Great Finds – proper outerwear, snow toys, The Shack, and Camp music

On our little holiday away I was surprised to find some really great new ‘things’.

First off, actually a little before we left for our trip, I discovered the value of good outerwear.  My sweetie bought me a new Wetskins jacket – it’s kind of a 3-in-one thing with a zip-in fleece liner and a water proof rain coat that go together.  It’s fantastic!  My last rain coat I got at my favorite store, Value Village, and I got more than my $20 out of it for sure – it was on its last leg.  My new one is SO warm that I could go out with just a t-shirt and the jacket on even to play in the snow.  It’s just lovely.  Did I mention that it’s burgandy?  Oh so pretty, and easy to see in the snow (important when a child slides TOO far down the track and gets lost – see below)!

We also all got good new gloves – waterproof warm gloves for playing in the snow.  My sweetie found me these GREAT Kombi performance gloves.  Wow, are those things terrific or what?  They have waterguard, they are super warm, and they fit SO nicely.  They’re like SUPER high quality and I Love them!  Did I mention that they are lavender and white?  They go so nicely with my new jacket!  Just lovely.

Between my jacket and my gloves I felt totally spoiled.  The simple things in life.  I hate being cold, so that was just what I needed to be able to enjoy our time in the cold!

We’ve had lots more snow this year, even in our city, than we’ve ever had since we lived here.  More as in inches, but also as in frequency.  It has snowed like once a week since early November.  CRAZY!

As a result, we wanted to get some snow play toys for the kids.  We, being frugal and thrifty and Mennonite (i.e., cheap!) found these great round plastic discs at the Real Canadian Superstore (kind of like these).  They kind of look like oversized garbage can lids.  We initially got 2 of them and 3 little plastic ‘sheets’.  When we checked out, they were $5 a piece less expensive (i.e. cheaper!) than we thought.  So the next time it REALLY snowed (like 2 days later) we went back and got 3 more discs – 1 for each member of the family.  These things ROCK!  They are totally simple toys, but we had SO much fun with them.  We used them on the little hill in front of our house and they were small enough to travel with us.  At our cottage, we could slide the kids down the road and around the corner, for hundreds of feet.  They loved it!  My sweetie and I even tried it out.  TOO FUN!   Who would have thought these little discs could be such a blast?!

While we were away, we exchanged our family gifts with one another.  The kids had a blast with their new books and games and Legos and Littlest Pet Shops and stuff.  It was awesome to see that they all loved what they got, even the Dollar Store gifts they bought for each other.  Very Cute.  The kiddos got me a new book – and do I ever love books!  I was just finishing up a book I bought myself for my birthday (Hood, by Stephen Lawhead – loved it, by the way!) at the cottage so I was ready for a new one anyway (like I don’t already have enough ‘new ones’ waiting to be read…).  They got me a book calle The Shack.

The Shack has totally rocked my world.  Written by William P Young, this book walks through some of the biggest questions about faith and God and life and death, and does so with flying colors (literally, in a few places, but I’m getting ahead of myself…).  Wow, the way this book is put together is a glory of itself and the deep truth that is in it is life-changing.
It’s about a man whose youngest daughter is abducted on a family camping trip and evidence leads to a remote, run-down shack where the girl has apparently been murdered, though her body is not found.  Fours years after this horrific event, the man is seemingly invited back to the Shack (by who, he isn’t quite sure), and there he faces his greatest nightmare and his biggest hope.

Well, I read this book in a day and a half and I’m already half way through it again.  It is AWESOME!  The description you get on the back of the book (which I summarized above) doesn’t even partially prepare you for what is revealed in the book.  It was wonderfully something completely other than I expected.

The endorsements for this book are telling of the quality of the writing:

An exceptional piece of writing that ushers you directly into the heart and nature of god in the midst of agonizing human suffering. This amazing story will challenge you to consider the person and the plan of god in more expansive terms than you may have ever dreamed.   ~ David Gregory, author of Dinner with a Perfect Stranger

When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of The Shack. This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!  ~ Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology, Regent College, Vancouver, BC, Canada and author of The Message biblical translation

There are MANY many other such accolades.  I HIGHLY recommend that you read this book.  Get your hands on a copy TODAY, and share it with everyone you know.  It’s SO good!

The other thing I discovered was a CD by Jeremy Camp – the Deluxe Gold Edition of Restored.  The stuff that I was thinking about, and processing, both before and after reading The Shack, really wrapped themselves around the lyrics of this CD.  Powerful, humbling verses really spoke to my heart.

The chorus of Letting Go:
Letting go of the things I hold so dear

Letting go of all my pain and all my fears

Letting go of the things I hold so dear

Letting go of all my pain and all my fears

My Desire
You want to be real, you want to be empty inside

You want to be someone laying down your pride

You want to be someone someday

Then lay it all down before the king
You want to be whole, you want to have purpose inside

You want to have virtue and purify your mind
You want to be set free today

Then lay it all down before the king
This is my desire, this is my return

This is my desire to be used by you
You want to be real, you want to be empty inside

And I know my heart is to feel you near

And I know my life

It’s to do your will

It’s to do your will
All my life I have seen

Where you’ve take me

Beyond all I have hoped

And there’s more left unseen
There’s not much I can do to repay all you’ve done

So I give my hands to use

EVERY song on this CD had a message for me, for RIGHT NOW, in what I’m walking through with the Lord in my faith.  It was so awesome!  We played the CD over and over all week (it was at the cottage – there to share with people retreating there) and I bought it from iTunes as soon as we got home.  We’re all singing the songs, and it’s GREAT!  Another HIGHLY recommended find!


All in all – fun time and great finds!