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.

Thanks for your prayers

I want to thank everyone who has been praying for me. Thanks especially to my friend and sister in Christ, Lucie, for praying for my back. Please don't stop! My back has been doing great. My mental distress continues somewhat, but I think that will ease off in the months to come. Tom and I have talked about how busy I have been lately. We are in the process of changing some things around here so that I am not away from home so much, that we aren't running to town so much, and that the children take on more responsibility.

I am going to finish what I started about the servant's heart (Mary and Martha) later this week. After that I am going to take my cue from my daughter and take a blogging break for the summer. Meanwhile, we have our own Bible conference coming up July 30-August 3. Tom and I also hope to take the whole family (Nate, too!) to Maranatha Bible Conference (in Pennsylvania) in August (please pray that God will work out the details for this).

We are also building a small barn, Sarah is starting a babysitting job AND a meat rabbit business AND getting goats in the fall, I'm getting a Jersey cow, and there's all the gardening to do. We need to clean out our cellar and build a cold room down there, to use as a root cellar. We have a whole bunch of junk to haul away to the dump, and scrap metal to sell to the scrap yard. Our neighbour gave Elijah a trailer that Tom wants to fix up and get tags for, so that we can use it for hauling stuff. Stuff like several loads of hay, if the rain will stop long enough for the farmers to cut it!

AND, we're getting a new roof put on! We are getting a grant for this, so we had to submit two bids for the job. The inspector who approved our grant decides who gets the job. Pray that our friends Jon U. and Michel C. get the job. They are just getting started in their new construction contracting business, and we want to help them out. Plus we know them, and know that they will do a great job.

In a foggy place

My mind has been in a fog for about a couple of months. I have been forgetting things a lot, and am not able to think clearly. I will ask a child to do something, and right away forget that I asked that, and ask the same child to do something else. I will start to say something, and suddenly I can't think what it was I wanted to say. I told Sarah she could go home with a friend after church one Sunday night, then later I wondered where she was. I could not recall giving her permission, even though they tried to help me remember by telling me the circumstances and what we talked about.

Tom says I've not been getting enough sleep. I don't know. I go to bed no later than ten, and lately I think I've been sleeping pretty well. Samuel has been sleeping all night, anywhere from 8 to 11 hours. During the day I lie down with him when he needs nursed, and sometimes doze off. I did go through about a week or so of not being able to sleep, no matter how hard I tried. But that hasn't been the case lately.

It is hard for me to stay focused. If I am interrupted while writing, I have to read the whole paragraph, sometimes the whole blog post over again to try to remember what I was writing. Sometimes I totally lose my thought and end up deleting the half sentence I just wrote because I have no idea what I was trying to say. That is why I haven't been blogging lately.

I have not gotten the garden finished yet. I just can't keep my mind on it. I go out to do some planting, and find I can't think what I am supposed to do. Same for a lot of other chores, like laundry or sewing or cleaning.

I've got my children worried. Last night Elijah asked if Alzheimer's runs in the family. And Sarah remembered reading about a woman who began to be easily confused, especially about where she was, when she was younger than I am. I am 42.

I don't know what the problem is, but I ask you to pray for me. I don't think I have anything major on my conscience. Fellowship with the Lord has been sweet lately. I do think I am too busy. I am gone from home a lot, but haven't been able to help it. It's all been necessary, mostly related either to ministry or shopping I absolutely had to do. I did mark on my calendar all the days I want to STAY HOME for the rest of this month.

Sunday morning notes--November 18, 2007

I had the most amazing experience in Sunday school today.

I was raised in church and Sunday school. I have taught Sunday school off and on since I was 15. I love teaching, but sometimes it gets a little old because I teach children who have been in church since they were babies. They've heard all the stories so many times they could probably teach the lesson themselves. Even the application is old to them.

Today was different. Today we had a visitor, an 8-year-old girl who had never been in Sunday school before, ever. Our lesson was on creation, and the all-powerful God Who created everything. This was all new to her. She was astounded, incredulous, awed, by the whole idea. While the other three girls in my class were maybe a little bored, had all the answers, and tried to teach the lesson themselves, this girl asked questions, said things like "Cool!!!" and asked, over and over, "But HOW did God do that?" "You mean He just said it, and it was there?" "So God is sort of like magic?"

Then, right toward the end, when I didn't have any more time left, the subject of sin came up, and how sin keeps us from heaven. We described what sin is, and listed some examples (disobedience, lying, stealing, etc.). This girl asked, "But what if you only do that ONCE?"

Oh, for more time! At that point I wished I could have dismissed the others so I could talk to her alone. Instead, I told her that next week's lesson will be about Adam and Eve and how sin came into the world. We would talk more about sin and salvation then. I gave her a Bible and a Sunday school assignment paper, showed her where to read for her assignment, and told her how much we'd like to have her come back. I also invited her to Bible Club Friday nights, and she sounded excited about that.

Later, I talked to her father. He is the kind of parent that believes there should come a time in every child's life when she is exposed to religion, and then allowed to make her own choice about it. We had an "interesting" conversation that really didn't go anywhere. But I encouraged him to keep bringing his daughter back, that we'd love to have them come again, and told him about Bible Club. He said he hoped to come back.

Please pray for this family. A brother was mentioned during Sunday school, but no word was said about a mother. The father said he was raised by parents and a grandmother who went to church and were "very religious." I do not know what he meant by that. Pray that the father will take seriously his responsibility to train his daughter in true religion. Also pray that his daughter will put pressure on him to bring her back.

While you in the USA are praying, pray for cold, dead, Canada which cannot tolerate on-fire, living followers of Christ. This little girl is the product of a system that did away with God a long time ago. There are so many more children like her all over our city and nation. Bible Clubs and Sunday schools are reaching a few, but we need the power of God upon us.

A prayer request for the Walker family

If you visit any of the blogs I have listed in my sidebar, you will find one called Rebekah's Thots. Rebekah Walker is the daughter of our former pastor in Texas. She and her husband Steven are expecting their second son next week. I would encourage you to read through her blog to know her difficult journeys into motherhood, and to understand the urgency of this prayer request.

Rebekah is to be induced on Monday. Please pray for a safe delivery. Please also pray for peace of mind for their whole family. God is gracious.