Saturday, February 4, 2017

February 4 – “Painter’s tape+ceiling fan+Barbie=???”

Well, Texas is still up there.  I’m not talking about the Rangers.  I’m still a die-hard Astros fan.  And no, I didn’t misspell the name of the Houston professional football team.  I mean the actual Texas.  That state off the coast of which our little Island Paradise is located.  It’s the week before the Super Bowl shows up in Houston, so things are a little crazy there.  New Englanders and Georgians are making their way into town and establishing tailgating positioning.  I think that’s sort of like GPS positioning, only much less reliable. 

So why did we take our life in our hands and make a trip into Texas yesterday?  Well, we didn’t actually go as far as the swamplands of the big city.  We went to Lifeway Christian Store to start out.  That’s a little more than halfway to Houston, but it’s still closer than I like to be found.  We needed communion supplies for church, and I needed to replenish my stock of birthday cards, and they have them at the most reasonable prices (buy one box, get the next box free).  We also scored Frank Peretti’s new book at 40% off.  That was a coupon they sent us in the mail.  Not a bad haul, and since we were there right after they opened, there really wasn’t that much traffic.

We did a Sam’s run for the church as well.  Our last dinner on the grounds, when we hosted the group that had been staying in the retreat center, pretty much depleted our stores of paper goods in the kitchen.  That stop was on our way back to the Island.  In fact Sam’s is right down the street from where Kel and Christina live, so we stopped in at Sonic for a gourmet lunch and picked up a tray full of cherry slushes and went by to say hi. 

They had a few little girls over for a play date, so we got them each a slush, too.  That made us the good-guy grandparents.  But it was at their house that we experienced what was by far the most … interesting … part of our day.  I went upstairs to say goodbye to the thundering hordes.  There was obviously much hilarity going on when I arrived at the door to Micah and Josiah’s bedroom.  I knocked on the door and waited for an answer.  Suddenly, the door flung wide before me, to reveal quite the spectacle.  Oh, I’m not bothered by a floor full of toys.  That’s as it should be, I suppose.  But what caught my eye was further up.  All the way up, in fact.  And it brought back memories of a much earlier time, a time when a certain Uncle Nathan was young and carefree.  The ceiling fan was spinning merrily, doing its job.  But the blades had extra adornments.  One of the boys (Not saying which one, but Micah was holding the painter’s tape) had taped a Barbie doll to each blade.  Upside down.  Hung by their feet.  And every other time the fan made a revolution, one doll in particular smacked her face up against the bedstead.  And since we all know that Barbies can’t bend their arms, it was the perfectly devised torture method.  I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before she gave up whatever information the evil Dr. Micah and his loyal assistants desired.  Honestly, it was hilarious.  Er, I mean horrible.  Yes, that’s the word I meant to use …

Colossians 3:8-10 says, “But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.  Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”


Father, thank you for playdates and for the creative ways boys find to make playing dolls “OK”.  Amen.

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