celebrating 27 years of blessings!

27!

My birthday weekend started on Saturday with some great new slippers which have graced my feet nearly every moment since I opened them. And if I thought my feet looked small, these make them look even smaller. (I wear a 6.5) And they seem to cause me to dance around the apartment in a jig like fashion.



Then it continued on Sunday with these exciting Italian vocabulary cards! I'm trying to do a crash course before we go to Italy in March (more on that later). And these will be great for studying at the gym or anywhere, since they fit easily in my purse. Plus, they're visual, and I'm big on visual learning so they'll be a nice pairing with my audio CDs.



Along with two boxes of vocab cards also came this:



I have been eying this for some time now and can't wait to try some of the projects it suggests. Don't worry, I'll share them as I make them, so that you can get ideas too!

(I interrupt this broadcast to report that my Grandma just sang to me over the phone... this is why birthdays are so great! What other day of the year do people sing to you over the phone?)

It's stories like this one that make me truly appreciate each new birthday I am blessed to experience. I revel in growing older and each year passed is one more that can't be taken away. I look forward to getting old enough to have wrinkles and creaky joints. But if that is not to be, then I will pray as Jim Elliot did, nearly 50 years ago as he prepared for missions work in Ecuador that would ultimately claim his life:

"God, I pray Thee, light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life, but a full one, like you, LORD Jesus."

Amen.