Thanksgiving for Forgiveness

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Matt and I had our coffee around the fire bowl this crisp and wintery Tucson morning and spent a little time talking about what we are most thankful for this year.  The top of the list this year and every year has to be forgiveness from God in Christ.  I recently listened to an awesome study on forgiveness from my favorite Bible teacher John MacArthur.  He taught this four part study out of the book of Philemon.  It was amazing.  As he says in the beginning of the study "we are never more like God than when we forgive."  I highly recommend this study to you.  It can be found here free for download on the Grace To You website.

Thanks be to God who demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Feline Fun in the Desert

We take our cats outside every so often for supervised visits with nature.  They absolutely love it but they cannot go out without us or they would quickly become coyote food or road kill.  Here are some pics from today's field trip into the east patio where they learned all about cactus...

Kitchen Gone Mexican

Matt and I have been making the most of our time here in Tucson while he looks for a job. Each day we get up early, have our coffee and then get to work on the house. We have made many improvements in these last couple of months with kitchen remodeling, painting, yard work, and a host of other odds and ends around the house. Here are a few pics of the kitchen so you can see how it turned out. We did this all ourselves with Matt's mom helping us on the tile work.

                                                                 BEFORE...

                                                                      AFTER...

We were inspired by a Mexican kitchen we saw at a store here in Tucson called Rustica which had copper cabinet inserts and was very colorful. Due to the cost-prohibitive nature of these special kind of cabinets we thought we'd try making inserts ourselves. We searched high and low for tin but in the end had to use aluminum. We chose a different southwest design for each cabinet pair and Matt hammered them out using an awl. We also used a bit of paint to give them an aged look and mounted them to our existing outdated cabinets giving them a whole new look. We then removed the orange laminate counter tops and constructed the countertops and backsplash using Mexican talavera tile. Craigslist made it possible for us to upgrade our appliances and then we replaced the sink and lights and painted. It all turned out muy bien! The only thing missing now is the dishwasher and saltillo tile on the floor. Someday...

The Serpent at the Tucson Zoo?

A few weekends ago we went to the Tucson Zoo where I saw the snake from Genesis chapter 3. YIKES!!!

  









¹Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

 ² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

 ⁴ “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

 ⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. -Genesis 3:1-7

An Amercian Family Photo

Matt and his brother thought it would be fun to dress like rednecks and take pictures with their guns one day.  Once we started taking pics we were laughing and having so much fun we had to take one with not just the brothers but with  the whole family.  I thought my friends in Europe would especially appreciate  the pics given their feelings regarding firearms.  What can I say but viva la second amendment!