My kids continue to astound me.

1 car + 2 daughters + 1 mom + an afternoon of driving around Toledo = some great conversations!

At some point in the car, we began to sing a worship song. No music, just three voices singing to Him. It’s one we sang to Jesus last Sunday during True Crossroads Stories. The last line of the song is “Hallelujah Jesus, my Lord, beautiful You are”.

As the three of us finished, Livie – my three year old said with a giggle, “I didn’t know Jesus is beautiful!” She wasn’t questioning whether or not Jesus is beautiful. After all we just sang it, so it must be! I realized that Livie’s concept of beauty had to do solely with physical attributes. That began a conversation about Jesus and beauty.

We began talking about things that were beautiful, what makes something or someone beautiful, how real beauty comes from the heart (a whole other conversation) and so on. Big sister Jocie contributed her concepts of beauty to the conversation and in listening to Jocie, I learned that she understands so much about beauty. At the risk of sounding quite cheesy – the whole conversation was beautiful. I found myself quietly thanking God for the opportunity He gave to all three of us this afternoon to learn a little bit more about beauty, about each other and most of all about Him.

As I wind down from the day, I find myself landing on that thought -

Jesus, You are beautiful

My three-year old’s giggle and innocent comment opened a window for me to praise Jesus and reflect on His beauty.

Thank you Jesus for showing me a glimpse of Your beauty through my daughters’ eyes.

I am venturing out into blogging territory. Not such a big deal . . . yeah, sure. I’m one of those people who will record my voicemail message over and over again until it is ‘just right’! Imagine my surprise when signing up for my blog, I encountered a space for a ‘title’. Oh no! How could I come up with a clever title that clearly indicated what this blog would be about? Would it be better to simply state the nature of this blog? Argh, the pressure was building! Before I stressed out entirely, I remembered the purpose for this blog – a place to journal my thoughts and reflections. A place to write and muse about God and life – I would suppose my life mostly. My life as a child of God. My life as a wife. My life as a mom. My life as daughter, sister, friend. My life as a worship leader. You get the idea . . .

Before settling on my title, I consulted an online thesarus. I wanted to be sure that ‘musing’ was what I would be doing. Here is what I discovered:
There are 17 entries for the word ‘musing’.
Here is the entry that fit:
Main Entry: reflection
Part of Speech: noun 1
Definition: thinking
Synonyms: absorption, brainwork, cerebration, cogitation, consideration, contemplation, deliberation, idea, imagination, impression, meditation, musing, observation, opinion, pensiveness, pondering, rumination, speculation, study, thought, view

reflection. (n.d.). Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1). Retrieved August 31, 2006, from Thesaurus.com website: http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=musing&start=11

I had to look up cerebration and cogitation in the online dictionary because I couldn’t define those words. Oh, I could use them in a sentence, but couldn’t tell you what they meant. Do you have words like that?

Musings . . . as a title it fits. Clever? I’m not worried so much about being clever. Does it clearly state the purpose of this blog? Well, since my thoughts and reflections will probably be all over the map, I’d say that one word makes it about as clear as it’s going to get at this blog!

Since starting this first attempt at blogging, my awesome husband Kevin has come in to let me know that our Accord is now parked in the garage. This is a big deal because we moved into this home in June and have been unable to park both cars in the garage because we had so much stuff left to unpack in our garage. I’m off to celebrate this accomplishment and hopefully won’t have to cerebrate later when I’m looking for those things that until a few moments ago, had been taken up space in the garage.