Clare has turned NINE years old!!  So much fun.  She had friends over to swim and made her own cake–for the second year in a row.  I think that’s officially a tradition!  She loved to bake.   She is such a graceful, delightful, radiant girl!  I am so proud of her!!!

Oh, it was such a delight getting together with these wonderful friends!  I am so richly blessed!!Getting ready for a boy–for the first time in over a decade–is a new thing altogether!  Such a joy!

    Sometimes we are spiritually attacked.  We experience a bombardment of problems, or perhaps one main problem, and they are not explicable in natural terms (i.e. are not due to psychological weakness or character flaws).  Whatever we do on our own strength to rid ourselves of these problems does not have any impact whatsoever. …