Today I am thankful for the clouds. I am thankful for the rain. Sometimes you need hard times to appreciate the good ones.

It's the contrast, you see, that makes the burning amber and the bright shades of reds and oranges pop. Against the grey skies is the beauty of fall. 

It's this same contrast between the light of the Son and the darkness of sin. The life in Christ and the death all around us. His holiness, our wickedness. His strength, our weakness. His greatness, our littleness.

Today I am thankful for my Heavenly Father who sent His only Son so that I might be freed from sin and death and the chains of this world. I have been bought with a price, ransomed, set free! In love, in gratitude, I give it back to Him.

My life is not my own. It is His. I am His. And He is mine.

109 books to read before you die

There are so many different lists of the greatest classics, each one claiming to be "the list." But this one was 1) smaller than 1001 titles and 2) didn't have so many trashy modernist novels I have no wish whatsoever to read. So I picked it. I've also tweaked it a bit.
It makes me want to quit everything and read. My goal is to finish this list and be able to cross out every one. And if I ever finish this list, I'd like to tackle another.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (Confession: I've only read the Fellowship)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 My Antonia - Willa Cather

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 The Old Man in the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

101 Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper

102 Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

103 The Iliad - Homer

104 The Odyssey - Homer (Currently reading)

105 Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

106 Black Beauty - Anna Sewell

107 Silas Marner - George Eliot (Marian Evans)

108 In the Reign of Terror - G.A. Henty

109 Ben Hur - Lew Wallace

Weekend according to Instagram

 A few of my favorite, most fall-ish activities include visiting the pumpkin patch, picking out a pumpkin, getting lost in a corn maze, taking a hay ride, and carving out the pumpkins into anything I could ever imagine (like pretty stars, or Kermit the frog, or Snow White). On Saturday, I did all of them with Luke and Rachel. It was wonderful.
And of course, we couldn't leave without getting our picture as floating goat and sheep heads. Luke opted out and insisted he had to be the one to hold the camera.

P.S. I said hi to Santa at the Celebration Village. You'd think he'd be to busy to visit us in little Tupelo, Mississippi. But, no. He asked me if I had been a good girl. And then I promptly jumped up and down yelling, "SANTA! I KNOW HIM!!!" Like this.

Well, maybe not just like that.

Let's have a tea party

What's my life if it's not praising you

With every breath I take, with every heart beat,  

Sunrise and the moon lights in the dark street.  

Every glance, every dance, every note of a song.  

It's all a gift undeserved that I shouldn't have known.  

Every day that I lie, every moment I covet 

I'm deserving to die, I'm just earning your judgment. 

I, without the cross there's only condemnation.  

If Jesus wasn't executed there's no celebration.  

So in times that are good, in times that are bad, 

For any times that I've had it all I will be glad.  

And I will boast in the cross. I boast in my pains.  

I will boast in the sunshine, boast in his reign.  

What's my life if it's not praising you.  

Another dollar in my bank account of vain pursuit. 

I do not count my life as any value or precious at all.  

Let me finish my race, let me answer my call.

If this life has anything to gain at all I count it lost if I can't hear you, feel you, 'cause I need you. Can't walk this earth alone. I recognize I'm not my own, so before I fall I need to hear you, feel you, as I live to make my boast in you alone. 

Tomorrow's never promised, but it is we swear.  

Think we holding our own, just a fist full of air.  

God has never been obligated to give us life.  

If we fought for our rights, we'd be in hell tonight.  

Mere sinners own nothing but a fierce hand.  

We never loved him, we pushed away his pierced hands.  

I rejected his love, grace, kindness, and mercy. 

Dying of thirst, yet, willing to die thirsty.  

Eternally worthy, how could I live for less?  

Patiently you turn my heart away from selfishness. 

I volunteer for your sanctifying surgery.  

I know the spirit's purging me of everything that's hurting me.  

Remove the veil from my darkened eyes.  

So now every morning I open your word and see the Son rise.  

I hope in nothin, boast in nothin, only in your suffering.

I live to show your glory, dying to tell your story. 

Glory was solely meant for you, doing what no one else could do.  

With All I have to give, 

I'll use my life, 

I'll use my lips. 

I'll only glory in your Word. 

What gift to me I don't deserve. 
I'll live in such a way that it reflects to you my praise.

-"Boasting," Lecrae

Weekend according to Instagram

I spent Columbus Day weekend with (most of) the family at our friend's penthouse in Fort Walton Beach, FL. There was a hammock. On the deck of the penthouse. The weather was perfect and my weekend consisted of sleeping on the beach, sleeping in the hammock, sleeping in my bed, reading on the beach, reading in the hammock, reading in my bed. Oh, and a liiittle bit of watching movies, playing bananagrams, and snuggling with friends' puppy. It was wonderful. Did I mention there was a hammock on the deck of the penthouse?

The Holocaust and Abortion

Please take some time to watch this.