No more encumbering

Below this post is the last of the "Servant's heart" series. Now the time has come for me to say goodbye to the internet for an extended period of time. I will continue to communicate with friends and family via e-mail. But there will be no more blogging, no more internet "research", no more Facebook (why, oh why, did I ever sign up for that anyway?), no more home-school or large-family forums, no more frantic searches for the best, most miraculous (the "Christian" word for magical) weight loss secret.

I am not even going to print out my friend Rand's Friday Night Notes for our church bulletin board. I'm going to pass that job on to my son Josiah.

Pray for us this summer. Our church Bible conference runs July 30 - August 3. Our very dear friend Pastor David Dickerson is coming all the way from Georgia to preach for us. We are so looking forward to his coming, and pray that the Lord will bless it and begin to send us the revival we have been longing for (but not longing for nearly enough).

August 11-15 we will be attending the Bible conference at Maranatha in Pennsylvania. Our oldest son Nate was able to get time off from work to go with us. Please pray that God will awaken him.

The Sunday after the Maranatha conference we hope to be in Mount Vision, New York, visiting our friend Chris Ellis' church. I'm looking forward to seeing them again, and visiting with his wife, and his daughter Esther. Mount Vision is just about half-way between our house and Pennsylvania, so we've been sometimes stopping there to break our trip in half.

I am concerned about us living in a neighbourhood setting. On the one hand, I see such an opportunity to share the gospel with our unsaved neighbours. But on the other hand, I see my children more and more negatively influenced by those lost children. Pray for us about this. I don't want to try so hard to win my neighbours for Christ that I lose my children to the world. But I don't want to so close my family in that we neglect our neighbours, either. I don't know where the balance is, but I do know that my first and primary responsibility is to my home and family.

Part of what's hard about living in a neighbourhood is when all the neighbour children congregate in my yard. This is fine sometimes, but often they're all here way too much. If none of the children are outside, they'll come to the door and ask if they can play. I like that. But if the children are already outside, they won't ask my permission. They'll just come into the yard and start playing. I'd like to find a way to stop this so that my children are not with the world's children hours upon hours every day throughout the summer. I don't think it's fair to make my children stay inside until I am able to be out there with them. I'd like for them to be able to go out without having the neighbours in my yard, too. If any of you have any suggestions for how to deal with this, let me know.

As I get the money, I am ordering schoolbooks for this fall (the only other internet use I will justify for myself right now; a money order costs five dollars!!!). I am looking forward to starting up school again. I am thinking of doing home school more or less year round with breaks for gardening, conferences and family days. That way I don't have to try to cram all the lessons into the short months between Canadian Thanksgiving in October and Victoria Day in May like I have been. (That's between the end of harvest and the beginning of spring planting.) And it will help some with keeping my children occupied without the neighbourhood joining in.

That's it for now. Have a great rest-of-the-summer.