‘Ink Re-Cap 129 and Inspiring Inklings of the Best Life
‘Ink Re-Cap 129.
Sharing sketches and scribbles,
and catching inklings of the best life.
Plus a quote for your scrapbook.
And if you’re a kimenink email friend, you can download and print it FREE!
(If you open our weekly re-cap email, the link is in there.)
‘Ink Re-Cap 129 Sketches and Scribbles
I have to tell you about Sunday.
We had friends over after service in the evening, and it was too much fun not to share about it. They are in-laws of one of my besties, so we’ve been with them over the years. (They are Texans.) But I’d never had them to my house before. Did I say we had fun? A laugh a minute. I realized a mind boggling thing. We are at the age now where we say dad-isms and random-mom things. However, we’re still young enough to realize it, and it cracks us up. My husband looks at me when I say something random, and I say, “What?” And then, “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way!”
Our tall Texan friend, whose twang actually wore it’s own cowboy hat, said, “Y’all have your own mental health support group here?” because he thought we just had too much fun in our church family. Well. You know how it is, when you get to telling stories, they get funnier and funnier as the evening goes on.
That, my friends, is golden. That someone would think we’re extra happy!
So that got our work week off to a good start, and here’s what happened:
How to Make Dreamy Gauze Table Runners
25 Baby’s Best Summer Books: Top Picks For 2021
7 Surprising Kitchen Storage Ideas When Space Runs Out
How Not to Use Hot Foil Transfer Sheets When Laminating
When God is All In All and With Us All
Until we had…
An Afternoon Not to Write Home About
We are still in the process of getting Mom’s Olive Street house ready to sell. It’s getting very wearisome by now. Mr. Kimenink spends long hours over there, sometimes waiting for sub-contractors, sometimes doing the work himself. He has one more very hard day left, then the sign is going up! Woo-hoo!
So when it gets to the time of final clean up for a fix and flip, Jayne and I go do our polishing up. Except this time the polishing involved showers from a foreign Land of No Cleaning Supplies. I don’t think Miss Renter knew anything about the aisle in Walmart that has all those magic bottles and scrubbers and bubbles and shiner-uppers. My gloves gave out after the first hour. Lucky I was planning to cut my fingernails, because a thumb nail works wonders on water scale.
So the tub I was working on with my helpful littlest g’little didn’t have a cover on the water pipe. That thing that directs the water from a straight pipe coming out of the wall, downward into the tub, was missing, because Mr. K hadn’t installed it yet. What happens when you turn a straight pipe on in a shower? Right. It blasts a stream of water clear across the tub. Littlest g’little screeched in excitement and from then on was in the “swimming pool” with me. Needless to say, by the time Mr. K got there to put the cover on the pipe, shrieks and giggles and splashes were all over the bathroom, and the very hard afternoon I wanted to forget became an afternoon I want to remember!
Next time I blink, she’ll be in school. She reminded me again yesterday that she won’t be “fwee” very long anymore. Awww. Please stop time.
Most read posts this week:
Easy Handmade Seed Paper for a Mother’s Day Card
Rahab Saves the Spies | Children’s Bible Lesson
New Products in our Shop
God Created Light Lesson 2: Children’s Bible Story
Top Seller This Week
Chosen By God, Children’s Bible Lesson Study Book
Catching Inklings of the Best Life
In my browsing for a certain book, I came across a quaint Google E-book with the title, “Letters of a Canadian Stretcher Bearer.” These are a soldier’s letters to his wife, written in 1918 after serving in a Canadian hospital for wounded soldiers in France for 3 years. The forward of the book declines to name him, as he is “still in active duty.”
“At H___ there are a fleet of automobiles that at a distance look just like ordinary grey machines till you get close. Then you see each is mounted with a high-angle gun. It all seems so out of place in these little quiet English lanes, all drowsing in the hot summer sun. The brambles are growing on the hedges just the same. The sheep dot the little green fields, and old women bustle around their little rose-covered cottages, everything just like it always is,
When all of a sudden a line of huge grey trucks goes tearing through the narrow lane, stirring up great clouds of dust, each machine with “Canada” painted on its grey side and a couple of Canucks, who have no notion what “speed limit” means, on the front seat. Inside may be anything from bread to guns. The natives don’t even look up anymore. No one even glances at marching men, or aeroplanes, or anything. All this is quite natural now.”
Yay, us!
Something happened this week that rarely, so rarely, happens to me. I won something! I took a free on-line training by Heather Heuman, and I actually got drawn for one of her daily prizes. Her Sweet Tea marketing course would be totally worth it, but it’s like $5,000. This is her book.
Billy Graham via Greg Laurie
I also meandered around the stories of the lives of Billy Graham and different members of his family this week. Here is a quote from Greg Laurie’s biography of Billy Graham:
“The Lord prompted Billy to ask for what the Lord actually wanted Him to do.
Billy could have refused to pray (and many do), but he would have missed a tremendous open door. The Lord does not usually give us a full roadmap in life. Rather, He usually leads us one step at a time.
Billy’s confidence soared after he spoke one day to a large group of teens at a local mission. He was asked to come back several times by the mission’s director. Billy even took it upon himself to start preaching on the street, and sometimes in front of seedy bars and rowdy saloons.
Slowly but surely, word got out about Billy’s work. Invitations came trickling in.
One was from a Baptist church in Venice, a small community of about five hundred people on Florida’s Gulf Coast. This particular invitation sounded a little more unconventional than most: the congregation held its services in a converted meat market. Jesus had no problem preaching in an open field and feeding thousands with a few loaves of bread and a handful of fish, and Billy didn’t see a problem preaching here either.
This service was “meaty” however you sliced it. Of the approximately eighty-five people in the congregation, almost a third responded to Billy’s invitation to “commit their lives to Christ.” If an evangelist has a 10 percent response to his preaching, that is considered a great success. But to have a third of an audience respond? That is “revival-like”!
Billy was awestruck. Humbly, he did not believe it was his sermon or the invitation that got so many to come forward; he credited the powerful prayer preceding the afternoon service that set it all in motion.
Billy told me once that he felt he had a gifting from God to give the invitation. He did not regard himself as a great preacher…
… he did have a supernatural ability, or what the Bible calls “an anointing,” to call people to Christ. You can’t learn that in a classroom or from a book. It is a gift from Heaven, and Billy already had it as a young man. Though every Christian is called to share their faith, not every believer has the “gift” of the office of the evangelist…
His confidence soon grew to fearlessness. He was now a crusader, a warrior for the Lord, a Joshua who would wade into any fight or any dark alley.”
More Inspirations
When you look around, you find many inspiring people. Like this man and his amazing integrity.
We always have ears for an inspiring young person who wins at life against all odds.
I want to try this recipe.
Check out this Mother’s Day project.
This patio.
This perfect picnic.
This bird bath.
Inspiring Quote
And this quote for your scrapbook:
I listened to Donna Dewberry, the artist/CEO behind One Stroke Painting, in a podcast.
She quoted these words by Emerson, because they’d been resonating with her this week.
She is nearing retirement, or maybe partially is already, and this quote made her think of her own life. Donna didn’t follow a typical artist’s path. She made her own path, creating a new decorative painting method that appeals to so many who wish to be artists but don’t have enough of the genius juice to set them apart. She perfected the technique, and left a trail for others to follow her rules for painting and making beautiful things.
This story inspired our art, which we foiled in this post.