I suppose I didn’t keep you up this evening mulling and scouring over ten photos! You clever lassies figured it out before I had time to get up and get a bowl of cereal! (I eat cereal every night before bedtime right now.)

Well, guys and gals, here’s the scoop. {For the ones of you who didn’t read the comments of the last post or figure it out, anyway}.

The photos were all taken with the same camera. They were not taken by yours truly, but by Hero Hubs. And all of those photos, taken within the past couple of weeks by Hero Hubs (you may have figured some of this out, hey?) were taken with a new camera. And not just any new camera. Our new camera.

Oooh, ooh! Did Canon reply to the mountains of emails? Negative, captain, they did not.

It turns out that even before some of you, dear friends and readers, were being so wonderful as to clickety-clack your keyboards and write encouraging emails to Canon (which really blessed me!), someone else had it in mind to bless us with a new camera when we next returned to the States (unless it worked out for them to send it to us with visitors before we returned for the holidays.)

So, some beautiful boxes, wrapped in Christmas paper by some beautiful fingers, were waiting for us here in the Carolinas. They contained a beautiful, shiny new camera with two lenses, and a lovely bag, and a bunch of other bells and whistles that I might bore you with if I go on. And we are SO blessed, SO encouraged, SO thankful…SO many words that seem SO overused when trying to describe how you feel about receiving something that is just so kind and so generous you don’t quite have the words to fully respond.

The wonderful donors responsible for this act of delightful kindness would prefer to remain anonymous, so may I perhaps suggest we all just say a special prayer as we read this, that they’ll be especially blessed by the presence and goodness of Jesus during this holiday season, and in the year to come? The Lord knows who they are, and, being fully assured that it’s more blessed to give than to receive, I am excited at the thought of the return of blessings to them, because of the seeds they’ve sown.

{Dear sweet donors, you know who you are — again and again and again, thank you.}

Now that I’ve connected the dots on the Guess-the-Connection Photo Challenge, I hope you’re excited as I am about our very special Early Christmas Present. Wow.

I hope you’ll get back to enjoying Presence and not just thinking about presents! We are excited about enjoying and especially capturing the presence of family together this holiday season, and having an awesome camera at our fingertips to help us do it! There are some absolutely adorable cookie-decorating-cousins photos waiting to be downloaded and uploaded from today!

For so many reasons, which deserve their own blog post, this story is a beautiful example of how the Lord redeems rough stuff, and, just as I’d trusted when I first shared the story, God has worked this out for good in our lives. Whoo HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

xCC

P.S. In case you’re wondering…we were seriously blessed with an awesome camera kit. We have so many more exciting photo-magic possibilities at our fingertips than we did before. As I type Hero Hubs is busy reading the manual and testing out features. And to answer the question you might really be wondering, it’s a Nikon. 😉