Tag: house

Your Idea

Jennifred Jones

Ideas! Ideas! Ideas! We all have ideas. They’re like little brainstorms happening inside our heads!

Some are mere passing rain clouds while others just might have something to them. Examine the passing clouds and see if their waters hold any weight! Yours might be the next helpful idea to get you through. Or maybe it’s for your company or family situation that will move you forward.

I have many, many ideas about so many things and sometimes voicing them as ‘some crazy idea of mine’…yet is it always crazy? Maybe it was just what I needed!!!

‘Nah, they won’t be interested. That wouldn’t work. It’s too far out! How could I do that? Could it really happen?’…and we discredit the idea rather than think about it more… Another good idea thrown to the wind!

Everything done and made began as somebody’s ‘big idea’.

Like what???

  • Every painting you see
  • Every house built
  • Every sink or stove or washing machine or blender or coffee pot!
  • Every wallpaper, piece of fabric, paint color
  • Every loaf of bread, spaghetti, or sauce
  • Even the different types of plants and flowers that were crossbred to make a different color

You name it, somebody made it! But it began with their idea first!

Think again. You’ve got a life full of creations if you begin with your good ideas and carry through.

Don’t hold yourself back. Just get started and keep moving!

Now, about that idea I was thinking…

Tenant vs Resident?

Jennifred Jones

Are you a tenant or a resident? The words mean basically the same thing, but in my mind they seem different.

When the kids were small, we moved a lot. Rather than buy a house we rented. We were tenants. We lived in somebody else’s house, on their property, under their jurisdiction.

My husband had a rule of thumb. Always leave things better than when you found them. One time we borrowed his younger brother’s car while ours was in the shop. Before we returned it, he said, ‘We’re going to vacuum his car and wash it. Then we’ll fill it with gas before we take it back.’ He felt it so important to leave it better than when we got it.

This translated into the houses we rented. We always improved upon them any way we could. Putting in flower gardens, keeping everything swept and tidy, doing painting, deep cleaning, maintenance, yard care, anything we could do to make it better, and others noticed, including the landlord. We didn’t want to ‘live up’ to the name ‘renters’!

That was the difference in my opinion. A tenant was a ‘mere’ renter…living in somebody else’s place where the landlord did all the work. The tenant did nothing…maybe even was destructive to the place.

We were residents! We lived there, it was our home and we wanted to take good care of it like it was our very own! We were proud to live there and help keep it up. It was a true sense of ‘ownership’

How do you feel about this?

Tend the Land

Jennifred Jones

God put us in the land and told us to tend it.

We have a lot of tending to do I noticed walking through a parking lot the other day.

We will always be cleaning up after other people, but we need first to begin cleaning up after ourselves. If we can keep our allotment of land orderly (front porch, driveway, sidewalk, garage, barn, shed, bathroom, etc.); it will foster in the eyes of others the care of your ‘land’, and just might motivate them to tend their land better.

‘It’s not my trash, it flew out of the trash truck and landed in my yard!’ ‘I didn’t break the glass bottle on the street in front of my house, somebody else did!’

We’re sending signals to others around us how we do things in our land. Let’s send good signals that we are clean, neat, tidy, orderly, caring and respectful people. We will have to send these signals repeatedly, daily, over and over. That’s just the way it is. But it is worth it! You will feel better because you were helpful and did something good. Indirectly, others will feel better because things are orderly.

We individually can’t tidy up the whole world, but we can tend our small ‘plot of land’.

What do I need to tend to today on my land?