Happy Friday! Here we are entering the weekend when our Daylight Savings Time springs forward to longer days of sunshine. This beautiful season launches with St. Patrick’s Day and an early Palm Sunday and Easter. It’s such a sweet time of year. Our weekend in Richmond is supposed to be beautiful with lots of opportunity to plan outings and plant gardens.
1) Antidepressant Soil – I came across this article on antidepressant microbes in soil and was intrigued. My husband loves to garden.
As hard as he works out there, he always comes in with such a joyful satisfaction, I wonder if this article might actually be true. What do you think?
2) Signs of Spring – The morning sky, the changeable weather, and all the new growth are cause for wonder. The sunrises amaze me how they change with the seasons in their glorious presentations.
Photo Credit: Bekkah Mills (Beach Sunrise) & me
3) Farewell to Downton Abbey – Although the BBC show finished at Christmas 2015, we can manage here in the US to watch it through to its finale without knowing how it ended 3 months prior. The finale episode of this upstairs-downstairs story, set in a Victorian England manor house, was lovely and completely satisfying. All sorts of resolution to the different storylines. A wedding, babies, and NO deaths. Finally, in the end, DA creator, Julian Fellowes “let Edith be happy“. So hopefully you’ve all seen the last episode, otherwise the photo below becomes a spoiler. If you’re not already a fan, I hope you’ll catch up with the family and servants of Downton Abbey sometime over a beach week. 6 great seasons. You won’t be disappointed. The thought of that reminds me of our occasional Pride and Prejudice weekend marathons with friends when our daughter was a teenager at home overseas. Such a lovely diversion…
Even our son Nathan, who usually watches something altogether different on Sunday night TV, honored Downton Abbey with an arrangement on classical guitar. Enjoy.
4) Single Most Important Habit – So what do you think might be considered the single most important habit of our lives? Probably not the one David Mathis marks as a keystone habit – that is, “simple, but catalytic new routines that inspire other fresh patterns of behavior”. He contends that for Christ-followers that single most important habit is corporate worship.
David states: “God didn’t make us to live as solitary individuals. Neglecting corporate worship sows seeds of unbelief in our soul.”
Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24–25)
This isn’t just a casual hanging out with each other, nor is it merely church attendance. This is a community of Christ-followers attending to the teaching of God’s Word, agreeing together in prayer, and joining together in response to God’s love, goodness, and sovereignty in all of life…through the singing of songs and the witness of His faithfulness in each of our lives.
Photo Image: UMC Discipleship
It’s definitely something to consider for our spiritual maturing when staying in bed or making other plans seem so much more inviting, at first, than gathering with other imperfect people who know how much we need God. At first…Something to consider…
5) Roaring Lambs – Lastly, I just want to give a shout-out to those people in my life and whom I know through their writing and other celebrity who live their faith wherever they are.
Photo Credit: The Salt Collective
The bus driver, the clerk in the doctor’s office, the TV producer, the teacher, the mail carrier, the retired person, or the [fill in the blank]. Those people in our lives in whom we see the love of Jesus, the excellence of effort, and the tenacity of a life poured out for others. Not baiting and switching, but day in/day out, living their lives with honesty and transparency, faithful to God, loving as He calls us to love. Thank you. Thank God for you.
Bob Briner’s Roaring Lambs: A Gentle Plan to Radically Change Your World
Johnny Hart’s I Did It His Way – celebrated comic strip creator who mixes his faith with his humor. Not in every strip, but from time to time…”drawing” attention to God, Creator and Redeemer, while depicting stories of early (pre-historical) men and women.
Interesting about the soil – bet it is true.
So sad Downton Abbey is over, but yes, delightful finale. Now we’ll just have to watch the series over again from the beginning.
I think ‘habit’ is a good word choice. It’s not something you do just as a fun activity or a social get together, but as a discipline, a part of the routine of what your life is. Not that it can’t be fun or social, but that it is bigger than that and something you choose to make important.
Yep…it’s true. A habit – and habits aren’t necessarily loathsome things…like, bummer, have to get up and go hang with other believers… It’s a beautiful habit. Thanks for commenting.