Mandarin Salad from Karen Bradley
Dressing:
½ tsp salt
Dash pepper
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp vinegar
¼ cup oil
1 Tbsp parsley

Salad:
¼ cup sliced almonds
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp sugar
¼ head lettuce
¼ head romaine
1 cup chopped celery
2 green onions with tops, thinly sliced
1 - 11 oz can mandarin oranges, drained

Make dressing and refrigerate until needed. Cook almonds and sugar over low heat in heavy pan until almonds coated. Cool and break apart. Five minutes before serving salad, add oranges and almonds to greens. Shake dressing vigorously and pour over salad. Toss well.

Yesterday Denise gave us great decorating ideas. Today we read the last of her decorating tips.

3. Experiment with color. In God’s gracious creativity He gave us all a favorite color. Whatever yours is, put something that color in each of the rooms you use the most. Don’t worry if it doesn’t “match” the rooms color scheme (you can choose the most compatible shade of your favorite to make this experiment less frightening). If you like red, add a pillow to a chair or sofa; or paint a picture frame orange for your bedroom or buy a sky blue lampshade. That one thing in the room will catch your eye when you walk in and can actually lift your spirits.

My favorite color is purple (remember the eccentric part) and although I don’t use purple in my family room I do have hanging in a prominent place a painting of a French field of lavender. It’s by a good friend of mine who is an artist in the primitive style. It doesn’t match the room’s colors or even the style of any other thing. But when I see it I can’t help but smile. After all, it is purple, and so very ME.

What is your favorite color and how do you decorate with it?

By Denise Marks

Like lots of women, I really like to feel good about my house. I know its just four walls and the things inside are merely “stuff”, but somehow God seems to have wired us to take a certain pride in this place where our family life revolves and our hospitality is practiced. And we would all like for people to enter our house and be, well, maybe not impressed but at least pleased and definitely not appalled!

One of my favorite things to hear when someone enters my home is that it looks like ME. Now granted, a few of my friends tease me for being eccentric, so that might not sound like a compliment, but to me it is the highest praise. I want my home to reflect the people who live in it. Fortunately, home design trends in recent years favor a look that isn’t perfectly matched and coordinated…good news for those of us who can’t afford to buy the whole furniture showroom. Even if you feel like your style is “neo-clutter” and your home looks too much like you, there are ways to let your personality shine through.

Here are a couple of tips that may get you started.

1. Don’t get too hung-up on your home furnishings’ style. If you have certain items of furniture, or a picture or some other keepsake that you love, by all means use it! Grandmother’s treasured antique table can still look great with a more modern décor. Concentrate more on coordinating fabrics and colors rather than woods or furniture styles. Mix styles a little at a time if the whole concept feels like a leap of faith to you. Go with what you like and remember that only in catalogues does everything in a room match.
2. Decorate a room with the little things that typify you. Frame your kid’s artwork. If you or a family member collects something (even if you don’t want to show the whole collection) put out a couple of things on your coffee table. Do you love books? Stack a few favorites under a lamp or table top picture frame. Don’t over do it with the knick-knacks, but place things around that will pique someone’s curiosity when they walk in or stir a memory for you when you see it.

Tomorrow we’ll read the last of Denise’s decorating tips!

We’ve all had embarrassing moments right? If not, then you must have blocked them out. So let’s write about them.

What’s been one of your embarrassing moments that you can look back at now and laugh at?

I’ll start - falling. It sounds vague and it is because my biggest fear is falling in front of people and IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME! From January - May I fell 6 times, all for good and different reasons. Still, very embarrassing. I even fell UP the stairs! Yes, it’s possible to fall going up steps. And it was as a semi-formal event with important people around. Luckily, only a few people saw and helped me.

Now it’s your turn! Can you beat my moments?

By Currin Ann Seely

I volunteer each week at Campus Crusade for Christ in the Volunteer Services office. This particular day I was in charge since the director was ill and not in the office. It was quite a hectic day, juggling all the duties that go with the job (more hectic for me since I was not used to being in charge). In the midst of the chaos, God put me in the middle of an answer to someone’s prayer.

I received a phone call from another Christian organization that was looking for 4 volunteers to distribute brochures at a Casting Crowns concert in Orlando. The volunteers would get free tickets to the concert, sit on the front row, and be able to go backstage to meet the group. That sounded like a request that could be easily answered since there were so many young adults in the building. As I turned around after the call, a colleague was standing behind me and I told her of the request. She said she would send out an email to her department and let me know about the response. I quickly forgot about the tickets (there are hundreds of people in her department so I just knew the tickets would be snatched up).

Later in the afternoon, she returned to my desk, saying that she had received no responses. I told her that I would just walk around my area and ask. As I turned to get up from my desk, I saw that we had several volunteers working near me, most of them of retirement age and probably had not even heard of the group, much less even want to attend the concert. I asked them anyway and one of the ladies who is 81 years old, smiled and said, “Go ask my daughter if she wants them” (her daughter is on staff at Crusade).

I walked over to her daughter and told her about the tickets and her daughter got this big smile on her face and said, “Did my mother send you over here?” I said that she had and so we both walked back to see her mother. She said, “Mother, do you want to go to this concert?” Her mother said, “Yes, I would really love to go”. Then the daughter turned to me and said, “This is my mother’s favorite group and I prayed that we would win tickets through the Christian radio program”. I could hardly speak. She prayed and God provided “the desires of her heart” and He let me see how He cares about the details of life. I began to ponder just how many people had rejected those tickets in order for God to get them to just the right person, the one who was willing to ask.

“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us”.