Beauty For Ashes

Being a human being is an interesting thing isn’t it?  I have been pondering on communication quite a lot over the last several months.  Some of my thoughts have been centered around how frusterating it is to be misunderstood and how difficult it is to find the words to straighten the misunderstanding out.  I’ve also been thinking aobut how interesting it is that as people we want to be unique and loved for our uniqueness.  We want to be loved for who we are in our hearts yet, we put on a little show and then get hurt because no one really knows us.  We don’t show our true face to the world for numbers of reasons, the main one I think, being rejection. 

Why do I bring this up?  Well,  T and I are having an issue with one of our children that we could use some help with.  The help we could use really needs to come from people we don’t know but who interact with our child.  Strangers, if you will.  The hitch, no one will speak the truth because they don’t want to look bad, hurt our feelings, you fill in the blank.  I get that, I do that.  The remedy, open your mouth and speak.  I know, easier said than done.

I just think it’s interesting.  As a people, we could just open our mouths and speak I wonder what connections could be made that we never would have dreamed. 

All of this coming, ironically, from the very quiet, speak avoiding person that I am…

What have I been up to lately you ask? Well, a little of this and a little of that. The pendant above is one I just completed yesterday. I am thrilled with it. It is made from a domed silver disc paired with a domed copper disc that has been enameled with peacock blue enamel. The little “stamen” in the middle is made from a fine silver ball. I think it is terrific and quite striking really. It is the first of many I’m sure. I have a series using these domed discs floating around in my mind and I’m anxious to get going on it. 

Oh, and don’t let me forget this little treat:
I completed this on Monday and have been wearing it none stop since.  It is a bracelet made of sterling silver and gold filled wire.  It has such a nice weight and makes me feel very feminine and energetic.

I am loving my metal shop classes.  This last weekend I completed an intense enameling class.  It was so very fun and I developed another skill using color on metal.  You all know how I love color.  I am loving the enamels and all the different techniques you can use to create a lovely piece of art work/jewelry. 

Currently I am working on completing a sculpture that I will certainly show you in addition to a lost wax cast ring, a pair of earrings to go with the domed disc pendant as well as a bracelet to complete the set.  I can’t wait to show you how it all turns out. 

This is so fun!!!

We all had cabin fever last night and even though it was snowing and cold, we decided to head out of the house.  Our usual destination when cabin fever strikes in the winter is Barnes and Noble.  It’s close, it has coffee, it has lots and lots of books…perfect!  We always hang out in the children’s section as we peruse through the billions of books.  C and M have favorites they like to read through so sitting at the little round table in the children’s section really is the best way for them to have access to everything they are interested in reading.  T and I pull up an adult chair and peruse through the stacks of magazines and books that we grabbed on our way to the childrens section. 

Last night was nice.  The kids enjoyed their time and I enjoyed bugging C.  We shared a bench and I just couldn’t keep my hands off him.  Even at 7, he is so darned cute!  As he read, I periodically reached over and poked a rib or tickled a chin.  He finally looked at me with a twinkle and a frown and said, “Mom, you are really bugging me, stop it”.  Which meant do it some more, please!  Or at least that is what I heard.  I tried to refrain but just couldn’t keep my hands off his cuteness.  With exasperation, he put his book down, turned to face me and gave me a big fat kiss right on the cheek and said, “please stop, I’m trying to read”.  I stopped but it was hard cause I really wanted another big, fat, sloppy kiss right on my cheek!

We get a snow day today.  Yeah!  My class was cancelled and my kiddies get to stay home.  I decided to let them sleep in so while they were snoozing Abbie and I went out to shovel the sidewalk.  Okay, Abbie just chewed on a pinecone while shoveled.  It took me about 1/2 hour and sweat was pouring off me by the time I was through.  Toward the end of my shoveling, I heard a little voice call out to me.  M was worried that I had left her all alone and was looking high and low.  Of course her worry was put to rest when I told her that she wasn’t going to go to school today.  “So, we get to sled all day today?” she said.  I told her that yes indeed, she could sled off and on all day today.  We have quite a  hill going in the front yard, only to be enhanced by all the snow storms building off the Pacific just waiting to dump beautiful, fluffy white stuff on the mountain and maybe bless us Bendites with some of the extra.  It’s lovely and fun. 

I have a whole list of things to do today since I’m not going anywhere.  I know I’ll probably only accomplish one or two things but I can still dream.  Here’s my list.

Sled with the kids
Do some metal craft
Order some metal supplies so I can complete this lovely bracelet I’m drooling over
Finish reorganizing my closet (we got a new bedroom set so I need to put all my stuff away)
Tidy the house
Vacume everything within reach (Abbie is a wonderful dog but her hair is driving me bananas) 
Make Hot Chocolate
make some phone calls

I could go on but I think I’d better end with that and get started on my list!  Can’t wait!

I think I’m done trying to find clever titles for my blog entries and so I’ll just throw one up there that has some validity to what I might happen to say on this given day.  Hmmm.

My children are well, mostly.  We went to the doc this morning and he declared that they looked much better.  The one little hitch for my sweet and courageous girl is that she has a nasty thrush infection in her mouth from the adult doses of antibiotics she has been on for the last week and a half. I have been pushing the yogurt but she, like me really doesn’t like yogurt so getting her to consume it always seems to involve funny faces and sometimes tears.  I’m tired of tears. 

Anyway,  back to my title.  Well,  M, my sweet daughter has a competitive streak.  She likes sports and games and she is good at them all.  Last year my Dad taught her how to play cribbage.  This year for Christmas, my husband and M got a cribbage board.  I have never seen a nine year old play like she does.  I think I already mentioned at the top of the paragraph that M is very competitive right?  Well,  she gets down and dirty with her daddy, smack talking and everything.  Not only that, apparently she has the moves to back up her talk.  She regularly kicks her daddy’s butt.  Well, a couple of days ago, her grandpa challenged her to a game.  I guess she kicked his butt too.  When we went to pick her up from his house, he made sure to let us know, with pride in his voice, that his granddaughter is a cribbage genius.  He also told us, with pride in his voice, that she is a stinker when she plays. 

We laughed. 

I think I’ve had enough of cartoons to last me for the next 10 years.  Sponge Bob is not a favorite, in fact, I cannot stand to be in the same room as him when he is on TV.  Kim Possible is great fun but, alas, she is not on the tele as often as I would like. 

Why am I ranting about cartoons you ask?  Well,  even though the sky is blue, blue, blue and we have snow on the ground, the sledding hill is calling our names and the crisp air is beckoning to me, I’m on Mommy duty.  My children are sick.  One has pneumonia and the other is quickly heading that direction.  Because they feel yucky, my duty as a Mommy is to indulge them which means…all the cartoons you can stomache.  In exchange, I get to sit and snuggle with them while they watch.  I think I’m the richest Mommy in the world.  Snuggles are better than chocolate and because my children are growing up, they come fewer and fare between.  Don’t get me wrong, I would exchange all the snuggles in the world if they were never sick again.  Since it appears that that exchange is not going to happen, I’ll enjoy the snuggles and the fact that they just want Mommy….and cartoons.

:0)

I am so excited.  I just got my first client.  He has asked me to make a piece of jewelry for his wife.  I am just so stunned and excited.   We are working on the design now.  He has some thoughts as to what he wants and will be getting me his schematics to start.  Did I alread say that I am just so excited?!?

On a little bit different topic, someone asked where you can get a jewelers saw in Bend.  My answer is that I don’t know.  I ordered mine from www.riogrande.com as well as a bunch of other stuff I couldn’t find here.  I am loving Harbor Freight though.  They have great prices on different tools and they even carry cutting compounds now.  I think you will really have to dig to find jewelers supplies here. 

Yesterday was my first day back to school.  I am taking the second in the series of metal craft courses at our local college.  It was so great to walk into that room and see the faces of my classmates. 

It was also funny to me to see the differences in attitude between the younger students and the older students.  There is a dycotomy of perspective.  The difference, I believe is desire.  The older crowd was so excited to be in class, ready to learn and happy to jump in with both feet while the younger crowd whined a lot which in fact is due to them just tryingto get through another boring class.  In fact one girl stood to my right leaning over my work station whining about how she didn’t have enough to do and still had 45 minutes left in class.  She took a break from her diatribe for a few minutes to walk over to one of my classmates, who is a brilliant photographer and has done it professionally for many years (he is part of the older crowd) and give him a lecture on what negative space looks like.  I nearly snorted  and then I realized that I’ve done that very thing plenty.  Oh, I felt embarassed for her and then I felt embarassed for me and my own arrogance at times.  Eeek.

Anyway, it was so terrific to be given design assignments and get a glimpse at what we are going to learn to do this term.  I can’t wait to get my hammer out and start banging away.  I’ll try to get more pictures on here as I go but my darn camera is broke again.  Grrrr!  I am very frustrated by this!

Wow!  It is snowing.  Not much has accumulated yet but it seems that the pretty white stuff is wreaking havoc on our town.  I got up at 6:30 this morning to get ready for my first class of the quarter.  Looked on the internet to find out my children have a two hour delay for classes so my dear friend who takes them to class in the morning is now babysitting for 2 hours.  She is so sweet to do that. 

I trade cars with my sweet hubby and now am driving his rather large 4 wheel drive pickup so I can make it up the hill to our local college (which by the way, is notorious for being a skating rink), park and walk up the hill to class.  I am so excited to be going back to class I can’t even stand it! 

Anyway, I get out onto the main road up to the college and it has turned into a parking lot.  No one was moving.  My plans to be early to class have been squashed.  I remained hopeful anyway and sat in the traffic line for about 35-40 minutes.  As I am sitting, I decided to call my husband and find out if he has heard anything about the traffic or school closures.  He told me that they have closed the roads to the school, someone fell in the parking lot and broke their leg and even the ambulance is stuck.  I feel terrible for the poor person who fell.  Yuck!  So I figure out how to get my rather large truck, with a turning radius of 3 states turned around and head home and see if I can get any more info on school.  I get on the net and look!  there it is!  School is closed for the day.  So now, here I sit, blogging and trying to think about what I need to get done today and what I can live without doing. 

I am enjoying our snow.  It is pretty and secretly I’m hoping for 3 feet so we can go sledding and drink lots of hot chocolate.  Some of my favorite memories of growing up here in Central Oregon are the snow days and the neighbors coming out to sled with us.  We had an awesome sledding hill out in our pasture.  We would gather all our sleds, get our long johns on and our jeans(didn’t have snow pants and wouldn’t have worn them even if I had), snow boots, hats, mittens, smiles and head out to the pasture for a day of sledding.  I always thought it was such a treat but the treat turned into paradise when at about 9:00 at night we would look outside and realize that the snow had slowed down, the clouds were fairly low in the sky and the light was bouncing off the clouds to make it very light outside.  We would call the neighbors, grab our sleds and head out to the hill and sled until midnight if our mother’s would let us.  It was wonderful!  I hope, I hope, I hope we get lots and lots of snow.  It so happens we have a terrific sledding hill in our front yard and I’ll be the first one out!

I have probably shared some of this before but just in case, I wanted to get it down on paper, or the computer rather.

So I have been thinking a lot about those things that bring peace and have been pondering on the act of sitting at the feet of Jesus.  I think one of the most valuable things I have learned in my Christian walk is that Jesus does not need me to do anything in order to accomplish what he wants accomplished.  More than anything he wants me to come sit at his feet and just BE.  He wants me to BE in such a way that I am not bringing my agenda or my must does or haves with me.  He speaks to me best and moves my heart in amazing ways when I come even with my broken humaness just to be in his presence.  I am finding that it is an incredible thing to have him pour out his loving mercy and grace over me and doing so he mends my broken places in such a way that I can sing his praises and adoration to the world.  What that means to me is that he refills my overwhelmed heart in such a way that those things that normally send me over the edge of anxiety are now things that can be tackled and managed because of my knowlege of whose strength I am filled with.  When I go to him and sit at his feet on a regular basis he fills me up to the top with grace to deal with things I would never be able to handle, mercy to give to people who normally would tick me off and wisdom and insight into situations that I would usually be very narrow minded about.

I haven’t been sitting at his feet much over the last several months and I am hungering deeply to do so.  I am just a week away from Christmas and the celebration of the birth of my Savior and I want to dance and sing his praises more than anything this year. 

The other thing that dawned on my while walking the butte with my friend is that a spiritual desert is a very special place to be.  I have always abhored going through a spiritually dry time.  I have found it depressing and scary to be honest.  Well, my outlook on it has been changed.  Here’s what I think.  The desert is talked a lot about in the Bible.  It has been a huge instrument of challenge and change from the beginning.  I think of the Israelites wandering in the desert with Moses.  Is it Elija or Elisha  that ran into the desert when a queen wanted to kill him?  John the Baptist lived in the desert and finally there is Jesus who went into the desert to be tested for 40 days.  I think that God uses the desert in our spiritual lives to meet us.  He uses it to minister to us and to help us heal and move forward.  He uses it to expand our faith and help us understand that knowing him is more than just feelings and emotions. 

When I go through deserts in my spiritual life, I have found that God meets me when I am desperate in ways that are so intimate and tender.  He feeds my soul and quenches my thirst in some of the most unexpected ways. 

If you think of it, go and read about how God met the needs of the Israelites as they wandered through the desert.  Be sure and look at how much and what he gave them to keep them alive.  Ask yourself what he was doing when he didn’t give them more.  After that, go look up what God said to Elija/Elish(sorry can never keep them straight) and what God did to keep him alive.  What was God’s point?  Finally, look at Jesus when wandered in the desert.  What happened to him there?  What did he accomplish and who met him there?  At the end of his wandering what happened to him and how do you think it might have grown his faith and love for his Father?

I would love to hear your thoughts. 

If I don’t get to blog before Christmas, may you be blessed beyond measure by His grace, mercy and love.  May you find deep peace in the presence of the Savior.