Joyfull Living

Happy Friday! Today I am participating in "Five Minute Friday" an opportunity to write thoughts about a given work prompt. Today's word is "Broken".   Broken —what a sad word. When I hear the word broken, in my mind a picture comes of something fragile that was once beautiful but now lays shattered in pieces on the floor. When something is 'broken', it is easily discarded, or no longer useful to us. Broken applies to more than items that take a fall or become damaged, it is a heartbreaking word when applied to relationships, attitudes or people.  But for every broken thing, a cry comes out—fix it. Put it back together, take the pieces and bind them up. From plates on the floor to hearts in anguish, if someone could just come and put the pieces back together again.  If we were never broken, we would never know the wholeness of God. That’s the beauty of brokenness. When our hearts are broken, when we’ve just made a mess of things, that is the space when Go...

  A sweet childhood memory I have is being in my maternal grandmothers old house. It was really an old shack on the outside, but inside it was full of love that spoke to all the senses. Snuggles with Grandma and her homemade quilts, smells of a meal always cooking, sights of old treasures she would happily tell stories about, love totally surrounded you when you were there. A sound I always associate with Grandma's house is the sound of an old fashioned pressure cooker. As a child, we lived in the big city, but would make the hours long trip to the country to visit Grandma. In the south, boiled peanuts were a staple for my grandparents and a true treat for my parents and I.  During our summer visits, Grandma would boil peanuts in her old pressure cooker. She would fill the pot full of peanuts, water and salt and let them cook for hours. After a while the pressure cooker would begin to make noises! A gentle rocking of the pressure regulator would begin.  I now understand t...