Happy Birthday Grandma

I miss you very much. 

Post Season Fantasy

Ok, with the Niners at 8-1 I can engage in some post-season day dreaming. My dream Niner playoff scenario :

1st Round: Niners over Cowboys
2nd Round/ NFC Championship: Niners over GB
SB: Niners over Pittsburgh

Niners banish playoff ghosts of the past by defeating The 'Boys and GB, and emerge as the winningest team in SB by defeating Pitssburgh.

Beating the Raiders in the SB would be a close second. :)

Fathers

I think the weight of a father's presence and discipline develops a weightiness and density of soul. I missed that growing up.

Weeds and Dreams

I have a childhood memory, perhaps apocryphal, of an instance when I was helping my grandma garden. I was probably four, and had been helping my grandma weed a flowerbed when she asked me to pull out a certain weed.  Now this 'weed' seemed to me to be a perfectly good plant. I didn't want to pull it. In my opinion, it was as legitimate a plant as any of the others she had in her bed.  I let her know that I thought this plant should stay, and in the process of reasserting that it had to go she let me know that weeds were simply plants that were out of place and whose presence choked out the growth of the desired plants.  It's the gardeners prerogative to determine what stays and what goes, she maintained, and he makes these decisions based on his desire to see certain plants flourish.

This morning it occurred to me that this is an analogy for life.  Our life is a flower bed.  God is the gardener, and we are his helper.   Our activities and dreams are the plants in the flowerbed. There are some things in our lives which we hold dear that God wants to remove because they will choke out what he's trying to cultivate.  Our job as his helper is to know his desire, watch him in action, and follow his lead as we assist him in his work.

(This analogy also helps clarify who's life it is to begin with - God's, not ours).

Crotchety Comment of the Day

I realize how INCREDIBLY important and busy you are, dear sender of email, but unless we've been sending several emails back and forth in the span of a few minutes, please use an Opening containing my name and a Closing containing yours when corresponding via email. FB, Twitter, and text messaging are available for those messages that don't require complete sentences, but let's try to preserve some semblance of courtesy when we correspond with each other.

Two Questions:

1. Think this won't happen here?
2. If/when it does, would you refuse to receive government support that was funded by these means?