There's Always Room for Cello!

The Lord has blessed me much this day, though I do not in any way deserve it! (And I feel I know much better now how much I do not deserve His blessings than I have in the past...) He has blessed me with a cello!

James 1:16-17 says "Do not be deceived my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." I used to think that verse said "Every good and perfect gift..." But no, it says "Every good gift and every perfect gift..." So the good things, like cellos, nice homes, good food-- as well as the perfect things such as eternal life in heaven, Jesus' sacrifice for our sins... These are all from Him. So we can enjoy the littler things as well as the most important thing, His love for us displayed ultimately when Jesus died on the cross to purchase our forgivenness!

So I found this cello on Craig's List for a very decent price (decent equalling affordability on my part), and it came with a stand and a gig bag as well-- so when I learn how to play it well enough to do in public (right now it sounds akin to caterwauling), I can carry it with me with great ease. I played cello in beginning band for one semester in high school, and took it home over the summer that year, but I think it takes a lot of practice to make it sound pretty. But I can play it relatively in tune... That's a good start. I enjoy plucking the strings and pretending it's a stand-up bass. That's fun. :)

The pictures are actual cello I bought-- I copied them off the ad (sneaky way to get pics! I don't have a good digital camera, so it was the only way to get nice pics of it).

Well, just wanted to share. Hope you are enjoying as well the blessings of a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ-- Praise God for His wonderful works to the children of men, as the Psalmist says! --D

Wow, How Time Flies!

My oh my... I can't believe it's September already! Pretty soon it will be autumn. In SoCal, that means it will be 80 instead of 90-100, and a small percentage of trees may drop a couple leaves. My plants will no longer be frying out in the hot summer sun, and it will once again drop below 70 at night. :) I love autumn!

Autumn is actually my favorite season. I love winter too. Thanksgiving, Christmas... The cool weather, the layers of clothing. Scarves. Cool breezes, the warmth of hot coffee or tea, hot food, a snuggly blanket and the warm air blowing through the heating vents (this winter I will actually have a functional heater).

I have been SUPER blessed this summer-- it's my first summer ever where I've had air conditioning in my home. It is so absolutely wonderful. I hate hot. I can't sleep, I am sticky, it's muggy... The sun saps your energy and you're stuck being a blob of sweaty uselessness. Blech. But it all goes away with air conditioning... I can sleep through the night, eat my dinner in peace, even eat hot food and enjoy it. And it probably keeps me from gaining weight from overindulging in ice cream! Surely God is good.

But God is good for so many other, better, more important reasons. Dying for our sins, promising us forgiveness and heaven when we put our trust in Him, giving us His Spirit to direct us and mold us into His image. He is wonderful. 2 Peter 1 is good:

"Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust."

Life has been busy lately, as it has been for the last couple months. This past Sunday we (the band) were guest worship leaders for Coastlands Calvary Chapel. They are a rad bunch of people, and I enjoyed the fellowship.

Work was ridiculously busy Saturday. The mall was packed out this weekend due to the disturbingly hot weather (105 at least). But today,though the mall was busy, my store was very, very slow-- which afforded me much opportunity to study for my real estate license. I just enrolled in a course to prepare to get my real estate sales license a few weeks ago. I'm not terrifically interested in real estate, but it seems possible enough and hey, it's not like I'm getting anywhere in retail, so I figured, might as well go for it! If I could sell 4 $500,000 houses a year at 1% commission, I would make about the same amount of money I make now. So at worst, I will have something to supplement my retail "career". :)

I must be off though, my pillow calls. So does the fridge. Hmm... food, or sleep? Can't really do both at the same time... (Might be messy...) God bless! --D

Update

Well, things are certainly busy over here! It's been a little while since my last entry... :)

Band Update:

We are blessed to have the support of our church body! They are fully behind us, wanting to help us fulfill the calling the Lord has given us. Our pastor got us a gig on the 12th leading worship for Ralph Wood's church in Oceanside.

We also now have quite a bit of good quality recording equipment now, and after a trip to Guitar Center on Sunday, now the computer actually recognizes the equipment and we can record! Granted we have very little idea what all the knobs do... But we'll figure it out. Tom's taking a couple classes on recording this semester, so he should be a whiz pretty soon! It's going to be exciting to start recording. We have a guitar track for 1 song so far.

Well, we went up to the Harvest Crusade last Friday, and it was pretty cool. Phil Wickham and David Crowder were playing, along with the Harvest Praise Band of course. Hundreds of people responded to the message too. It was rad.

As far as seating... We were supposed to meet up with a friend who was ushering who had saved us some seats on the ground level by 3rd base (Angel Stadium in Anaheim is where it was held), but when we finally got to the stadium (traffic, had to get food, etc.), the line to get in was I'm pretty sure wrapped around the whole stadium. By the time we got in our seats had to be given up.

Tom wasn't about to give up on getting good seats though. The ushers were very insistant that there was no ground level seating, but Tom told one usher he thought he saw some seats. The usher responded, "If you think so, you can try...!" So we walked and walked and got to these seats Tom saw. He says something to the usher lady, and then we proceed to take our seats in an almost completely open section, ground level 1st base. I turn to Tom, "What did you say to that lady?" "She asked how many, and I said 3." "You do know this is the deaf section, right?" "It is?? Oops!" ... Hahaha. Tom didn't know we were in the deaf section. But it's okay, they started opening it up to everyone a few minutes later. Tom decided our friend Jesse looked the most deaf out of all of us, which Jesse thought was pretty funny. He responded, "what?" Haha.

Afterward we went up to the Block in Orange, right up the freeway but with my directions around the block and back and forth up and down and then right up the freeway. I've been there a million times, but never from Angel Stadium! Oops.
We'd met up with our friend who'd originally saved us the seats and a bunch of his friends, and we all hung out at Starbucks there. A bunch of people from Harvest Riverside were walking the Block handing out Harvest Crusade flyers, and we met up with them and started talking. It was great to meet them. We met the worship leader for Day Seven at Harvest too, and I got to meet a couple rad girls who prayed for me. It was a blessing. :)

So we were there fellowshipping (if it's at a coffee shop I guess you could say "fellow-sipping"... Hahaha) until 1am (I had decided around 11:30 I was going to stop checking the time; I had work the next morning and there was a 1 1/2 hour drive home awaiting me. I just enjoyed the fellowship that I have been craving for so long.

Finally we headed off, having to drop Jesse back off at Camp Pendelton and me to drive home from Tom's house after we got there. The 1 1/2 hour drive has begun... And lasted... and lasted... and lasted... They blocked off the 4 left lanes of the 5 at La Paz, which slowed traffic to about 25 mph. But then it picked back up after the lanes opened back up. *Phew* Back on the road... Until... They closed the entire freeway one mile before the PCH exit in Dana Point! They were diverting all traffic onto PCH.

Man, lemme tell you. The Lord gave me some mighty grace that night, because I wasn't the least bit bothered by it all. That's gotta be a miracle of sea-splitting proportions! Praise God! But that traffic... There was a half mile of big rigs backed up in the right lane, and at least a quarter mile of cars in the other 4 lanes backing up to get off onto the 1/2 mile 1 lane exit to PCH. After some tea and coffee Tom made good use of the trees off the side of the exit... :P We finally got onto PCH quite a while later, set to creep along the 1 lane hwy until a mile or so before the San Diego County border line.

I finally got home at 4am, after a 3 hour ride. It was nice. Jesse got some good Z's in the back seat, sawing some logs. Tom and I listened to Danny Donnelly's new Worship 3 CD about 6 dozen times. It was the perfect stuck-in-traffic-at-3am CD. And I remembered a wonderful thing before taking off from Tom's house to mine-- I have sick time! I never call in sick. So, I made good use of it. 3 hours of sleep is no bueno so I called in sick and slept until 12:30. Yes! A day of rest. Put that sick day to some good use.

(If you're a guy, you might want to skip this part, lest you be bored to death...)
It is good. OH! And yesterday... Okay, this might sound really pathetic to some people, but it was a major drama for me. I can't stand what clothes they have at the mall where I work. It's all retro '70s and '80s stuff. Bag dresses and things that look like your cat sewed them together, polka dots and other non-endearing patterns. I have been on a seemingly impossible quest to find some light shirts for summer-- to wear over a tank top or really short sleeved shirt when it's a little too cool. Plus I just like to be a little more covered.

I had this shirt that was a thin material, but I put my elbow through it after 2 years, and it was ripping in other places. The women at church were threatening to take it from me and throw it away. I also had a red hoodie that I wore when it was cooler that was completely falling apart after 2-3 years of constant usage. They had similar threats about this article of clothing. But I couldn't find anything to replace them, and it was them or winter sweaters and sweating to death.

So yesterday after looking at 3-4 stores in the mall, I was entirely frustrated (it's AUGUST now I've been looking all summer!) and in the car on the way home prayed LORD please help me! And then I got an idea to go to Kohl's, and so I did, and the second I walked in, to my left, were hoodie sweaters like the one that was beyond repair that I had, and so I tried it on and perfect! I had been 100% unable to find anything remotely similar to that in months. And I briskly walked through the rest of the section keeping an eye out for anything of interest. I found a rack of button up shirts that looked interesting. I put the one in front on (didn't even check the size, still not sure what size it is, but it fits) and checked in a mirror to see how it looked. Perfect!

So now I have two hooded sweaters (so I don't have to go through this again for a while) and a new button up shirt to wear over my tank tops and short sleeved shirts! Yay! I wore a t-shirt with a scarf at church Sunday, looking very ridiculous for August (though no one said anything, how loving of them!) because it was too warm for my jacket and too cold for nothing. So now all that drama is over. Praise God. And I got a coffee table for free the other day too from the side of the road by my house-- I'd been using a carboard box with an old table top! Yay! A real table! He's so good to me. May I never forget it!

Well, enough enough. Peace out till next time!