One Is Just A Number

My first thought when I read today's word was the power outages across my city. We had a 20-minute storm with winds as fast as 76 miles an hour that tore trees up from their roots and left 100,000 people without power. I didn't have power for 40 hours. In July. In Oklahoma. It wasn't so much the heat in my house though, it was the silence. The minute I walk into my house, I turn my TV on to one of the music channels. But with no power, there was no music. I spend my evenings watching TV and without power, I went to bed at 9pm. The silence made me uneasy. It was so spooky for some reason. Then as the sun set, the darkness was amazing. The street light on the corner that lights up my living room wasn't even working. When I walked in my door after work yesterday, I was so glad to see the clock in my living room flashing 12:00. But then I realized that everything that connected me to the outside world still wasn't working - no telephone, no internet, no ca...

I belong to a great group of friends. We call ourselves The Tribe. Our local newspaper did a story on several of us and how people build an urban tribe of sorts when they live away from their own family and the name stuck. It is a wonderful bunch of people and through the years we have gone through everything together - weddings, deaths of parents, multiple job changes. Besides the family I was born into, they are the one constant in my life and whenever I spend time with them, it's always fun and it's just as comfortable as family. Last night we gathered because one of The Tribe was back in town from her new home in Maine and she shared such exciting news  - she's engaged and getting married in June. We screamed and cried and hugged. And just like everything in life, there is a flip side - another friend shared that her husband has been having seizures that doctors can't determine the cause of and he's not able to drive for the next six months. A...

A day late with my Five Minute Friday this week. I left my house yesterday at 7:30am and didn't return until 9:30pm and had nothing left in the tank but I'm here now... Present is such a hard word for me. I spend so much time wishing I could change the past and worrying about the future that I find myself ignoring the present. This was the case on my recent vacation. Something happened a couple of weeks before I left that rocked my world and had me questioning everything in my past and in my future and I often had to bring myself back to the present and make myself concentrate on the fact that I was in Europe, a place I'd dreamed of visiting. You would think that the present would be the best place to be. The past only leads to frustration - we can't change anything in the past so why take up residence there? The future is a mystery that we have no control over so why borrow trouble and waste any time there? But yet, I prefer both of those places to the pr...

It's good to be back to Five Friday Minute Friday. I hit a bit of a rough patch and then I took a three-week vacation to Europe and I've missed taking part in this community of writers! Beautiful is something I've thought a lot about lately. The Dove experiment with the beauty sketches ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk )  was something I could completely relate to.  When I look in the mirror, I don't see beautiful - I see a nose that seems too big, teeth discolored by too much coffee, and bags under my eyes that tell of the struggle I have with sleep. Beautiful is the farthest thing from my mind when I see myself. I know that I'm supposed to see myself the way God sees me - fearfully and wonderfully made - but it's how the rest of the world sees me that I worry about. I know that I have a good, kind heart but I am so afraid that no one will give me the chance to prove what I am on the inside because of how I look on the outside. I've be...