The Rest Before The Drive

Soon and very soon we are entering the twilight zone portion of our 2007 Mexican Adventure in Missions, that being the 36 hour driving marathon. In order to prepare for this bodily punishment, that begins Thurday night, I have been trying to rest more. A week ago I was struggling to sleep at all. Several nights I was kept awake by the four billion things my brain was processing at the same time. That makes for restless times staring at the dark ceiling. Just ask my wife! However, as the day draws near I am happy to report that I have been sleeping much better. Two out of the last three nights I was able to log about 11 hours of sleep each night, ahhhhhh! Hopefully tomorrow I can accomplish that feat again.
Thank You God!
Once again the Lord is providing for the trip. Hudson Taylor has a great quote: "God's work done God's way will never lack God's supply." As of this post we are only $700.00 short of our financial goal, which a week ago we were $6,000.00 short of the money we needed to accomplish our goals! We are rebuilding Cecelia's house that was burned to the ground last summer and we are attempting to get the bunkhouse to the place where teams can use it, including finishing the bathrooms, drywall, outside trim, etc.
My prayer is that we are doing God's work God's way trusting His supply!

“What Must I Do To Be Loved?

In Erwin McManus’ book “Soul Cravings” he has an interesting entry called “What Must I Do To Be Loved?” His position is that first we humans long for love and second we are convinced that all love is conditional.

We all want to be loved or to find love. It is written into our genetic code and is the basis for most of what we do with our lives. We want the human experience of love so we do what we deem to be necessary to gain the affection of someone to whom we are attracted. Flowers, candy, long walks, dancing lessons, whatever it takes, we jump through so many hoops that we could be mistaken for leader dog trainees.

Lets not kid ourselves into thinking that this is the only arena in life where this takes place either. We relate to God the very same way: praying five times a day facing east, praying the rosary, giving enough money, lighting the right candles, using lawn statues for luck, bottom line we are looking for acceptance from God. McManus says “the reason religion “works” is because we believe in conditional love.”

What would happen if we began to live like we believed in the real message of Jesus, his unconditional love for us? “What would happen if we began to realize that God was not, in fact, waiting for us to earn his love, but that he was passionately pursuing us with his love? What would happen if the word got out that Jesus was offering his love freely and without condition?”
Indeed!

Horseradish

The picture is of my youngest son Ryan at his first birthday, cute little guy. The other day I came home and noticed this picture was now the background shot on our computer and Ryan himself had scanned it and put it in. That was a little odd, I thought to myself. But now that I have taken some time to reflect maybe it isn’t weird at all. So many of us humans (maybe all of us) want those warm fuzzies when we think of “home.” We love to remember (or dream of) a place where we are loved just as we are, embraced for being us, not some made up veneer that we play at work. So why not go back to some early memories when everyone thought that we were cute, and listened to all the dumb things we said and liked it. Our world is such a harsh place to live, believe me I work with students all the time, that we enjoy thos little escapes to "home".

So I was putting together our devotional for Mexico the other day and (we will be making our way through 1 Peter during our ten day trip) this “horseradish” verse reaches up and grabs me by my throat:

“The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.”
1 Peter 4:7 (Try a forkful of horseradish when your nose is plugged up and you’ll get my drift)

Lord grant us that perspective! Help us live not only in the fuzzies of yesteryear but in the cold mountain-air reality that this is almost over, that the REAL fuzzies are yet to come because you are our home!

Monthly Update?

All right this is ridiculous! I haven’t written for a whole month now, I think that is the longest I have gone without posting - ever! So I am going to try and be a little more diligent.
Life has been good and busy too. The holidays were quickly upon us and over in a blink of an eye so here is a quick update on my family:

My daughter is getting huge =] with the baby just about six weeks away from being born into our world I still have a hard time conceiving the fact that I am going to be a grandfather, it’s just so weird! They have finished Carson's room and it looks great. Perfect for a baby boy to destroy!

Matthew is still in California and we haven’t been able to talk to him since Christmas morning when he called, which was a very nice Christmas gift for the whole family. We have an ongoing ordeal about trying to get him a phone which it now appears the post office has lost!!! URGGG! He apparently is working everyday now and loving all the snowboarding. I told Connie the other day that he is going to be so good at riding when he comes back that he won't want to ride the puny snowpiles in Michigan anymore.

Ryan got into an accident and we are trying to get his car back on the road before I leave for Mexico on the 25^th. He's back at SC4 for the spring and is in the process of applying to OM to leave hopefully in the fall for one-two years on the minsitry ships that travel the planet helping people.

While in Mexico we are going to rebuild the house that burned down last summer and work on the bunkhouse project, trying to make it finally functional for the summer building season!