Vacation Bible School Set-Up (Wordless Wednesday) and Words for Wednesday

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Linking up with Wordless Wednesday and Sandee at Comedy Plus.     

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Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and has become a moveable feast of word or picture or music prompts to encourage us to write stories, poems, or whatever strikes our fancy.    

This month, the prompts are being provided by Charlotte/Mother Owl at her blog.     

This week's story comes with a warning, it's a sensitive topic.

This week's words are:

Dozen

Tiger

Redundancy

Mile

Confuse

Equinox

and/or

Mountain

Treaty

Suspicion

Strategic

Investigation

Light

There were a DOZEN things i'd rather have done on Father's Day -- wrestle a TIGER, climb a MOUNTAIN, try to work out a peace TREATY between Russia and Ukraine, to name a few.

As you read this, please do not let that statement CONFUSE you.  In the end, i really did want to be there for these dear people, to give them my support.   After my own loss all those years ago, i couldn't stay away, but it doesn't take a lengthy and STRATEGIC inquiry to figure out it would not be easy.

About five or so years ago, a young woman started attending our church to play with the stage band during services.  Smart and with the loveliest red hair, she was a fabulous violin player majoring in violin teaching and performance at the university.  She graduated with honors and married a wonderful man who also now attends our church.  He astounds me with both his depth of Biblical insight and his devotion to her.

Since she plays violin on stage at church 2-3 Sundays a month, there was no hiding the fact that they were now expecting.  They both glowed and i took particular delight in watching as he would help her up and down the stage, make sure she had a full water bottle, and just attend to her with gentleness and strength.

As they left church on the Sunday my Sweetie and i were out of town, a mutual friend reports that she heard him saying, "G-d bless this child!"  Tuesday morning, she was going in to have labor induced.

That's when everything went sideways.  There's a SUSPICION that a deep INVESTIGATION will show someone dropped the ball somewhere, but that's for a different time and won't make a difference now.

The sweet little baby girl was wrapped up in the cord, and that cord was coming out first.  How they didn't figure it out until the child's heart almost stopped is something i'll never understand.  An emergency surgical delivery was performed, but it was too late.

Our church pastor had just read the text for discussion at the weekly elder's Bible study when he got the heartbreaking text from the bereft father, "We just lost the baby.  R pulled through the surgery."

Pastor G got down there and baptized little baby S, so perfect and beautiful, with fuzzy strawberry blond hair.

It was a shock for the entire congregation and we're all devastated and heartbroken for this young couple.

That's how i ended up attending a memorial service on Father's Day for a daughter of our church, one we'll never have the chance to see in our nursery, or running down the halls of Sunday school, or attending that VBS the crew spends so much time putting together (as you can see from the above photos).

Going to funerals for elders hurts.  Going to services for newborns like my little girl and this little girl makes me want to run a MILE in the other direction but i don't because i have to tell them the pain doesn't go away but becomes easier to bear, goodness wins, G-d is faithful.

This world is not like the EQUINOX, with good and evil, LIGHT and dark, being equal and trying to fight on even terms.  Bad stuff happens but it doesn't have the final say, we have the promises at the back of the Book to remind us of that.

There's only one word i couldn't work into this, the word REDUNDANCY, but right now i can't see to type more because my eyes are leaking.

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Today is:

Anti-Fascist Resistance Day -- Croatia

Bouphoria -- Ancient Greek Calendar (sacrifice of an ox to symbolize social order dissolving and being restored; date approximate)

Dairy Queen Day -- the first Dairy Queen® opened this day in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois

Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War -- Belarus

Elfin Music Festival -- Fairy Calendar

Festival of 1 Lithe -- Hobbit Calendar

National Chocolate Eclair Day

National Onion Rings Day

Soap Microphone Day -- grab your soap in the shower and pretend you are on stage! (promise i won't tell)

Solennität -- Morat, Switzerland (on Morat Commemoration Day, a Youth festival remembering the pivotal role this tiny town played in winning a battle in 1476)

St. Nicetas' Day (Patron of Romania)

St. Thomas More's Day (Patron of adopted children, civil servants, difficult marriages, large families, lawyers, politicians/politicos/statesmen, stepparents, widowers; Arlington, VA; Ateneo de Manila Law School; Pensacola-Tallahassee, FL; University of Malta; University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Arts and Letters)

Stupid Guy Thing Day -- included under protest; "guy things" aren't necessarily stupid, it should just be Guy Thing Day; sponsored by Wellcat Holidays, who want all women to just not count anything against guys today, but chalk it up to being a Stupid Guy Thing

Teacher's Day -- El Salvador

Anniversary Today:

Harry Houdini marries Wilhelmina Beatrice "Bess" Rahner, 1894

Birthdays Today:

Eric Stretch, 1980

Donald Faison, 1974

Carson Daly, 1973

Mary Lynn Rajskub, 1971

Kurt Warner, 1971

Amy Brennenman, 1964

Dan Brown, 1964

Randy Couture, 1963

Tracy Pollan, 1960

Freddie Prinze, 1954

Cyndi Lauper, 1953

Todd Rundgren, 1948

Meryl Streep, 1949

Lindsay Wagner, 1949

Pete Maravich, 1947

Klaus Maria Brandauer, 1944

Ed Bradley, 1941

Michael Lerner, 1941

Kris Kristofferson, 1936

William Ralph "Bill" Blass, 1922

Joseph Papp, 1921

Billy Wilder, 1906

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906

John Dillinger, 1903

Captain George Vancouver, 1757

Debuting/Premiering Today:

The Rescuers(Animated film), 1977

Lady and the Tramp(Animated film), 1955

Today in History:

Ptolemy IV of Egypt defeats Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid kingdom, BC217

Bilbo Baggins returns to his home at Bag End, (Shire Reconning), 1342

The  Jewish quarter of Prague is burned and looted, 1559

Galileo Galilei is forced by Inquisition to "abjure, curse, & detest" his Copernican heliocentric views, 1633

A poisonous cloud from Laki volcanic eruption in Iceland reaches Le Havre in France, 1783

The British Parliament abolishes feudalism  and the seigneurial system in British North America, 1825

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession in London, 1897

The Flag of Sweden is adopted, 1906

The Flag of the Faroe Islands is raised for the first time, 1919

Erwin Rommel is promoted to Field Marshal after the capture of Tobruk, 1942

The Cuyahoga River catches fire, which triggers a crack-down on pollution in the river, 1969

The Canadian  House of Commons  abolishes capital punishment, 1976

Charon, a satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto, is discovered, 1978

The largest hailstone ever recorded falls in Aurora, Nebraska (7inch diameter, 18.75 inch circumfrence), 2003

Eastman Kodak Company announces that it will discontinue sales of the Kodachrome Color Film, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon, 2009

UNESCO officially names Mount Fuji a World Heritage Site, 2013

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Internal Medicine Journal claims that obese Americans now outnumber those who are merely overweight, 2015

Eurozone countries agree to a debt relief deal for Greece, signalling end to the country's economic crisis, 2018

The Russian volcano Raikoke erupts for the first time in 95 years from its 700m-wide-crater; the eruption is seen from International Space Station, 2019

The Japanese supercomputer Fugaken produced by the Riken Institute is declared the worlds fastest and most powerful, 2020

Unesco proposes Australia's Great Barrier Reef be put on the list of World Heritage Sites that are "in danger", 2021