" Shake & Wake!"

Time for a brief respite, so pour yourself a hot, soothing cup of tea, maybe add a sweet treat, settle in your comfy chair, & let's have a nice "God bless you" as spoken of in the book "A Christmas Carol". I'll get mine too & we'll get our perk-o-laters going!

I have discovered a new flavorful tea that I like very much called, "In the Garden", by "Little Prayer Tea Company". It is loose leaf tea which I have come to really enjoy. I also like it for the added blessing of a scripture or Christian sentiment on the decorative container. This particular flavor has a fruity blend with a slight smell of rootbeer! To me anyway. It's delightful to the taste buds! Maybe for an extra perk, I'll have a piece of cherry pie with it. 

Actually, this particular cherry pie was made to commemorate Washington's birthday, but I thought it was so pretty that it should  have it's moment of fame! 😋

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We try to celebrate or at least acknowledge the holidays of the month, so here is our little merrymaking of St. Patrick's Day.

I started off with Shamrock Tea (squeezed from many magic shamrocks that can only be found in the country of Ireland. I like to buy it loose leaf of course. ☘ ) & Irish scones. 

You can cut them open to add clotted cream & different jams, but I had mine with raspberries & melted butter. Deelish! (Notice my guest. His name is Finnegan, or Finn as he likes to be called.)           

  My daughter made the Irish Soda Bread this year.

Doesn't that look yummy & pretty? We add raisins but you can add currants. My husband thought they were blueberries & thought it was delicious. We didn't tell him they were raisins because he doesn't like raisins. Ahhhh, sometimes ignorance is bliss...                                     

Our usual dinner fare is Irish Stew on St. Patrick's Day.

& old movies such as "The Quiet Man", "The Luck of the Irish" & such & a good smatterin' of Leprechaun jokes throughout the day!         

After not seeing my grandson's for six months, they finally got to come for a visit this month. YEA!!!!!! Time stops when they are here & everything else for that matter! We take them to their favorite Mexican restaurant, we do their favorite things, watch their favorite movies (old movies that is. 😉), play their favorite games, speaking of which, one of my grandsons is trying to teach me how to play chess. I am sloooooowly learning. I like strategy & analytical thinking, but as a woman, I admit, I overthink everything. So at the end of an hour & a half, I had to start fixing dinner so we had to quit the game. I think he went in the bedroom & screamed into his pillow. I know my daughter, who was 'helping' me, cried. Oh well, that's how you learn, right?

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I also love to cook their favorite foods!

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lots of buttery popcorn!!

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Each night, before going to bed & after we read the Bible & prayed, we would watch a 'Laurel & Hardy'....

ending the day with laughter! Such a good prelude to sweet sleep.

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It was all such a rich & blessed 'over much too quickly' time, & after a few days of catching up on ignored chores while the boys were here, now we are at the end of the month, back to the world of TODAY, & all that there is to contend with after the blessed state of oblivion. How necessary are these little perks of respite so we can process & productively respond to the happenings around us that threaten to suffocate the life or rather, His life out of us. Here is a good scripture for we Christians that sums it up pretty well. It's the parable of the sower in Mark 4:4, telling about the different kinds of ground that the seeds are sown in to. Verse 19 describes most of the Christian people for at least some part of our lives.

"...& the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of  riches & the desires for other things entering in choke the word, & it becomes unfruitful."

I believe that it's the first part of this verse that so perfectly describes most Christians. We let "the cares of this world" take us captive through fear, anxiety, stress (remember how great an artist the devil is on the canvas of our imagination!) & it can be so very easy to do, especially today with all that is going on. We lose our focus. Our Jesus focus. There are two shakings going on in our lives here. All the negatives, the lies, the deceptions, the delusions, that satan is trying to get us to accept as truth, & God's shakings to rid us of all of the influences of the lies, deceptions, the delusions that are NOT truth. The result is ...

"the removal of those things that are being shaken...that the things which cannot be shaken may remain." Hebrews 12:27

My husband used to be a gold miner, & depending on the quality of the ore, it took about a ton & a half of the ore to produce an ounce of gold. & that's before the vat purifying process to make it pure gold. 

Now, let's make it more personal.

Malachi 3:2 

"He is like a refiner's fire & like the launderers' soap. He (the Lord) will sit as a refiner ( or a shaker!) & a purifier of silver. He will purify the sons of Levi,  (us) & purge them as gold & silver, that they may offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness."

    No impurities remaining. Only what is unshakeable remains.

So there is purpose, divine purpose, in each one of us who belong to Jesus, for all that is going on in our own personal lives. We are shaken, perhaps in our faith, or our belief system, or security ( or literally 'shaken' in our boots! 😊) But the Lord's 'shakings' are always productive & life giving & life restoring & life redeeming. They are for the purpose of waking us up to our apathy, complacency, laziness in our pursuing of Him & His "wants" in our lives, waking us up  to our compromising, to our making excuses, to our lack of holiness, to our evil attitudes of willful sin & our perverted slant of God's forgiveness. They are also the awakenings of the Lord's heart & identity in us.

"Arise, Shine!!!" In other words, WAKE UP!!

Did your Mother ever shake you to wake you up out of a dead sleep? Maybe because the house was on fire?! Well, in many ways, our "house is on fire". Hence, the shakings.

God's shakings=God's wakings.

& then we go on to waken others, to snatch them from the cavernous mouth of fire which is hell!  

Remember the commercial from the seventies for the product "Shake & Bake"? Two little girls would say at the end of the commercial, 

"& I helped!" (you have to have an extreme southern accent to pronounce the word 'help'  correctly. It is with two syllables & pronounced 'heyulped.' We lived in Oklahoma & my little girls were always mimicking this commercial. It was hilarious!)

The time is so urgent to make our mark, to make a difference for our families, our country, our sphere of influence, the body of Christ, to our world, to leave behind an inheritance of lives lived for Jesus, & because of that, turn the world upside down, kind of rock it off its spiritual axis, changing the 'rotation' to the Lord's rotation.                     So, it's time for...

"SHAKE & WAKE!"

& I heyulped! By yielding to the Lord's disciplines of those shakings. 

Happy wakings!!

Raintree Perk of the Day:
"But we all...are being transformed into the same image (His image) from glory to glory, (& from shaking to shaking)." Amen.