One way to make picture quotes on line!

Good morning friends

You must have noticed those picture quotes everywhere. The idea is that if you do your own design for your blog or your company, you won't have to spend ages looking for them!

The best for me so far is recite.com. Easy to use, plenty of beautiful design already made. And it's free.

She thought she saw...

One morning as Kathy Inman got up and walked out to her front porch, she glanced out of her door window, and thought she saw a dog laying there.
But, when she knocked on the window the "dog" turned around and showed itself...to be a mountain lion!

Brownies made with honey!

Yes I had to look up some recipes because Steven's bought some honey last week and I ran out of sugar. I thought I had some brown sugar but I must have used it.
Anyway for the recipe, click here  ; it says put rum of vanilla, in  the end, I put some gingerbread flavour syrup.
You may want to know what was the occasion. Well our friends Dave and Marylin usually host a bible study and prayers and as they've gone to England for a family wedding, we hosted it.
We talked about Habakkuk and added that we can have a conversation with our Father God, thanks to what Jesus did on the cross for us, how wonderful that is!
The Sovereign Lord is my strength;(AT)
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.(AU)Friends, have a blessed evening in the name of Jesus-Christ our saviour and redeemer. Amen.

Pursue righteousness

2 Timothy 2:22 

“Flee the evil desires of youth,

 and pursue righteousness, 

faith, love and peace,

 along with those who call on the Lord 

out of a pure heart”

An atheist academic becomes Christian

I heard about Holly's story before we moved to France but I ran out of time. Anyway, here is her moving testimony.
As a teenager, Holly Ordway was quite concerned with meaning, belonging and issues of right and wrong, but it never occurred to her to seek out any answers in religion or theology. By the time she was in college, she had dismissed religion entirely, and from there, transitioned into a hard-core atheist as an adult:

“I was convinced that there was no God (or any spiritual reality). I did not believe that I had a soul; I thought I was just an intelligent animal, and that when I died, my consciousness would simply blink out. I thought that there was no ultimate meaning in life, and that people who believed in any form of God were seriously self-deluded.

She pursued and obtained her PhD in literature from UMass-Amherst. She obtained a professorship teaching English literature and composition at Mira Costa College in California, passing on her passion for literature and writing to the next generation.
“The Christian writers did more than pique my interest as to the meaning of ‘faith’. Over the years, reading works like the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Hopkins’ poetry had given me a glimpse of a different way of seeing the world. It was a vision of the world that was richly meaningful and beautiful, and that also made sense of both the joy and sorrow, the light and dark that I could see and experience. My atheist view of the world was, in comparison, narrow and flat; it could not explain why I was moved by beauty and cared about truth. The Christian claim might not be true, I thought to myself, but it was had depth to it that was worth investigating.”
This investigation was spurred on by her fencing coach, a man whom Ordway greatly respected. She had been working with this caring, patient and very intelligent man for over a year when she discovered, to her surprise, that he was a Christian. She had always thought of Christians as pushy and thoughtless, and realized that this man did not fit her preconceptions at all. She felt safe in asking him questions about Christian beliefs.

She also expanded her reading into Christian works, starting with C.S. Lewis. Her reading included Mere Christianity, Does God Exist, In Defense of Miracles, and The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Ordway became a Christian in 2007. Since then she has gone back to graduate school to study Christian apologetics, receiving her second MA from Biola University.

There were many pieces of evidence that all fit together to make a convincing case for the Resurrection; I’ll mention just a couple here. One of them is the behavior of the disciples before and after the Resurrection. The Gospel accounts do not portray their behavior after the Crucifixion in a particularly flattering light. Even though Jesus had predicted his own resurrection, the disciples gave up and went away, assuming that Jesus was a failed messiah. If the disciples had made up the Resurrection story afterwards, why would they have included details that made them look disloyal and cowardly? My academic studies in literature allowed me to recognize that the Gospels were written as history, not myth or parable, and that there hadn’t been enough time for a legend to form. It began to seem like the best explanation for all these events being recounted this way, was that they really happened.

This is her answer to BRANDON's question Perhaps the key hinge of your conversion was when you came to believe in the historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead. What evidence led you to that conclusion?

HOLLY: One of the first steps to that conclusion was my realization that miracles are both possible and rational. Since I had come to believe that there is a transcendent Creator who is the source of morality, order, and rationality, then it made sense that the physical world was orderly and comprehensible, with natural causes operating in a regular way, but also that there was a supernatural dimension of reality. Just as I could allow nature to take its course in a garden, or I could act to alter the course of ‘natural’ events by planting a tree or pulling up a seedling, it was rational to suppose that the Creator could work with natural causes or could act directly, intervening in history. So I was willing to consider at least the possibility that a particular miracle could have happened: the Resurrection.

There were many pieces of evidence that all fit together to make a convincing case for the Resurrection; I’ll mention just a couple here. One of them is the behavior of the disciples before and after the Resurrection. The Gospel accounts do not portray their behavior after the Crucifixion in a particularly flattering light. Even though Jesus had predicted his own resurrection, the disciples gave up and went away, assuming that Jesus was a failed messiah. If the disciples had made up the Resurrection story afterwards, why would they have included details that made them look disloyal and cowardly? My academic studies in literature allowed me to recognize that the Gospels were written as history, not myth or parable, and that there hadn’t been enough time for a legend to form. It began to seem like the best explanation for all these events being recounted this way, was that they really happened.
Then, after the Resurrection, there’s a complete turn-around in their behavior, and they become bold proclaimers of the Risen Lord. There were plenty of words that people in ancient times could have used to describe visions or sightings of ghosts, and indeed, such language would have gotten them in much less trouble! But they spoke of a Jesus who was alive, bodily resurrected, and in short order were willing to die for that claim.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence for the Resurrection, though, was the Church itself. If I supposed that the Church had invented the Resurrection to explain its own worship of Jesus, I had to ask, how did that worship arise in the first place? If the Church was not the result of a miracle, it was itself a miracle.

Source: click here and there

French countryside at its best!

I hope you'll agree with me! Last night there was a heavy storm but today was sunny and warm until 6ish. Then it started to be windy, a cold wind. 

Stroke has a new indicator!

Stroke has a new indicator! They say if you forward this to ten people, you stand a chance of saving one life. Will you send this along? Blood Clots/Stroke - They Now Have a Fourth Indicator, the Tongue:
uring a BBQ, a woman stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) ...she said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes.
They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Jane went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening.
Jane's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00 PM Jane passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ. Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Jane would be with us today. Some don't die. They end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead.

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

>>RECOGNIZING A STROKE<<

Thank God for the sense to remember the '3' steps, STR. Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

S *Ask the individual to SMILE.
T *Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently)
(i.e. Chicken Soup)
R *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call emergency number immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

New Sign of a Stroke -------- Stick out Your Tongue

NOTE: Another 'sign' of a stroke is this: Ask the person to 'stick' out his tongue. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other that is also an indication of a stroke.

Exciting time ahead

Dear friends, you may or not be aware that we have moved to France since the end of February and I have been pondering over the future of this blog. Should I end it and start another one, one matching a new exciting time ahead in our life. 
Then again, I thought that bearing in mind that time is precious and my knowledge in blogging hasn't improved much, I will abstain from changing blog.
So what's new?
1 Shall I pick on Steven first? Is he learning French? ..nop
2 One question for me...Have I found a job? ...nop
3 Is Steven still practising what he is best at...bbq?....yes with a gas bbq! Really as Verity Yarwood told him, he's become a traitor to the charcoal bbq league!
4 Have I found another friend to Christopher rabbit yet? ...nop..
5 Do we have a French TV...nop...English thank you very much and we enjoyed watching the two programmes for our Queen's 90th birthday, the BBC one and the ITV one. 
Hugs and blessings :)
More to come....

A very special wedding!

We had a fantastic time last Saturday for the wedding of my step daughter Verity with David Yarwood. Everybody had a fun time and it was great to meet new people and make new friends. Everything went smooth and as they say photos speak louder than words, here they are!

I'm delighted to report that the couple travelled well to their honeymoon location in St Lucia that they described as paradise. The Lord bless you richly Verity and David in Jesus' mighty name.

Our God is a great big God

As I am updating my 'music' page, I've just realised  that I did not put this awesome song 'Our God is a great big God!' in my blog! 
The words are there too! I discovered that song when I was...fifty-two and I love it! What about you? Have you heard that song before? Maybe when you were at school? This is fun and there are actions with it too. 

Music and family: a perfect combination!

Last week on Thursday, Steven had a very important meeting in a recording studio called Redbridge Studios in Bolton! As a retirement gift from his last school, St Peter in Hixon, the pupils chose to give him a voucher for a recording session and he was over the moon. The session went extremely well and Neil, the music producer was very friendly. I will put the recording on my youtube channel as soon as possible now that we are back home!

In the evening, our daugthers who were in Manchester joined us for a diner with the bride to be Verity and David, the bridegroom in the Rivington. It was great to spend time all together and we talked a lot about the wedding of course! 

On the Friday, it was the wedding rehearsal at the church and I decided to join the girls who were still in Manchester so we went for a relaxed lunch. Later on that night, my sister in law Pauline and her sister Eiline met us at an indian restaurant in the centre of Adlington, Zalzala. I recommend this place, the service and the food were excellent and we had a great time!

More to come, everything on the wedding will be revealed! lol 
Have a blessed day :)

The joy of a wedding

We have parked  the  caravan in Adlington and we've enjoyed walking by the canal.
Whois getting married?
Verity , Steven's  daughter
With...
David
When?
Saturday

We can't  wait!
Have a blessed  day