Seed

I’m currently on the topic of ‘Knowing God’.  What I mean is, it has been impressed upon my heart to get to know God better.  I ask God for plenty, but I don’t often take the time just to spend it with God…When I read my bible I am often looking for inspiration in regards to my life, not usually just to get to know God better.  When someone mentions the name of God I want my response to be ‘I know him!!’  So that is the seed that is currently growing inside of me.  I mention this so that you can ask yourself what seed the Holy Spirit has put into your heart.  Is there something that is getting your attention?  Make sure you seek it out, get it into you.  There is no better time than when the Holy Spirit is trying to show you something, because then you’ve got supernatural powers to have it revealed to you.

Missions vs. Evangelism

The title of this post isn’t actually accurate, but it seemed the closest I could come to my point.  Seeing as I am the Missions Coordinator for our church I tend to spend a little bit of time thinking on the subject.  I consider all Christians to be missionaries, but it seems that our ‘named’ missionaries seem to be doing ‘missions’ better than those who do not own the title.

Trying to understand it in my own head, I have long thought that missions on the home front looks a lot like evangelism.  In third world countries, missionaries can feed the poor, give medicine to the sick, build houses for the homeless, but in first world countries we just don’t have the same sort of needs (after all, our neighbours live in houses and buy their own food), so we do evangelism (tell people about Jesus and invite them to church)…then it suddenly dawned on me.  The difference between what ‘they’ (the missionaries) are doing and what ‘we’ (at home) are doing, is that they are showing the love of Jesus and we are just telling people about it.  The truth is, there is a lot of need everywhere around us.  It may not be as obvious, but it is most certainly EVERYWHERE and goes beyond food and shelter. 

Now, I’m not saying stop doing evangelism, but we really need to mix the two together.  Everyone knows there is a big difference between telling someone you love them and showing them.  I just want to put it out there that if we are going to make the name of Jesus famous (some of us will know the song), then lets get out there and show people why He’s a God worth knowing.

Inspiration

I thought it was important to write ‘something’ seeing as it has been a while.  I haven’t really had time to be inspired for something to write…or perhaps I have been inspired, but haven’t had the time to think about it and jot it down.

We’ve finally moved into our own home after 8 months in one bedroom (there was a lot of travel mixed in to that 8 months as well), so most time has been spent unpacking and organising, and because we have plenty of room in this house, we’ve also taken the time to SPREAD OUT.

God has been working, building, changing etc… He has been very busy with us, but it is hard to keep ‘rejoicing in our suffering’.  When I have a bad day with two kids and unpacking I try to remember that my capacity has been enlarged and not diminished (even though sometimes it feels that way)…and I am trying to be ok with that fact that sometimes being a mum is hard (thought comes to mind of recent time cleaning poo off of the carpet).  But I continue to try to remember that there are great times ahead to be had and they will be even better if I let myself be grown and changed.  Can’t have ‘new wine in old wine skin’… 

On the Road Again…

After about 15 hours of travel over 3 days with a 2 1/2 year old and an 11 week old we have arrived in Gladstone for 3 weeks.  Then its about another 15 hours of travel over 3 days back north to find a place to live in Cairns.  I thought I would give a brief update – my mom pointed out to me the other day that the last post I wrote talked about me being pregnant which is no longer the case.  As stated above we now have a daughter named Ada, who at under 3 months has already started travelling.  I calculated once that Seth in the first 2 years of his life has travelled about 1/4 of it.  We’ve done a lot more moving around since having kids than in the DINK (double income no kids) years of our marriage.  I did have that usual fear people get that once they have kids they are really stuck.  Luckily I have a few great friends with kids who have travelled many placed around the world to push that fear aside.

We are still waiting to find out what God has in store for us which is an interesting journey in and of itself.  We recently had a ministry opportunity come up that we felt was finally what God had for us.  After so many possibilities arising that we did not feel right about, this was finally one we ‘knew’ was right.  Then it fell through and has left us a little shell shocked to say the least…what does that mean!?  It has been harder to trust God when that answer to prayer (or what we thought was answer to prayer) turned out not to be.  It’s the first time something like this has happened and so I’ve got no experience to look back on.  So here we are learning something new once again.  God is forever teaching (haven’t we learned enough? – how many times have I said that!). 

And so that is a summed up version of the last couple of months.  Not much in it (not that Ada isn’t much), but continuing the journey one step at a time and working hard to remember that God is in control.

Waiting Room

It’s a strange time for us…waiting for a baby and having no place of our own.  We’ve been in such expectation of God but with nothing eventuating as of yet it feels as though we’ve been sitting in a waiting room.  Sort of like God has other matters he must attend to before dealing with us -- after all, he would be pretty busy.  Then, just the other day we got an encouraging note from a friend we hadn’t spoken to in quite a long time, who had no idea of our circumstances, and it was such a good reminder that while it may feel like we are waiting for God to get around to us, he’s actually out there working for us right now – building our ‘house’ so that when it’s time we can walk in and everything will be set up ready to go.