This month, I’m participating in a study on love, based on 1 Corinthians 13. I’ve had different ideas on the topic over the years—back when I was 5 or 6 and couldn’t write much, the most common phrase in my letters was “God is love”.Back then, those words were security to me. That is who God is. But my idea of love—God’s love—never went far beyond that. That is who God is, but I never applied it to my life as “God is love, so therefore I should be . . . .”
Or in other words, season finale! Although we weren’t planning to have a season at all, and we probably aren’t going to do this again.
This particular movie was fun to make. As a family, we children had been kicking around the idea of doing a twist on the traditional Three Little Pigs story, but we hadn’t been able to figure out exactly what we should do or how we should go about it. But since I wanted a nice wrap-up to these recipe videos, and since everyone wanted to make another family movie (it’s becoming a tradition around here), we decided we’d give this a go.
There’s a bit of a story behind this one…my brother came up with the idea for sharing how to make eggnog one day, but for several days we couldn’t make it because I was working. Finally, we were able to do it—but due to poor planning, and acting-as-you-go, the first take turned out pretty terrible. (I laughed while videoing at one stage! Bad, bad videographer!)
For a while, he was okay with the result, but then decided it should be better if we were going to share it with anyone. Below is the second version, much better than the first.
Hello, again! Today, I’d like to share our family’s two most favorite snacks. These are eaten a lot around here—as in, almost everyone has one kind or the other each day.
The nice thing about these is that they’re simple enough that with a little supervision, my six-year-old brother can make them himself! He thought he’d like to show you how to do it, too.
Want a quick and easy, but fairly filling soup? This rice and tomato soup recipe is a great choice—and one our family loves!
A few months ago, a friend of mine reminded me of the attempted recipe video series I started about two years ago (in total, I made three videos). Since then, I’ve learned a little more about how I do things, and creating a recipe video every week is not one of those things I can continue very long.
Twice in the past two months I have had an “ah-ha!” moment. Both times, I suddenly had an answer to something that I had been feeling guilty about for years.
I was reading by the time I was three years old. When I was a baby, someone gave my mom a book, something about “Teach Your Baby to Read.” I was the first baby, so she had time, and she made flashcards to put on objects all over the house. I can’t remember not being able to read, and I’m guessing maybe she eventually regretted teaching me that young, as I quickly developed an addiction to reading! I remember being excited to start first grade, but then being very disappointed because the first day of first grade the reading lesson was simply, “God.” I was reading whole books by then! I spent hours and hours reading thousands of books as I grew up, and put that love of books to good use when I started a bookstore in my late teens. However, after I got married, little by little I started feeling guilty for loving to read, and guilty for taking time to read when there were other things to do, as there always are. Comments some people made such as, “I only ever read the Bible and ___________(church paper),” or, “Reading is a waste of time for me,” added to that feeling of guilt. I still read, because I can’t make myself stop reading, but always with a slight feeling of guilt.
Last year, my daughter came in from her bedroom one morning saying that she felt like the Lord had given her an idea. She wondered what I thought of a website devoted to book reviews. She would include warnings with the reviews of anything that parents might want to know about the book before giving it to their child, and build a search function to help parents find books about a particular area they were studying. After we all prayed about it, she built the website, and soon I started writing some reviews for her of books I read to myself or aloud to the other children. Still, I felt somewhat guilty about loving to read!