Learning and Being Useful

Gratitudes:
1. I am grateful that I'm able to listen to great sermons on YouTube. Today I listened to Charles Stanley.
2. I am grateful for my journals. I seem to have a lot of them and need to work on filling them!
3. I am grateful for plenty of free time for my artistic pursuits.
Plan for the day:
1. Work more on my Sanctuary painting in the Leuchtturm1917 no-lines journal. Great paper for ink painting! One side of the paper only.
2. Collage - not one of my favorite things... but consider this for art class.
3. Create a form for art analysis in art class.
Currently reading:
1. Physical: Start reading Amazing Grace, by Eric Metaxas
2. Audio: My Brother Michael, by Mary Stewart
3. Kindle: How to Write Like a Writer, by Thomas C. Foster

The sermon by Charles Stanley (the one I listened to today) was about how to continue to be useful in old age (per Psalm 92:14). Considering what I wrote about yesterday, regarding feeling useless during this last summer of foot pain and non-walking, it was a very helpful sermon with great advice like keep learning, laughing, loving, leaving problems behind, longing and dreaming, looking your best, leaning on the Lord and listening to God. Yes, I wrote it all down in my daily planner because that is the kind of thing I do. I love the alliteration of L's... especially because I am Linda and this blog is Linda's Life.

It is a definite issue in my life. I want to be useful to God, yet my approach is so subtle most people in my community don't even know I'm doing anything of value. A lot of what I do is on the internet, and my life there is compartmentalized. The Lord had me start a blog about how my former religion, a cult, misinterprets the Bible. Who knows about that? Well, nobody locally knows, and my family doesn't know except for a few and they pay no attention to it. 

That led to a video channel - again, nothing I'd share locally. And then there's my long-time family rights activism which is hidden but helpful to some who need the information, and my prayer site I should add to more, and my art channel, my book channel, and my Christian channel - all so compartmentalized but hopefully useful to the Lord to reach His people - otherwise why am I doing those things - right? 

It isn't all about just having fun for Linda. At least I hope it isn't............. that would be so self-absorbed and insane, really. The book channel gave me a chance to learn to speak out more - I was so timid when I began. It was all a huge learning curve. And there's the thing: LEARNING... I must keep learning. That was the first bit of advice from Pastor Charles Stanley today. 

Well, there you have it - more ruminations from the wandering mind of Linda. Now I'll go get busy on my reading and painting and other tasks. I have to love it - there's never a spare minute. Life's good and God is forever.