I have a 'guest writer' today.  Paula Bailey has been an internet friend for years. . . .and she posted this on October 27th.  She is a wife and mother of 2 girls who loves the Lord and, like all of us, needs an occasional change of perspective on the journey she travels here below.  

Thank you, Paula, for graciously allowing me to share where that perspective should be.  God bless!

Ok. So, I still can't find some of Mikayla's uniform clothes. They are hiding out somewhere. We have enough to make it for a bit, but still.... As I was looking for them today, I was aggravated. I can be pretty grumpy, so here's a list of my thoughts: Why should my kid HAVE to wear a uniform to go to school????? Really, so because there are gangs and other violence in schools, my kids have to wear uniforms-some of which I can't find right now!?!?! I then thought about our consequence-driven society. We live in a society where, regardless of the freedom people want, we are still dealing with the consequences of a few, and our freedoms - in this case to wear whatever we want - are taken away. So, she has to have uniforms. My mind went to Billy Joel's song, "We Didn't Start the Fire", because I was thinking her wardrobe choices are mandated by somebody else who decided to start a fire. After I fumed and fretted for a while, my mind then turned to how we are not to be "of the world". We live IN it and WITH all of the consequences of man, but we are not to be OF the world. Not only that, we need to be a light to show others that there is a way out of the darkness of our present circumstances.

John 17:16King James Version (KJV)

16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

King James Version (KJV)
by Public Domain

By the way, the missing pieces are still AWOL, but I learned a new perspective.