Where did May go? It’s a battle between December and May being the busiest months of the year and I honestly think May wins over December when it comes to adding up all the end of year school and extracurricular activities, holidays, cookouts, and summer preparations.
Time has also come for What I Learned this month, It’s an intentional practice to be observant of the simple and big things that I’m learning each month. You can do that too! It’s really amazing when you realize how much you can still learn in a month’s time.
So, here we go. This month…
1. I saw a cool bumper sticker and I wish I was able to take a picture of it, but we were on the interstate and I didn’t want to distract myself on that busy road. So, I found a picture of it. Even though it’s one simple word, it says a lot. Earth is one of God’s greatest piece of art, after all, He is the Creator and the Artist. It’s the first verb in the Bible, “God CREATED” and see how magnificently creative He is! I’m looking forward to heading out west this summer to see many of those pieces of art on this earth. Here’s an example:
2. Speaking of heading out west, my husband found a website with an app called Roadtripper. It’s really helpful as we’re planning our Family Vacation. Yep. How Roadtripper works: You plug in your destinations and it builds your adventure. It gives us the mileage and travel time between each destination and allows you to give a mile radius around the places you’d like to stop. For example, we will go as far as 20 miles off the main highway and it’ll point us to places to visit, restaurants, hotels and points of interest in that radius. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re taking a road trip this summer!
3. We’ve had a couple of weekends where our family has traveled for our son’s soccer games. We’re thankful that most of them have been in the town my sister and her family live so they’ve been great family-time weekends. One weekend was at the beach though so we made it a little get-away weekend and stayed in a hotel. When we were trying to decide who sleeps where in those two double beds, I noticed these words woven into the pillow sheet. “Firm” or “Soft”. I’ve never seen pillow cases like this in hotels, so either it’s a new thing, only done at the hotel we stayed in, or it’s been way too long since I’ve gotten away for the weekend! So do you like a firm or soft pillow? I go for the soft!
4. When carrots are ready to pick in your garden. For the first time this year, we’ve grown some vegetables we’ve never tried to grow before. They’re the kind that you plant late winter and are ripe mid and late spring. I’m not much of a gardener so we’re lucky to get a few tomatoes and come zucchini in the hot summer. But we decided to expand our horizon and plant some other veggies. I think we started a little late and learned that lesson too. We actually have eaten some lettuce, and still waiting to see if we’ll get any broccoli, onions and carrots. Onions and carrots, as you know, grow under the ground. So, I asked,”How do you know they’re ready to pick?” So, we looked on YouTube and learned you’ll see the orange top of the carrot coming out of the ground and that’s the time to pick it. We’ll see if it grows hopefully in the next month!
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5. Some activities to do this summer with your kids. Summer is great to have a break. But not too long after school is out, if your kids are like mine, you know about 3 weeks into it with 9 more to go, they start getting bored. Well, here’s some ideas I found from Jen Hatmaker that are pretty fun. I think her poem in the tune of “The Night Before Christmas” will make you LOL. So, here’s 10 things to do this summer.
6. Mark Ballas on Dance With The Stars was is still a ninja warrior. I know I’ve posted earlier something I’ve learned from DWTS because I try to watch it every week in season. I think Mark is matched with good partners and was sad to see he and Willow Shields (from Hunger Games) got voted off too early this season. (watch that dance here) But one of their last performances they dressed as ninja warriors and did a great performance. They did a story about his childhood how he loved dressing up and playing ninja warrior. So great to see that creativity.
It reminds me of a post of my friend’s that said…
I totally agree and support that!
7. Digging Deeper – A daily study through the unfamiliar and misunderstood in the Bible. This is a month-long devotional a friend of my wrote. The purpose is to encourage the readers and believers to dig deeper into His Word. I learned about an axhead that floats (2 Kings 6:5), how Elisha was called a baldy (2 Kings 2:23), why the Magi brought their particular gifts (Matthew 2:11), and Nephilim’s (angels) joined with human daughters who had babies which were half angel and half man and then all killed during the great flood. (Genesis 6:4) – just to name a few. If you’d like a FREE copy, call 1-888-772-9634.
8. Ann Voskamp’s powerful post about women and girls who are being trafficked, abused, and violated in Iraq and ISIS’s role that most don’t know. It’s not something I necessarily wanted to learn this month. Ann tells her experience with 4 women and their children who barely escaped their homes being destroyed by ISIS and are now hiding and trying to live in shipping containers. It made me sick to my stomach reading it. It’s nothing I really want to learn but it’s real and we need to be educated on what is beyond our North American tunnel vision. I strongly encourage you to read all of it here.
I’ll share something Ann did write, “The madness & modern day holocaust & slavery that is ISIS — It begins to end when the world lives what we actually are: *We belong to each other.* We belong to the women who can’t read, we belong to the women who have been stripped of every hope, who are being sold naked in slave markets, whose daughters are coming back to families with ripped apart & violated innocence…Not on our watch. Not on our watch will we let blinders be stapled to our hearts, not on our watch will we say we can do nothing, not on our watch will we let women be made invisible so they can be made useable inventory. ISIS doesn’t own these women — they belong to us. They belong to the sisterhood of the world. When we live like we all belong to each other, we answer much of the longing in the world.
We, the people, you and me, can help defy ISIS. Here’s a worldwide way and here’s a local, Alamance county way where you can actually get a “hands-on” opportunity to prepare meals for ISIS victims in Iraq.
Please pray about reaching out to our sisters and brothers through Christ. Please pray for their protection and for our eyes and heart to be opened to do something about it. Please pray for the willingness to be uncomfortable instead of comfortable and to be broken with them.
Yes, hard to learn this month. Thanking God for the simple things I learned as well. Each day God gifts us with everything we need, everything we have and learn. Everything.
What is something you learned in May? Feel free to comment below!