A Stellar Day of Learning

Asherel received her first dividend from her share of Disney stock. As she ripped open the envelope, I am sure she was thinking of all the amazing things she could now purchase. Only age 13 and an official investor! Would she get the iPhone she had been salivating for? Or maybe a trip to England to walk on the very ground the Beatles themselves had trod. She pulled out the dividend check.

40 cents. The check was for 40 cents.

It had cost more than that to mail it! And along with the check were all kinds of graphs and charts outlining how her stock was generating such amazing revenue for her.

Later we went to test our latest helicopters. All three broke. Now we have no working helicopter for Science Olympiad. And I have developed a nasty chest cold. I felt like taking that 40 cents and hopping on a plane as far as it would take me. How far can you fly on 40 cents?

I would research that myself but our computer broke.
Yesterday.
Right before we went to test and break three helicopters.
When I realized I felt sick enough to consider the possibility of pneumonia.
After the bonanza of 40 cents to offset all those disappointments.

We all have days like that and i always exaggerate to make my points. But even without exaggerating, I think it is safe to say yesterday will not get a smiley face on the calendar.

Asherel is worn out building things and trying to keep up with a hectic school and extracurricular schedule and I am sick, probably from accompanying her on that hectic schedule. It is sometimes difficult to persevere when the things going wrong begin to pile up.

As I was sketching a forest yesterday, I noticed how dark, and empty the tree limbs were. The scene could have been gloomy except the sun poked through, laying spatters of golden light on the trunks and forest floor.
"It's Not so gloomy! " I thought.
And if we learn most from our failures, then it was a stellar day of learning.

Isaiah 29:18 NIV

In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll,
and out of gloom and darkness
the eyes of the blind will see.

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The Tears of a Cloud

It looks like our snowboard adventure is rained out. The weather report warns that only ducks or polar bears would enjoy being outside today on the mountain we would be enjoying before our hospital stay. This of course is in no way to be construed as being said with great relief and praising God for providing a gracious out because I was not at all fearful of careening down a mountain with my brittle bones standing balanced sideways on a small piece of wood. After all, I have been watching the Olympics and taking prodigious notes. I paid particularly close attention to the scenes where the snow enthusiasts were being carted away unconscious on a stretcher. I cannot begin to tell you how excited that made me for our upcoming snowboarding trip. But alas, it appears that we will have to wait. I made reservations for March 10 when Matt will be home and able to go with us so we could maybe split the cost of the physician in the ER.

Rain is not usually welcome. It is often a plan-spoiler. The folks in Seattle can attest to the depressive disorders caused by constant rain. It can be known to push some people out there over the edge, right into Communism. One of my favorite disorders is caused by lack of sun- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I just chuckle every time I see that disease mentioned, though of course I realize how unkind that is. It is just that I know some people with pencil and notepad spent hours coming up with that acronym and I admire good slogans. It apparently requires many days of rain in a row to develop SAD. Until the critical number of days have transpired, most sufferers have the less serious condition known as MAD, or Muttering Against Dreariness, and even just one day of rain can invoke BAD, which involves swear words that have no place in an uplifting blog like this one.

If you google rain and depression, there is a whole plethora of unhappy people who are sitting by the grey window picking lint out of their belly buttons and listening to "The Tears of a Clown." So among the questions I intend to ask God someday is why did He invent rain?

I know that spring showers bring May flowers. My question is deeper than that. When you are the Creator and can plan the universe anyway you want, choosing details right down to the color of the wallpaper, why make a planet dependent on a source of water that makes us SAD, MAD, and BAD? Water could have just bubbled up from below leaving the sun free to shine and give us all enough vitamin D to prevent osteoporosis.

I think Asherel came to the proper answer a few days ago. It was Friday, and we had finished school and were spending time in one of our favorite stores, LOWES building supplies.
Out of nowhere she said, "I guess if we didn't have Mondays, we wouldn't appreciate Fridays so much."

I suspect that is the crux of many of the hard things we grapple with. If we didn't have pain, how would we understand and appreciate its absence? Without evil, would we understand good? Without rain, would we know to dance in the sun?

Hosea 6:3
Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth."