A Beautiful Life

My sweet little granddaughter turned 2 on Friday and I took the day off to spend it with her ...

Her mommy surprised her in the morning with a tea party with all of her dolls and special furry friends.

Everybody wore a birthday hat and we sang "Happy Birthday" FOUR times!

Milk was served in tiny tea cups and the cupcakes were delicious!

Afterwards we went to a local farm to get some fresh fruit and vegetables and say "hello" to the chickens and horses. We bought frozen yogurt and played for hours at the park. We swung on the swings, danced in the gazebo and slid down the highest slides. 

 

It was a magical perfect kind of a day.

After everyone else went to bed, I started a new book - Donald Miller's, "Through Painted Deserts." I didn't make it very far but already I am hooked. A few of my favorite excepts taken from the author's note (preface):

"Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons. I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently..." 

"... life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath: 

   I'll tell you how the sun rose

   A ribbon at a time... 

"And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" 

"This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."

-Psalm 118:24

Quotes