“The RoseBouquet”

Yesterday I sent a friend a bunch of links to sites to check on when he gets the next forward to pass along. He was very concerned about an Amendment to the USA Pledge of Allegiance, which was to take the name of God out of it. I was able to find him some links to sites that reported that issue had died almost as soon as it was raised in 2002, but the internet is still circulating petitions on that issue!

When you run into something that sounds amazing, check it out. Bookmark these sites and become familiar with how to look up things. Maybe it’s an old rumour or even a scam.

http://www.truthorfiction.com
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/
http://www.jesus21.com/portal/index.php?s=scams
http://www.librarysupportstaff.com/4emailthinking.html

Are you soft and tenderhearted? Do you identify with the weak and hurting, and get easily wounded yourself?

Join our club! That’s what a number of us in our family are like too. Dad is like that, so was his Dad, and his brother Aaron. Aunt Helena, his sister always has a tender tear in her voice. As does her daughter Brenda. My brother Tom is easily absorbed into another’s pain, and of course, I’ve lived with it all my life too.

In my case, a vivid imagination was stirred into the mix that became me.

If you’re one of this breed you know the ups and downs of it, right? You’re drawn totally into a story or drama, and every nuance in a family relationship or friendship is magnified. Joys are tremendous, but a crisis crushes you and tosses you into a pit of despair!

Sometimes you wonder why you have to experience everything so intensely. When someone hurts your feelings, you really suffer.

I’ve given this quite some thought at different times in my life, and I’ve concluded that I’d rather be like this than cold and unfeeling.

On the other hand, as with everything else, I think God wants us to learn to
discipline ourselves, and balance our compassion with forethought, and a firm kindness toward ourselves and toward others.

How, pray tell?

God’s favourite method seems to put sharp, irregular people into our lives and even our homes. Maybe you have a friend who is always cutting you down. More likely it a a relative or family member who crushes you.

The key is all in how you respond. If you lie down and whimper in pain, you will hurt and your wound will bleed profusely, and never heal.. If you keep running off to cry out to the Lord, and tell Him about it, and actually listen for His instructions, God will use that person to build a velvet-steel strength into your fiber. You’ll learn to say yes to the right things, and no to the bad things. You’ll learn to love like God! You’ll learn to use your tenderness as a gift to bless and help others, and you will experience joy and contentment.

I used to feel sorry for Mom, who suffered so much after the cow gored her and tossed her over the gate. She was in hospital, or at least in bed, most of my childhood and early teens. But when I came home to care for her, after being on my own and far away for twelve years, I discovered that her suffering had embittered her, and made her cold and withdrawn. Getting along with her grated on my tender spirit and tore me up like a harsh rasp.

But I had learned, while on my own, to run to the Lord with everything, to talk over every little thing with my Best Friend, Jesus, and to spend hours over an open Bible. This turned out to be what saved me from going over the deep end myself. Little by little, as I begged for help in loving and caring for Mom, I learned to be strong and tough with my love, to persist and never let go, despite tears and pain.

I still find my soft and my disciplined sides slipping out of balance from time to time, but enough distance has come in the past eight years since her death, that I can see what God has accomplished in my character development through that.

Dad is really quite easy to get along with. We seldom have a clash. There are others of course, who can stab me with a word, or just an inflection, but a profound truth has come to me; in Christ I have power to LOVE them and they have no way of stopping me! In fact, I think in making that dramatic resolution, the sting of their hurts can be cancelled forever.

Recently I heard that Dr. Billy Graham had once doubted God’s Word, but he had it out with God Himself, and came to a point where he announced, “I’ll believe Your Word no matter what!” After that he had power and great success in preaching.

I think a similar power is released upon us when we emphatically decide to love someone who has hindered us from full joy. Today I am making some resolutions to love certain individuals - no matter what they do.

If you have similar problems with people in your life, (and I know many do!) I’m sharing this solution with you so you can try it too. Make up your mind that with God’s help that wound-giver cannot STOP you from loving her or him ever again!

Actually, Ruthe, the heroine of my novel lives by such principles too. Want to watch her at work in the midst of it?

To read sample chapters of my book online, start at
Ruthe’s Secret Roses

To order the e-book to download and read on your computer;
Order page (or if you email me, we can make a deal and I’ll send it to you on CD).

To order the softcover paperback from Booklocker use;
Booklocker.com

My sister-in-law phoned last night, and when she heard that I’d had yet another computer crash last week, and another this (although I recovered by last night, and have fixed the original error I’d made last week) - I could just hear in her voice, as she informed me that they never have computer crashes, that I must be really dumb or klutzy to have such problems.

I bet others think the same. I’m torn between wanting to defend myself, and realizing that such behaviour only stirs up worse kinds of trouble.

But for those who are sympathetic I would like to point out that I learn from my mistakes. In fact if there is a grading line between being a complete novice and a very knowledgeable computer nerd or geek, then I’m over 50% towards the geek end of that line. Maybe those nerds just don’t tell their friends about every mistake they’ve made and learned from.

Besides hunching intensely focused over my computer, I have sorted Dad’s 150+ cross necklaces into a large pizza box, and taken inventory, and on Tuesday, we went to the city and I was able to get the largest Christian Bookstore to take a batch of 25 on consignment. The buyer was happy to get them right now for the Christmas season! Dad’s pretty thrilled too.

We made contact in two other stores, but have to go back in a week to talk to the owners.

Besides all this, I’ve taken to bundling up in Mom’s old down-filled hooded, full-length parka coat, and going for early morning prayer walks around town. It has invigorated me, and given me new energy and cheer for the rest of the day. I march through back alleys and around the outer edges of town, and am pleased that my concentration as I pray through my intercession lists is much improved.

My apologies for being a day late. I thought I had everything restored and set up to work smoothly last Friday, but had made a mistake, so my computer system crashed again this week Tuesday morning. This time I believe I have it right. At last!

However, I had Board Minutes to type up, and I’d promised the evening to work on another mission’s site, so all I could do was put off this RoseBouquet issue until this morning.

I had begun my renovational work on the Sharing Library section of my site, Ruthes-SecretRoses.com. Whatever I didn’t upload to the site is lost and I’ll have to start that over again.

But hey, I’m grateful that I didn’t get too many days’ work done before this crash on Tues/Wed. I DID get two publications completed and sent off after midnight on Monday of last week - before that crash. Then, this Monday I got a number of pages revised, updated and uploaded by midnight - again before the crash. What marvelous timing! What grace of
God in all that!

Tuesday morning when programs were seizing up on me, I still managed to check over the proof of the Reflections (a desktop design job for Western Tract Mission), and get word back to the printer on three corrections to make.

I gave up yesterday to TRY to fix things, and then install and re-start the Install of my SuSE until I learned that I MUST set the mnt points in the partitions. Last week they looked right to me, so I just went to next without checking into that. The system tried to stuff everything into the root partition, and 3 GB was just too small. No wonder I got error messages saying I had run out of space.

I am rather pleased that I remembered NOT to format the /home and /local partitions, which saved all the data I’d re-installed there last Friday. I only lost the work from Friday to this Tuesday morning, except for what I managed to send off or upload to the sites.

I groan as loudly as anyone else when a crash happens, but when I stop to look things over objectively, I see that God’s Hand is still with me, and protecting me in the midst of it all.

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day. I’ve had some good article ideas for the Ruthe’s Roses section, but none exactly on that topic. I’ve not had time to develop them in full, but will share some thoughts on time and God’s timelessness.

Do use tomorrow - and every day - to remember well and wisely, and to entrust the memories that hurt to the Heavenly Father. He handles them kindly and can give you a garment of praise to wear instead, if your memories are rough and painful.

Three key poems for this day; canada.kos.net/remembrance.html

Poppy Crafts for young kids; www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/remembrance/

Do you know about Anne Frank? Excepts from her famous diary, read
by various celebrities. Both sound and text options. www.annefrank.com

If you collect pictures of the royals, you can download some excellent portraits of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh from this web page; www.pch.gc.ca/special/reine-queen/index_e.cfm

We live on earth in a dimension called “Time.” Because the earth spins every 24 hours we have past, present and future. We can’t go backwards - except in our minds.

On the other hand, God lives in eternity where past, present and future is all in the NOW. That is why Christ’s death on the cross, and His resurrection is effective for saving our souls, no matter what era of human history we live in. The invitation to receive this gift of forgiveness, salvation and new life stands until the end of time.

Yes, time as we know it will come to an end.

God intends to remove us from this dimension and bring us into His timeless eternity - which shall never end! That is usually referred to as Heaven, but eternity encompasses the whole universe.

Eternity is really another dimension in which many other dimensions will be available to us. Time will be that restrictive skin or shell we have shed, freeing us to live with God on His plane, as members of His Family! Wow!

Everybody ought to know this, and prepare by believing and obeying God.

Someone who understands the urgency of that “ought to know” is Ruthe, the heroine of my novel. She really works at getting that message out, despite her natural timidity. In fact, she overcomes her shyness again and again, to introduce people to the God she knows personally.

To read sample chapters of my book online, start at
Ruthe’s Secret Roses (index).

To order the e-book to download and read on your computer;
Order page
(or if you email me, we can make a deal and I’ll send it to you on CD).

To order the softcover paperback from Booklocker use;
Print copy

There’s snow on the ground this morning. We’ve all been grateful that it has stayed away this long. Seems folks around here all appreciate an extended fall, much as we know winter has it’s positives too.

Two nights ago we had about 43 Halloween trick or treaters at the door. I gave out caramels and children’s tracts, however, I had only 10 caramels left at the end.

Dad has been busy stringing up more of his cross necklaces - but I’ve got to get some sales rustled up for him. I managed to create a fairly good sales page, and on Monday started setting up classified ads to send people there. Then yesterday morning I had new surprise computer woes, and haven’t been able to get any of my usual work done.

I’m glad to be functional here in my Mandrake operating system though, and able to get this to you on schedule. If you’re waiting for me to answer an email though, don’t hold your breath too sharply. Much as I’d love to get back to my routines, and emails, I have no guarantees how long this will take.

Basically, I’m here to apologize for my one-track mind, and to ask your prayers. I do believe I’ll learn from this though and be much better for it.

Long-time readers will recall that last fall I raved about Mandrake, my Candy-store of a new computer operating system, instead of Windows 98. This fall, in September, I was going on and on about my new Castle, SuSE, which I had installed instead. Much bigger, better, everything, except that I had that email sending problem for a few weeks, and had to figure out how to set up some things. Well the email glitches were fixed, and I just had a few more things to work out - but I’d already got quite comfortable and busy in my pretty Castle.

Then, yesterday I had another computer crash, due to an error of the mistress. Well, to be technical, just the screen resolution in SuSE. I spent the day trying various rescues, and re-installs, and finally after a second try, I got Mandrake re-installed, and was able to go online and seek for advice by late in the evening.

I was also glad to see that Mandrake allows me to set up a bootloader that gives me a chance to choose on opening up in the morning, which operating system I want to go to, SuSE or Mandrake. Only problem is, right now SuSE won’t let me in. It thinks it has no configuration for the screen settings. (I HOPE everything else is still in place there). I’ve got to learn how to fix these things from the commandline. I keep putting off doing it the way the expert geeks do it, but the old familiar windows-style of doing things in a graphical interface - well, they just cling like old habits.

Perhaps it’s a means of keeping me humble. I’d begun to feel a bit smug.

Have you ever noticed that your troubles come in the area of your life where you think you have it most together?

However, I am truly grateful that I got off two regular publications for our WTM mission on Monday night by staying up past midnight to finish them. Whew!

I did have a new article drafted on Monday for this issue, but since I can’t get at it, I have none to offer in the Ruthe’s Roses section today. Unless! Oh hold on!

Yes, I can put in another profile of a character from my novel. Meet Granny Kate O’Brien in the Ruthe’s Roses section.

Do you like good stories? Here’s a true one I just found!
Staci’s Story: Staci’s Story

If you have loved the Narnia series, you’ll be interested to know that a movie is coming out next month about it. This web page gives you a list of things to do to prepare your kids and family to see it and get the maximum impact from it.
The Narnia Opportunity

You’ve met her granddaughters, Cathy and Muriel O’Brien in a previous Closeup, and I don’t want to spoil the surprises in the novel if you have not read the story yet, but I think I can dare to tell you a bit about her past, what brings her to who she is when Ruthe meets her. These details were not all part of the plot, so some got trimmed out.

Kate O’Brien grew up in England in her childhood, and later moved to Ireland, which was her parents’ birth place. They were entrepreneurs who tried to make a sale of whatever they could, just to keep body and soul together. In other words, sometimes they raided garbage dumps, looked for things they could fix or paint up and sell as antiques.

Kate was assigned the job of gilding old clocks and other knick knacks, or damaged art projects, because she had such a steady hand with a fine brush.

She also had a steady flowing tongue and a lively wit. That was what helped her win the heart of a handsome landowner, and got her into a fine castle. She disowned her family, believing they would be an impediment to her rise in society.

It turned out that her husband’s family fell on great financial difficulty, and so she urged her husband Ian O’Brien the I, to sell the household goods for tickets to Canada. He was not used to hard labour, so at the beginning she had to support them with her old refurbishing skills.

Fortunately, Kate seldom forgot anything once she learned it, and while they had been in the castle back in Ireland, she’d learned quite a bit more about true antiques and their values. Ian was embarrassed, but she was able to restore their fortune, and get him a fine job as a banker. Of course, he learned to ask her advice on business agreements at home.

They had one son, also named Ian, who became a lawyer about the time his father died.

When he married Pearl without consulting his very controlling mother, it threw Kate and Pearl into bitter cross-purposes. They quarrelled over just about anything and everything. Ian usually gave up being the peacemaker and withdrew into the quiet ivory tower of his mind.

He felt he had done his duty to his mother when he had their home built next to hers, and that he was there whenever his mother screamed of a crisis.

Kate on the other hand, wished with all her might to provoke him to action She was ashamed to have a son so unlike herself, and was confounded that her attacks on Pearl could not rouse him. Kate feared that if he and Pearl ever came to ruin as she and her husband had in Ireland, he would not be as resourceful as she had been.

Ian and Pearl’s four children, as they grew older, gave her a wide berth too, and so Kate, completely out of ideas, took to her bed and decided to be an ugly old witch.

But she choose a bedroom on the second floor of her huge, greystone house, that had a window overlooking her son’s property. That way she could spy on their comings and goings.

To see what happened when Kate met Ruthe, you need to read the novel! Read more about it first here Or, jump straight to the order page.

To read sample chapters of my book online, start at
To Read online

To order the e-book to download and read on your computer;
To order e-book edition
(or if you email me, we can make a deal and I’ll send it to you on CD).

To order the softcover paperback from Booklocker use;
To order softcover