Month: December 2012
Statements that bother me.
STATEMENTS THAT REALLY BOTHER ME WHEN I HEAR THEM.
When people talk about their grandchildren and say:
“I never knew how much love my heart could hold ’til someone called me Grandma!:”
“If I’d known how sweet grandchildren were…I’d have had them first!”
“There is nothing else like it!”
I feel very sorry for those parents because they evidently missed something very special in their own children.
We love our Grandchildren. We have three of them. We also now have four Great Grandchildren. We know how sweet and precious they are!! But we have never said nor felt like those three statements above and we will not say them, because it is simply not true in our case. They are very sweet and special…but in no way are they more so than our own children! One day an acquaintance said to me, after his first grandchild was born. “Isn’t it amazing how much more special your grandchildren are than your children were?” I looked him in the eye and said, “Mine aren’t!” He looked shocked and then recovered quite nicely and said, ” Well, when my kids were growing up, I was pretty busy and wasn’t around them very much. I had to work nights and sleep days.”
How sad and I’m afraid that is the norm in this present age. I think about this and I wonder what their children feel and think when the statements above are made where they can hear them? I think it is very sad and tragic. When our kids and their kids see us loving their babies…they just know even more, how much they were loved when they were babies. They don’t hear the above statements made.
The year was 1994….
The year was 1994 and we were going shopping for my very first new car. Bobby had bought a new pickup, his first new one in ’91 to drive the mail route and I was ready for a new one because I was driving 24 miles to work. We invited our three grandchildren to go with us shopping for it.
The Chrysler place didn’t have exactly what I wanted and there was a year old new car (never sold) on their lot. I told Bobby, let’s just buy that one. Angela, our oldest grandchild was about 11 years old, and she said, “Me-Ma you don’t want that car. Look how chopped off that is in the back! It is cut off square!” You know, she was right….those styles of cars went out in 1993 and this Chrysler Concorde was more rounded at the back. Well, we started to leave and the owner of the Chrysler place came out to see why we were not buying. We told him that the guy couldn’t locate what we wanted. He wanted us to come back in and let him try…and he found us just what we wanted in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The grandkids went back with us the day we picked it up. I was driving it home and Bobby was driving his pickup. The grandkids wanted to all ride in the new one. We had driven a little ways when Daniel, about 7 at the time, piped up and said, “Meems, where are the bumps!!!” Would have made a good commercial for Chrysler. 🙂
Well, today it is 18 years old and still looks good. When Angela traded it in this year, it had 260,000 miles on it and hadn’t had any engine, or transmission troubles all those years. The work it needed was just front end work so she could get a sticker and it was just more sensible to trade it in, since it had that many miles on it.
When we bought our van in 2006, we wanted to give the Chrysler to Angela, but Wendell wanted her to pay for it…so we gave her a really good deal on it. She kept it until just this year and it was beginning to need work on it. So she swapped it off for another nice car. She was about as attached to it as we were. lol Our cars become about like our pets because we keep them a long time.
WHEN WE BUILT OUR SUNROOM….
When we built our sunroom, Bobby put a sidewalk down the middle of one part of it and left the dirt on each side for two little gardens, about 3 feet wide and 8 feet long. That was a brilliant idea. But when we bought the panels for the roof, the salesperson picked up the wrong kind of panels and we didn’t know it until we had already put them on top of the sunroom. It was unintentional on the part of the clerk, but it didn’t help our little gardens. They are the kind that don’t let the ultraviolet rays of the sun in. The sun that our plants get has to come in from the windows…so the plants grow horizontally instead of vertically. That means that when they get taller and heavier…they end up lying in the soil.
Actually we got a bargain…we had to purchase 9 panels for the roof and we got the more expensive ones for the price of the plain ones. But it was a bargain that was not what we really wanted. It wasn’t our mistake but if we’d known before we put them on we would have returned them, and got the right kind. The only reason we knew (besides the evidence of how the plants grow) is that we lacked one getting enough. When we went back and looked through them, the clear ones were about 20 dollars cheaper than the ones we purchased…and we could tell the difference too, in the shades of them.
There are so many spiritual applications that come to mind. First off….if Christ the Son, is not at the top of our lives, we will not grow right spiritually…. our spiritual lives will be dwarfed. Instead of growing up spiritually, if we grow sideways, we will end up lying in the soil…spiritually. If we don’t look UP to Him as we make our decisions and live our lives…we will not grow spiritually.
Acts 17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
Don’t just listen to the preacher: Yes, he should know and preach the truth if he’s going to be a preacher…just like that sales clerk should have known his merchandise. Read the Bible and see for yourselves that what they teach is true.
Satan tries to get us to accept a bargain…an easier life, more money, more fun and games…but it really isn’t a bargain if we lose our soul in the meantime. Actually we didn’t make the mistake…the sales clerk did, but in our lives, we can not blame someone else. If we do not make the right decisions for our children as they grow up and train them to make the right decisions…the world will make them for us and for them.
Some cheap stuff in the world is not really a bargain for us spiritually.
We finally closed up the little garden that isn’t close to the windows. The plants there REALLY grew sideways. We need to close up the past…and the parts of our lives that do not induce us to live for Christ.
familyties8 