Diva's Border Challenge and Blessing of the Animals

This week's Diva Challenge was to look around our immediate area at things that have borders or can be used as ideas for borders and use them in a tangle. Each of the coils has a border that's in my living room.

 From the upper left and going clockwise: The wooden beading around the edge of my telephone table, the grill of my heat vent, the design around the top of a pottery piece, the border of a pillow on my sofa, the edge of a piece of  pre digital era film, My guitar neck and the middle one is a hank of beads I'm using for a knitting project. Fun and great to do while watching Bones, Sleepy Hollow and Castle! Thanks again Diva!

Yesterday I volunteered to help the animal outreach volunteer at Heartland take animals to Primrose Lutheran Church for a 'Blessing of the Animal's service. It was an amazingly incredible experience. I wish our church had done it. I would have been all over that!

I loaded Ricky and Fonzie the roosters into my car...

And Faye took Teddy the Shetland sheep

I followed her which was hysterical because Teddy was looking all around the entire way. It was a brilliant, perfect fall morning and the ride through the farmlands was astounding. I think Tedward enjoyed it as much as I did!

I didn't know what to expect for the service so the first surprise was that the entire service was held outside. Couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather. 

 The next surprise was how many animals the parishioners brought! Almost everyone brought a dog. There were all shapes and sizes and breeds and they all got along!

The organist had a golden doodle.

But there were also cats, ferrets and horses as well as two roosters and a sheep!

The pastor of the church was super sweet. Here she is blessing Fonzie and Ricky together. They stayed still and let her pray for over a minute. The prayer she said for Teddy when I took him up made me cry it was so heartfelt and beautiful.

 And while the animals were being blessed, this lovely lady played wonderful, haunting music on her Native American flute.

I am so blessed that I picked this opportunity as my first volunteer gig back at the farm. I  teared up several times during the morning;  it was such a touching and beautiful ceremony.  I also had a giggle though because before the service, the minister asked everyone to take a moment of silence and center themselves to prepare to worship. The MINUTE she said 'moment of silence' Fonzie, the little rooster,  started to crow his heart out. He has been non-verbal except for clucking the whole time until that very moment. And he didn't just stop at one, he crowed and crowed and crowed and crowed through the entire thing!  He's little but he's LOUD! Then he stopped when she broke the moment of silence and started talking again. She announced that the first hymn would be 'Morning Has Broken'. Well! Howdy Do! That's a rooster's theme song! So he 'sang' along for the entire song. Then when the song was over, he was done as well and was quiet for the rest of the time. Nobody, not even G*d gets to tell Fonzie when to be quiet!

After the service, the parishioners brought out a kiddie swimming pool and completely filled it with gifts for the farm; the pool for the ducks, a bag of cracked corn, a push broom, pet dishes and beds, tins of cat food, paper products, a Mounds gift card and cash.  All very thoughtful and much needed gifts from these sweet people. I was truly humbled at the generosity and the way that these folks loved their animals, their pastor and their church. I think animals should be allowed in church every week!