New year new lessons

It is the new year and usually I get excited thinking about what the new year will bring. I am excited for 2015, as I will watch my oldest graduate high school in a few months! This year is different though for other reasons. Last year at this time I had no idea that in a few months in one weekend my health would be tipped upside down. A swollen hand one weekend in April turned into a 6 month journey to find out what was wrong and how to treat it. It totally caught me off guard. Now I am in the phase of learning how to live with being on constant medications and learning new ways of doing things since my body doesn't always want to cooperate. Confession, I am a bit of a control freak....my kids may say more than a bit. I like a plan, I like to make big plans...hence the 8 kids. I am a weird creature as I love things that terrify me, such as storms and disasters. If i didn't follow the path of having a large family I would have finished my degree in emergency management and worked with FEMA. I only had one semester to go! Now though I am starting a new season of life on different levels and really its terrifying and excited...but mostly terrifying.. I have spent that last 17 years building my family and the last 10 years deeply involved in the adoption world. Now this will be the first time I start to enjoy the family and even start to watch them become their own people. As a planner I have often thought about what I would do when the family building/adoption time ended. Some of plans involved things like getting back into storm spotting and volunteering with an organization, getting ready to start my career as a teacher (which is what I ended up finishing college with), going out and doing mission/ministry work with Randy and the kids. I imagined that with some more time I would get into fitness (though this was ALWAYS a long shot..) or even taking up something new! So here I am looking at the future but realizing I have no idea what my future will look like. Some people with rheumatoid arthritis do great and the medications allow them to do all sorts of things, others end up living a pretty depressing life of pain, exhaustion and multiple surgeries...oh did I mention I research everything constantly so I have read every website and blog that talks about RA? One thing I know is that God knows what he has planned for me. I also know that I am weak in walking in the faith of this knowledge. My fear is that I will become someone who doesn't leave the couch and is wasting the life God has blessed me with because I can't figure out how to live with this disease, but my hope is that I can find new ways to discover new things and enjoy old things. Luckily I have some time to think about the future as I am currently still homeschooling 8 children!  One humbling thing I am learning is that I have never really let go and given it all to God, every time I think I am letting God lead, He shows me an area that I am clinging to and I have to learn to let go. So here is to the future, whatever it may hold. This year will be a year of learning to trusting in God's plan for me and stop trying to control and guess the next steps...

Generation follows generation...

As I watched my daughter set up the table and the other kids who are part of the youth mission team at our church stand up and make a plea to the church to donate shoes for the souls for orphans project, I realized the importance of passing on what God has called us to do to the next generation not just in words but in actions.  She has not just heard but experienced the plight of orphaned children, Four of her siblings formerly lived in orphanages and 2 in a foster home.  She not only heard of children needing shoes, but watched her new sister and brother come home with flip flops held together with paperclips and watched me put ointment on the sores on their feet for months until they healed.  She saw the pictures of the excitement of the children in Bulgaria as they received the shoe boxes so many pack with treats for Christmas and heard her sister tell of how happy they were to receive them a week before and how hopeful she would be Christmas morning only to find year after year no presents on Christmas Day.  She has watched her father faithfully head out every Saturday morning and spend countless hours building Trusted World and she herself has gone out and handed food out to the men and women in need.  To her God's commands to serve the orphans, the reality of pure religion is not just words on a page, its not just a catalog that comes out at the holidays that shows pictures of hurting kids.  Its the people she loves and its the people she has watched transform through the little we had to share.  Its amazing to me because so many times I worried that the sacrifices we made in her life whether time, money or emotions in following God's calling in our lives would impact her.  It did, but in a way that gives me great joy.  She is standing in a church lobby today making sure as many children as she can possibly can will have a new pair of shoes.  She is touching the souls of children she will never meet, but she knows that they are valuable.  The Bible tells us to pass it on from generation to generation and so it fills me with such joy to see my children rise up to the occasion and stand in the gap for those who can not.  God has taught me through these 16 years of parenting, kids will learn love and will learn compassion if that is all they know...I will be the first to admit I go into life having no clue what I am doing, everyone who truly knows me knows this...  I have had a ton of ups and downs and many times I have questioned if I am really following God or really messing up what I have going :)  But as I watch my oldest daughter share her love for others and as I listen to our uniquely created family talk about their futures and realize they believe caring for others is just, what you do and have the realization that love is color blind, I begin to see a peek of what God has done despite me.  He has made this.......

Sifting

Years ago in my teenage years I was going through a hard time and questioning why God would allow something to happen and my father told me to read the book of Job in the Bible to see if I could find some answers.  I read it and not knowing the Lord it was confusing.  I was stuck on the unfairness of Job's life.  Fast forward a lot of joys and trials and growing with Jesus.  These past few months of dealing with the rheumatoid arthritis have been trying both physically and emotionally.  To go from someone who barely needed a Tylenol to someone who keeps going back to doctors to try new medications mixed with realizing this isn't going to end nor will I ever feel completely like I did before has been hard.  So much changed so fast and its like I am finally getting to a point after 6 months of figuring out what I am doing.  I have found myself very emotional this summer, crying at the drop of a hat, which is so unlike me!  So today I was sitting in church and I began to think of what things I personally have walked through and started to see a pattern of trust growing through the trials.  I thought of Job he lost his family, friends, health, financial security but he trusted God and God redeemed him.  I remembered how he had been sifted, done in order to change him to bring him closer to God, what Satan had meant for evil God had used for redemption.  I thought of the major sifting I have experienced, losing my mother, losing my fertility, walking through adoption and the issues that have come up, and now my health.  Every time I have hit a time of sifting I have learned to trust the Lord.  The loss of my mother taught me to cleave completely to my husband, the loss of my fertility taught me to lay down my idea of my "rights" and I was blessed with all the children I was meant to have, the adoption trials have taught me that none of us can walk alone and that often those difficult moments are what truly define family, and these health issues reminded me today that this life is temporary, I do not have this disease forever, I have it for a time and a purpose to one day be freed to live eternally with my creator.  So today I told the enemy he cannot win this battle, for it was already one a long time ago with my King on a hill.  I can be sifted, but all that will remain is the gold that Jesus gave me, the rest is temporary.

Why don't they listen!

Sometimes the things I see in my children's life that drive me crazy end up teaching me about my relationship with my heavenly father.  Just this morning I had 3 incidences in my house in which I said out loud if people just listened in the first place they wouldn't be in these situations.  Let me explain, see a certain child lost a shoe.  I tell the children to keep their shoes in a common closet so they don't get lost, but this child tends to kick off his shoes wherever he happens to be.  So he wanted to come to the store with me but he couldn't find his shoe and so he had to stay home, which made him annoyed with me for not waiting longer.  Another child has been going through a lying/stealing phase.  We have rules about both of these items that this child choose to ignore at the time.  Now their is consequences and the child is very upset with me because of this.  The third child has lost something that I have been clear for a long time to keep in a certain place, but because they choose to keep them some place else they have lost it and they are angry with me that I will not stop everything and look for it or buy them a new one.  See if I were to go back in each of their lives in a crazy time machine and each were to simply follow what I told them, the first would have shoes and have had a good trip to the store, the second would be enjoying a beautiful summer day and be in good graces with her parents and siblings and the third would have no concerns other then what they want to do and would have not acted disrespectfully to others.  In other words, when we do just exactly as we are told, life is much better.  As I sat in the car on the way to the store stewing over the ironic fact that every time a child chooses to disobey me, they end up angry with me I began to think about myself.  The times that I know I skirted the biblical way, or being honest totally disobeyed something I know is very clear about God's nature.  When I used the its no big deal excuse with God, or the I am not perfect idea to justify growing farther from who God created me to be I denied the truth about who God is.  Just like I know with my children, my Father knows with me.  He hates sin not only because of the action but because of the fall out.  Its not the moment of anger that does the most damage, its the feelings it leads too or its not the doing this one time that kills the soul, its the lingering thoughts and memories.  God knows life is happier when we live in his image.  When we live good, honest, humble lives not only is God honored and our testimony saved, but our lives are just calmer, more peaceful and more enjoyable.  Now if I could just remember this post the next time we are running late because a child can only find one shoe.......

The Mountain

I have been following the news about the Yazidi's in the mountains of Iraq.  Many are Christians who are being persecuted and killed.  These people are stuck on the side of a mountain in sweltering heat with no water and no food, knowing going back down means certain death for them and their families.  Most know that even if they convert to Islam they will be killed anyway.  Women have been abducted and sold as slaves.  This will literally be the hill that they are dying on.  The irony that our Savior dies on a hill for these people and now in his name they will find the same fate.  This will be a defining moment in history between the tragedies in Syria, Iraq, Israel, Gaza and Ukraine. This will be what the future generations read about in textbooks and think how did they allow this to happen, the same way I did when I read about the holocaust. I have read it and thought how did other countries go about their normal life while the Jews were in concentration camps?    Now here I am in this generation going about cleaning, cooking, watching tv, taking the kids swimming and going about life while these brothers and sisters in Christ are desperately clinging to life on the side of a mountain for the name of the Savior we share.  At church on Sunday as we sang the worship songs my mind drifted to the mothers on the mountains who are crying out the same name I sang.  I thought about my hills vs her mountain.  Yes God hears it all, but at that moment I saw the size of my hill in comparison and I prayed for her, I sang because she couldn't, my trust in Jesus and faith in my Savior grew because she is my living example of faith.  If faith can put you on the side of a mountain clinging to life while under terrorist threats and you still claim your God, then do I have to wonder if his words are true?  These people have shown the world that their God is bigger then their circumstance.  They understand that to live for Christ is good, but to die for Christ is even better.  Because they understand we are passing through, this is not eternal, this is temporary they are able to sit and wait.  Someday they will come down from that mountain and we will hear about the Corrie Ten Boom of the Yazidi's who prayed with those losing hope, we will hear about the Brother Andrew's who risked their lives on the mountain to bring the Gospel.  We will hear stories of how God worked a miracle and hear about the many who left this temporary home and are now with Jesus out of pain and fear, hearing our Savior say well done good and faithful servant.  It has taught me to keep my eyes on whats eternal, it has shown me the ultimate faith in the face of persecution, it has given me a great appreciation for my freedoms and has shown me how better to pray for the world.  What is your hill or your mountain, were you placed where you are in this time and place to show your faith boldly, to use your freedom to pray or give, to get the gospel to someone else, to carry another's burden, to ask for help

Hands

The other day I looked down at my hands and it made me think.  One of the ways the rheumatoid arthritis has effected me has been the changes I can see in my hands and fingers, not tremendously noticeable unless I point it out, except that I can't wear my wedding rings until I get them re-sized.  However as I looked at my hands I thought about all the things my hands have done, they have held my mother and fathers hand as I began life, they held the steering wheel as I learned how to drive, held the books as I stepped on campus for the first time, held the keys as we moved into our new home,  they hugged someone who was lonely, held the hand of someone dying, gently touched touched the faces of my newborn babies, fed those who were too young to sick to feed themselves, carried my adopted children home, wiped the tears of my kids when they were hurting, embraced my husband, graded the papers my children completed, folded the laundry and cooked the meals that keep the house moving, turned the pages of my Bible and folded them in prayer.

I don't know what the future holds and how my hands will hold up....but I pray I will use them to fix the veils on my daughters wedding days, use them to fix the tie on my sons', hold a grandchild or 12, clap at my children's graduations, wipe the tears as they move to their own homes.  So many days to embrace!  I challenge you especially on a long hard day when you feel like you haven't made much of a difference in life or when you feel like you are just "fillintheblank" and nothing special, take a look at your hands, what have your hands already accomplished, what more awaits them.

What makes a family?

I love the impromptu moments in life.  Tonight I was sitting around with my kids and we got on the topic of childbirth (only the girls were with me).  I told them all the gory details of birth, the stuff only a momma can share, that from the looks of their frightened faces told me I may have shared too much....but better to be prepared someday!  Anyway after a lot of laughs we started talking about memories we had about the kids baby (or since a few weren't babies when we adopted them) little kid years.  All the poopy diaper disasters, the stories of ill timed vomit and the crazy dance moves only a preschooler can come up with had us all all roaring with laughter.  Its funny how the most mundane days become the best memories.  Its stuff only a family can share because we lived it.  Some of it would embarrass us if we told it to someone outside the clan, other things were had to be there moments, that others would not find half as hilarious as we do.  But mostly it reminded me why I am spending most of my adult life raising 8 kids from all over the world, because these the moments that make us.  Its the one's who remember the crazy thing you said or did, the chorus of "OH YEA!" when someone starts a story with do you remember when....   There is something special about people remembering the moments that defined us.  So many kids grow up in foster homes or institutions going from one caregiver to another, no one knows their story, or their story is a piecemeal work of an old picture or a fragment.  A family however remembers the cute stories, the messy stories, the crazy stories, the I am glad you survived that stories.  All of our kids will have a dad and a mom who will be crazy excited every time their lives change, crying as they graduate remembering seeing them struggle over that math problem or watching a wedding with anticipation as we remember the first dates.  A mom and dad who can't wait to squish the cheeks of the grand kids some day and share the memories of them to their children.  Talking over the memories I realized life is fun, crazy, messy, heartbreaking, and meant to be shared.  Family is who you make memories with, who loves you enough to laugh about the bodily fluid that landed on them or smiles when they think of your crazy past.  Sometimes its biological, sometimes its adopted, sometimes its the friend who did not officially move in but was there all the time, but its always who is present and witnessing the current to most likely laugh about later. Or maybe its just my strange bunch of humans that bless my life....because seriously some of our memories are kooky.....