Sewing

I started trying to sew as a hobby.

The first thing I made was a duffle bag to carry all my gym stuff in now that I’ve been utilizing the free gym at work (before I stuffed everything in a plastic bag and a laptop case…like a hobo yuppie). I figured if I could make a duffle bag in middle school, I could probably figure out how to do it now. Results (I could’ve stuffed it with all my stuff, but that was more work than I deemed necessary for the blog, you get the idea):

The second thing I made was a cat bag for Jackson. He likes it, and as stated in an earlier post, he actually does sleep on it:

I’ve been mending Jim’s pants for a long time (I’ve made so many patches that the foundation of his jeans is now comprised mostly of square shards of an old pillowcase), but tonight I mended his mittens. I kind of love these little guys:

Jim made popcorn and we’re going to watch Star Trek. Goodbye.

So great!

This made me smile big today (thanks for sharing, Chris!)

An Exercise

This blog used to be an exercise in (kind of) creative writing. I don’t know where things went wrong, maybe I felt that all my blogs were a way of either complaining about something or talking about some of the least important aspects of my life…and then I felt convicted that maybe complaining about things and drawing attention to what TV Show Jim and I last watched, wasn’t the best use of my time. Or maybe it’s that I just don’t want to waste time uploading pictures and correcting grammar. I don’t know.

As an update, here are some of the normal “Some People Call Me Maurice” Happenings of late:

• Over the course of the last 6 months, Jim and I watched Star Trek Next Generation: Season 1. It got continuously better as it went on and our theory is that there is a direct positive relationship between how much air time Lt. Yar got to how good the shows are.  A-like so:
  



 

• We’ve trained our cat to stand and sit on command. And yeah, that is pretty awesome.
• Jim and I have 4 different ways that we regularly brew espresso/coffee in our house. Snobbiness snuck up on us.
• I finally got the Lauryn Hill Unplugged album.  Something about folk meeting hip hop seems to meet all my musical cravings.
• Jim got me One Yard Wonders for Christmas, and I’m learning how to sew.  I made a kitty bed already, and he actually sleeps on it, which is the best part.
• My company won an Emmy.
• Jim and I shop at Aldi’s and save oodles of cash.  Step into our kitchen and you will be walking into an Aldi’s commercial. 

And here are important things that I normally would fail to write about:

• We moved into Jim’s dad’s house this year.  We have some serious loan-pay off goals; we had the opportunity to live rent free in this great house and we’re doing it.  It is frustrating some times for us to know that we’d like to be more generous, we’d like to have more freedom to serve, to give, to have kids, to go wherever, but the weight of debt keeps us from so much.  We prayed like gangbusters before asking Jim’s dad about it, we got advice from everyone we could think of, and in the end it just made the most sense.  Oh, how God has blessed it.  We are very content here.  If you pray, please pray for us to be wise with money so we can pay off our debts even quicker than we anticipate!
• I’ve been meeting with my friend Melissa every fortnight. It’s my desire for her to live an uncompromising life as a woman of God – what I didn’t expect was that these meetings would make me depend more on God in my own life, they have challenged me to not settle for “good enough” when thinking about how I work, love, serve, etc.  She asks tough questions that make me think twice about whether I’m believing a person’s interpretation of the Bible, or if I’m solely interested in what God’s Word really says.
• My job has brought me to tears many times in the last few months. Even though it’s a good job and I know God is using it to grow me in SO MANY ways (pratically, spiritually, emotionally), the stress of it at times is unbearable. I’m smack dab in the middle of this battle, and I don’t have much uplifting to say about it at the moment.  I may (will) never be the most skilled person in my position (I am not a defeatest.  I try to be as good as I can!), but God willing I will be remembered for my faithfulness, love, patience, gentleness, and kindness. Those fruits can never be stolen because they come from a Source more dependable than this frail shell of a person.  Despite this, I am human and I constantly struggle with inadequacy and anxiety.
• God is a god of peace, so I know that all anxiety I feel is from ME or something NOT of God.  Did you know there are 361 verses on peace in the Bible?  God is definitely a god of peace.  Some personal favorites:  “A heart at peace brings life to the body” – Proverbs 14:30, “My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you, not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” – John 14:27 (as spoken by Jesus Himself).   “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You because (s)he loves You.” – Isaiah 26:3.  And sometimes the most comforting, that he knows how weak I am: “For He knows our frame: He remembers that we are dust.” – Psalm 103:14 

And some items that fall somewhere in between:

• I had a realization that I can’t imagine anything baby-related past being one-month pregnant.  I can imagine realizing we’re pregnant (we’re not), but I cannot imagine actually dealing with the effects of being pregnant, nor can I imagine sleeping with a human in my stomach (taking up all the space).  I cannot imagine giving birth, I cannot imagine living with a small person in the same apartment/house as us.  I cannot imagine raising a human, teaching them all about life, character, etc.  I don’t know why all this is so impossible for me to imagine, since my sister and so many of my closest friends are doing all these things as I type!  And I witness it happening!  I guess it’s just hard to imagine life as anything other than what it currently is.  Our imagination is limited.
• 2010 is here and Rock TV is officially off hiatus.  Look forward to fresh new youtube videos soon.  Let’s hope the lighting is good.
• My friends Brigitte, Chris, & Dan (2/3 of which blog at the blogulator)’s band Paragraphs has a CD release tonight!  Yes!  You should listen to the songs on that link and/or get their album.  These are good people that I enjoy a great deal, and it is also a good band that I enjoy a great deal.  So.  Win win.
• The worship band at  The Rock, our church, has written a bunch of songs that we often sing at church.  They decided to put these on an album.  Jim and I picked up a copy last week and we are really liking it.  They are encouraging us to burn it for people, so it would not be illegal for me to make you a copy.  Let me know if you’d like one!  You can listen to some of it here.

Time to go to Aldi’s!

Christmas

From today’s Daily Faithwalkers Journal, written by one of our pastor’s wives, Dawn Bovenmyer:

For in Christ all the fullness of Deity lives in bodily form. Colossians 2:9 NIV

Being both a mom and grandmother, I’ve had plenty of experience with newborns. The top three questions I was asked following the birth of my babies related to the baby’s sex, name, and looks. The first two questions elicited obvious and straightforward answers, as in the case of our firstborn, “He’s a boy, and his name is Daniel.”

The last one was much more subjective. “Who does he look like?” This question invited all sorts of inspections, queries, and conclusions: “There’s that Knaphus nose”, or “Oh, he has the Bovenmyer notched ear,” or “Whose eyes are those?” And more often than not, we heard the famous summation, “He looks like his brothers!”

Today we are celebrating Christmas. It’s a story about a baby’s birth, and I’m sure Mary and Joseph were asked the top three questions themselves. Sex and name—no problem: “He’s a boy, and His name is Jesus.” Who does he look like? “Well, there’s some of mom and hmmm, not much of dad…he looks like a baby, OK.” And so He was, a helpless, human baby, for you see, God, through His Son, had joined the human family.

We’ll never fully comprehend the passionate love that drove God the Father to send His Son into our world to become one of us, live with us, and ultimately die for us. But because of that decision, we each have been offered an invitation, a tremendous Christmas gift, to become part of another family, God’s family, with a new name (Chris-tian, “belonging to Christ”) and the promise of looking like Him. Jesus became part of the human family so that we could become part of God’s family. What an incredible gift!

 

Amen.  An incredible invitation and a gift that’s worth celebrating.

1:30am Conversations

About 9 hours ago, I came home to our apartment after a most pleasurable Christmas party at the Waller-Mussack residence. When I came into our bedroom, Jim popped his head up. It made me very excited to know he was still awake because this meant I could tell him about the cat puzzle we’d spent the evening trying to put together. Unfortunately, the subject never came up. Instead we had this conversation:

Jim (garbled):  Good Morning, Minnesota

Christine:  What did you say?

Jim:  Good Morning, Minnesota

Christine:  What?

Jim (annoyed):  Good Morning, Minnesota

Christine:  Jim, you just said “Good Morning, Minnesota.”  What are you talking about?

Jim:  Multiply all the X’s

Christine:  What?

Jim (really annoyed):  Multiply all the X’s

Christine:  So, the answer to why you’re saying “Good Morning, Minnesota” is that you’re supposed to multiply the X’s?

Jim:  Are you making fun of me?

Christine:  Good night.

Jim:  Good night.

So this morning I told him about the cat puzzle instead.