I received this from my sister –in-law and just had to share…

Clay Balls...

A man was exploring caves by the seashore. In one of the caves he found a canvas bag with a bunch of hardened clay balls. It was like someone had rolled clay balls and left them out in the sun to bake. They didn't look like much, but they intrigued the man, so he took the bag out of the cave with him. As he strolled along the beach, he would throw the clay balls one at a time out into the ocean as far as he could. He thought little about it, until he dropped one of the clay balls and it cracked open on a rock. Inside was a beautiful, precious stone! Excited, the man started breaking open the remaining clay balls. Each contained a similar treasure He found thousands of dollars worth of jewels in the 20 or so clay balls he had left.
Then it struck him.
He had been on the beach a long time. He had thrown maybe 50 or 60 of the clay balls with their hidden treasure into the ocean waves. Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have taken home tens of thousands, but he had just thrown it away! It's like that with people. We look at someone, maybe even ourselves, and we see the external clay vessel it doesn't look like much from the outside. It isn't always beautiful or sparkling, so we discount it.

We see that person as less important than someone more beautiful or stylish or well known or wealthy. But we have not taken the time to find the treasure hidden inside that person. There is a treasure in each one of us. If we take the time to get to know that person, and if we ask God to show us that person the way He sees them, then the clay begins to peel away and the brilliant gem begins to shine forth.

May we not come to the end of our lives and find out that we have thrown away a fortune in friendships because the gems were hidden in bits of clay. May we see the people in our world as God sees them. **I am so blessed by the gems of friendship I have with each of you. Thank you for looking beyond my clay vessel.
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God makes a promise. Faith believes it. Hope anticipates it.

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My rant for the day…
When I first started working for the great state of New York in Rochester, I noticed that most of the buildings on the campus were abandoned. Literally, many of the buildings were just abandoned, left where they were standing and now rotting. Now I am not one to re-use everything and certainly would not be called Green by most standards, but I really hate the fact that NYS just left these buildings to rot. Yes, they eventually sold these areas, but this only happened recently and come on, can’t we take care of our buildings?
A property owner would get fined if their house were unsafe or didn’t fit in with neighborhood regulations. But what do we really do to NYS or commercial property owners? If there are fines, they obviously aren’t hurting them where it really counts! If so, the properties wouldn’t look so neglected.
Why aren’t we re-using these buildings? Some say that it’s far too expensive to repair or rehab these buildings while others say that the cost associated with this are necessary and needed.

This is on my mind as Brian and I remodel our house. I’ve started calling it The House of Stages – we are currently in the breakdown stage. Rooms are being dismantled and torn apart to get fixed up. We are currently discussing whether there should be a side door by the kitchen when we move the bathroom. I am all in favor of this as I don’t want to bring groceries through the living room and track all that dirt, dust, etc. Please make sure that you weigh in on this important matter as it’s a bone of contention!
We could eventually redesign the layout of the house to be more efficient with space and have the layout of my dreams. I certainly would be moving quite a few things. Take for example, the doors to the kitchen, living and dining rooms. All three rooms connect at a central spot by three door ways. What a pain! Why not just have one large open area? Yes, there is a pesky problem of a load bearing wall – but come on! We can easily solve that with one main beam instead of three doorways.
I’m again hounding Brian to start the front room project – he has little (really, none at all) time to start this, but looking at the amount of stuff the kids have – it must be done! And if you’d like to take a bunch of toys off my hands, I’d appreciate that as well!
Have a lovely day!