Out of the Comfort Zone

My Sunday six are as follows:

1. Griffin is taking Kempo, and tested for his yellow belt, which is very very serious.  It required two whole months of classes and work. Alan and I don't really get why we are doing this except that it makes our son happy--and they encourage him to do chores at home successfully.  The first picture is before the big reveal of the new belt and captures the gravity of the moment.  He is so cute!

He made us read this certificate out loud to him several times. It had funny wording.

2. I spent most of the week packing up our kitchen and advertising appliances to sell.  Tomorrow they are supposed to start ripping out cabinets, and the whole center of our home is empty with our stuff squirreled away in other places. I'm hopeful they also uninstall appliances because I set my prices a little too low and have whole crowds of people lining up to buy them.  We are now eating in our basement.  The first Sunday dinner was a success!  Wyatt made an awesome chicken tikka masala in our new Instant Pot.

3. I am LOVING the assignment to read The Book of Mormon quickly, noting references to Jesus Christ. It's not particularly easy to fit in my life, but now I have pages of notes in my journal recording what Christ does, who he is, and what our responses to him are.  The most notable things are how MANY ways the Lord reaches out to us in compassion and love and how iffy we are about responding appropriately.  We don't do nearly as much as he does, and about half of the time our choices aren't really the ones that lead to happiness. 

4. I joined a book club, and was slightly underwhelmed at the first meeting I attended. We read a book that was about as pleasurable to read as having my teeth scraped.  (Really.  Imagine Me and Earl and the Dying Girl where the main character is feigning a seizure then death.  This book made me want to do that. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell) And the club itself isn't really full of my people. It's full of other people who are interesting, but unknown and very different from me for the most part. But I'm going to plow ahead and see where it takes me.

It's fall! We needed pumpkins.

5. I started taking a watercolor class from an amazing artist and friend, Ken Sheldon. This is what I came home with the first night. It was a group effort from the class. The best parts were done by Ken, although I do like that hot pink flower I did at the top and the center bottom two leaves.  The second painting is one I tried at home while painting with Griff and Eve. The most inspiring thing to me was seeing Ken's painting sketchbooks. He has a practice of stopping what he is doing and recording things he sees and wants to remember with watercolors.  It's beautiful! And probably takes forever.

6. Not to brag, but we have a really, really great ward. We had awesome church today. One of the highlights was a talk by John Whiting-Call who very simply but articulately told about how he learned he was a child of God.  He joined the church as a teenager and had never thought of himself as having siblings until he joined the church of Jesus Christ which explicitly labels us all as brothers and sisters. He said, "They say blood is thicker than water, but the spirit is even thicker than blood" and went on to explain how he loves being bound to the family of God by the spirit and he feels a real kinship and brotherhood with both his fellow saints and everyone on the planet that he had never felt before he found this understanding.