The toad in the basement, the sun in the sky

The bad news is that we found a snakeskin in the crawl space. The good news is we found a big, really big, fat toad living there. He sat at the entrance to his hole for three days and watched Bob work. By all appearances, he’s survived a long time, which gives me the idea the snake has shed and fled.

If you are a herpetologist who thinks otherwise, please don’t bother to enlighten me.

On another note…   

Since our daughter married a man with family in Peru, a trip to Machu Picchu has moved up on our bucket list. 

A stock car racing woman and a great big God

 Marcia Moston

As a writer for the Journey, Christian newspaper, I get to interview some of the remarkable men and women God positioned here in the upstate to accomplish his purposes. The stories they tell of the modern day marvels and miracles God brought about to provide for their ministries when all else looked grim encourage and delight me.

God is just so not stodgy. He puts together the most unlikely of companions and circumstance.

A very present help in time of trouble -Marcia Moston

I’ll give you this—a dog has an impressive sense of smell. They have tens of thousands more receptors than we do, even two different passageways that separate the air they breathe from the air they smell. By some accounts, they can sniff out a teaspoon of sugar in the amount of water it takes to fill two Olympic-sized pools. Or, according to James Walker, former Director of the Sensory Research Institute, if smell were sight, what we can see at 1/3 mile, a dog can see at 3,000 miles.

But the facts still don’t negate the miracle.

Life Interrupted? Or Life Lived?

I used to multi-task well. It was a handy ability for a woman who wanted to read every book, and who thought every adventure an equal opportunity worth pursuing. A renaissance woman of sorts—I knew a little bit about a lot of things.

So when the Christian school in my town expanded to include a high school, but suddenly found themselves without an English teacher the weekend before school opened, someone recommended me. (Mind you, I had never taken an education course, and although I read a lot and was probably the only person in town who remembered with fondness her seventh-grade exercises in diagraming sentences, I had a degree in sociology, not English.)

It was bold of the school board to offer me a contract after interviewing me that Saturday night.  But that’s one of the beauties of a Christian based organization—even when things seem contrary, they can trust God with the response to their prayerful petition.

And God—well, when he gives you a gift, he makes a way for it.