pictures

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Instructions – Are They Really For Everyone?

When assembling anything, following instructions is optional for some people and not for others.

instructions - are they really for everyone

I personally am one who likes to follow the instructions. 

I don’t want to be that guy who puts something together and has a handful of nuts and bolts left over. It looks like it’s finished, but will it work or will it fall apart? 

There are the companies that just use pictures for a manual and leave you a little confused. 

More than once while building a “KALLAX” or a “BILLY” from IKEA I had to take something apart because I had put the wrong piece in place.

I, for one, just want clear easy-to-follow instructions that guide me to the assembled product. 

Then there are those who you expect to be able to do things without instructions, like the person who maybe had built that product a hundred times and can do it in the dark, blindfolded with only one wrench. That guy is the expert.

We don’t expect the expert to follow the instructions. We expect him to just go at it and get the job done. 

I remember watching a friend do the Rubik’s cube back when it first came out. The guy could solve it in a matter of seconds. His hands flew as he spun the cube and made little adjustments. Then, all of a sudden, each side was all one colour. 

I was fascinated at his skill and knowledge. I had complete confidence in him to solve the cube in any state of mess.

We figure the experts know what they are doing and can do it without having to follow the instruction manual step by step. 

Well, this week we had to get a new stove for the cottage. It runs on propane and the range we got had to be converted from natural gas to propane.

I watched a bunch of YouTube instruction videos on how to make the conversion. But I decided that I didn’t want to take the chance of blowing Lily up while she was cooking spaghetti or something. 

I called in an expert, someone who is trained in working with gas. However, I think this person may not have done too many stove conversions before. 

I got a little nervous when she opened the manual and started reading it like I would have done. 

To be honest, I was not confident that she would be able to do the job until right near the end. 

But the expert was able to finish the job … even though it cost me more than it should have in labour. 

If she wasn’t an expert before, she is now. I guess it was a good thing we had the instructions for her to follow.

Here’s the thing: Most people go through life trying to figure out what their life is all about. Along the way they discover their skills and gifts, their passions and aptitudes. Some try to figure out the purpose of life and their purpose in it. We can try to figure that out on our own, but we have an instruction manual given to us that will guide us to it. It’s called the Bible, God’s instruction manual for us. I encourage you to use it. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: How are you at following instructions? Do you welcome them or resist them? Leave your comments and questions below.

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Pictures Are Needed For More Than Reminiscing

We spent some time today looking at old pictures, but the purpose was not to reminisce. …Mind you, you can’t look at old pictures without remembering back to the day or time the pictures were taken. 

pictures are needed for more than reminiscing

Many of the pictures we looked at had family in them and we were taken back to the days when we were younger and our kids were little.

In looking at all those photos, I did realize one thing: I don’t take a very good picture. I’m not talking about my ability to snap the perfect shot, I’m referring to how I look in the images. 

Though I looked younger and thinner, I still was able to come up with a goofy look for the photographer to capture. 

… Either that or the photographer was trying to get an odd look from me. Most of the pictures were taken by Lily so maybe she’s the reason I didn’t appear very photogenic. 

Though we couldn’t help commenting on the pictures, we were really looking at the photos to come up with something to put on our living room wall. 

Some people display family pictures prominently in their homes, but this wall needs something very sizeable on it, like five feet wide. … I don’t really want such a large picture of my family in that spot. 

We looked at sunset pictures we’ve taken – we have millions of them – but they didn’t seem to be right. 

We looked online at canvas art that we could purchase. But it’s hard to find one that suits us. 

Then I realized that in the thirty-six years we’ve been married, we’ve never picked a large picture to hang in our living room. We’ve had some given to us that we put up, but we have never gone out and looked for a picture or art to place on our living room walls. 

Lily has done some art in the past, but this is not something that she feels confident about or has the time for. 

Our son, Mike, when he was about three years old, had an artistic streak that lasted about one day. He was using poster paint at the time and produced twenty-seven paintings in the span of about an hour. Lily had to stop him when she ran out of places to set them to dry. 

… Even if we still had them, I don’t think any of them would work. 

So we are stumped. We have a large feature wall in our living room that is screaming at us to put something beautiful on it. But we have no idea what that would be.

Should it be an actual picture that we like, a painting, something realistic or abstract? We don’t know. 

We certainly have not seen anything that has wowed us yet. 

And we are not in the market to spend lots of money on an original art piece. 

I just hope we find something before Lily decides to paint that wall again and we have to look for a completely different colour scheme.

Here’s the thing: There are times when we realize we need something in our life. We are sure of it, but we don’t know what it is and can’t really put our finger on it. We make half-hearted attempts to find out what it might be. Let me encourage you to seek God. If you need something in your life, He will be the one who can supply it for you. Don’t look in different directions; start first with God and ask Him what He thinks you need. He knows you best.

That Life!

Paul

Question: What is something you can’t figure out right now? Leave your comments and questions below.

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This Isolation Is Taking Us Back In Time

I can see where this isolation is taking us – right back to the 70’s!  

This Isolation is taking us Back in Time

I’ve already started to see some people’s facebook pictures of what they looked like in their teens. 

Why the photos? Well, with hair salons and barbershops closed, our hair is going to get longer … at least for the people who have hair. 

I’ve already started thinking of how I might comb my hair after it reaches a certain length, because my present hairstyle is not going to work. 

I’m also interested to see how many Donald Trump look-alikes start cropping up. You know, guys who are thin up top and have to start doing the combover.

It should be good for laughs … but it brings me back to a time that I don’t really want to go back to.

Back in the seventies, I could not imagine myself with short hair. Now I can barely handle thinking about what I would look like if I had long hair again. 

The picture might give some ideas. 

If we get to that place – and we’d have to be isolated a long time because I don’t think my hair grows as fast as it did back then – at least we have better resources now to deal with long hair than we did in the 70’s.

In the early 70’s, my hair would take upwards to an hour and a half to dry after a shower. If I needed to go out then my only recourse was to put on my mom’s hair dryer. 

That’s right, I said “put on”. 

That hair dryer had a base unit that generated hot hair which, in turn, flowed through a tube into a plastic bonnet-like shower cap that was perforated with holes on the inside. 

I was quite a sight sitting with that dryer on my head! 

When the first blowers came out, they barely had enough power to blow out a candle. The blower dryers we have now would have no problem drying my 70’s long, thick hair. They can pretty much dislodge the hair from my head if I’m not careful!

Until my kids were in their twenties, they had never seen me without a moustache or goatee. It was a tough adjustment for them to get used to looking at my clean-shaven face. If we end up staying holed up in our homes for a long time, my kids will have to get used to seeing their dad in a whole new way.

I wonder if having long hair again will make me look younger. In reality it will probably just make me look creepy, and who wants that?

So I guess either our isolation will have to end sooner than later or our premier will have to list hair stylists as an essential service and get them back to work.

Even then, think of the backlog of people trying to get their hair cut. We might have to wait another month just to get an appointment. 

Here’s the thing: I think we are more concerned with how we look to other people than to God. Yet others don’t see us when we first get up or when we are sick; only God sees us all the time. He sees us when we are at our best, but also when we are at our worst. We should pay more attention to how we look to God than how we look to people. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What is your plan if our isolation lasts longer than one month? Write your comments or questions below.

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You Can’t Capture It

“You just can’t quite capture it,” I thought to myself as I looked over my wife’s shoulder. She was taking pictures of the sunset.

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It was spectacular that night, but what I viewed on her screen didn’t compare to what I saw just above the horizon of her phone.

Almost every night it’s the same thing. Well, it’s different in that the sunset is brand new every night, but it is just as amazing one night to the next.

All we can do is capture a portion of it, a scaled down version and reminder of what we really saw. We can’t capture the vast scope of it, nor can we capture the depth of what our eyes drink in. There is nothing like it.

The crazy thing is it’s free. Every night it only costs us a twelve minute walk, or a three minute bike ride down to the shore to take it all in.

My wife, Lily, and I were at a market the other day where someone was selling large prints of nature scenes. There were pictures of the beach, flowers and trees in the woods.

They were all stunning and inviting. They were also so cheap I wanted to buy at least one, but we didn’t have a wall that was big enough to hang one on. And how long could I look at the same picture without wanting, needing something different to look at?

Even with the cheap cost and beauty of these images, they paled in comparison to the free sunsets that go for as far as your eye can see, until the sun dips below the horizon on the lake.

And these sunsets are different every night. One displays a pale blue sky overlaid with light orange ribbons of colour. Another is a dark red fireball that sends deep pink and purple brush stokes across the clouds to complete the vista.

You can’t keep them though. You want to take one home, to look at it and then be able to look back at it again.

And maybe again.

But it is gone when the darkness takes over and erases the enormous etch-a-sketch in the sky.

People, all kinds of them, with their cameras and phones, lingered to take captive one last shot of the never returning sunset before them.

There was a little sense of melancholy at the end, but not too much because everyone there knew there would be a new one the next night.

I was ready to go for ice cream, but Lily wanted a few more pictures and even after that she wanted to just stand and watch for a while, as if it was an intriguing drama on the big screen.

No, it’s just a sunset. It’s big and bold; it changes every day, and it’s free for all. You just can’t really capture it.

Here’s the thing: You can’t capture a picture of a sunset that really shows what it’s like, but the sunset captures you. And that is God’s intent with creation. He has made it so it will draw us to His beauty, grandeur and magnificence. We can’t capture or fully understand God, but He can capture our hearts and our minds with what He has made for us. Allow God to capture your heart; the encounter will be new and fresh every day like a sunset.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: Where have you seen the best sunsets? Leave your comments below.

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Another Painful Picture Experience

I don’t really like getting my picture taken. There are lots of black and whites of me as a kid, but I didn’t have much of a say back then. And besides, they were mostly action shots of me doing stuff when I didn’t know the camera was on me.

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By my teens, I had discovered the sneaky way people take pictures when you’re not looking and I avoided cameras like the plague. In fact, it’s really hard to find a picture of me in my teens outside my high school yearbooks.

But the picture curse has followed me. I married into a family that loves to take family pictures. When my wife’s family gets together, a family picture is difficult on two counts: One, there are a lot of us so it’s hard to get everyone in the picture, looking half normal all at the same time. And two, is the holding of the pose for 10 or more cameras to be lined up and clicked. … It’s a low point of every reunion for me.

This Christmas the traditional family picture was missed. I didn’t miss it, mind you, but my mother-in-law forgot to mention it and we snuck out of there without that annual painful experience.

But my luck ran out when my wife, Lily, announced she wanted a family picture the next day. You might think that I would have been happy with this photo shoot because there was only four of us and one camera. But remember, I don’t like having my picture taken.

No one in my family, other than Lil, likes these photographic sessions, either. We all have bad memories. The worst memories hang on the wall in our hallway. We were all together on a cruise a few years ago and Lily wanted a family picture.

The cruise line wanted to make some money, so they had photographers who would arrange you in all sorts of poses – poses I would not normally be found in. You get the idea … three out of four of us hate the hallway pictures.

Lily thought everyone would be happy to have their picture taken this year, on the promise that she would replace the dreaded cruise pictures. (That’s not going to happen, I’ll guarantee it.)

Well, the photo session was horrible, at least from my standpoint. I’m not that photogenic, and I’m not a natural poser. I was either standing too far from Lily, or I was lurching over her. They all were having a great laugh with the all pictures I was ruining.  But I wasn’t.

At one point there was talk of just cropping me out of the picture because they all looked really good together. They could be a family of three. I wouldn’t have minded that but I was still having to pose for the pictures.

Finally, they got a picture they were happy with, or that was semi-decent of me. I started to walk away, trying to shake off the trauma of the whole experience.

Then they called me back. They wanted pictures of just Lily and I. Oh boy … here we go again.

Here’s the thing: At the start of a new year, we have the opportunity to read through the Bible in a year. Now you may have some bad memories of trying and not finishing, or finding parts of the Bible really dry. You might want to avoid that experience again. But let me encourage you not to think of the painful process; think of the lasting memories you will have as you soak up God’s Word.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What do you dislike about taking pictures? Leave your comment below.