Wednesday, December 9, 2009

O Christmas Tree!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Cheer!!

I wanted to share with you our very first Christmas tree as a family! Wow... we had so much fun. Here is the tree on the civic... it started to fall off while we were driving home (a .5 mile drive) and I almost started crying... But she made it after all!


Thankfully, we had Criag there to help us. He carried the tree and here he is untying the tangled mess...





After Craig untied the tree from the car, PJ was determined to continue untangling the rope.. He's so sweet!


These boys really do love each other. But look at that tree!!



Here we are hanging our lights. How precious!




PJ's Mom bought us an "Our first Christmas 2009" Ornament. Here we are hanging it together. It was around this time that PJ called me tacky. I would prefer to say that he has a lack of Christmas spirit. ;)



The final product. O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, How beautiful your branches!!!



Merry Christmas Yall!!!
-Mrs. Scalf

























Wednesday, December 2, 2009

I'm the one that Jesus loves.

Hello friends and family.

Today is a really tough day for me. My boss resigned from her position. She is more than a boss though. She is the glue that holds our team together and she is a friend. I'm so happy for what God has planned for her next, but she will be missed dearly. I feel destraught. That's the only word that I have for it.

Grace. God is teaching me a lot about Grace... mostly because we are reading a book called "What's so Amazing about Grace" by Phillip Yancy. Yancy was writing about the parable of the workers in the vineyard. In this parable, there are some workers who get paid a days wage for working for a day and some get paid the same amount for only working an hour, which the world would see as completely unfair. Yancy explains it this way:

"Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?...God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell."
Hm. I think sometimes I do get envious when I see other people being blessed more than myself... but when it's because we have a generous God, why would I ever be envious!!!
Another great part of the book,
If John were to be asked, "What is your primary identity in life?" he would not reply, "I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist, an author of one of the four Gospels," but rather, "I am the one Jesus Loves."
What would it mean, I asky myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as "the one Jesus loves"? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day?
If only I could grasp that.
Mrs. Scalf