Through my Kitchen Window

 

Last Thursday about mid day, I went outside to eat lunch on the patio. My sixteen year old son joined me. We chatted and laughed – had a delightful time – until it started to rain. With the first drop, he announced that he was going inside. I teased him about being afraid of a few raindrops, reminding him that as a child I used to play in the rain. I said I was going to finish my lunch and then look at the garden. He laughed at me for staying out in the rain and ran back inside, taking his plate with him.

It was only sprinkling so I finished my food and then headed to the garden on the side of the yard. But I was distracted along the way by a long vine type weed growing along the house in the rock landscaping. I stopped to pull it. As I did, I stepped back into a hole my dogs had dug, twisting and as it turns out, breaking my foot as I fell.

There I was on the ground in pain, unable to get up and raindrops falling on me. I called my son’s name but he didn’t hear me since he was inside. So I began to scoot on my butt to the door. It seemed to be miles and miles away and I was making slow, painful, progress, when my son opened the backdoor. Surprised to see me on the ground, he said he knew something must have happened for me to still be outside in the rain, no matter how much I liked rain. He helped me inside where I called my husband to tell him the news.

Now I’m laid up. I’m not supposed to put any weight on it for two weeks. I grew tired of watching TV after just a couple of days and pulled out a sketch pad I haven’t opened in years. I like to draw, I just never make the time for it. So, these weeks off my feet, I’m enjoying sketching. The two I am posting are from my childhood. One is my childhood home in Nigeria. I had a parrot hanging on the front porch, a monkey in a cage in the back, and a guava orchard in the back where I spent endless hours climbing the trees in search of the perfect guava. The stones around my driveway were white and flat. I used to lay my head on them and watch the clouds drift by. The second picture is of the chapel at the boarding school. It was such a beautiful structure.

Yesterday, my son saw me sitting on my bed sketching away. He sat down at the foot of my bed in disbelief saying, “Mom, I didn’t know you draw?”

I replied, “You know how your sister is an amazing artist?” He nodded. I continued, “Well, I’m the gene pool. It’s just that my talent is rusty and was never developed like hers was when she majored in it in college.” He laughed.

It’s a pleasant way to spend hours that could otherwise become very boring.

The Quotable Susan

Quotes on Prayer:

“I say it reverently, if God were stupid enough or weak enough to answer every prayer we made, I think we should have to stop praying or become much more wise than we are now. We should be about as safe on our knees as at the controls of one of our great bomber planes –loaded.”

 -Susan Anderson from her book “So This Is Africa”

“There are some prayers that have not been granted, and I cannot understand why.  As my human eye sees, there are a number of persons who would be very much happier and better off in every way if the Lord could only see eye to eye with me and answer my prayers concerning them.  So far He has not, and that’s all I know about it.  But I do not plan to give up trying to learn to pray.”

-Susan Anderson from her book, “So This Is Africa”

“Ask with a focused mind and an engaged will.  Seek with the objective of attaining.  Knock with urgent sincerity.

 -Susan Small (a friend)

 

“Whenever, I find myself suddenly awake in the middle of the night with someone on my mind, I pray for them, because I think to myself, ‘Either God does wake His children up in the middle of the night to pray for someone or He doesn’t. But if He does, then this is what it would look like.’”

-Susan Siami

 

“People who ski, I suppose, are people who happen to like skiing, who have time for skiing… Recently, I found that I often treat prayer as though it were a sport like skiing - something you do if you like it, something you do in your spare time…. But prayer isn’t a sport. It’s work.  Prayer is not a game…Prayer is the opposite of leisure. It’s something to be engaged in, not indulged in. It’s a job you give priority to. It’s performing when you have energy left for nothing else.”

 -Elizabeth Elliott as quoted by Chip Ingram in his book, “The Invisible War”