“The RoseBouquet”

Perhaps you get tuckered out just reading about my home reno projects? (Gulp! I just swallowed a desire to defend myself).

But if you want to know what goes on at my place when I’m home, this is the MAIN THING on most Saturdays. I know the seasons will change and then it will not be so possible. I spent a second Saturday on the stairwell project because a friend from the mission (WTM) agreed to come and help since he is tall and has long arms. I had hinted that I needed such a friend to help get the plaster out that I could not reach the previous Saturday.

Wayne Senger brought along his landlord, Jake, who had a weak arm from a recent accident, but they worked without complaining for about 2 and a half hours.

The plaster came out and when I asked about the slats they tackled that too! God bless them!

Wayne had worked a night shift at a warehouse and by 3:30 he really needed to go home to rest, but fortunately I could reach the lower slats that were left, and then I had to do the clean up. If this peaks your interest, I’ve added a few photos to last week’s photo story page; Stairwell-plaster-out!

After Ernie’s visit, I’ll be away at a genealogy workshop the next weekend, so it will be mid-February before I get back to my reno projects. I like to think that I may get the worst of the dirty jobs done by the end of March.

Yesterday a number of things came to a head at the office.

1. The data recovery I’d started for our Director here at WTM on Friday, finally finished. We had to put the hard drive from his bad laptop into my laptop (which often crashes), and then using a Knoppix CD, I was able to upload the files he wanted saved to one of my websites. From there I downloaded it to my main desktop computer. Tomorrow we will format and load his new laptop and add his old files that I recovered. Jondalar had already worked on this for two weeks, so this is quite a victory.

2. I got this next issue of Reflections ready to print, including some last minute corrections. This is the quarterly newsletter of which I am the layout editor and key writer.

3. In the morning I discovered that Ginny Dye has stopped – ended – MyPowerMall. I saw a video last week in which she hinted at this, so I wasn’t totally wiped off my feet, but I had been working on a new site that would drive a lot of traffic to MPM and that is now stopped in its tracks too. I should be able to shift gears, but I’m glad I haven’t lost more than a couple of months work on that. It was foundational though, to a huge dream I had of helping non-profits. I guess lots of people signed up but only a handful were really shopping online through the mall.

This means I’ll have to go through a lot of my sites to remove those MPM links. Hopefully I can find something else to replace them so I don’t have to go through those motions twice.

4. Last week I’d received a letter from Betty, a client, whose prolife website I was hosting. They had moved as a family to follow her husband to a new job. They are in a place in Mississippi where she can’t get phone or internet access. Her domain had gone down for lack of registration renewal. Since I couldn’t reach her any other way, I wrote to her, and yesterday she got to a phone and called me. We worked out a plan whereby I would register a similar domain name, and set up what I have as a backup to her site. I managed to get that done yesterday yet. The site still needs fine-tuning as some of the links don’t work, but if you had been looking for or linking to http://children-of-the-heart.net you need to change that now to http://Children-of-the-Heart.com (one that had not been available to her a few years ago when she first started her site).

Here’s a chance for you to give me your opinion or recommendation. In checking to see if there are any other sites with a shopping rewards program similar to MyPowerMall, I’m discovering that there are quite a few out there!

Just today I’ve been looking at BigCrumbs.com, Ebates.com and UPromise.com. All are free to join. Some have more stores, and some have less. BigCrumbs allows those who have a store on eBay to list it and thus get traffic to their own store. It also has an active forum and it appears that the users are enthusiastic about it. If they are all free it may not hurt to sign up for each of them.

However, it occurs to me that there may be still others out there, and I should do further research. So rather than me offering you tips and solutions today, I’m asking YOU to let me know what methods you recommend for great deals and frugal shopping online. I might just sign up under you. – and provide a link here next week.

King Solomon started out so nobly with such a fine request when God said, “Ask for whatever you want and I will give it to you.” He asked for wisdom to be a wise ruler. God was so pleased with that request He gave him wealth and fame and honour besides.

However, as often happens when we ride on the air stream of success, we soon take some mis-steps and end up tumbling into the gutter.

In Solomon’s case, he had a weakness for women. As he conquered the foreign kings around Israel, he usually worked into the deal, besides the heavy taxes he charged them, that he should get one or more of their princesses to marry.

I Kings 11:3 tells us that he had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines. That’s a lot of women friends to love! (Or don’t wives count as friends?)

As he grew older they begged for altars and temples to their own gods and he yielded to them. This led not only Solomon but many Israelites away from worshiping the one true God. The Lord became angry at Solomon for this and promised to wrest the kingdom away from his son.

You can have too many friends, at least if they are of the kind that will lead you astray from God.

Some people have a great need to be liked, so they are friendly and outgoing and get excited whenever they make a new acquaintance who seems to admire them.

Yet such of us are in a unique danger of being misled by these new friends, if we do not have the moral stamina to stand by our convictions. Knowing this, it is better to limit our friendships to those few individuals that we know will not lead us astray but will strengthen our faith in God and us in our walk with Him.

Ultimately, making the Lord our Best Friend, and giving Him quality time to teach us through His Word and His Holy Spirit is the best safe-guard to keep us from going astray. If we know we are weak and easily swayed, we can give ourselves extra protection by avoiding time spent with those that disregard our Best Friend, the Lord Jesus. Let our motto be: I’ll be polite to everyone, but I’ll only associate informally with friends of my Best Friend, Jesus.

Leave the friendship evangelism to those who are stronger in faith and practice, or seek to grow and become more mature first yourself.