You’ve Been Busy!

While I’ve been away from cyberspace tending to earthly and heavenly matters, I see from all the comments that you’ve been busy!

I answered inquiries for specific pattern requests on the pages you commented on, but I don’t want anyone to miss them. So to make up for lost time in cyberspace, here’s a special post with the requested links. (Better late than never, I hope!)

Dolls

Butterfly Babies

Flowers

Oh, it’s so good to be back in your company!!

Happy exploring!

When Learning, Loving and Serving Doesn’t Bear Fruit – or does it?

Peeking Out

No guarantees. That should be on the label of every skein of yarn, every fruit and vegetable, every heart.

Does everything work out the way we hoped when we bought the yarn, put the veggies in our farmer’s market bag, or served our heart on a platter?

Nope. It doesn’t. And that can get discouraging.

We want to serve, we want to love, we want to learn. Our hearts yearn for opportunities.

But not every gift is well received.

  • A baby hat, gently crafted and prayed over, may be tossed in a heap, rejected because it wasn’t store bought. Yarn and Stick

 

  • A basket of green tomatoes, longing to be cornmeal-dipped and fried, may turn soggy and sloppy in the pan rather than crisp and succulent. Or worse yet, turn red and mucky out of neglect because there was so much other fruit to be eaten. Farmer's Market

 

  • A heart may learn all it can learn, love the best it knows how, serve all it can serve, but its gifts may still get left on the temporal platter. Rose Place Setting

Not the Fruit We Were Looking For

Sometimes, our learning, our loving, our serving doesn’t result in the fruit we were hoping for.

Why? Because the response of the recipient is truly beyond our control. (That hurts, I know.)

The fruit may fail, but it was still worth fruitifying*.

Fruit on Our Own Tree

The fruit we need to focus on when our gifts are rejected is not the end result, but the process by which:

    • We were changed.
    • Our lives were imprinted on.
    • We grew (in the wisdom that not everyone appreciates our fruit and we can live through it, if nothing else. 🙂 )

Fruit on Our Own Tree

There is still fruit. It just might be on our own tree**.

If a recipient enjoys the fruit of our labor or love, all the better!

But if not, we know that we gave from our hearts, our hands, our pocketbooks.

And God knows, too.

Did you know that God doesn’t judge our giving based on the other’s receiving? Or what they do with it when they receive it?

God Himself gave His only Son, even with the knowledge that many would reject Him.

We Could Stop Giving

We could let the rejection stop us from giving.

(Oh, I hate rejection. It kills me. Right here —>  )

It certainly tempts us to hole up and never trust, never give again.

Or We Could Do This

There’s a better plan: keep giving.

On the wisdom side, there’s nothing wrong with being discerning about where we give, however.

We still can’t control the response, but we can certainly give where it is most likely to be appreciated. Smile

Even Jesus walked away a time or two.

Three Opportunities

Here are three opportunities to give of our crafting talents where they are certainly greatly appreciated:

                             

Please share in the comments about the trustworthy opportunities!

It’s Your Turn

  • Have you given up giving because you’ve been burned?
  • Do you prefer not giving because it feels safe?
  • Is there a place or person that is not safe or wise for you to give to? (TIP: Pray that others will reach them with God’s love, for that’s the love they really need.)
  • Are there others you would like to give to, but are afraid how they will respond? (TIP: Give once and see how it goes! Smile )

 

*Fruitifying may not be a real word, but it’s my word. 😀

**REALITY CHECK: Some of the fruit we grow as a result of rejection and other fallen world problems is moldy, mucky and best tossed in the compost heap. But sometimes, we are afraid of giving up that fruit because we aren’t confident we can bear any better. That’s when we need to …

 

Discover Ways to Learn, Love, and Serve

at Home ... and Beyond

Silence! SILENCE! Waiting in Silence

I know. It’s been quiet around here. Every day, I think of you. And every day I think, “Silence.” Until this week. Words started coming. Not that words haven’t been coming, but these are words that I can share online.

The reality is not everything in the real world is online-wise-shareable. That’s a bummer because I like to be real on and off the page. But sometimes my reality collides with other realities that make it wise to hush.

Ugh, I like silence. <— That’s a weird sentence.

[Read more…]

Home Work (and my apologies)

Sometimes, beyond has to wait. On occasion, even precious blog time has to be bumped out of the way to take care of home.

[PAUSEOh boy! How blog time had to be pushed out of the way!! Just as I went to publish this post on JAN 10th, I found my website was down. BOOM! As if life hadn’t already handed me a bowl full of moldy raspberries. Yuck. So here I am twelve whole days later, finally able to face cyber life long enough to find it took just a few moments to fix. I’m SO SORRY my blog was down and out for so long. I had to work on more at home than what you are about to see below. It’s been a difficult, difficult season of learning, loving and serving. And I may be failing in all three because I’m in a bit of survival mode, but I’m trying. Really, I am. I am trying and I am leaning hard on God. What else can I do?? Now … on with the original post …]

If home didn’t play a part in my life in a huge way, I would have just called this website Learn, Love and Serve at Beyond. But that sounds silly and just isn’t reality.

To have a beyond, we must have a home, at least of sorts.

I say all that to say …

You Have Snow, We Have Goo

My home was calling loud and clear yesterday (see pic above of steps and bottle of ammonia).

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Year-Round Shoeboxing: Paper Day (and a bit about foghorns)

 

Paper Day

Op-er-a-tion Christ-mas Child. My heart just beats this tune no matter what cacophony is sounding in my ears. Sometimes when we are in a fog, we need a foghorn guiding us along what would normally be a familiar path. Shoeboxes are my foghorn. And our women’s ministry coordinator pressed its ON button for me a few weeks ago. Red heart

Ahhhh, the familiar sound of the foghorn.

Yes, I’m listening to that YouTube audio up there ^^^.

Yes, over and over and over!

Yes, as I type.

And yes, it’s sooooo comforting.

Dead Seal Floating

Foghorns bring back memories of being on my daddy’s boat, the NVR-NO-WHN in California when I was growing up.

We got caught in a swift-moving dense fog once beyond the harbor.

[Read more…]