We had a pretty special weekend down in Lincoln, where we attended the State VB Championships. We watched all three of Lutheran High Northeast's matches. They won their first match, lost the 2nd, then won the 3rd, bringing home the Class C2 3rd place trophy. We watched Lincoln Lutheran's first 2 matches, which they won en route to the Class C1 trophy.
There were times of nostalgia. I served at Lincoln Lutheran from 1980-1993 & actually hired Sue Ziegler, the LL VB coach. (I hired her as a Spanish teacher.) I served at LHNE from 1997-2014 & also had a hand in hiring Kathy Gebhardt, the Eagles' VB coach.
There were also times of wistfulness. I miss being part of a Lutheran school community. I miss first hand experiences, like LHNE's two state VB championships.
I do NOT miss Board meetings. I do NOT miss contentious conversations with Board members & school parents. I do NOT miss anything involving budgeting. I DO miss the opportunities God gave me to serve, & I am thankful for them.
DEPT. OF SHAMELESS JOKE-STEALING *
*courtesy of Reader's Digest, July/Aug 2019
"Why is it a penny for your thoughts but you have to put your two cents in? Somebody's making a penny.
TEMP CHALLENGE
We woke up to the sound of our neighbor shoveling snow. It looks like we got 1-2" . . . on Veterans Day! Then I saw our temperature & figured, as it turns out incorrectly, that we would win this morning's temp challenge. 2nd place isn't shabby. It's remarkable that we have a 4-way tie for 3rd place. Ratings as of 7:40a, courtesy of wunderground.
#1, Eagan, MN, 13 degrees
#2, Norfolk, NE, 14 degrees
#3, tie, Ventura, IA; Garrison, IA; Beatrice, NE; Lincoln, NE, 17 degrees
I hate to grumble(?), but I'm tired of winter . . . & it's not even winter yet!
GIFTS FROM GOD
Christianity is often thought of as a set of principles that people struggle to follow, working their way into God’s favor by offering tokens of self-denial and obedience. Even Christians who profess a far bigger story sometimes live as if this is the reality. But such a story looks at God as we might look at a gumball machine or a bank. If the prize we seek is God, we cannot earn our way to the thing we have our eye on—no matter how many tokens we might come up with. For the shiny quarters we proudly offer, belong, in fact, to God.
In the Christian imagination, every faculty we have—from our ability to think or move to our ability to praise or seek Father, Son, and Spirit—is given to us by a God who wants to be known. As the apostle Paul declared among the idols of Mars Hill, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”(1) We are embedded in God’s creation; we are creatures within God’s story enabled by the Spirit to see and know and love, to respond in gratitude to the God who reaches toward us first. --Jill Carattini, Slice of Infinity
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