"The Kingdom of Heaven is Like..."

I love in scripture when Jesus says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like..." I find myself on the edge of my seat, trying to glean even the tiniest speck of wisdom from, as my Vineyard family would say, "the smartest person who ever lived."

Dusty started a really fun summer series on Wednesday nights called Weekly Outdoor Object Lessons or WOOL. (Clever, eh?)

Tonight we looked at what Jesus meant when he said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.”

We asked the students after making the dough and kneading the dough what they thought this parable meant. I loved their answers!

One replied that we have to let ourselves be kneaded like this dough so that the "yeast" or the Kingdom will spread throughout our lives and cause it to rise. Never thought of it that way.

To me this parable says that even a little bit of Kingdom goes a long way. And I sure need that truth in this season of my life.

I Heart Faces-- Babies

This week's I Heart Faces Photo Challenge is All About Babies! I was so excited when I read that because I really love how Sophia's one-month-old pictures turned out a while back.

Yay for friends who let me take pictures of their kids!

In Honor of a Childhood Memory

Snippets From The Interwebs

I found two snippets today that I just had to share:

Aside from the fact that Los is now being referred to as the "Horrible Father," check out the stellar grammar. (Families? Really?!)

ALSO, do you have the Fever?

WORLD CUP FEVER?

"Play"

Here's another picture from our zoo date with Gabby. Her curiosity about the water (and subsequently why it kept shooting up at her) was so sweet!

I'm submitting this photo in the i ♥ faces photo challenge this week. The theme is "play" and I think it's the thing Gabriella does best!

Visual Aids

Have you read my last post? Well you should or these pictures won't make a ton of sense. I stole them from my friend's mom's Facebook:


(That is my car in the picture...)

Close call for everyone eh?

Reflections on a Crazy Day: Thanks Jesus

Today was quite possibly the most insane day I've had in a while. Maybe ever. It's in the top 3 for sure.

I'm swimming at my friend Lauren's house and it was quite relaxing. Delightful really. Suddenly we hear a loud noise. This noise proceeds to gets louder, then we hear something that sounds like an explosion. We pop our head over the pool gate and see a semi truck careening into her front yard, taking out all the telephone lines along the way.

Mercifully this truck was stopped by the trees in her front yard. If not, it would have hit all the cars in the driveway (mine included), and made it's way to the pool... Where. We. Were. (!)

Another mercy: the driver and his grandson were okay. (Later reports trickling in that the driver has some semi-serious injuries. Updates to follow.)

At this point diesel is spewing everywhere, live wires are running all over the place, people are running around like crazy, and everyone had a cell phone to their ear. (What did we ever do before those things?) The driver is helped to a chair and things seem to be, somewhat, settling down.

The EMS comes on the scene yet a few minutes later we hear someone shouting, "RUN! Get out of here!" What more could go wrong?

Apparently, another semi had been flagged through and the top of his cab caught the low hanging wires. The telephone poles on both sides of the road snapped in half and fell into the front yard (wires and all) where we were all standing. The rest is a three hour long saga in which it rains, we watch a new telephone pole be dropped into the ground, and the semi gets hauled away piece by piece.

So, thanks Jesus that everyone in the truck was okay. More selfishly, thank you that no one else's cars were wrecked and that the trees stopped the truck.

The Lord has new mercies every day, this I know. Sometimes, those mercies are small and we tend to overlook them. Sometimes, like today, they are the only thing we see.