The February Calendar Picture - Clifden Nonpareil

We chose a photo of this lovely moth - a Clifden Nonpareil - as our February calendar picture.

The News, alas, is not so lovely. There has been a fatal stabbing of a young pupil at a convent school in Sheffield, my Northern hometown.  A stabbing...  I was a convent schoolgirl back in the 1950s and while I was very unhappy at school at least our lives were not at risk.  And also the very next day - Tuesday - there was a shooting in a Swedish school, with possibly as many as ten dead.

The broken nights are making me so tired.  I can't think what I did on Tuesday. Col was out on his Archeological site - no interesting finds this time - I did a load of washing, and made lentil and veggie soup for supper - did a bit of studying and a few witness letters and that was that.

Oh, and HOLD THE PRESSES, I did scrub out the bathroom.

That was quite sensational actually, as everything hurts so much at the moment its hard to do anything.

And we woke up to the News that President Trump is proposing to ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians from Gaza.  I say "ethnically cleanse", but I guess it will be called something more anodyne when and if it happens.   For sure the place has been laid waste.  And someone has to rebuild it, which will be America apparently.  But I hope the President will at least allow the returnees time to bury their dead, who lie under the rubble of their homes and neighbourhoods.

And I also hope that the remaining hostages will be returned, unharmed, to their families in Israel.

What a cruel cruel world system we live in - and have done every since our first parents made that tragic decisions to cut themselves, and us (their unborn children), off from their loving Creator, and his law of loving-kindness.

How could it have been otherwise?

I hope the beauty and delicacy and strength of the Clifden Nonpareil, whose photo (by Captain B) heads the blog, will prove reassuring in the face of all the sadness.  The One who made it, and who made this splendid universe, Jehovah, can and will restore paradise earthwide.