September Means a Birthday Giveaway

September is my birthday month and as I've told you all before, I love birthdays. I've just quit counting them up. Not enough fingers and toes to count on for that. :) I'd have to call the fire department if I had a cake with candles. But if you don't count them, then you can consider Satchel Paige's question. "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?" So, what do you think is the perfect age? 25? 35? 55? Or maybe the perfect age is whatever age you actually are.

I just sent out a newsletter with all the details, so if you're on my newsletter list, you may have already entered. (If you want to be on my newsletter list, just let me know.) I've gotten lots of e-mails, but since I had surgery yesterday, I haven't started going through them yet. The surgery went well. I'm sore, but the surgeon thought everything looked good. They will run more lab test to be sure they got all the cancer and I will have to have some followup treatments after I heal for a while. I do appreciate all your prayers and sweet concern. After I tell you about the Birthday Contest, I'll tell you another story, I think you'll like. But first the contest.

I do enjoy having birthdays and it's even more fun when I celebrate getting older by giving something away to my reading friends. This time I thought and thought and came up with nothing exciting to give away - well, other than my books. :) Then I remembered how green always fits. So 1st prize in my Birthday Giveaway is a $50 gift card to the winner's favorite online book place (Amazon, B&N, or Christianbook.com). Plus the winner gets his or her choice of one of my books. Two 2nd place winners will get a $25 gift card and their choice of one of my autographed books.

How to enter? It's easy. Just send me a message. You can send me a message from my website or leave a comment on a post here on my blog in September with a way to contact you. That's very important for without the contact info, I can't get in touch with you should you be one of the lucky winners. Comments on blog posts don't automatically include your return address. Deadline to enter is September 30 at midnight EST. You must be 18 to enter. For fun and for a bonus additional entry, you can tell me a birthday story. It can be about your birthday or someone else's birthday. You don't have to share a story to enter - any kind of message will do - but I enjoy reading your stories when you want to share one with me. I sometimes share a few of them forward here on my blog but I won't without your permission.

Now for the other story. Last night after my surgery, I was missing Mom. The other times I've had surgeries, Mom was always there for me, helping me with whatever needed to be done, sympathizing with me, loving me. Moms are just good at that. So I was missing her and when I went to bed, I was thinking about her and it was as though I felt a hand gently caressing my hand. It only lasted a minute, but I couldn't help thinking that Mom had reached down a little comfort to me. Just writing this today brought tears, but it was good.

Thanks for reading.

 

Butterfly Season

 

The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign. ~Primo Levi

It's butterfly season in our hayfield and garden. I know the summer is over and fall is upon us, but the butterflies have been out in force these last few weeks as if they know time is short. There's much to be done in order to insure butterflies for a coming spring. My spirits always lift when I see that first butterfly in the spring. It will float down on a sunny day and promise that any cold snaps will be just that - snaps, gone quickly as spring gifts us with flowers and summer edges nearer. All summer the butterflies float around, doing what butterflies do. Scaring off the birds with the eyes painted on their wings or bright colors warning that they're not good to eat. 

And then comes the last days of summer and the fall flowers begin blooming with intoxicating butterfly odors. The butterflies begin to keep me company on my walks in the hayfields, fluttering up from the flowers I pass by to race ahead to a new bloom. Dozens of the little white and yellow butterflies. Could be those yellow ones are why they're called "butter"flies. Could be I wouldn't be so entranced with them if I had seen what they looked like a few weeks before they began to light up my walks with beauty. 

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. ~ Richard Buckminster Fuller

Maybe that's a lesson for us. Maybe we all start out as caterpillars or at least have our caterpillar days. And then we surprise ourselves with a butterfly day.  "How does one become a butterfly?" she asked. "You must want to fly so much you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."

That doesn't sound so hard - to give up being a caterpillar - but how many of us cling to what we have and fear to try our wings?  

I hope the butterflies floating through your world in these last warm days of the season will lift your spirits and bring you smiles.

Remember, if you haven't already entered, you still have time to throw your name in my hat for my birthday giveaway. See details on my website by scrolling down to the bottom of the Home page or going to the News & Events page. Some nice prizes including a beautiful NIV Study Bible and of course some of my books, too.

Birthday Newsletter and Giveaway

"There is still no cure for the common birthday."                  ~John Glenn

 

Birthdays! That’s something you have to have once a year as regular as clockwork. And the clocks seem to work faster the older I get. My sister sent me a birthday card with the picture of a dog with his ears and fur all blowing back like a race car just went past him. Inside, it said, and so another year just zoomed by. And it ever more did.

A good year in ways. A hard year in other ways. But that’s how it is for most everybody. With the sunshine comes the rain. The rain is how Mom is declining especially in her thinking ability. The sunshine is my beautiful family and two more books published (Words Spoken True  and  The Gifted) plus another one written. (Small Town Girl – releasing in 2013). More sunshine is all the wonderful reading friends I have.

 

To celebrate those friends and my birthday, I sent out a reverse birthday card yesterday – a newsletter to everyone who has signed up to be on my e-mail list. If you’ve signed up and didn’t get a copy yesterday or today, you might check your e-mail spam box. I hate it if my newsletter is considered spam but I sometimes get things that aren't spam sent directly to my spam folder. I do have some people to add, so if you are on the list and didn’t get a newsletter or if you aren’t on the list but would like to be, just let me know.

At any rate, I’m giving away some books to celebrate my birthday. I love giving away books and what is the very best book in the world? The Bible, of course. So one of the prizes is a NIV Study Bible along with a copy of one of my books. Another prize is a devotional and journal combined along with one of my books. Last for those who say they never win, I’ve got a special prize of an autographed copy of  a Liz Curtis Higgs historical fiction novels, Mine is the Night along with that copy of one of my books.  Deadline to enter is midnight EST on October 15. You can go to my website to enter or leave a comment here with a way to contact you, should you win. You have to let me know you’ve never won anything from me to get in that drawing.

One of my favorite quotes to read on my birthday is something  Satchel Paige said. “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” Not sure I know the answer to that, but I’m thinking maybe around 35. I guess I could try to figure out an answer to Paige’s question from my mother. She no longer knows how old she is and when she thinks about it she usually thinks somewhere around forty or younger. She certainly doesn’t believe she’s all of ninety-two. No, that can’t be, because she’s planning to go home and visit her mother.

Every day she plans to do that. If only she could find her shoes. I told her tonight that it was too late. We couldn’t go anywhere so late and that we’d have to sleep here. She doesn’t like “here.” Said it was a bad place. But when I told her it was too late and we’d have to see about it tomorrow, she looked at me and made more sense than she has for a while. She said, “And in the morning it will be too early and later it will be too bright and then it’ll be time to eat.” I think she’s on to us, don’t you? If only she was onto the fact that this is her home. No such luck there.

Thanks to all of you who sent me birthday wishes. As I said on Facebook, I felt like the popular girl at the dance.  And a special thanks to those of you who came by the Patriot Quartet’s booth to talk to me during the NQC. This year my Scottish friends from last year returned to buy three more books to carry home with them. Then I met a couple from Sweden. Also talked to people from lots of different states – Iowa, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, to name a few. A fun time.

Thanks for reading. Hope you have some fun times coming up for you. Oh, and how old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?