Thoughtful About . . . Fruit

Thoughtful About . . . Fruit

by | Feb 27, 2020 | Thoughtful Thursdays

We love fruit in our family. Fresh fruit, canned fruit, dried fruit, jammed fruit, fruit from our own garden, or fruit from the other side of the world. We love citrus fruit, stone fruit, berries… Fruit can be a taste of the familiar or the tang of the exotic. We love to eat it raw, to bake it into recipes, to puree it into smoothies. Last week, I even learned to make homemade fruit roll-ups. With a kiddo who despises vegetables, fruit is often the way I get much-needed nutrients into all of us. And a much-appreciated taste of yumminess too.

Fruit is a pretty amazing thing. As a homeschool mom, I’ve had the opportunity to study it with my kids in our science classes. And as a Christian, I of course read about it a lot in the scriptures. For instance, take this passage from Colossians 1:3-6

3 We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; 5 because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as it has also in all the world, and is bringing forth fruit, as it is also among you since the day you heard and knew the grace of God in truth… (NKJV, emphasis mine)

Photo by Heather Barnes on Unsplash

To take out some of the phrases there for focusing purposes, that says “because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, which you heard in the gospel, which is bringing forth fruit.”

Now, anyone who knows me even a little knows that hope and I are good friends. I’m not only an optimist, I’m a see-the-good-in-everyone sort of person, a cling-to-hope-at-all-costs sort of girl. So any time the word is mentioned in the Bible, my spiritual ears perk right up. As we were discussing this passage in our Bible study last week, my mind kept circling around those particular words. Hope comes from the Gospel…the Gospel brings forth fruit.
As we talked about what this fruit is, it’s easy to come up with the usual answer: spreading that same Good News to others so that they can believe too. Yes, absolutely.
But, with memories of strawberries and blueberries and mango and peaches still fresh in my mind from my fruit roll-up making adventure a couple days before, I had to look at this a little more closely.
In other passages, we hear of the Gospel message as a seed. It’s planted, watered, fed. As it sprouts, the seed itself passes away and becomes a plant. It’s no longer a seed at all–it’s changed. Transformed. Why? So that it can become something more.
I love that it’s likened to a fruit-bearing plant though. Because part of the very nature of a plant is to spread its seeds. WHY do we bear fruit? Love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control? For OTHERS.
One of the things I learned in our science class is that the plant itself doesn’t benefit at all from the fruit it bears. The sole purpose of it is to be delicious. Alluring. To appeal to animals so that they come, eat it, and thereby transport the seeds elsewhere, so that they’re deposited far and wide and the plant can find new life somewhere else.
Photo by Brian Jimenez on Unsplash

So what is the purpose of us learning to produce those fruits of the Spirit? Not for our own sake–for His. So that others come, smell the fragrance of His peace, see the beauty of His love, taste the perfection of His Joy. Our job as Christ followers is to share those things with anyone who walks by hungry. So that they eat of it, and the seed nestles deep inside. So that He can water it and it can grow. And so that then that person too can experience the transformative power of God and turn from fallow ground with a dried up seed inside to a life-giving, thriving tree spreading out their limbs and offering His love to others.

I’d always considered the Fruits of the Spirit to be things we should want for our own sakes; or for their own sakes. Because they’re, well, good. Because they’ll make us better people. Holier. More worthy of Him. And that’s certainly true…
But that’s only half the story, isn’t it? The other half isn’t about us at all. It’s about THEM. The other people in our world. Our spouses and children, our parents and grandparents, and our aunts, uncles, and cousins. Our friends, our neighbors, the strangers in the grocery store. The drivers who cut us off and the customer service rep who won’t listen. The homeless man begging for money on the street corner. The mother desperate for clean water in Africa.
Each and every one of them needs the fruit–because that fruit carried the seeds of the Gospel, and that’s where our hope is found.
I don’t know about you, but that changes my perspective a bit on why I should be working hard to be the person He wants me to be.
And it makes me look at my beloved fruit differently too. My daughter and I joke that the orange marmalade we made is “sunshine in a jar” (because seriously!)–but it’s not only that. In a way, it’s hope in a jar too. A reminder that the goodness of others is our nourishment…and that our own ought to be theirs in return.
Announcing Tote Bags!

Announcing Tote Bags!

by | Feb 26, 2020 | Announcements, Bookish Tees and Totes

Actually, I’m not just announcing totes, I’m announcing a whole cute little division. 😉 Bookish Tees and Totes will soon be a store on Etsy as well (once I get lovely photos taken) and for now directs to the T-shirt page on my website. Y’all have already been introduced to my Codebreakers T-shirts…I’ll be adding general bookish tees as well, not specific to my books, and–as the subject line suggests–TOTE BAGS!

Right now I have 6 bag designs–the 4 Codebreaker ones you’ve already seen on t-shirts, and two bookish ones, which read:

It’s Not That I Have TOO MANY BOOKS
It’s Just That I NEED MORE SHELVES
and
TODAY I
Saved the World / Fell in Love / Won the War / Beat the Bad Guy / Lived Happily Ever After
READ A BOOK
All of these tote bags are and will remain
$8.99

(I do still have the Library card tote bag available as well, which is a higher priced item–I’m down to a couple of these in stock and will not be ordering me, so when they’re gone, they’re gone.)

Also, do note that t-shirts are now all on the same 3 colors:
Raspberry, Aqua, and Banana
Word of the Week – Cameo

Word of the Week – Cameo

by | Feb 24, 2020 | Word of the Week

I’m having so much fun going through my old Word of the Week entries and redoing some of the oldest ones. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember all these tidbits I’ve looked up in the past! LOL. This one comes to you from 2011. Appropriate, again, since I’m editing the book I mention below, Dreams of Savannah, to release in the Winter 2020/21 season from Bethany House!

I can’t tell you how much time I spent
chasing rabbits down trails (literarily speaking) for a one-line
mention in my books. Like, did they have bells over the doors in 18th
century New York? Hard to discover.
This last week, one of my random
questions was, thankfully, easily answered. I wanted a character to
mention a cameo necklace, which I was pretty darn sure were around and
popular by the 1860s, but I’ve been wrong before. So I looked it up.
I was pleased to see that cameo,
by which I mean a carved stone with two layers of color, has been
around since the 16th century. Cameos maintained a steady popularity for
centuries–Elizabeth I had a sizable collection, as did Catherine the
Great. And since Queen Victoria favored them, they even stuck around
during the fast-changing fashion of the 19th century.
In 1851 the word was attributed
to “a short literary sketch or portrait.” Very much related to the
pendant, which commonly depict a bust or figure (though not always). And
so this sense was also transferred to the stage/film in 1928, when it
came to mean “a brief role that stands out from other minor parts in a
performance.”
I have a cameo necklace I
inherited from my great-grandmother, and I love it. =) There’s something
so very romantic about those treasures from times past . . .

Thoughtful About . . . Our Faults

Thoughtful About . . . Our Faults

by | Feb 20, 2020 | Thoughtful Thursdays

I’ve been thinking a lot about character lately. The kinds I write, yes…but also our characters. And how, really, the two are pretty much the same, hence the shared name. 😉

Learn More

I remember back in the day when I was a 12/13-yr-old, writing the first draft of the book that eventually became The Lost Heiress. As I wrote Brook, it didn’t take me long to realize she was a bit too, er, perfect to be a likable heroine. I’d paid attention to the lessons in my literature class–I knew that a good character was supposed to have–gasp–faults.

But Brook was, at that point, Idealized Me. She was what I wished I was. So I remember sitting down with a notebook and a pencil and scratching across the top of the page “Brook’s Faults.” I added things like “bad temper” and “impulsive.” Things I really couldn’t claim, but they seemed like more fun for a heroine than my faults.
The more stories I’ve written, the more characters I’ve poured onto the page, the less likely I am to ever enumerate their faults on a piece of paper. Do they have them? Sure. Faults…maybe weaknesses…sometimes it’s more an emotional injury…occasionally it’s what modern society would even deem an illness–mental or physical.
But as I’ve been pondering these things over the last week, thinking especially about the weaknesses that we might try to fix with medication, the kinds we have to manage, something has struck me.
The very things that we try to get rid of, to manage, to moderate, to medicate; the things we try to ignore, make excuses for, or are ashamed of…those are the things through which God uses us. The way by which He reaches us. They are the things that make us aware of our need for Him, and sometimes they’re the things through which His voice even comes.
That really made me stop and think. I’ve always imagined that God uses our strengths–which of course He does. But our hurts? Our insecurities? Our illnesses? The things the world tells us we ought to obliterate at any cost? How are those anything but bad?
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

In some cases, they do definitely need to be addressed–I’d never say they shouldn’t be! But through the addressing, God usually teaches us something. Through the managing, He reveals Himself. Through the hardship, He whispers grace and strength into our spirits.

When we’re lonely, we reach out for Him. When we’re sick, we lean on His arms. When our mind isn’t working as it should, there may be more room in it to hear Him. When our tempers rise, we often speak a truth that needs healing.
We all have our faults, whether we’re Christians or not. But what I’ve come to appreciate about those faults as I write them into my characters is that it’s in our very weaknesses that His strength best shows. A lot of society isn’t going to understand that–they’ll call us crazy, accuse us of listening to voices in our head, think we’re irrational.
They have a point. 😉 Faith isn’t rational. It goes well beyond that. But it’s when it’s irrational, radical even, that it changes us. Changes our families. Changes the world.
Because when we let Him work not only through our strengths, but through our weaknesses, then we’re making everyone around us think, “Why? How? Who?”
The answer to all those questions is the same: Jesus.
How has He worked through a weakness in your life?

Word of the Week – Fiddle (dedee, faddle, and sticks)

Word of the Week – Fiddle (dedee, faddle, and sticks)

by | Feb 17, 2020 | Word of the Week

This is another re-post, from way back in 2011…and I couldn’t resist sharing it again now, given that the most famous use of fiddle de dee is undoubtedly from Gone with the Wind, and I’m currently editing my upcoming novel, Dreams of Savannah that has a very similar setting. ? So on to the words!
Everyone knows what a fiddle is, right? Or what it means to fiddle. It’s a Violin. More, it’s a colloquial use (that usually denotes the rural or country or south) at this point. Why? Interestingly, the word fiddle has been used since the late 14th century (!!!), so it’s a perfectly legitimate use. Why the connotation? (Let’s keep in mind that I LOVE what has become termed
“”fiddling.” I like the more formal Violin too, but the fiddle is so much
fun!)
Interestingly, it’s been
relegated to such use largely because of the other words containing fiddle that mean “nonsense.” Funny, huh? We’ve got fiddle-faddle used
since 1610 for “nonsense.” Fiddlesticks has meant the same since 1620.
Fiddlededee combines the nonsensical with contempt and has since 1784.
From what I can tell, there’s no particular reason why “fiddle” got used in all these words, but it’s certainly had an effect on the root word.
Fiddle now has associations with nonsense.
Maybe that’s why I like it so well. ?

Cart
Checkout - $0.00
  • 0
  • 1