Greetings from the Lone Star State where I am visiting my youngest daughter and her family. It has been a whirlwind of activity since I got here Thursday afternoon, but today daughter and son-in-law both had to work, so I am at home with the grandkids and trying to get some work of my own done.
Back home in Idaho, it is cool and rainy, but here on the Gulf Coast, it is warm and sticky. I even came back yesterday with a touch of sunburn, something I’m supposed to avoid since going through radiation treatment. Oops! It was so windy at the beach yesterday, I really didn’t think about the sun. Come summer in Idaho I will think about it, but March seems so early to consider such things. Oh well. I lotioned up this morning and will hope for the best.
Back to St. Patrick’s Day. A fellow blogger on Writes of Passage blogged about it today, but I need to do my own Irish blog in honor of my great-grandmother, Mary Emeline Malone. I’ve written about her here before, so many already know that I named my heroine in In His Arms after her.
An email I received from Global Media Outreach shared the following:
St. Patrick is perhaps one of the most celebrated men in the world. He is known as a saint of Ireland, yet St. Patrick was not Irish at all. He lived in Ireland six years before he escaped back to his homeland of Wales. There he joined the church. From a dream he heard the souls of Ireland calling out to him to come and share the truth of the gospel with them. So, he listened to this prompt from God and returned, as a free man, to the land and people who had once enslaved him.
St. Patrick is noted to have said, “In short, I am a slave in Christ to these faraway people for the indescribable glory of everlasting life, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”
I ended my author’s note in In His Arms with my favorite Irish blessing:
May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
And the rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.
I’m praying that for those who read this message today. Amen.
~robin
