Yesterday I interviewed author Melanie Dickerson over on the International Christian Fiction Writers blog. (She's offering a free copy of her book, The Merchant's Daughter to someone drawn from those who comment before February 3. Come on over and check it out.) In my brain, I had done my blog for this week. Wait a minute. That was International Christian Fiction Writers. It doesn't put anything on Times and Places. At writers' conferences they tell us that the best way to lose readers is to be irregular in your posts. Those of you who stop by are expecting to find something interesting, thought-provoking, worth your time--something that makes you want to come back for more next week.
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So how many New Year's resolutions have you broken so far? I wasn't brought up to make New Year's resolutions. My parents taught me that if something was right to do, I should start now. If it was wrong, I should not wait for January 1 to stop. They had a good point, but the fact is that for many of us the new year is a time of thinking back over the past twelve months, noticing things we wish we had done differently and planning how to improve. As my husband and I approach retirement in a couple years, I find myself thinking back farther than the past year. This week we have been watching the progress of Hurricane Irene and praying for friends and loved ones on the east coast of North America. In our corner of the Northwoods we had our own storm the first of July. It wasn’t a tornado—all the trees fell from west to east—but there were a lot of them. We lost seventeen on our lakeside property. Some of our neighbors lost many more. In some places acres of forest have had to be completely cleared because of a tangle that reminded me of the game of Pick Up Sticks we played when I was a kid. Between my husband's heart attack and my bronchitis, this has been a week spent in recovery. We are grateful to be able to do this in such a beautiful part of the Northwoods.
The phone rings at 5 AM. It’s my brother-in-law. I look vaguely around my office over the garage where I have been sleeping due to the family reunion and try to figure out why he is telephoning me from the house. Only he isn’t in the house. He’s in a town 45 minutes away. He’s telling me my husband has had a heart attack and they just sent him by helicopter to the Cities. “By the time you get there, he should be coming out of the procedure.” My dad is coming up to his eighty-ninth birthday in September. I was recently going through old photo albums with him looking for pictures of the house where he was born for a blog about life in the Midwest. He was a cutie! He reminded me of my brother when he was small, and I know my dad would consider that to be the greatest compliment. My father was a doctor. He left for work before I was up in the morning and didn’t get home until supper, but nearly every evening he led our family in worship. We sat on the couch and sang a few hymns from the old Inter-Varsity hymnal. Last week we remembered and honored our mothers. This week I would like to talk about the joy of being one! Katie made me a mom. I guess it isn’t fair to broadcast the year on the internet. What a joyful day!
Mother’s Day 1946. My parents were married in Indianapolis, Indiana. My mother wore a blue suit that afterwards was her best church outfit. They intended to be missionaries to India, but my dad came down with tuberculosis that year and my mom with rheumatic fever, and it was eighteen years before they made it to India. We recently celebrated my husband’s birthday by feasting at Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian restaurant in Minneapolis. *close eyes, lick lips and savor. Mmmmmm.* A couple friends on Facebook asked what Brazilian food is like. It occurred to me that “Foods we love, from places we have lived” would make an interesting series of blogs. So let’s start with Brazil! The 1960s were an era of counter-cultural rebellion—young people renouncing their parents' striving for affluence in the suburbs and choosing instead the simple lifestyle. For many of my generation that meant a commune with free love and drugs, no bras or baths. For some of us touched by the Kingdom of God, it meant committing to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth, no matter the cost. I always pictured myself in a thatched hut in the jungle, befriending the ‘natives,’ wrestling with the puzzle of an unwritten language, creating an alphabet and translating the Scriptures. |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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