Studio Styles, Snowflakes, and Sparrows

Here is one of the 3-D snowflakes our children made during December. We made white ones, white and blue ones,  multi-colored ones, and ones like this green and blue one.

This week were asked for a "studio style" photo of Jonathan and me. So we decided to just get it over with while we were talking about it. After a lot of laughing and giggling like school children about us country bumpkins trying to come up with a "studio style" photo (what is that???)   and making our hair over (Jonathan spent just as long as I trying to make his poor, thinning hair styled the way he likes it by his totally unprofessional barber wife look just right for this important picture :)  :) ...

and choosing a couple possible backgrounds in our prairie home that doesn't offer very many "studio style" backgrounds, Sammy did the honors of taking one picture after another till we got the right expressions and lighting and TRIED to get us centered against the background.

This is the photo Jonathan chose to send. I am so proud of my dear hubby. Don't ask me why, but I think he just keeps looking more and more handsome. (Don't ask him what he thinks about that statement, but I am his wife, and I am the only woman in the world who is allowed to say that!!!)

Now, to be honest, I am not sure what our children look more and more like.

Bad hair days?

The three littlest ones got their hair all wet and acted silly for us while we were taking photos. So while they were looking at us in the above pictures, this is what we had to look at! 

Smile!

And of course, Sam has to go around taking unwanted photos of other people.

Please, picture taker, this is NOT my day!

When life has turned upside down.....

And you are trying to hurry and hide underneath a way-too-small cover after doing the worst blunders of your life (until the next one)...

And you feel like you are all alone in the shivering cold...

or lonely in the midst of the crowd,

pecking at the crumbs you find somewhere down there in the dirt....

 About then, a gentle voice will remind you of the song you used to sing years ago,

"His Eye Is on the Sparrow,

Child, 

And I am watching over you."

Today my sister Dorcas wrote an email from Vermont titled, "The Birds sang to me!" 

She wrote about a walk she took in the woods. "I took off
alone and, as I rounded a corner of the trail, I startled a flock of
robins off their perch on a nearby tree. For some reason on any warm day
we may still see a robin or two around here! They flew into the sky
singing with all their power. It wasn't a spring time  song--since it's
not spring yet, but it was a beautiful loud chorus that I stopped to
listen to. It was so encouraging to hear. Then I thought to myself, I
wonder why God had those birds sing to me?! I was the only one there to
hear the song, so it must have been for me. I thought, I am not anybody
special, why are they singing for me?

Then I thought, over the past year
2013, I've been singing a lot to the Lord in the midst or trials and
worries and burdens; I guess, the Lord thought that at that moment He
would send a flock of birds to sing to me as if to tell me somehow that
He'd been hearing me and He would like me to go ahead and keep singing,
too!! It was a moment of joy! "

That was such a special letter to me. It is not always easy to sing. So when I looked out the window on the snowy days and saw so many birds in the tree, I wanted to take pictures. There was something comforting about those sparrows flocking to our trees and to our bird feeders. I always think about how His eye is on the sparrow.

There is something comforting about remembering what our Lord said about sparrows.

Remembering His love gives us the courage to peek outside of the blanket of despair that we have huddled under, and to look out at life (in the form of a silly camera at times!) staring us right in the face all over again. 

God transforms the "I am going to throw water at you" moments

...into "May I give you a hug?" moments. (It all depends on how you interpret the picture.)

And He has such a way of giving us sweet treats every once in a while. 

The flowers are ones Jonathan bought me on a down day,

and Hannah is peeling the wrappers off of chocolate peppermint kisses for peanut butter cookies.