Life on the Vine

My blog assignment this month from Gospel for Asia is to blog about whatever is laid on my heart.  One of my favorite daily devotionals is Charles Spurgeon's Morning and Evening .  The scripture verse from my July 13 evening reading really struck a cord with me...particularly the last part of it.  It is Psalm 56:9: "When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn back: this I know, FOR GOD IS FOR ME."  We all have those moments when it seems like the world is against us.  When we are surrounded by people and yet feel all alone.  When it feels like no one else can possibly know or understand the struggles we are facing.  But just think...God promises that whether we are in our highest moments of achievement or in our deepest valley of despair that HE IS FOR US.  He is our champion.  He has a good and perfect plan for each of our lives and He wants to help us achieve it.  GOD IS FOR US! I think about the men, women and children o...

Aside from visiting the great museums of Paris, we also visited some of the must-see sights of Paris.  This included, of course, the Eiffel Tower, but also the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame and Sacre-Coeur.  Visiting these sights included plenty of walking both the horizontal and vertical kind.  Many of these sights offer great views of the city.  The weather while we were visiting was a bit of a cornucopia so we didn't always have the best of views.  For example, it was raining when we visited Sacre-Coeur so the views weren't the greatest but it had cleared up some by the time we got to the Arc de Triomphe. I guess it's only right to start with the Eiffel Tower.  Its presence is virtually impossible to escape when exploring the city center.  There are elevators at the Eiffel Tower but the lines can be extremely long and it is more expensive.  For a reduced price, you can opt to take the stairs up to the first and second levels, 200 feet ...

My mom and I really had a great visit to Paris.  It was the first visit for both of us.  During our four day visit we went to the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, Orsay Museum, the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Versailles, Rodin Museum, Sacre-Coeur, walked the Champs-Elysees, and visited the Holocaust Museum.  We explored mainly on foot but also took the subways, buses and regional train.  I've already done a blog about our first stop on Friday, which was Versailles . This will be a fairly lengthy post but it'll be mostly photos.  I thought I'd share some of the photos from the three museums we visited - Louvre, Orsay and Rodin.  We logged more than 10 miles walking to and through these museums.  Surprisingly no-flash photography is allowed in the Louvre and the Rodin but photography is not allowed in the Orsay.  I wrote down some of the sculptures and paintings I found interesting in the Orsay and was just now able to find most of them on the...