Penny Prophecies

We’re on our way to Germany today (July 24) to help teach youth how the body of Christ functions by using the game of baseball as a parallel. Teamwork and a good attitude are, of course, key factors. We have spent the last few days in Maryland with the mission team leader on his farm. He allowed us the experience of emptying a trailer full of straw bales into a loft of his father’s 100 year old barn. Family unity I think he called it. The picture shows the children and me descending down the conveyor after our work is done.

While stacking the bales, I glanced across the barn and saw a small window near the pitch of the roof. I laughed thinking of Glenn, a twelve year old boy who throws his little sister’s 1938 penny out such a window in 1943; it could have happened in this barn had it really ever happened at all. As far as I know it only occurred on the pages of the sequel manuscript to my 1973 penny’s adventures. I imagined this barn on those pages and now here it was.

A few weeks ago, while in an Alamosa grocery store, I watched as a man poured coins into a Coin Star machine and a penny ricocheted off the machine’s basket onto the floor. This I had also previously written about in my manuscript, not sure at the time if such a possibility existed.

My pennies have been swallowed, wedged under pews, stuck in fuse boxes, scorched in fires and used as guitar picks. Possibilities, probabilities and prophecies, all. The same goes for getting the pennies’ chronicles published. Any day now. Surely any day.

A pony in the family

Meet Brandi. She is Emmali's Haflinger Welch pony. We picked her up on July 4 at a New Mexico ranch. I had suggested the name Penny but no one in the family agreed. Imagine that. Then we came up with Brandi because of a strange brand on the horse's left hip. Emmali chose to give it an "i" ending to match her own unusually spelled name (who named this kid anyway?!).

Isn't she a beauty (the horse and Em)? And such a gift from God (both of them also). Brandi is spending the summer with Em's riding coach, a woman who has trained many a pony in her day. Grace is as excited as her sister to have a pony in the family. No doubt this will be quite an adventure for all of us. Giddy-up!