I Believe

Forty-nine years ago "Ask and ye shall receive" was our lesson in church.

As you can imagine at five, I could not quite get my thoughts around this. I did not ask anyone to explain it. I had always been encouraged to figure things out for myself.

I thought ok, if God does answer all prayers, I will give him a test and see if it's true. I told no one. This was between me and God.

Every day when I went to check the mail, I prayed. I asked God if He was real then He could send me an Indian doll, with a white beaded buckskin dress, and long braids.

Every day I went to the mailbox. Every day, there was no doll.

After a few months, I gave up and decided God was like the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Remember, I discussed this with no one! I still believed but did not rank Him at the top.

Many, many years later, I told a friend. We discussed it and it was soon forgotten.

My friend lost her son a few months later. It is never easy to lose a child but hers was an especially difficult loss.

A week after her son was buried, I received a package in the mailbox.

Inside was the most beautiful Indian doll! Just as I pictured all those years ago when I prayed!

A note said, "Gail, God really does answer prayers".

I cried.

Yes, Virginia...

This is a partial quote from the New York Sun on September 21, 1897.

An eight-year-old girl wrote the newspaper and asked if Santa was real. Her father had said if you read it in the Sun, it is true.

The editor answered.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and Devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life it's highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished." By Francis Pharcellus Church, Editor of the New York Sun.

May we take the time tonight and tomorrow to view the world through children's eyes.

Two Things

There are two things that take me away...painting and horses. I am good at neither.

The touch of soft hair, the smell of a horse, the sight of any horse is like a hand wrapping around my soul and each nuance tightens the grip.

It is just being with them. I can brush, clip or train or I can sit and absorb whatever peacefulness horses seem to pass to me. They are my four-legged Valium.

Painting is the same. I lose time with both. The brush in my hand stops the clock and stills the sound around me. Colors choose me and are mixed and smeared with no forethought. The result is not something I've done but what the paints, themselves, have created.

Horses and painting take my breath away and fill me up again!

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Marcy's Art

There is beauty in nature.

Marcy has captured that.

Even when a photo might not be perfect, the art comes through.

There is beauty in all of God's Work.

I want to enlarge these rooster pictures and make a series for framing.

Aren't they just farmy??