Changes and additions

"My Favourite Blogs" in my sidebar has been changed. It is now titled "Important People in My Life." These people are important to me, not because they post regularly (a few seem to have given up blogging). They are not important because I have met them (a couple of them I have never met, and two of them I haven't seen in years). They are important because they are part of my greater family--the family of God--and I have grown to love them either through real life or through their blogs. Because they are important people, I have listed their names rather than their blog names. Go visit them to find the blog names you might be accustomed to seeing.

Here are the additions:

Christy: I had her linked before, but she, for some inexplicable reason, deleted that blog. Now she has started a new blog, in which we learn that she is looking forward to one of life's greatest events: her own wedding!!! Congratulations, Christy, and I really hope you keep this blog!

Melissa: I met Melissa through an internet forum she started, about homesteading. About four years ago, we got to meet her and her family in person at their home in southeast Ohio. She is a dear friend, and we hit it off right away. Melissa is the most frugal person I have ever enjoyed knowing. She manages to make her home and family look like they should grace the covers of those really nice country homes magazines while living on a shoestring budget. They have a gorgeous house on a gorgeous piece of property. It is so beautiful that they were once offered enough money to retire on if they sold it. (I sincerely doubt they will ever sell.) I believe they were offered close to ten times what they had put into it up to that point.

If I stopped talking about Melissa at that point, I would fail to tell you this important fact: People, not things, are what Melissa is all about. When you go to her house, you feel like you are home. You notice the clean, clutter-free house, but you aren't afraid to sit down in it. They want you there, and they take time to make you feel special. Melissa loves her children's friends, and likes having them over, even to the point of having 25 girls for a sleepover. And all those kids love her, because they know they matter to her.

I want to be hospitable like that, but I sadly fail too often.

(Melissa is a down-to-earth, old-fashioned sort of person, and I was not really surprised to learn that she cooks on a wood stove because she wants to.)

Sarah: My dear, zany daughter has started blogging. I love her more than she knows, and need to show her that more. She has a heart for God, and, though I look forward to seeing what God does with her future, I am really enjoying what God is doing in and through her now. If we were teens at the same time, I would really have admired her, but she would have be extremely annoyed at me. She is not the "daughter just like me" that my mother wished on me. (I hope I never get one of those!)

Read and enjoy, and comment if you like.