My Hope

I think I've said this before, but maybe the thoughts have just run through my head.  I'm saddened by the divide in the church that just seems to be getting greater and greater.    We are called to be one body.  I am not speaking of everyone, but there are some people that have made us feel as we no longer belong to the body because they don't view the things we do as being of value.  We are so grateful for the members of the body who have lifted us up and confirmed our call to be here for such a time as this.  We will not stop being a part of the body just because some people have said "I don't need you!"  God has placed us where He wanted and we will continue striving to carry out the unique role for us.  We strive to please God, not man.  But that doesn't make it easy to sit and listen to the hatred.    Are you working in unity with the rest of the body?  Are you telling other parts of the body they don't belong?  We only need so many eyes and s...

The struggle is real.... I’ve been struggling this past week.  There are so many conflicting views and thoughts on my news-feed and I’m wrestling with reconciling them all.  I love the community we’re in.  When we moved here I imagined it would be a step towards ministry and knew we could impact refugees in the area, but being here for the past year and a half has been so much more than I ever imagined!  The friendships I’ve made have enriched my life so much!  We share each other’s joy and pain.  I feel like the time here has stretched my faith and caused me to examine in different ways what it means to truly live my life as a Christian.  Welcoming the tired, the hungry, the huddled masses is not just something that is symbolic of my view of America, it goes to the very core of my beliefs as a Christian and being here I’ve been able to practice that faith in a way more richly than before. It’s not that the outreach I’d done in the past was superficial, but it truly wasn’t incorpora...

Training wheels Teaching M how to ride a bike didn’t go quite the way I envisioned.  I really thought I’d be running behind her holding onto her seat try after try and bandaging plenty of scraped hands and knees.  In reality, it was much easier than that.  We made an early attempt to remove the training wheels but she seemed frozen in fear.  She’d barely make one rotation of the pedals before hopping off declaring she was scared she was about to fall (even though I still had a tight grip of her seat).  She didn’t allow herself to get enough speed to really take off.  We were getting nowhere so we took the advice of seasoned grandparents and put the training wheels back on, but at a higher level.  We taught her to listen for the sound of the training wheels hitting the pavement and how to straighten the bike back up when that happened.  After a while riding this way, one of her wheels literally just fell off.  She didn’t even realize she was riding without it and stopped not because s...