our growing world... being wrecked

It has been an interesting last month in our little piece of the world. Our world is growing! 

Exactly one month ago we left to go on our surprise vacation, which was so full of amazingness!! Words cannot simply describe it! Best vacation EVER!! 

Vacation came to an end, and the morning after we got back home, we picked up Joe our exchange student/Host son for this school year. Joe is from China and was pretty much in awe that we have two sons from the same province he is from and they speak Chinese! 

Then just three days ago we picked up our other exchange student/Host son, Balsa, for the school year! He is from Montenegro and pretty much just fits perfectly in with our crazy crew! We love them both and are so excited to be able to open our home and hearts to these two boys!

God has done some major molding in our lives this month. He is leading and directing and sometimes we are blindly moving to the sound of His ever comforting voice. But, to be really honest, it is hard! 

When things don't make sense to those around us it can cause some pretty harsh judgement.  And it can be difficult to even answer the critical questions because saying yes to God does not always mean He gives you the answers to all the questions, He just expects you to obey!

Change in direction, change of home, change of name, change of religion, change of job, change of pace, change in relationships, change-change-change.... When God decides to, He just pretty much wrecks your world!! And that is the point... He wants to wreck "your" world to make it "His!" 

To use the title from Jen Hatmaker's book, "interrupted, when Jesus wrecks your comfortable Christianity"... Jon and I are in the midst of learning the meaning of this!! 

For us, our comfortable Christianity was great! Pretty smooth, except for the Sunday morning rush getting kids dressed, fed, and out the door and lookin cute for Sunday school.. That was our "Christian living!" We paid tithe, we did Christmas Eve, we did Easter, we made sure we were there at "church", and sometime both services! We were nailing the Christianity thing pretty good! 

About 2010, we started feeling this stab at our hearts. Thought it was heart burn, so we went gluten free! ;)

2011 Rolled in and the heart burn was still there but this time someone great threw a book our way to help with the heart burn... That book was titled "radical", and forget about heart burn, this put us into cardiac arrest! The Bible did not help this issue, Jon and I went for the medical expert Luke... Luke said in chapter 9 verse 23,

"If anyone wants to be my followers you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross and follow me."

So, there you go... Heart burn, cardiac arrest, and death!  Jesus, "wrecked our lives" and our "comfortable Christianity!"

2012 brought on new directions that caused actions, 2013 China showed up on our front door and we found our two sons... And here we are now in 2014, God pulled us up out of our comfortable church home, showing us  "church" is larger and bigger than the comforts of Sunday mornings... (There is nothing wrong with Sunday mornings... Just saying God is redirecting Jon and I, and our family) One thing is for sure, when your are serving God, it is never boring, it most certainly is never something you have ever thought of, it is only the maker and creator of life that can dream up these wild plans!  So we say, "yes" to the change and hang on for the ride.

No, we don't have all the answers or the finer details. God's got that.

You know the topic of church has been a hot topic in our house in this month of all this change. 

My dad was traveling a lot when I was growing up... He missed countless Sundays... The fact is he still does due to work.

Jon, (my husband) works almost every Sunday. There are months where he misses "church"....

But I guess that is where my question comes into play... "Is he really missing church?" "Was my father really missing countless Sundays at Church?"

These two men are two of the most servant minded, lovers of The Lord, doers of His word, and putting action to the faith they claim, men of God! They live their day to day in worship with their lives. It is Amazing to witness. So, do they miss Sundays, yes, but do they miss church, no! No, they have not missed church, they are serving The Lord in all that they do... The hands and feet are at work in the lives of these two men and lives are being transformed and disciples being made. 

"But to fully appreciate what the missional church is, we must look outside of our traditional understanding of how we do church and religion ourselves with the biblical narrative."- Rick Meigs

I love them both so much and it is incredible to see God's work in the life of these two first hand!

This month school is in full swing! We have the entire range of hormonal teens up in our house! With 6 boys and one girl (ptl),  we have smells that equate to biological war fare, sounds that are not from instruments, tears, screams, and a roaring of laughter that can be heard from outside the walls of our house.

Yes, this school year is going to be fun!! 

We are so thankful for the way God is teaching us, leading us, and showing us one day at a time how we must surrender to Him. We are loving learning about the new members of our family, and enjoying our multicultural mix that God shook up! 

Wow- what a month can bring when you say "yes"! 

Please continue to pray for our family as changes are often times hard and that does not always make sense to everyone. 

Philippians 1:21 For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better.

shot into the dark...

It's scary going into the unknown.  We just took a step in our lives that led us away from a more certain future.  It is scary.  But, it appears to be directed.

"If we desire our faith to be strengthened, we should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried, and therefore, through trial, be strengthened."

-George Mueller

We went to Disney this past weekend and got to see our kids take a venture into the unknown.  Our two boys from China had never even seen a roller coaster, much less been on a roller coaster.  So what did Bethany and I do to gently and slowly introduce the concept of roller coasters into our boys lives?  We took them on Rockin' Rollercoaster!

 

If you've never been on this ride, it starts out shooting riders into a dark corridor at 60 mph and then promptly into a loop, through twists and turns, finished by a couple of corkscrews.  

To the inexperienced rider, it is intimidating to say the least.  

The only part of the ride the boys could see from the waiting line was the riders being shot into the dark....screaming....that's it!!

You don't get to see the excited, but relieved faces come out on the other side.  You only get to see the fearful expressions as they are shot into the darkness.

I couldn't help but continually laugh as I sat behind the boys, because I knew the direction of the ride, even if the boys didn't.  I knew how long the ride would last.  I have ridden this ride so I knew where the twists and turns were. I even found myself turning into some of the bends and rolls as I knew what was ahead.  But the boys had no idea. They were completely safe and protected the entire time, they just didn't know it.

Abraham was shot into the darkness as well, wasn't he?  He didn't know the outcome, did he? He barely knew the God that shot him into the unknown!  

But he obeyed and it was counted to him as righteousness.  

Sometimes, things just don't make sense.  Sometimes we are directed to build football field size boats on land or spend the rest of your life in an unknown land.  Sometimes we are directed to take the coin from the fish or be swallowed by a fish.  Whatever the direction though, it appears that the more odd, the more sense it simply doesn't make, and the more off the wall the direction, the more and more it seems that God is truly the one at the helm of the direction.  

So shooting into the dark we go.  Now, if we just had some Aerosmith music...

"Blessed is the man who doesn’t know! Abraham even moved house ‘not knowing whither’. When we really understand that God is the Originator of all that matters in life, we no longer have such cocksureness about what we are going to do. We gladly say, ‘If the Lord wills.”

-Watchman Nee, -Changed Into His Likeness