Impossible Situation or Great Opportunity?

"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as impossible situations." ~Chuck Swindoll

I have read this quote before but was reminded of it when it was a friend's facebook status this week. We are currently facing one of these situations that I don't want to go into details about yet. As we walk through this situation with God I wonder how people get through these "great opportunities" without Him. One thing that God has been teaching me through the current trial is that trials are going to come but I can not allow them to trip me up. I need to keep living life through the trial and not go into crisis/ survival mode every time. God has been teaching me that He is going to allow many trials in my life but that I can trust Him through them that His grace is sufficient and that He will provide exactly what I need exactly when I need it. He has also taught me that I need to simplify my life and create habits and routines that will help me when difficult times come. We were reminded at the MMI - 1. This world is not my home. 2. I am not my own. 3. Night is coming. I can't let impossible situations overwhelm me but I need to look at them as great opportunities for God to grow me and ultimately for Him to use them for His glory whether that be today or years down the road. He knows what is best and I want Him to make this difficult situation a great opportunity for His glory. How? I have some ideas but only He sees the big picture and knows why He is allowing it and how He is going to use it.

I trust You my Sovereign God, You know what is best. Please help me to keep living for You through this great opportunity. Use it for your glory to turn people's hearts to You in Your perfect way.

Dates

This summer has been full of dates and it has been wonderful. The first weekend in June Glenn and I went to the homeschool convention while my friend Bethany watched our kids. It was so nice to just hang out together and learn how to be more effective as parents. On the Friday night of the conference we even got to go out for dinner at Dinosaur BBQ because a friend had given us some date money for helping her out. That Sunday we went to Northridge Church and the message from the parenting series that week was on the priority of marriage in parenting. It was neat that God had already used our time over the weekend to prepare us for that message. We have never made dating a priority for various reasons but we have decided that we need to make it a priority.

The next weekend our kids spent the weekend at my brother and sister-in-law's house while we went to Harrisburg, PA for ABWE's Medical Missions Interface. It was our first weekend away since we've had kids and it was great to hear how God is working through their various ministries and to be challenged to live for Him.

Both of those conferences are worth a several blogs each from all that we learned from them but this is a date blog so I will go on.

We also were able to "get rid of" our kids for a night a couple of weekends ago on a Friday night when they all spent the night at a friend from church's house. It was so great to go out and then come home and watch a movie together without the kids peeking in on us wondering what we were watching. :)

Another kind of date happens around our place. We have each of our kids names on half of a 3x5 card that are put on a ring that is magneted to our fridge. Whenever Glenn or I have to run an errand and the other is staying with the kids we grab whoever is on top and take them with us to be able to spend one on one time with them. I noticed as we were packing that it hadn't flipped in a long time. Throughout the school year pretty much the kids went everywhere with me. Occasionally I would grocery shop after they went to bed but usually all 4 came with me everywhere. It has been fun to take the kids on "dates" more often this summer. Today Caleb went on a date with me to Ollie's, Wegmans and Home Depot. It was fun to chat with him in the car and as we shopped. Then later this afternoon Hannah got to go on a date with Glenn when he went to pick up a bike off Craigslist. Rarely are our "dates" more than a quick trip to P&C to get milk (what Lydia's and Abigail's dates the last week or so have been) but it is so great to just spend one on one time with them. I think that is one thing that I picked up at one of the sessions at the homeschool convention, it isn't about getting them things or spending money but more about spending time one on one with your kids that really matters.

It has been a great summer having dates, both with Glenn and with the kids. They are precious times that we need to schedule into our lives more regularly even when life is busier than it is this summer. How we are going to do that this year we haven't quite figured out yet but we know that it is important so we are going to make it happen.

ABCs of our Michigan Trip

On our way home from Michigan we decided to come up with the ABCs of our trip to Michigan last week. We had a great time visiting the Lishawa's and exploring the Traverse City area of Michigan. Here is our ABCs, some of them are a bit of a stretch and if you may notice food is pretty important to my kids so many of them are foods we ate:

A - adventures, accidents (Lydia did come with us after all) and Allison (Brian's sister-in-law whom we met)

B - Brian, Barry (Brian's dad), boat rides, beaches, bonfire, Bananagrams, bike rides

C - corn on the cob, cherries (we went to an orchard owned by one of their co-workers and picked about 60 pounds of them for free - YUM!), chips, cat (Sampson - we love him!)

D - dahl, DH Day Campground

E - Eagles (the name of the speedboat and the bird that we saw one day on the lake)

F - food, fish, friends

G - Good Harbor Bay

H - houses, hot dogs and hamburgers, The Hobbit (we listened to it on CD on our car ride)

I - i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m - a must anytime you're with Kristina :)

J - Juliana and Jacob (kids our kids met at the campground), Jeff Myers (more CDs we listened to on our trip that we'd gotten at the homeschool convention), jumping in the lake

K - Kristina, kayak

L - Long Lake (lake Brian's parents' house, where we stayed for most of our visit, is on), Linda (Brian's mom), loons (there were loon families with babies on Long Lake), Lishawas, lightning storms, life jackets

M - Michigan (the state and the Lake - the Lake is so clean and beautiful!!)

N - night walks, Niagra Falls (we took the Canada route on the way there)

O - opportunities (it would be a beautiful place to do residency)

P - Peter (we got to meet him - he's so cute!!), Petosky stones, peas (fresh from the garden), packing

Q - quietness, quintessential vacation (it was the best vacation we've ever had)

R - Randolph - the moose half of us kissed at a restaurant, rocks - we found lots of cool ones, rest

S - sand, shish kabobs, Sleders (home of Randolph), Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, swimsuits, Shane (Brian's brother)

T - Towanda (the Lishawa's pontoon boat), tent, tubing

U - Us!

V - Vacation!

W - water

X - eXciting, eXtraordinary

Y - yellow sit and ski

Z - Zed (the end, I don't know)

Moving Out and Moving into #16

The last few weeks have been consumed with moving. I quit school with a kids a couple of weeks before I was planning to because I was not doing a good job homeschooling them or packing. I knew that the packing had to happen and that we could start school early in the fall and do some stuff over the summer and several of our subjects were already done so I don't feel bad about it. I knew that we were planning on taking the whole month of June off because it is Glenn's break so we didn't quit too much before I was planning to.

It seemed to me that packing goes better every time that we move and this time was no exception. I am learning some tricks to make it easier for myself. Not easy mind you but easier. For a while when I first found out that we had to move because of our landlord planning to move in I had a goal of 5 boxes a day. That was manageable until I was done packing books. They are the easy part but we do have a lot of them! After that I struggled because I didn't know what we were and were not going to need in the last 2 weeks we were in our last apartment.

One nice thing about this move was that, though it cost us a half month's rent, we had a 2 ½ week window to move in. That makes it so much less stressful that trying to move everything out and in in one day. Glenn and Phil, one of his classmates, did most of the heavy lifting on two consecutive Fridays as study breaks. That was a HUGE blessing to me (and to our marriage – we often get mad at each other when we move heavy stuff together.)

As we were packing and cleaning the last couple of weeks we have had lots of visitors from the kids on our block. We are sad to be leaving our old street because we have left 6 sad kids that were frequent visitors to our home behind. We are planning on being intentional in keeping in touch with the kids and families on our old street because we know that God put them in our lives for a reason and being only 5 blocks away it won't be easy but if we plan in that direction we will be able to continue to have a relationship with them.

We spent our first night at our new place on Friday (after a fun visit from Russ, Camy & Malachi) but went back to our old place for a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday to finish packing the last of the “yucky stage” and clean up. It looks a lot nicer than when we moved in (with the toilet and sink in the dining room, about an inch of sawdust and construction materials all over the place). On Monday we stopped back to grab our bags to take to Salvation Army and turn our keys over to our landlord.

Our new living room is still a hallway of boxes but more unpacking is getting done every day. It has been fun to finally use our lockers that we picked up off craigslist to help us get organized. A tour of our new apartment will be posted when we get unpacked (which we are hoping to have mostly done before we go to PA next weekend – we'll see on that one.)

A Season of Anniversaries

We have come upon the season of anniversaries in my life. A couple of weeks ago was May 23. All day long I kept thinking to myself, “May 23rd, May 23rd.... why does May 23rd stick out in my mind? Is it someone's birthday? What is it?” A couple of days later I remembered. It was the 9 year anniversary of my mom's botched heart catheterization that landed her in the ICU for a couple of months and in a nursing home for the rest of her life with no real ability to move on her own or communicate. A date that changed my life forever.

As I sat doing my devotions on Sunday morning I started to cry when I noticed the date – May 30th. It was my dad's 60th birthday. He always loved that his birthday was on May 30th because he claimed that the town of Waterloo always had a parade for him on his birthday because, being the birthplace of Memorial Day, they always have their parade on the 30th. Two years ago on May 30th he was at the parade giving out God's Word in the form of Gideon New Testaments along with my grandparents and some of his other Gideon friends. Caleb and I were talking about Grandpa on Sunday and he told me that he thinks that birthdays are probably better in heaven. I don't know that we celebrate earthly birthdays in heaven but I think that today may be a special day in heaven because it is the 2 year anniversary of his Home going. I mourn today but not as one with no hope. I know that Christ's return is eminent and that one day soon I too with be with both of my parents and, most importantly, my Savior Jesus Christ in heaven because I have trusted in Him alone and His work on the cross for the forgiveness of my sins.

I get “homesick” often, longing to chat with my parents, to tell them something funny or exciting or sad or confusing or whatever, just to talk about life. I am so thankful that my Heavenly Father is “a Father to the fatherless” and He is always there whenever I call. Missing my parents makes me homesick for heaven - “Even so come Lord Jesus.”

Bean Dolls

For the past week or so I have been working on getting ready for today. Since about February we have been a part of a homeschool book club for girls centered around the American Girl books and their time periods. We meet every other week at a library and do crafts and activities together about the girls and the time period. We have enjoyed it so much. Every month a couple of moms have worked together to prepare activities for our gathering. It was amazing to see the creativity of the different mom but I hadn't been one of the moms yet. I had wanted to do Kirsten because I love learning about immigrants and I'm Scandinavian too but moms volunteered before I had a chance to. This month we were studying Addy and the Civil War time and there were no volunteers. I knew nothing about Addy and I knew that we were going to be busy moving and packing but I didn't want it to go without a leader and since I hadn't done a month yet I volunteered. The mom that got the group started offered to help me out and do it with me. At the first meeting I read a book to the girls about Harriet Tubman and she had the girls make puppets and put on puppet shows. It was a lot of fun.

To start off today's class I read a choose your own adventure book (I always loved those books as a kid) called The Underground Raiload: An Interactive History Adventure to the girls. I let them vote on whether to be a escaping slave, a slave catcher, or an abolitionist. The girls voted to be the escaping slave and enjoyed the story but in the end she died on her way to freedom. I hadn't read that ending so was a little unprepared to be up there reading it to the girls and confronted with, "oh no, she dies, what do we do now??" running through my head. We talked about it a little bit and I think that everyone ended up understanding that not everyone who tried to escape made it to freedom but I, personally, was not prepared for that ending so it left me a little shook up.

I had checked out The American Girls Party Bookout from the library (great book by the way full of terrific ideas!!) it had the pattern to make a bean doll like the one Addy had gotten for Christmas from her mom made out of scrap material and filled with beans. I got excited about the idea but didn't want 4 full sized bean dolls added to the collection of dolls around our house so I decided to try a half sized one one day with the girls to see if it was even possible for a group of 13 4-8 year old girls to do it. My girls had fun with it and it seemed doable so I decided to sew the dolls and take in some beans to fill them with and some old clothes that weren't nice enough to donate for the girls to make clothes for their dolls out of. I also made some bean bags out of the legs of jeans and camo pants of Caleb's that were too short and the knees were blown out of for the boys to make. It was a lot of work today too but the girls had a lot of fun and the moms were a terrific help!! I really couldn't have done it without all of the help from the other moms! It was fun watching the girls play with their dolls afterwards. I am so glad we took the effort.

There is another reason why I am glad though. It was a lot of work to get ready for the bean doll project but I always need something to do to distract me from packing when I move, a procrastination tactic, and this was it. Usually it is a book but this time it was sewing. Sewing gave me a chance to be out on the porch watching the kids play but still feeling like I was getting something accomplished. The neighborhood girls were fascinated with me sewing and would sit and watch me. I was able to start to build relationships with them that I wouldn't have taken time to do, especially not in the last month of living in a place, if I didn't have this project to make me sit still. I am thankful for the bean dolls in that. I now have 4 other little girls who have become a part of our family. Today when my kids were outside playing and I was making dinner one by one 5 little girls wandered into my kitchen to watch me cut potatoes and help (with my Ultimate Mandolin). One of their moms came in too to meet me and introduce herself (our apartment is in upheaval - totally not in any condition for normal visitors but the girls didn't care - it isn't a clean house that attracts them but I really think it is a caring heart). The girls all want to make bean dolls and bean bags now too. I told them that if there were extra dolls I would let them make some when we got home but we used all the dolls up so I'll have to make a few more for the girls to make another day. Those bean dolls were a lot of work but the reward, not only in seeing the book club girls make them but also in getting to know these other girls made it all worth while.

I am sad that we are moving. We are only moving 5 or 6 blocks away but we live only a block from where we lived last summer and we don't see the people that live on that block hardly at all. I have loved living here but God has plans in having us move as well. It is so hard to leave people and so hard to have people leave us. So often I am tempted to block off my heart and put walls up and not let anyone in but that steals the blessing from me and others. I was challenged a couple of weeks ago to "enjoy people while they are here" by a woman who has worked in campus ministry for a couple of decades. She has seen lots of people come and go and I think that it is very good advice. You don't know how long you have with anyone so make the most of the time that you do have.

Thanks God for the bean doll project and how You used it in my life to teach me things that I needed to learn.

An Expensive Trip to Rochester

This past weekend we went to Rochester. Here is a blog that I scratched out on scrap paper Sunday night:

“'So let Your name

be lifted higher,

be lifted higher,

be lifted higher.'

At this point I can't remember anymore of the words of this song but it is on my heard right now and going over in over in my mind.

We've had a good weekend. After Glenn's exam we made a quick-ish stop at my grandparents to sign some papers then we headed out to Farmington to see my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew to spend the night. It was fun to visit with them. I don't know how much longer they'll be in NY so I'd like to visit as often as possible. On Saturday we headed to Rochester to pick up something Glenn had found on Craigslist and to go to Imagine RIT (which deserves it's own blog but I will leave it to say it was amazing and well worth the trip!) After we closed up Imagine RIT we stopped at Aldi and picked up food for a picnic and headed to Highland Park to wander around. I love Highland Park. It is so gorgeous! We were excited that even some of the magnolias were still in bloom as well as the cherry trees and tulips and daffodils and, of course, the lilacs. Combine Imagine RIT with a walk through Highland Park to get an almost perfect (though exhausting) day, especially with starting it with breakfast with Russ, Camy and Malachi! We quickly fell asleep at Dave and Hannah's after quick baths.

We finally got to see Dave (Hannah and Hudson were out of town) in the morning when he came in from his 24 hour shift and visited with him some before church. It was great to be back at Northridge Church. We hadn't been to see the new building yet but it was the people that we wanted to see the most. David was giving his last sermon in his destinations series where the theme was: “Your direction, not your intention, determines your destination.” We were challenged to intentionally share life with people who will help and challenge us to grow spiritually, to have mentors to listen to, and to be careful to choose to focus on the right things because where you look is where you'll head. It was really a message that I needed to hear because I need to be purposeful in all of those areas.

After church we got subs from Wegmans and took them to Zach and Maryellen's house for lunch and finally got the meet Matthew who is 5 months now. It was so fun to visit with them for a while. We hurried back to meet Dave's brother Dan and his wife Sarah and their kids who are home on furlough from Paraguay. I'd met them before but Glenn had not and it was neat to talk to them briefly about their ministry training youth leaders in rural communities.

We then went to Vertical Worship and afterwards got to visit with a number of people. I didn't get to catch up with or connect with everyone I would have liked to but we did have the lights turned off on us. (It wasn't the first time that has happened after Vertical Worship.)

After we said our final good byes, filled Naglenes and went potty we started down St Paul and as we were passing RSD we heard something funny “chunk” under our car. There hadn't been anything on the street so we turned back to find out what it was and Glenn found what looked like a big section of spring on the street so we drove back to the church parking lot to see if we could determine if it was from our vehicle or not hoping that someone would still be there that would be able to give us advice. God provided both – Glenn determined that it was from the front right driver's side tire area and the small group leaders training was just getting out and God provided several men to look at it and give us advice. It was determined that we really shouldn't be driving it to Syracuse with how it was broken.

I was amazed at how God worked out the details. Within minutes we had a place to stay and more than enough volunteers to give us rides to get there. On the ride in Mr. G's car to get to Chris and Miranda's house I had a chance to talk to the kids about how important it is to have wise advisors like had been talked about in church this morning. I am so thankful for teachable moments and that God is in control. Though this was a surprise to us it wasn't to Him. I am still learning to depend on Him and trust Him and to allow others to help me. You'd think that I'd learn not to be so fiercely independent after all the times God has tried to teach me but I still haven't learned yet.”

That ends what I wrote. When we got to Chris and Miranda's house my sweet Caleb was crying over how grateful he was at God's graciousness to us. When we got back home to Syracuse we made this list of praises from our experience with a broken strut:

* we didn't get on 104

* we were so close to church when it happened

* the van was drive-able so we didn't have to stay parked on St. Paul in front of RSD and that driving it didn't damage it more

* the tire didn't pop (that was the mechanic's first question)

* small group leader training was that night and it was just getting out so people could help and advise us.

* Mr. G and Chris and Miranda gave us rides and others offered.

* Chris and Miranda's hospitality at the last moment

* Glenn was driving and I wasn't alone with the kids somewhere (with Glenn in school, more often than not I am alone in the car with the kids when )

* Glenn's 4 or 5 lectures that he missed on Monday were videoed so that he can watch them even though he had to miss them.

* We had the funds available in the bank to fix it [I was thinking about it yesterday – everything that we have is God's and we are just entrusted with it for now but it is still His. I guess that He wanted almost $1000 of His money to go to JG Autowerks. I can trust Him that He knows best what to do with His money that sits in a bank account with our names on it.]

* we were in Rochester: many friends to help us out, close to a mechanic that is trusted by many from church

* the kids wanted to add that they were thankful that they got to ride with Mr G and that they got to meet Bella (Chris and Miranda's dog).

God is so good. I am so thankful.