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Friday, March 31, 2017

March days

Words that strike fear in a mother's heart, "Mama, come see what happened in the bathroom!"
Thankfully it was not a big deal, I was imagining far worse......

We love muffin tin lunches!
He got into his sister's headbands!
She asks to wash windows!

When you get a bag of Starbucks coffee passed on to you and you remember that today is the anniversary of your very first date, which happened to be at Starbucks, you have to take a coffee selfie 💑 ❤☕

New favorite!

The Duke marching out to the van after church, keys in one hand, "gun" in the other 😊.

This little guy is all boy, and such a combination of John and my personalities. It's amazing sometimes how much of myself I see in the kids! He loves his guns and his tools, but he also needs some quiet down time just like me. Not a day goes by where he doesn't ask for a guggle (snuggle) in the rocking chair with me. He loves to make people laugh, has a very quick temper, and has a tender, empathetic heart at times. The poor baby was in tears last night over the scene in Lady and the Tramp where Lady is supposed to sleep alone in a dark room. I love how he notices and cares when others are sad.....and I love our little boy! 💙

When my amazon subscription comes.
Helper Duke.

I wore pink and jewelry with flowers in honor of it being the first day of spring......then I layered on a coat and boots because I live in Wisconsin.

Free cones at DQ!
Free cones at DQ!
Thankful for this stuff.
This was a great Swagbucks month!
We finished our story book.

y oh so helpful children tidying up the basket of clean diapers they had covered the living room with. Yes, Caroline is using her mouth, don't even ask......sigh, lol.

Produce for the week.

Caroline sharing a Psalter with all her animals at family worship this evening.

Someone is addicted to bandaids on minor "injuries." She barely was able to make it the table and eat dinner tonight because she was hurt so badly, lol.

Sometimes it is hard to be two.

The kids LOVE to have their own Psalter at family worship so John ordered them each one of these cute little ones 😊.

First flower we found this year!
Making lemonade. Dukie loved it!

Lol

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Restoration

A friend posted this on IG today and it encouraged me so much thinking of the mess that my extended family sadly is right now.  Pray, do the next right thing, and trust God to take care of the rest....Only the Lord can change hearts, cause people to be open and honest, cause them not to assume motives, and give them the grace to say, "I'm sorry, I was wrong." And without honesty, humility, and trust it's impossible to have a close relationship. A fluffy surface one? Yes. Maybe someday I will be healed enough for that, Maybe prayers will be answered and there will be healing.  May God's will be done, and may I be content, and behave rightly no matter what is done or said.

Heart bracelet

I love how this sweet bracelet has a heart for each ember of our little family. Jewelry with meaning is my favorite!

Luke's baptism memories

Throwback to Luke's baptism in South Carolina two years ago. That was seriously the most exhausting, difficult trip with two under two, a nine year old, and a mom that was still dealing with too many postpartum hormones and exhaustion (read, lots of tears), but in spite of it all I'm so grateful to look back and see that we were able to get our little boy baptized with lots of family and friends to witness it, and pray for him.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

A simple life



This post showed up in my news feed and I wanted to share because I could have written it. So often I feel guilty or apologetic because I get tired so easily, I'm quiet, I'm shy, I'm not exciting, but what is so bad about wanting a quiet, simple life?

What if I all I want is a small, slow, simple life? What if I am most happy in the space of in between? Where calm lives. What if I am mediocre and choose to be at peace with that?

Photo courtesy of Erin Loechner
The world is such a noisy place. Loud, haranguing voices lecturing me to hustle, to improve, build, strive, yearn, acquire, compete, and grasp for more. For bigger and better. Sacrifice sleep for productivity. Strive for excellence. Go big or go home. Have a huge impact in the world. Make your life count.
But what if I just don’t have it in me. What if all the striving for excellence leaves me sad, worn out, depleted? Drained of joy. Am I simply not enough?
What if I never really amount to anything when I grow up—beyond mom and sister and wife? But these people in my primary circle of impact know they are loved and I would choose them again, given the choice. Can this be enough?
What if I never build an orphanage in Africa but send bags of groceries to people here and there and support a couple of kids through sponsorship? What if I just offer the small gifts I have to the world and let that be enough?
What if I don’t want to write a cookbook or build a six figure business or speak before thousands? But I write because I have something to say and I invest in a small community of women I care about and encourage them to love and care for themselves well. Because bigger isn’t always better and the individual matters. She is enough.
What if I just accept this mediocre body of mine that is neither big nor small? Just in between. And I embrace that I have no desire to work for rock hard abs or 18% body fat. And I make peace with it and decide that when I lie on my deathbed I will never regret having just been me. Take me or leave me.
What if I am a mediocre home manager who rarely dusts and mostly maintains order and makes real food but sometimes buys pizza and who is horrified at moments by the utter mess in some areas of her home? Who loves to menu plan and budget but then breaks her own rules and pushes back against rigidity. Who doesn’t care about decorating and fancy things. Whose home is humble but safe.
What if I am not cut out for the frantic pace of this society and cannot even begin to keep up? And see so many others with what appears to be boundless energy and stamina but know that I need tons of solitude and calm, an abundance of rest, and swaths of unscheduled time in order to be healthy. Body, spirit, soul healthy. Am I enough?
What if I am too religious for some and not spiritual enough for others? Non-evangelistic. Not bold enough. Yet willing to share in quiet ways, in genuine relationship, my deeply rooted faith. And my doubts and insecurities.
This will have to be enough.
And if I have been married 21 years and love my husband more today than yesterday but have never had a fairy tale romance and break the “experts” marriage rules about doing a ton of activities together and having a bunch in common. And we don’t. And we like time apart and time together. Is our marriage good enough?
What if I am a mom who delights in her kids but needs time for herself and sometimes just wants to be first and doesn’t like to play but who hugs and affirms and supports her kids in their passions? A mediocre mom who can never live up to her own expectations of good enough, let alone yours.
What if I embrace my limitations and stop railing against them? Make peace with who I am and what I need and honor your right to do the same. Accept that all I want is a small, slow, simple life. A mediocre life. A beautiful, quiet, gentle life.
I think it is enough.
*Note — This article was originally published at A Life in Progress.

The kids said

Luke was talking to me before lunch, " Daddy likes guns, Hunter likes guns, Caroline likes guns, Dukie likes guns, Mommy likes books!"


Caroline, "Mama, when can we go to the Sleep store?"
After a few questions I realized she was asking about staying in a motel!

I was taking the kids' temps one day and Caroline was like, "Mama, you're just like a doctor!"

While eating dinner John accidentally dropped some food in my water. Caroline spoke up before anyone else could, "Don't worry, Daddy. Mama forgives you."

Caroline has been very into the Bible story of Daniel lately. This morning she asked, "How come you don't throw me in the lion's den when I do something bad?"
John, "Well we really don't want you to be eaten by lions, Caroline. AND we don't have a lion's den."
Caroline, "Oh, ok."

If anyone in our home is feeling sick, or got hurt in some way, Luke asks the hurting person if he can get them a stuffed animal bear to hold. It comforts him, so why not share the love? 💙 😊

Hunter was complaining about slow internet and John told him he should have tried using dial up like we did when we were young.
Hunter, "What's dial up?"

The moment when your children are arguing over which one of them gets to marry you. I had to break the news that I was already taken :-). I explained to Caroline that if she is going to get married, God already has a special man picked out for her.
Caroline, "Oh, it will be a surprise? Like a birthday present?"
I suppose it will :-)

laughter

Lol, John posted this on my facebook.

No man is poor who has a godly mother.

Encouragement for Christian moms to press on and hold fast.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Empathy

This little guy is all boy, and such a combination of John and my personalities. It's amazing sometimes how much of myself I see in the kids! He loves his guns and his tools, but he also needs some quiet down time just like me. Not a day goes by where he doesn't ask for a guggle (snuggle) in the rocking chair with me. He loves to make people laugh, has a very quick temper, and has a tender, empathetic heart at times. The poor baby was in tears last night over the scene in Lady and the Tramp where Lady is supposed to sleep alone in a dark room. I love how he notices and cares when others are sad.....and I love our little boy! 💙

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The Invincibility of Faith


 This sermon was really good and helpful and I wish all my younger siblings could listen to it. What mainly struck me was when he talked about needing Christ alone for our justification before God. We aren't saved because we read lots of good books, have tons of knowledge, or because we have more knowledge, or seemingly live a more perfect outward life than others. I grew up with so much of an emphasis on works, and if someone's works weren't good enough than they were cut off from fellowship. Even family members. To clarify my thoughts though, living a godly, holy life, trying to please the Lord is a wonderful goal to have. Reading the Bible and good books, learning more about Jesus, is an excellent way to spend our time. But we are unable to do any of those things perfectly and we can not place any hope in them. Our hope is found in Christ alone. I'm thankful to have a pastor who reaches us the gospel every week, and so thankful that the Lord has saved me!

" But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
 Isaiah 64:6

Believe the best

Recently I read a blog post on marriage and this one section in it really stood out for me. A month later I'm still thinking about and wanting to do better at living it.

"[Charity] Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."
1 Corinthians 13:7


"Assume goodwill.

If you are in a good intentions marriage and none of the 4 A’s (abuse, abandonment, addiction, and adultery) are present, then you can and should assume the best about your husband.
We all make mistakes in how we present things, say things, do things. But if you can take a step back and assume that he meant to do it as a good thing and didn’t intentionally make a mistake and certainly didn’t mess up AT you, things diffuse a lot more quickly.
I ran our car battery dead yesterday. We have a fickle headlight system and I left a door open. My husband knew I didn’t run the battery dead on purpose or to make his life harder. He just pulled his car up and jumped it. No yelling. No passive aggressive down talk. Just fixing the problem. Because we all make mistakes.
Imagine how differently that interaction would go if he didn’t assume good things about me and instead assumed I was trying to make his life hard or that I messed up on purpose?"

Understanding love

This post popped up in my newsfeed this morning and it kind of made me almost cry a little because I wish I had been taught this when I was growing up. I've seen too much hurt and pain caused by people forgetting to teach and practice God's love and grace.Though many folks would say they believe we are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, what they show is that is that your acceptance and worth are found in your works alone. If your works aren't good enough for their standards then they cut you off. Even parents to children. I could write a long post filled with examples, but who wants to get that depressed? So I pray that we all learn what it means to love one another and to be able to see the love of God. I'm posting for my own reference.

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." 
1 Corinthians 13:1-3

"If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also."
1 John 4:20-21



Calvinists, We Need to Talk


Alright, I need to talk to the Calvinists out there. Stop with the John Piper memes for five minutes and gather ’round; it’s time for a family discussion.
Like you, I came to Calvinism by the mercy and grace of God. I’m one of you. I named one of my daughters Piper. I named another of my daughters Haddon (I don’t have to explain the reference, because we’re all Calvinists here). I wrote a children’s book on Arminians giving us nightmares. I wrote another book that explains the Doctrines of Grace to skeptics. I collaborated a Baptist Catechism using the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Rarely is there an article written about me – either positive or negative – that doesn’t put “Calvinist” right in front of my name, as though my parents named me that.
If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in their theology, I have more: Monergist by way of Spurgeon, of the people known as Reformed Baptists, of the tribe of the infralapsarians, a Calvinist of Calvinists; in regard to the gifts, a cessationist; as for zeal, running a polemics ministry; as for Reformed orthodoxy, flawless.
You get the point.
Like you, I speak of becoming a Calvinist like a born-again (but not quite) experience. It did change my life. Understanding the sovereignty of God over salvation gave me – for the first time – genuine awe and appreciation to God for his unmerited favor. For the first time, worship felt like a privilege and not a duty. God was big. God became (in my sight, as in reality) beautiful. The heavens opened, and angels descended from above singing a Getty’s album.
Again, you get the point.
My goal in preaching is to make God “bigger” for the hearer, and every time a church member moves away I tell them that my prayer is that they see God “bigger” (more powerful, more sovereign, more majestic, more beautiful, more God-like) than when they came. Calvinism is at the core of that preaching ministry. Don’t get me wrong. I preach expositionally, but the doctrines that most unfortunately go by the name of a sixteenth century Reformer are bled out all over the Biblical text, and there’s no avoiding them.
In one way or another, every sermon I preach is touched by the Sovereignty of God, the Providence of God’s micromanaging control over all creation, God’s decreed and hidden will, and the purposes of God’s election. If you listen to my podcast, radio program, or read anything I write, you know that to me, Calvinism is more than Reformed Thug Life memes, beard jokes, and a disturbing interest in dusty old books. It’s a way of life, the air I breathe, and so much more.
That being said…
Over the course of the last several years, I have grown increasingly disturbed at the amount of Bible-toting, Calvin-quoting, Spurgeon-reading, Bible Logos Reformed Platinum Edition-owning five-point, fire-breathing Calvinists who seem to exhibit no understanding of God’s grace outside of their (astute and true) soteriological system. While their theology seems to be stellar, their inability to apply grace to their personal relationships, church family and friends indicates that perhaps they don’t understand grace as much as their egos testify. The reality that a great deal of professing Calvinists are graceless to those around them – which is one that I am not alone in noticing – bears witness that a Calvinism that is inch deep is no better than no Calvinism at all.
I have spent a year teaching Calvinists in home Bible studies, and while they soaked in soteriological grace like rain on parched desert soil, I watched them go on to treat church family like the second coming of Judas Priest for a perceived infraction of some imaginary and self-contrived rule of deluded expectation. I have seen Calvinist brethren, near and dear and close to me, completely ignore the instructions of our Lord in Matthew 18 and sling slander like a sickle slaying wheat, and do so with unconquerable self-righteousness, assuming their trail through the swamp of gossip to be the high-road of virtue. I have seen Christians who could recite the Five Solas and propound propitiation who are unable to distinguish between sins and their personal opinion, and who treated the Bride of Christ as an object of their scorn rather than adoration. I have heard five point Calvinists (is there any other kind?) in the last year say – and I kid you not – that someone didn’t “deserve” their grace. Maranatha.
To be candid with you, if I wasn’t already fully and theologically convinced by a preponderance of Biblical evidence that the Doctrines of Grace were irrefutably true, I’d take one look around at my recent past interactions and run as far away from Calvinists as I could possibly get. For being a bunch of doctrinal smarty pants, we sure seem to lack the understanding of how grace works outside of salvation.
Perhaps, we Calvinist teachers are the problem. The thesis is worth evaluating.
When we do the job of Biblical polemics that each and every single pastor and teacher has to do to be Biblical (granted, we don’t all need polemics parachurch ministries, but we all need a dose of polemics in our teaching and preaching), and we talk about heretics like Joel Osteen or Joyce Meyer, do we clarify that’s our posture toward those who we are warned about in Romans 16:17 and that we should never ever ever ever have the “mark those” posture towards good-hearted brethren with whom we have minor disagreements?
Are we so busy clarifying that regeneration precedes faith and faith doesn’t precede regeneration that we don’t take the time to point out that we’ll be known by our love one for another (John 13:35) and not by the order of our Ordo Salutis?
When we teach doctrines like Total Depravity and Unconditional Election, are we making sure to specify that these truths have implications for our personal relationships? Are we taking a break from soteriology (gasp!) just long enough to point out that we are all sinners and unworthy of God’s grace, and that reality should inform our interactions?
Are we teaching people that God’s grace is provided out of the wellspring of God’s love, and that love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things (1 Corinthians 13:7)?
Are we teaching people that the love that we are to have for other people must be a mirror of the type of love that God has for us (John 13:34)? Are we clarifying that people are not disposable, friendships are not recyclable goods, and that church family shouldn’t be traded like a peace pipe at a powwow?
Let me speak from the heart, here. A Calvinism that doesn’t demonstrate and exude a long-suffering, ever-patient, sacrificial, indomitable love for others is a worthless and steaming pile of pointless, fetid σκύβαλον (surveys show 9 in 10 Calvinist know that word in Greek). How on Earth does one understand the impossibly-expansive depths of God’s gracious love for the sinner and not apply that love to other sinners?
If we Calvinists really understand the Gospel as much as we think, then we have got to understand that a Gospel which can restore a wretched sinner and a Holy God can surely restore two wretched sinners. If our Gospel can’t restore sinners together, then we might as well be preaching some kind of Arminian, heart’s door-knocking, Pascal’s Wager faux-gospel. For crying out loud, if we Calvinists don’t start cleaning up our act and learn to apply our soteriology to our lifestyle and relationships, we need to close down shop and head back to Geneva for re-education.
As much as every-head-bowed and every-eye-closed altar calls annoy me, I would rather worship with Arminians who understand the horizontal application of the love of God than many Calvinists I know. And truth be told, if Arminians are better at the horizontal application of the love of God than Calvinists, they understand Calvinism better than we do.