Better late than never? Battle wounds from the past...

As I have a new goal to make my way through the 300 valuable emails I have saved to look at later, I will be producing some pictures from the vaults of the Singing Bees experiences.  My goal of 10 emails a day should keep this blog pretty hopping, since we normally email our pictures to ourselves :).

The first one here is from September of 2013.  We were playing "Steal the Flag" for a youth group activity in the backyard of a neighbor and the Goob came up to me partway through the evening and said, "Mom, I cut myself on the leg.  Do you want to look at it?"

"Sure..." I said, and then say this:

 Being the woman without common sense that I am, I actually had to check with Q-dawg to see if we should take the Goob to the emergency room :).

He didn't get to finish the Steal the Flag game, but he did get a cool scar!

On that theme, we have a few shots of Chugger-dude's winning shiner from last August.  Wish I could remember what it was from! I am sure Q-dawg or Chugger-dude will remind me when they see this post.

We did the "soft look" like this on purpose.  Now he looks like one of the characters in love in an old Star Trek episode...only they would have make-up all or nothing...not just on one eye. :)  Just kidding!

Grateful that no one DIED

Yes.

Monday had been one of those days.

In consequence of the attempt to pray for humility this past month, my eyes have been opened to the many, many ways that I lack humility:
--in judging others
--in judging myself
--in thinking I know better than others
--in preserving a personal sense of pride
--in my relationships
...and the list goes on and on.

I read a delightfully painful list the other day of ways to check our E.G.O. (Edging God Out) from a book called "Lead Like Jesus" by Ken Blanchard, etc..  First he refers to Romans 12:3, where God warns us against thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought.  Then he gives us a checklist of ways we can tell that "pride is at its destructive work."  I go in to more detail on my other blog and give the list there, but it has definitely been quite the month so far.

For instance, the following is what I wrote on Monday in my "Seeing God's Hand" journal that I have been writing in every night:

"2 major humility checks:
-Spooner was found wandering in the street across Sunset. A  policeman returned him to me and filed a report.
-I was trying to figure out the way to get on a train in downtown Salt Lake and ended up getting stranded at an intersection with a train driver honking and yelling at me. (And "yelling" means it was through a PA system that was broadcast loudly enough to be heard over the train's incessant honking...)  I wasn't sure how to get out of the situation, worrying about the 8 children that were stranded there with me, and all the while the lady was honking and loudly broadcasting for me to "get off the tracks!!!"  Well, I was surrounded by tracks.  It didn't look like she wanted me to move in front of her, I wasn't sure how safe the other tracks were with the horn and yelling blaring in my mind, and the kids were getting upset.  Not that pretty and it felt like it lasted forever.
Tender mercy: no one was lost, kidnapped, and/or killed today."

Publickly and privately, I have had multiple opportunities to check my pride. :)