Happy 19th Birthday Kirk!!!!!
I love you lots!!
Love always,
Jo

Wednesday Poem

The 23rd Psalme

George Herbert


The God of love my shepherd is,
And he that doth me feed:
While he is mine, and I am his,
What can I want or need?

He leads me to the tender grasse,
Where I both feed and rest;
Then to the streams that gently passe:
In both I have the best.

Or if I stray, he doth convert
And bring my minde in frame:
And all this not for my desert,
But for his holy name.

Yea, in death's shadie black abode
Well may I walk, I fear;
For thou art with me; and thy rod
To guide, thy staffe to bear.

Nay, thou dost make me sit and dine,
Ev'n in my enemies sight:
My head with oyl, my cup with wine
Runnes over day and night.

Surely thy sweet and wondrous love
Shall measure all my dayes;
And as it never shall remove,
So neither shall my praise.

Poem Game 2

Here are the rest of the poems we wrote during the poem game.

Joel's poem is first:

Mr. Pare was looking in his dictionary,
He was looking the word "Hairy",
When suddenly his lunch got stale,
And he began to fiddle with a
pine cone, and then began to sew,
without a thimble,
He pretended that he was driving his car,
or was being condemned

I had some trouble reading Joel's handwriting, but I think I got it all. He gets really silly when we play this game.

The next one is mine:

It was unintentional
And very un-understandable
(Is that in the dictionary?)
An accident that nary
a person could repeat.

Somehow the strange old fiddle
With its worm-eaten middle
Was dragged form a box
With a stale smell and engraved fox
to accompany the pine cone fire.

An odor of hazelnut coffee
Mingles with the scent of pine tree
While the fiddle plays madly
Like a music box that's sadly
and terribly out of tune

After being woken by the sound
A bear begins charging around
And smashes Joel's red car,
Recently guaranteed to be up to par
with inspection regulations.

The guests had to leave by sleigh.

All my poems always have a story in them. Mostly they end up that way by accident.

This last one is my dad's:

It was completely unintentional,
the dictionary was rather stale,
so he made a fiddle from a pine cone,
and played it on the phone.

Very hungry - have a hazelnut?
We'll play the fiddle with a thimble.
Still hungry - orange next?
Set the music box on the table.

There's a bear on the car -
it's squashed now, guaranteed.
Don't eat the starfish! it's not far -
We'll ride the sleigh and hitch the steed.

Have some milk - it has calcium.
With the fiddle playing, a drink for a queen.

Dad said a poem written with this list of words would have to be post-modern. Also he was unsure how to fit condemned and coating in to his poem, but he had all the other words. Yes, hungry-orange was one of the words on the list.

Annie did not know quite what to do in the first round, so she just wrote down the list again.

That's the end of the first poem game. I'm trying to decide whether or not to post the poems from the second game we played.

Poem Game 1

Last night we played the poem game again. You can see the rules and the poems we wrote.
So I thought I'd post our results so everyone else can be almost as amused as we were. I'm not going to post all the words we came up with, but I will put the words we used in our poems in italics.

In random order:
First, here is Mum's:

It was unintentional that I chose the dictionary
for out came a fragrance so stale.
My eyes fell upon the word canary
and all at once I could hear the wail
That mournful wail of the fiddle.
What, do you think that a riddle?
Mournfully high then mournfully low
I'm so glad it's only one!

Although there are supposed to be at least five words from the list in the poem (see the rules here), Mum was holding a wailing Bethan. That seems to have also affected the content of the poem.

Second poem is Noelle's:

My chocolate chip cookie,
became very stale;
For I was playing on my fiddle,
a song about a whale.
Pine cones are very furry,
and my eyesight very blurry,
because I ate one to many,
a hazelnut cookie.
My thimble rolled away on me,
It reversed it's gravity,
And now it's sitting in a tree,
looking as happy as can be.

I guess she was thinking about cookies because we were eating Christmas cookies while playing this game. I am puzzled by the furry pine cone line. I never thought pine cones furry.

Next poem, Jo's:

The unintentional consequence of
his studying the dictionary was
that he became increasingly
stale. "Stop it!" he suddenly
cried. "When you fiddle with
the pine cone you make me
drop my hazelnut into the
thimble! And I can't hear my
music box when you make such
a noise! You sound like a
bear driving a car guaranteed
to run like a starfish! I would
prefer it if you drove a
sleigh, It would improve
the quality of the calcium
in the queen." After that
he was condemned to be
continually coating jellybeans
with chocolate.

I believe she used every word in that "poem". She said it was free verse.

The Quote of Wednesday

Since I have not found anything interesting today to quote, this is what I came up with:

"If muffins grew on trees, I would cultivate them."
Laura D.

That is a quote from a girl I met in college. I did not actually hear her say this, but her roommates found it so memorable, they wrote it down and frequently tell to one another again when they are in a silly mood. Laura loves muffins, and that is why she said this.

Tyndale and Spurgeon

On New Year's Eve, our family likes to pick a long movie and watch it instead of the dropping ball (a disappointing appearance - dropping balls ought look more like a dropping ball, not a slowly moving ball). This Eve, we watched God's Outlaw, a DVD about William Tyndale who translated the Bible from Greek to English.

William Tyndale lived in England during the time of King Henry VIII. The Reformation was just reaching England and books like those by Luther and English Bibles translated by Wycliffe were not allowed. Tyndale longed for people like plough boys and farmers and other common folk as well as the many unlearned priests to be able to read God's Word for themselves. So he began translating the Bible to English. Only, he needed it published, and that couldn't happen without a license. But he could not get a license because it was many churchmen believed it was wrong for people to read the Bible for themselves. They said the common people would not understand it without all the traditions of the church, that the people had no learning and would use the Scripture wrongly. Because of this, Tyndale left England and had his New Testament printed in Germany and smuggled into England. Of course the authorities were not happy about this, so they had spies after him. He lived a poor and dangerous life for many years. Finally, he was betrayed and summarily martyred.
But the Bible was being read all over England in English. Sometime after Tyndale's death, King Henry VIII ordered great English Bibles to be kept in all the churches and licensed them to be printed. At last the common people could legally keep and read English Bibles.

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Jo was reading Charles Spurgeon's Morning and Evening to me. The evening reading for today was about being renewed in the Scripture every day, feeding ourselves and becoming rooted in God's Word.

"We know the only way to prevent the body from wasting away is to eat meals frequently. It is just as necessary, in order to restore the soul, to feed on the Book of God, listen to the preached Word, and partake of the Lord's table."
Spurgeon, Charles H.Morning and Evening New Updated Edition. Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., March 2005

She and I agreed that we needed to be reminded of this for we have failed too many times.

And then we realized how great William Tyndale's gift was. For by God's grace we are able to read His Scripture and be renewed directly from the Word.

Oh, thanks be to God for raising William Tyndale, for placing us in a country in which Bibles are legal and in abundance, and for drawing us to Himself.
His mercies are everlasting and the truth of the Lord endures forever!