Count Your Blessings, Name Them One By One

I guess we'll start small today … catching up on some surprisingly interesting and inspiring reading, a few weeks ago in the children's section of Minot Public Library I came across Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl (ISBN 08110950456) authored by Tonya Bolden. It's an interweaving of the unpublished memoir of Maritcha Lyons with the people and places and events of her life spanning her birth in 1848 New York City to the year before her 1929 death. It's highly likely her childhood would have remained one set in NYC if it weren't for the draft riots of 1863, an event which brought an end to her family's business and forced them to relocate to Providence, Rhode Island to build anew and set Maritcha in the position to be the first black person to graduate from Providence High School. Eventually she returned to Brooklyn, New York as a teacher and retired as the assistant principal of Public School No. 83. And her father encouraged her to write a book of her own because he never did.

MEMORIES OF YESTERDAY: All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was – An Autobiography

From there let's go to history – or specifically, a person who's perceived because so much had been and has been and continues to be written since his 1865 death – writ large, in Abraham Lincoln. Of the United States, president the sixteenth, the guy whose profile is on the five-dollar bill, and the politician who gets appropriated or excoriated by every party and semi-deified or excoriated by any writer with a pen and some intelligence. From the selection at Indiana University's Lilly Library, Dover Publications edited and presented together two hundred forty of those items in Abraham Lincoln In Print And Photograph: A Picture History from the Lilly Library (ISBN 0486294277). And I will admit it's quite a read – bought it for five bucks last year from the used book section of Main Street Books and FINALLY sat to read it, and I enjoyed it. Found the picture which the oval portrait of Lincoln on that five in your wallet is drawn from (item 153), made me want to read about the life of Major Rathbone (item 194, he's the guy who with his fiancee sat with Lincoln and his wife at Ford's Theatre the night Lincoln was shot), and just the songs published at the time and the portraits you see throughout this volume covering Lincoln's entire life – it's well worth your time to read. But what do I read that's not?

(From the back cover, I love how this reads!) Enhanced by informative, often extensive captions, this handsome pictorial tribute will be essential for any student of Lincoln or American history. It will, of course, also appeal to a vast audience of general readers.

Well, endeavor to read that's not … I re-read George Orwell's 1984 this weekend which is consistently one of my favorite books but not for the reasons you might think. But again, I digress. I got to sleep in this morning while Martha, Sarah, and Jeffrey delivered the papers which came … I believe two minutes to four this morning in about an hour. And it felt good. We got ready to go and we left early to go to First Lutheran Church which is having an expansion built and its sanctuary repaired after being caught in the 2011 flood. I met Pastor David from there when I was working at Marketplace this weekend and he said I should stop by and see it. So I did, and the working crew was getting ready to do morning devotions as I arrived and several people there I'd apparently met at that synod conference the last weekend of May. When I said “Pastor David” as we got out of the van Sarah pointed to me and said, “That's you!” For years off and on I have considered it, but I don't think I would be a typical one.

 

 

Sarah: You're eating an ABC donut.
Jeffrey: What's an ABC donut?
Sarah: Already Been Chewed!

Just heard this one, 0847 hrs CST, and laughed hard. For the donuts ARE slightly out of shape ...

So what's the appeal in being typical anyway? When Becky was introducing newcomers before the fellowship time she introduced me as Pastor David, and I was tempted to run with it save for that “thou shalt not bear false witness” part … so I said I wasn't a pastor but I played one on TV, which got some chuckles. But Les led this morning's devotion and played the guitar leading us all in singing the hymn “Count Your Blessings”. And I must do a better job of that, count my blessings and praise my God even when I don't feel like it. Anyway, got the kids to Grandma's (and got snitched on by Sarah for taking some bite-sized Hershey bars from Grandpa's stash for them … and ok, for me yesterday) and stopped by Martha's workplace, met her boss again and shared a little more about me. When we got to my writing books, it's Martha who built me up and I so appreciate that! I'm sure you will see something of mine on a library shelf near you very soon.

And you will be singing as the days go by, David