The goal was to have the loan pay for his first year, and then use scholarships, and work to pay for the rest of his years.  This was supposed to be easy.  Our daughter got a school loan last year.  The bank sent her school the money, and the school sent our daughter a check for the left over part of the loan so that our daughter could buy books, get housing etc.  Easy.  Within the first two or three weeks of school,  all was taken care of. I don't know if it is Texas itself that is slow, but our son has not received any money. He had put the first semester on his credit card, which is now maxed out, and we are paying for housing.  We are glad to help our son, so I am not complaining about that, but dealing with the...

Something is wrong in a society where a person who works in a music department of a quality store is clueless about classical music.   Since I live in the country, I called a local store wanting to know if they have Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer , thus avoiding a wasteful trip into town. Calling the store became an exercise in futility.  Here is the conversation: Me:  Hello, I'm calling to see if you have Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer . Store:  So what group is this Mahler fellow in? Me: He is a composer and not part of a group. Store:  Oh.  Well then, does he spell his name M A L E E R Me: No, that would be Maleer. Store: But isn't that what you said when you said Mahler Me. No, it's spelled M A H L E R Store: Oh, Ma  as in Ma and Pa! Cute, but why put an h in it? Me: Do you have it? Store:  I'll check.  Five minutes pass, and I should have been worried when the background music was a rap tune. Store:  Wh...

  This is a picture of my Grandfather, Sherman Logan Fuller.  I never knew him, he passed away twenty-three years before I was born.  My Dad was seventeen years old when his father passed away.  Sherman must have been a wonderful man, for he passed a rich heritage to his children.  Sherman and his wife, Amy, had nine children. One died at six months of age from scarlet fever.  Everyone of his children had nothing but wonderful things to say about him.  He was generous, kind, considerate, and helpful, always ready to lend a hand.  He loved to laugh and tell stories, and this he gave to my father. He was a Christian man, from what I have been told, but came to faith as an older man.  He was one of 21 children.  His family had journeyed west in a covered wagon with others from Ohio, to plant a church in Illinois.   Sherman was born in the year the Civil War ended. His brother William fought in the Civil War and was with She...

                     In the late 1950's Jean Kerr wrote a wonderful book titled, The Snake Has all the Lines .  She tells the story of how happy she and her playwright husband were to know their son had won the lead role as Adam in the Garden of Eden play at his parochial school.  When he comes home from school, they eagerly ask their son how the first rehearsal went, and he wasn't happy.  When the parents tell the boy that he has the lead role, the son replies with , "Yeah, but the snake has all the lines." Today, as I struggled with the proper balance between law and gospel, I felt like the Kerr's son, the snake had all the lines!  Frustrating, to be sure, is how to manage the desire to please God and yet not get ensnared in the trap of works for works sake, which thing the Snake delights!  Just when I think I have things figured out, pride sets in and th...

Dear Readers, I hope you accept my apology for such a long absence in writing.  I have been overwhelmed by life, and just didn't write.  Has that ever happened to you?  Do you ever over-commit to things?  I have. In fact, it is a pattern with me.  I can't say no. Saying no is more difficult than saying yes.  Saying no to something means you have to explain why you say no, and so yes, seems the easier thing to do, until, as I found, that in saying yes, I overbooked by already booked and filled life. I love to teach, so when asked if I would lead a 7th and 8th grade reading group, without thinking I said, "yes, I would love to do it."  I do love doing it, but should I have done it?  Then I was asked if I would rejoin an orchestra I had once been part of.  What did I say?  Yep, you guessed it, I said "sure".  Never mind that I teach violin students, work at the church library and resource center. Oh, I must not forget that this ...