Saturday's Circle

What a day!  Frank and I left the house the first time at 7:45 to meet Beth and Ron for Breakfast at Jeff's Place.  This is a weekly tradition that we really enjoy.  After breakfast we stopped back by the house to take care of some things and headed to WoodYard in Griffin, GA (about 1.5 hours from our house) to check on their hardwoods.  We met a man at the Hummingbird Festival in Hogansville who told us about this place.  With the hour time change we managed to get there just minutes before they were supposed to close....but the salesman was wonderful and not in a hurry to get anywhere so we stayed nearly an hour.   You need to go to my link and just look at some of the woods they have.  Did you know there was such a thing as zebra wood?  How about purple heart wood?  I also had a lesson on lignum vitae.  Do you know what that is????  Well...let me tell you. Lignum vitae is a trade wood, also called guayacan or guaiacum, and in parts of Europe known as pockholz, from trees of the genus Guaiacum.   This wood was once very important for applications requiring a material with its extraordinary combination of strength, toughness and density. It is also the national tree of the Bahamas and the Jamaican national flower.  "Lignum vitae" is Latin for "tree of life", and derives its name from . Other names for lignum vitae include palo santo (Spanish for "holy wood").  It is a popular wood in shipbuilding, cabinetry, and woodturning but a completely different timber); lignum vitae is also one of the numerous hard, dense woods loosely referred to as ironwood.

Lignum vitae is hard and durable, and is also the densest wood traded (density: 1.23 g/cm); it will easily sink in water. On the Janka Scale of Hardness, which measures hardness of woods, lignum vitae ranks highest of the trade woods.  I am telling you this stuff was gorgeous...and to me there is nothing like the smell of wood.  After the WoodYard we headed to Columbus(1.75 hours away) to celebrate Virginia's birthday. 

We got there right at 3...of course we stopped at Starbucks before we got there.  3 hours of picking and singing followed once Amanda got there.  Noni came and played bass, Rebecca's cousin came and sang with us...Jeff, Virginia's fiancée played some amazing guitar licks and sang too.  This is what Virginia wanted for her birthday....so this is what she got.  It was a wonderful afternoon.  There is nothing like having a picking and singing at Rebecca's...unless it one at Amanda's....or my house.  I love it when we get together to sing.  I love my girls!  We headed home through Auburn, had dinner and finally got home about 7:30.  It had been a long day and this girl is whooped.  I had done my sermon earlier in the week...and forgot to mail it to myself....so when we got home I wrote a sermon.  Obviously the one I had written earlier...was not the one God wanted me to deliver....and sermon number two was nothing like it.  "Hey God...I get the message." 

Love as a Way of Life

My sweet daughter Kathryn's Sunday School class at Frazier United Methodist is doing a study right now on Gary Chapman's book, Love as a Way of Life. The topic for the last two weeks has been kindness. Kindness comes easy for Kat...because she is a kind person....but she has been instructed to not only be kind....but find kindness in others. She and her friend Mandy did a small pay-it-forward this morning that I think is kind of neat....and if more people treated others like this....the world would be a much nicer place to live in. This morning the girls went to Starbucks and paid for coffee....for people coming in....ahead of time...and instructed the manager not to tell. The cashier asked them...."if there was a hidden camera." It was sad to think that we only do nice things when we think someone is watching. Anyways,after they paid the money (and it was not a bunch of money) they sat at one of those cute little Starbucks tables and watched. People came to get coffee...and were told that their cup had already been taken care of. Kat said that some of the people...actually paid it forward again...others looked around trying to see if there was a hidden camera...or a gotcha waiting for them....but for around an hour....Kathryn and her friend Mandy were thrilled beyond words as they paid-it-forward and showed a random act of kindness. Funny thing...after she shared her story with me...I had the urge to do something totally random. So I mailed Spirit Jump cards. My encouragement to you today....do one random act of kindness every week....and see how it makes you feel. You know...when you practice love as a way of life...you really bloom.