I {LOVE} Sunday::to be planted and flourish...

The righteous flourish like the palm tree
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the LORD;
they flourish in the courts of our God.
They still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green,
to declare that the LORD is upright;
he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.
Psalm 92:12-15 ESV
{With the Sunday Community at Lisha's #GiveMeGrace }

As beloved children...

Therefore be imitators of God,
as beloved children.
And walk in love,
as Christ loved us
and gave himself up for us,
a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Ephesians 5.1-2

The fair flowers of grace...

"I must try and cultivate an eye for life's mercies... And life, while it has its ugly swamps, its vile weeds, and its sharp thorns,has always its fair flowers to charm the eye with their beauty, or to fill the air with their fragrance..." ~ Rev. John Flowers Serjeant, 1878

It's my Pollywog Creek motto - to cultivate an eye for life's mercies, but sometimes that Pollyanna attitude of gratitude can be hard to hold onto when ugly swamps, vile weeds, and sharp thorns prevail.

Ann calls it the hard thanks - the hard eucharisteo - counting the gifts in the muddy bog of affliction. Paul called it a boasting in weakness for the sake of Christ. Ann knows and Paul knew - it's grace. 

Gratitude and contentment "with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities" is not a resignation in defeat or a lack of faith, but an acknowledgement that the fair flowers of grace are sufficient amid the thorns.

And when the sharp thorns of chronic illness dig deep, I press on with joy, comforted in the knowledge that He promises for the sake of Christ, that when I am weak that He is strong.

This is my comfort in my affliction,
that your promise gives me life.
~ Psalm 119:50



{Photos} a tiny monk orchid - growing wild under an oak tree on Pollywog Creek

Weekend Wanderings...

 

















Weekends {are for} Wanderings on Pollywog Creek 

...looking back and catching up

"A Week of Wanderings" might be a more fitting title for this week's looking back. I wandered away from Pollywog Creek more in the past week than I have in months (appointments with doctors don't count). Unfortunately, most of my gadding about was crammed into one day. If you ever hear that I'm considering a repeat of such an adventure - please remind me of how awful I felt the next day. Enjoying my renewed freedom and to be a good steward and save gas, I tried to kill two (or four) birds with one stone. Not one of the wisest decisions I've ever made, though I don't regret the people and places I experienced that day - from the glorious sunrise over my friend Susan's ranch in Felda (photos next week) to discovering wild poinsettias along a fence in Ft. Denaud. I simply need to remember to spread the fun out over more than one day in the future.

Long ago I accepted the fact that I'm rarely on the cutting edge, but one-step-behind-the-times. I'd like to blame it on the rural southern lifestyle - slow and easy. I'll blame it instead on the low-energy, air-headed way I was created. We've already turned the pages on the first week of October and I'm still working on my September "Living in Yellow" posts. In the meantime, Susan asked me about the color of October. It's orange. Leaves, pumpkins and sunrises. Maybe I should retitle that series to "Living in Yellow and Orange" like candycorn. 

What about your week? I'd love to know where your wanderings took you - and if October means candycorn for your family, too.

{Photos} here, there and everywhere

Brushes...

Mine is a camera - and I say that with all humility. It's simply a "perspective gift" with which I've been entrusted...and Pollywog Creek is a canvas where that "camera brush" paints - where the abundance of my heart speaks in digital photo words of pixels and light.

And it's a sobering thought.

There's no hiding what turns my head or my concept of beauty - what captures my heart.

My idols.

With what brush(es) do you paint and the abundance of your is heart revealed?



Ann - who paints with a multitude of brushes, asks us to share on Wednesdays how we practice Ressurection. (Might you join?) It's my desire - my hope - that I am doing so as I "cultivate an eye for life's mercies" and brush those mercy images onto this Pollywog Creek canvas.

Photos - blanket flowers in all of their glorious stages - my current fascination (as well as the bees) - flourishing in the small flower bed under the study's east-facing window.

Too tired for words...

Seriously.

When my days are as rich and full and challenging and satisfying as they have been, there's simply no more energy for words.

I stare at the computer screen - hoping to retrieve those profound blog-worthy thoughts I'd entertained earlier - but they've scattered off to the land of lost thoughts and I'm left with photos and no words.

I can choose to leave the photos hidden in my rarely visited flickr account or I can post them here with no words.

I choose the later.

Tomorrow I might have words.

Photos: A spring dusk on Pollywog Creek

Sun kissed...

 

























Though I'm quick to say that we don't live in paradise, my husband is quite certain that Heaven will be just like Florida - without hurricanes and mosquitoes.

July or August, he'd get quite the argument from me, but on sun-kissed days like these I'm inclined to agree.

When it's cool and sunny and the birds are singing and the flowers - wild - are blooming and all is well with me and mine, it's easy to be agreeable and gratitude spilling.

The real test - the challenge for me - is this. When it's hot and humid, and the cat throws up on the carpet, and I drop the yogurt on the just-mopped kitchen floor and all is not well with me and mine. Does gratitude spill then?

Have I truly cultivated an eye for life's mercies? Will I still count gifts - name them, photograph them, list them, sing them, speak them, paint them - on difficult, less-than-stellar, horrible, no-good days?

Wonder what I missed...

Driving down the isolated wooded road to my friend's house one morning last week, I came upon four deer grazing along the side of the road. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera.


I was not going to make that mistake again. As I headed out the door this morning to make that same drive, I grabbed my camera and placed it on the dashboard over the steering wheel where I could access it quickly.


I drove slowly down the winding road, continuously scanning the edge of the woods for signs of the deer, but by the time I reached the road's end and the driveway to my friend's home, I had not seen a thing.

Disappointed, I turned off the car and prepared to go inside. As I snapped the lens cap back on my camera this thought occured to me, "I wonder what I missed while I was looking for deer."

*Photos from my Pollywog Creek backyard

The place where all beauty comes from...

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from” ~ C.S. Lewis

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

I think of Genesis as I wander about Pollywog Creek these stifling, humid mornings of summer.

 

The air is heavy, and I'm weighed down by sweat-drenched clothes and dew-soaked sneakers, and I swat at skeeters that nibble my ankles and sometimes question my sanity as I tip-toe 'round the pond.

Crazy lady with her camera. Whatever does she see out there in the wet grass and tangle of vines along the creek?

But truthfully, I can't resist. God sprinkled beauty in unlikely places - in mud and grass and on rocks and cypress knees - and I don't want to miss a thing.

It's in the way dangling moss sparkles in the early morning light, and bullfrogs skip across the surface of the pond, and dragonflies with their gossamer wings poise along the barb-wire fence.

It's in mockingbird serenades, and woodpecker fledglings, and perky dandelions dotting the fields.

And I wonder why we call them weeds when God called them good.

(C.S.Lewis quote HT Light for the Writer's Soul - Victoria Gaines)