Wow! So much time has passed! So many things have happened--to all of us! Virus, lockdowns, shortages, and now fires are out of control in so many many places! It makes one afraid to wonder what may come next--except for the fact that as the expression goes, we may not know what the future holds, but we know Who holds the future.
Mixed in with all these other things we have had some very very good things happen--our son married his sweetheart last month! We are delighted for both of them, and see clearly how God has brought them together. We have had some very very sad things happen--my brother in law passed away very unexpectedly from a brief illness (not COVID), about three weeks total length. He was only 52, and leaves a beautiful wife, and three children ages 14, 17, and 20. My heart just breaks for them. We do not know why God did not choose to answer our prayers the way that we wanted in that situation. We do know that God answered our prayers, but the answer for healing was a "Not yet" for right now. The Bible does promise that the dead in Christ WILL live again, and we hold to that promise. (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17)
Mixed in with everything, each day comes and goes. Meals need to be cooked. Clothes washed. Daily routines that make up our lives. I pray that you are finding some ways to keep stability going for the children in your life. Things may change--things DO change--but our love for each other and the love of our Creator for us never changes.
Among the changes in our lives with our son marrying was the realization that he is now "completely" fledged--even though he has been moved out for a couple years, as he has been attending graduate school. At the same time, while moved out, it wasn't the same level of "moved out" as it is when one is married and starting their own home. So I took a good look around his childhood bedroom--mostly already empty of his things, and analyzed how this room could function best for all of us that still live full time in this home.
As I thought about it, I realized that this room has two functions now. First of all, we use it as our "Music Room." Our daughter plays the folk harp, and while the harp she is borrowing from a friend is a very small one, her bedroom is an EXTRA very small bedroom, therefore there really is no room for the harp in my daughter's bedroom. So the harp "lives" in our son's bedroom. Our daughter is also teaching me violin, as well as my husband, and I keep my violin parked in this room. My daughter also keeps her violin and her viola in this room, and then there are two mountain dulcimers. . . . This is not ALL the instruments in the house, mind you! There is my hubby's violin, and the hammer dulcimer, and the electronic piano, all of which are out in the living room. But still, there are quite a bit of music instruments that live in this room now, and I use this bedroom for my practice room while my daughter is doing her practice at the same time out in the living room. Second of all, we do still need this room as our guest room, and we actually have guests for sometimes a week at a time--my parents as they snowbird back and forth from Michigan to Florida, our son and his wife, and sometimes various Aunts, Uncles, cousins, sisters, brother--you get the idea. This room is still definitely going to need it's bed to stay in it! HOWEVER, that being said, I realized there are far more days that this room is functioning as our "Music Room" than it is functioning as our "Guest Room." Therefore, I decided to look around and see if I could rearrange things to function a bit better along the lines of the "Music Room" part of the job.
I was talking with my daughter about this, and showing her some artwork that I found online that I thought was cute and would go well in a "Music Room," when my daughter told me that she would REALLY like to have a chalk board in that room. She wants this to be able to write down the assignments for my hubby and myself, when she gives us music lessons. Yes, I DO have a "assignment book." The only problem is sometimes she forgets to write in that assignment book. Or I forget to look in it. Or it gets put somewhere else. Or--it just hasn't been working. But she said she would very much like to have a chalk board hanging on the wall that she could write things up on, and that would keep our assignments front and center. I looked online, but pretty chalkboards cost an arm and a leg! And while my daughter just wanted a chalk board, if we were going to put it up in that room "I" wanted it to be pretty! SO off we went on a hunt to the local thrift store, where I found exactly what I was looking for! This little beauty:
