“The RoseBouquet”

For the longest time I have resisted getting on Facebook. I have (no, I still belong, I guess) to another networking community, and it just got so time-consuming to keep up with seeing what snippets people had written, that I decided that to get on with my working career I would have to ignore them. I have not deleted my account there, but I only check the email related to that community once in a long while.


Last week I was frustrated when our SiteSell guru announced some videos by contest winners on Facebook. Naturally, I couldn’t go see them without an account there. So I sighed deeply, created a new email just for this, and made sure that the flood of emails that would come in would not show up in my KMail where I normally deal with incoming emails from about 24 addresses. I have trouble keeping up with those, and my good friends are kind enough to be understanding that sometimes it takes me a week or more to get to them, because I’m so busy just dealing with business and client emails first.


At least I should be able to follow a link when it seems there is something important to see on Facebook.

Well, then the very next day I was calling my cousin Phil and his wife Barbara because his mother had died, and they urged me to see their family photos on Facebook. Wow! had their kids ever grown up. Even their grandkids were not babies any more!

Before I knew it I spied small photos of some other relatives’ names that I recognized, so I decided to “add” them to my friends list, or invite them to be on my list. Especially Saturday night when I was wrestling with a computer problem at home, I got distracted as I tried to hunt for a contact who might have some answers to help me. Just as I’d feared, one thing leads to another on Facebook.

Now I invest a lot of time in this RoseBouquet. I can’t keep up with my 8 websites, and all my client and mission work if I start corresponding with everyone I know on an individual basis. So I resolved some years ago, that I would schedule in Tuesday mornings to write a four-part blog and publish it not only as a blog, but an ezine, that can be subscribed to for free, and also as an RSS feed. The latter is touted as a great way to promote one’s website and blog.

This morning I checked to see how many “friends” I have on Facebook. What 13 already? Hmm… It’s nice to see what some relatives are up to that I haven’t heard from in ages, but is this thing going to run away with me and re-organize my life? I confess, I’m a bit nervous about this.

Two other things this past weekend and this week are breaking my stride. On Friday night I discovered that my home computer could not go online. I called the Sasktel trouble-shooting number, and a nice fellow walked me through the ways to determine if it was their modem (I have high speed lite at home), or the wiring. A spare laptop with Windows XP was able to get online without a problem, so it has to lie in my computer.

Saturday I gave up housekeeping agendas, etc., to try to solve this problem. I went to my office and brought back some spare ethernet cards, but that didn’t solve the problem. I went to OTV to ask advice. Two guys there were stumped, but thought I might need to replace my motherboard since this has an onboard ethernet (it’s a cube on the board). I can’t accept that because the computer works fine - except for going online. I NEED to go online to build and upload webpages!

Sunday I had to set it aside to go to the Waldheim Missions conference where Priscilla and I presented a project for our mission, WTM. We had to go in the afternoon already to set up our display and have faspa with the Committee and the other missionaries. So it was a long day.

I had stopped at the office and picked up a cast off computer that I had repaired and brought it home, hoping I could go online with that one, I tried that when I got home after 10:30 pm. No go.

Monday morning I had to call for a plumber because my sewer was backing up. (That was an expensive lesson in what company I will NEVER call again! A rude man, charging $364 for an hour’s work is expensive education money to learn that!)

Anyway, no need to bore you with all the technical details, but what with dealing with my own computer challenge this week, someone dropping off a laptop yesterday for me to work on this week, and we are still going to Waldheim each evening until Wednesday night - …you could say I’m busier than usual.

I did get a few emails answered yesterday afternoon, but I’m about 4 days behind now! I wanted to give myself a sewing binge this coming weekend, but I may have to spend it in email catchup. Maybe that will help me to resist the temptation to hang-out at Facebook, eh?

Hey, if you had a birthday recently. I probably saw it on my bathroom calendar, but I was helpless to do anything about it. I’m sorry! I hope you had a great day without me.

Oh, and a big thanks to Barbara and Helen who wrote to identify with the problem of being snubbed by friends in week-before-last’s article. Seems that has happened to most of us, eh?

Wish you could have a heart-to-heart talk with God?

Ruthe does. All the time, where ever she goes, she’s having a running conversation with the one she calls Lord, or my Best Friend. You’ve got to meet Ruthe! AND her Secret Roses.

People like to talk about their brush with the famous or various great people. Have you ever had one? A few moments with a very important person (VIP)?

I’ve met people who will tell in vivid detail about how they saw Queen Elizabeth up real close. Almost in arms-reach. Some will talk about speaking with a famous singer or movie star. The speaker a conference told last night about being at a Bible camp in Romania and being served his bread for breakfast by the President of that country.

But… is that good enough? Does a brush with a VIP count as gaining a true friend?

Who is your very best friend? How great or important is that friend? Does she (or he) have a relationship with a very important, influential person to whom she could appeal on your behalf? (On second thought, maybe we should not use our friends like that.)

I’ve got some great news for you though! I have a fantastic and super-perfect Friend who invites me to use His name to get special attention, and He’s willing to be your Friend too.

Oh, you’ve guessed who, have you?

Well, let’s just look at this tremendous Friend and the relationship we can have with Him.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He was willing to be born as a baby, to prove that He has gone through everything we did - from our birth. He told His friends that if they knew Him, they also knew God, because they are just perfectly alike. If you want to know what God is really like, study Jesus!

He said that a sign of a true friend is someone willing to die for another, and He sure did that! He died for everyone willing to believe and receive that death as being in our own place. That death and resurrection - if we receive it - is our ticket into Heaven - for eternity! Jesus showed that He loves us to the nth degree. He did more than any of our other friends could do for us.

Not only that, but Jesus went back up to Heaven to sit beside the Father (God), and to pray for us. Say-but, those prayers are effective! They always get answered!

Sometimes our friends will say that they’ll pray for us, but not all of them carry through on that. Jesus said, “I’m praying for you,” and He means it! (Just wiggle down into that thought and soak in it for a while).

Wait, there’s more! He also promised to prepare some rooms for us in Heaven. (Some translations say ‘mansions’). Now just think, it took Him a week to make the universe, the earth and sun and stars, and to separate the land from the water, and to make animals, plants and people. And that’s all glorious and beautiful to behold. So if He is taking all this time to make rooms for us, - wow! Hallelujah! Glory be! - and how magnificent shall those rooms be? (Just camp your mind on that thought for a few minutes!)

When Jesus sent His disciples out, two by two, to deliver the kingdom message to the Jews, and to heal the sick and cast out devils, they came back absolutely flabbergasted at all they had accomplished. But then Jesus told them to think nothing of that - rather be glad that your name is written in Heaven’s Book of Life.

Isn’t that something tremendous to brag about in your Facebook account? Your name is in the Book of Life - meaning you will live forever! And… (trumpets, please), your BEST Friend sits at the right hand of God, and prays for you - continuously!

No body, but nobody can top us on that!

By the way, Jesus has time to talk with us all the time - even if our other friends are too busy, or don’t answer our emails.

It seems like I spent this last weekend online shopping around for sympathy flowers. My Aunt Margaret Friesen died last Thursday. She was in her 90s, and in a nursing home. She was married to Dad’s brother George, and they had two sons, Phil and Paul. In the flurry of emails and phone calls on Friday evening, my youngest sister, Erma, suggested that we five siblings go together to send them each a bouquet of flowers. She could not afford to contribute though until the end of the month. So I volunteered to place the order.

I’ve been researching how to shop online in the smartest ways for my new website, so I applied all my skills. By email we agreed that we would limit our combined budget to $100. But the best looking arrangements are always more, of course. Elsie, located out on the west coast, suggested I find florists right in Oshawa, Ontario where the funeral was to be on Monday. (The viewing was at the funeral home in Huntsville on Sat. and Sun.) So I narrowed our choices down some more and emailed the links to my siblings. Then waited for feedback.

But Sunday afternoon I had picked the florist to use, but it appeared our order was too unusual to do online, I should phone it in. Because of the two time zones difference, I had to wait until early Monday morning. My 7 am was their 9 am store opening time. It took several tries to get someone answering, but I finally got our order explained, for two arrangements to be delivered to the church by 1 pm, and with cards so that Phil and Barbara would take one home, and Paul and Lynn would take the other home.

I pointed out one of their designs on their website as a guide but said their designer could follow her own head in making the arrangements. The woman was pleased that I understood this is the far better plan!

I believe Erma was going to be there, along with some other relatives, so at present I’m waiting for someone to send some photos and perhaps one of our flower arrangements.

When I called Paul he told me that they will be passing through here in August to visit their daughter and son-in-law in Alberta who were in the midst of a big move and could not return for the funeral. He promised to bring me some photos on a CD at that time.

In an old, odd-sized black binder I have some pages set up to record the STATs of my various sites and those of my clients. Unfortunately, I’ve been so super busy the last few months that there has not been time to go visit the cPanel of each site, and record the main STATs that I choose out of the plethora offered, to keep an eye on how they are doing. I get some shorts spurts of time and get a few done, but then the month zips by on me.

On July 1 I resolved to try to make time for this on Wednesday mornings before the missions’ staff meeting, but there have been computer issues to work on too, and that morning just whizzes by me. So does the afternoon!

But blocking out some time for certain sites means that I do get some things done. Last week I got a big batch of new Bible study booklets set up on the Mannapublications.org site. These are offered free for anyone to download and print out. The copyright doesn’t allow you to edit them, but you may freely make copies to distribute to a small study group, or to distribute further afield. Meaning of– studies

There is also a profile of Starfish Malawi on the Generosity-alive.org site; Starfish Malawi

Do you donate when charities send people around to your door? How do you decide which ones are good to support and which ones not? Or how much do you give? These are questions I grapple with in my article below.

1. The smartest move is to locate a florist in the town or area where the flowers are to be delivered. Particularly if you find one that offers free delivery. You can place your order online or phone it in.

2. Don’t send cut flowers to the funeral home or funeral location. Yes, they are cheaper, but the funeral director will reject them. You can have them sent to the home of the loved ones after.

3. Instead of choosing from the sympathy arrangements, pick from the general every day arrangements. It’s a more economical category and you’ll get just as nice arrangements.

4. Get the order in a day or two ahead of time if you can. Then the floral designer will not be slapping it together while the delivery guy is buggin’ her/him to hurry up. You’ll get a better design!

5. Let the designer work out a good arrangement. If you insist it has to have such and such flowers, and be shaped just so and so, she’ll grit her teeth and do the best with what she’s got, but if she’s out of carnations, she’s not so likely to substitute lilies or orchids for you, which will give you more than your money’s worth!

If you are in a great hurry, and don’t have time for the above links, call a network like 1-800 flowers and let them work on the details.

During the 23+ years that I lived in Hague, at my parents’ house, we often had people come to the door to ask for donations, or to sell something. (The town had a reputation for good prospecting).

I’m basically a kind, compassionate and generous person, but this issue of having to decide on a moment’s notice whether to donate at the door, or how to know which ones to give to and which ones to turn away - well, it was hard on me. For one thing, I had so little money myself. If I did have a dollar or two to spare, I didn’t want to give it away foolishly at the door.

The school kids often came to sell chocolates, or to ask for donations for UNICEF. (In the latter case I asked them to explain to their teacher that I did not donate because UNICEF supported abortion in other countries).

When the young people would come around dragging garbage bags and asking for empty pop bottles or cans, I could honestly say that we didn’t drink such stuff in this home. (However, I didn’t mention that Dad has his own stash of collected bottles and cans in the back shed, and when he had a good load, he’d ask me to take help him take them in to turn in for cash. It’s a plan of our provincial government to keep them out of the landfills). However, when they asked for support to go on a missions trip… that would tug at my heart strings.

Sometimes they would be strangers with wonderful-sounding charities that would do so much good for orphans, and the blind, etc., but if I had never heard of them before, I wondered…if they might be for real or not.

Sometimes it would be friendly woman from the community collecting for one cancer research fund or another.

I was frustrated by this donating at the door business. I wanted to be a good giver, but I didn’t like to be jerked around, or to fall into impulse giving. I prayed about it a number of times, and gradually came up with a plan.

My church tithe would always be a foregone decision, but I would try to set aside another tithe in a special wallet, and I would pray and wait for guidance to know when to give out of that. If it was empty, I could say “no” with a clear conscience.

There are always plenty of opportunities to give, so I would gather information, study it and pray about it until I could settle on a confirmed list of missions and charities that I would give to regularly or whenever prompted. At the same time I would pray about each ‘gift’ and keep my spirit tuned to discern well when I should donate. I would count on God to show me.

With that plan settled on, when the doorbell rang, I would dash down the ramp in the garage to the outer door, and cheerfully say, “Sorry, I don’t buy or donate at the door.” Most often they turned away immediately, so I didn’t even have to explain about my prayer plan.

One day though, a salesman with a heavy case, asked, “Why?”

I answered frankly, “Because I don’t have time to pray about it and discern the Lord’s will.”

His quick repartee was, “Okay. Let’s pray.”

That flustered me a bit, but I told him it didn’t work like a magic button.

In my present circumstances I just don’t see that many people at the door, and generally not ones asking for donations at the door. (Maybe that was unique to Hague).

Now that I have some incomes and and am contributing my time to various missions, I think about planning my giving even more. In fact, I’m doing a study in the Bible on giving and working on a good grid of discernment to help me find the worthy missions and projects and people to support.

My missions wallet swells sometimes and there is a very unique joy and delight in feeding orphans in one country, buying school supplies for poor kids in another, and supporting missionaries who need their daily groceries. When it goes flat I am at peace; it will fill up again.

But no rash, unconsidered donating at the door for me.

Whew! It’s surprising where we can “find” or “make” time when we have an urgent project to finish, isn’t it? By giving up pockets of time that I usually used for the garden, or on Saturday, for my housecleaning and reno projects, and even Sunday afternoon, I managed to get my manuscript reformatted, not just once, but twice, and out in the mail yesterday.

I thought I was done at 3:40 pm on Saturday, but then in evening checked the instructions again, discovered that it had to be in MS .doc format, and so did some more fine-tuning until 9 pm.

On Sunday morning I put it all on a USB stick. I was invited out to lunch with two wonderful senior ladies, but afterward I went to my office to print out the manuscript because Word Alive wants both a paper and a CD copy. There I found to my chagrin that once the file was on a different computer (in .doc format) the page length shifted, and the page numbers did not show up, plus the table of the index disappeared and the text was all one compressed paragraph!

Yikes! So I spent nearly 3 hours putting everything back in order again. Then I printed it, and burned a CD for them, and one for me to file, and took it home to package up neatly.

There’s a strong temptation to think that after all that work I deserve the prize, but my spirit knows that’s not how it works. It’s time to put it in the Lord’s hands, and wait to see how the judges will see it.

With all that work on one manuscript’s preparation, I have not written any inspirational articles ahead of time. I’ll write the first one this morning for this RoseBouquet. I’m as curious as you to see how it turns out.

Hopefully I will be able to claim some pockets of time to write as many inspirational articles as I intimated last week. A project like this always works best if I can block off a chunk of time and guard it like the queen’s private chambers. Even if it’s but a small block of time, if I faithfully use it for that one project, it begins to grow and eventually becomes a fairly big thing.

That’s why I’m so busy these days. Little blocks of time dedicated to small projects years ago are all ripening and beginning to bloom and bear fruit at once. A harvest season is always a busy one.

Oh, l want to share Tess’s feedback on my garden photo story last week;

“I really enjoy it when you send photos of your various doings. The more you do it the more I enjoy it. I am really astonished at how many sites you have and how you manage to take care of them all. It seems like such an impossible task! I have not been in touch for quite some time because I had a bunch of surgeries…” (Tess)

Robin also responded during the writer’s workshop. I don’t want to share too much of the personal news, but here’s a bit;

“Thanks for the SBI link to Suzanne’s very inspiring story. It was something I needed right now.

Things have changed quite a bit here, I’ve retired from my job because I know I’d completed the work that God had called me there to do (set up the Customer Services dept and identify a future manager and train him up to take over). . . . Anyway Suzanne’s story was quite inspiring, thank you.” (Robin)