Burning Ones

Tim was telling me about a sermon by John
Piper where he briefly comments on C.S. Lewis’s The Four
Loves, explaining two of them as being different kinds of friendships.
There’s eros friendship, where the two people involved are focused on
each other (as if they were facing each other) and then there’s Philia
friendship where, instead of facing each other, they are facing a
mutual vision or purpose and running after this goal together. I feel
like this is a much more biblical model of how friendship is supposed
to be, and we need this to stand… or I need it.

I’ve come to realize that I am lacking a Philia friendship outside of
Tim. It’s not that I don’t love the friends that I have, but I’m not
running towards anything with them. The closest thing I think I’ve had
to this was when Alex & Jaclyn were here in PA and Peniel (our
ministry) was active. As I look back on it now I’m not really sure if
we ever really hammered out the details of what our common vision was,
but it is something different to say “we’re in this together” while
leading various worship events and prayer nights instead of just
attending some function.

But now it seems like that has ended (even if it is because of sheer
practicality), and I’d really like that type of friendship. Sometimes
I think I’m more “holy” for doing without, but after thinking about it
I really don’t think we are supposed to be “without” this. I read a
story about a man who went to Hell and one of the interesting things
he said was that you weren’t able to communicate to anyone. So there must
be power in unity… a source of strength that I want. Just like its
always easier to bear something when another person is bearing the
same load.

Love to hear your thoughts about this. Piper boiled down his
point to this: “The greater the shared vision, the deeper the
friendship.” Do you agree? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

I had no idea moving would be this insane! Almost all of stuff is moved in and so far the only thing that is really left undone is the living room (pictures will be coming soon!)

We sadly do not have the internet so right now I’m doing laundry at my parent’s and trying to do a few updates while I’m here.

In the past week we’ve slept at three different houses and have had a dog to watch. We took him home on Monday and although its more lonely without him and I did enjoy having him around, I can get more unpacking done.

I cannot tell you how wonderful God has been through all of this. Everything seems to be working out perfectly. Yesterday we were given an over-sized leather Lazyboy recliner (looked brand new) that fits perfectly into our living room and there’s a rumor that we might be given a really, really nice sound system with a DVD and VCR player. All of our furniture seems to be fitting “just right” with inches to spare and any fear that I had about living in Norristown in completely gone. I could not love living in our apartment any more.

So hopefully by the end of the week we’ll be all situated. Yesterday was our anniversary (two years!) and it was nice to spend in the new apartment. We’ve been taking pictures along the way but sadly our camera battery charger is still in the muck somewhere :-).

So these are the pictures of our little one from Monday. According to the ultra sound shots it looks like a girl!! Unfortunately the ultra sound shots weren’t fantastic. The lady said that usually with thinner women the babies are in odd positions because the uterus is still kinda scrunched. The baby was wrapped around this huge bump in my uterus, haha. So, it’s not a 100% guarantee that its a girl. Tim still feels like God is telling him its a boy while I feel ok about thinking its a girl. So we probably won’t fully be settled until the baby pops out. But from now on, I’m going to refer to her as “she.” If it is a girl, her name will probably be Fiery.

When this shot (above) came onto the screen it kind of freaked me out a little :-). When its all skeleton people look very unlike people.

Most importantly the baby is 100% healthy and all the measurements that they did came out great. The baby weighed 13 oz. at the time and has a heart rate in the 150s. Yay!!

Here are some other shots:

Gender Shot:

Little Hand:

Tomorrow afternoon Tim and I will be on planes to Kansas City, MO to visit Alex and Jaclyn, see some other peeps, and visit the prayer room. We have a prophecy appointment set up for Thursday night which I am über excited about.

We did have our ultra sound this morning but I will post about it Lord-willingly on Friday because we wanted to tell Alex & Jac in person. It should be a very nice vacation. Yay!

Saturday was such a busy day: in the morning we dumped over 500 lbs. of garbage at a construction dump near us. Some of it flew off the truck on the way there but we drove back and picked it it up; no worries :-).
Mainly its just trash that we’ve accumulated over the past two years and a lot of Tim’s stuff from his previous house that we never went through.

After that we headed over to our apartment. We had originally planned to only clean but we were convinced that we should paint so we used some old paint from my parent’s and pastor, and bought some. We could not be happier with the outcome. I LOVE it. Here are some before and after shots (feel free to click to enlarge):

Bedroom:

Bathroom (my mom cleaned the whole bathroom- go mom!):

Kitchen:

Living Room (the cove):

So I wanted to do an official THANK YOU!! to every one who helped: my family who without we really couldn’t have painted; Robb and the kids (Johnny, Matt, Chris & Kathleen) who did a lot of the cleaning; Daddy Don- I have never seen a more persistent painter in my life. He was amazing. And of course God. We had no idea what we were doing and even though we decided to paint last minute everything worked out perfectly.

Here are some more work photos:

Everything is happening at once! Yay! This is a HUGE answer to prayer. We’ve been praying about God moving us into Norristown since before we were married and its finally happening! We’ll be cleaning out the place on Saturday, and then moving in the last weekend in May (Lord-willingly).

Here are the cool floor plans that I drew:

From L to R: first floor, second floor (you can click on them for a larger view). It’s a 3 bedroom, 1 full bath (which is on the first floor) with two bedrooms upstairs and one of them downstairs. At this point our bedroom will be on the first floor because I don’t want to walk down stairs to get to the bathroom 3X/night in my third trimester :-).

Here are some other pictures that we took when the previous family was still living there:

From top to bottom: This is one of the bedrooms upstairs that they made into a nursery. We’ll probably do the same thing when the baby’s a little bit older.

The next picture is the right side of the kitchen.

The last picture is of an area in the living room. I’m liking the cove :-).

Did some more work on Alex and Jaclyn’s website. I basically made it fixed width.

Mazel Tov!

OK, this is my blog entry, and it’s 6 days late. Hopefully I’m going to to actually post a Second Blog entry tomorrow… I know, I know… You’re now saying to yourself, “this little blog in its little infancy already has massive problems keeping up with its blogging schedule, as both of the official bloggers missed their official blogging days this past week, so how am I supposed to trust this place anymore?” Well, the answer is that you’ve just gotta bear with us as we continue to get used to the idea of being on a schedule and such. Eventually, this place’ll run like a well-oiled machine, but until then, have a little grace and a good sense of humor, and subscribe to us via the RSS feed for easier updates checking.

So, my day today felt like a big gigantic waste of time. I am a nerd in many ways and thus I get easily sucked in to things that promise me they will save me time, especially when they are tech-heavy. That means that I spend a great deal of time using these time-saving gadgets and gizmos when I could instead be spending more time doing important things. The latest thing that has been added to this list is a wonderful little program called Shrook.

So, say hello to Shrook. It’s an RSS feed aggregator that lives on your computer and sinks with any number of RSS feeds. That means that I can subscribe to any number of websites via their RSS feeds and automatically discover if they’ve updated themselves at all since the last time I was there. That’s great, right?

Problems:

1. I’m not discriminating enough in what I choose to read.
2. I get interested in WAY to many feeds.
3. When I do bother reading them, I spend all day doing it

So, I now have this beautiful RSS feed aggregator that’s free and beautiful and easy to use that promises to save me time and effort in checking up on websites, only to turn around and make it easier for me to check 10 times as many websites and use 10 times more of my, well, time in the doing of it. Useful? I think not…

I have a few options in my approach to this. I can:

1. Become more discriminating in choosing what to read. This would involve learning to be a better inspectional reader (Thank you How to Read a Book).
2. Subscribe to way fewer RSS Feeds

At the moment, I’m probably going to go with the second option up there, as I simply cannot afford to spend the kind of time I did today reading them anymore. So, I’d rather subscribe to 10 or so high quality feeds that have content that I should be reading and attempt to choose discriminately among them, and then if I become very good, slowly begin to add more. I’m basically interested in web design information, web standards information, Christianity related information, and world news information. If you have any suggestions of websites that I should check out, feel free to leave us a note here on the blog

Moving on…

So, the title of this blog entry is “God steals my golf balls, and I love him for it!” And honestly, I’m being totally serious. Lately, I have re-taken up the sport of Golf. If you don’t consider it to be a sport, that’s tough. I think it’s a sport whether you like it or not. For Alex’s Bachelor party, we took him out golfing in the morning, and that’s where it all happened. I’ve golfed for most of my life. Well, that’s probably not totally true, we’ll say I’ve golfed since I was in around fifth grade. I really enjoy the game of golf. There’s something about it’s elegance that really intrigues me. I despise golf culture, and probably would not play on a super-high-quality-country-club-esque course simply on principle, but the fact that you get such crazy cool results from a swing that requires intricate and minute adjustments almost every time you do it is fun to me. It’s like aiming towards perfection, even though you know you’ll never get there. Ok, enough waxing.

I enjoy the game of golf, but I haven’t really played much for over a year. I’m not the kind of golfer that will for the most part attempt to play year round some how. Even though that’s possible, it’s just too expensive and too impractical and too time consuming. So, I golf throughout the summer and then the golfing bug moves into someone else brain. This year around, it came back in a big way, and it brought its family too.

Ever since Alex’s bachelor party, I have consistently been golfing almost every day. No, I don’t go out to the driving range every day but for my “breaks” I go out to the backyard at the the Biddle’s house and wack a golf ball around until a lose it. This usually takes me roughly 30 to 45 minutes, even though in my head it always takes me 10 to 15. The funny part is, as I’ve been attempting to go deeper still with God, I’ve been loosing golf balls very quickly, and only when I know that I’m not supposed to be out playing golf at that time.

Has that ever happened to you? You’re on your way to doing something and you haven’t bothered to ask God about it and suddenly you feel in your spirit, “this is totally not what I’m supposed to be doing right now.” That happens to me sometimes, not often, but it does happen to me. And lately the most often time that it has been happening is when I go to play golf. However, I’m a stubborn oaf and I say to myself, “OK God, I’ll only hit the golf ball up the yard and back and then I’ll stop. Thanks for the tip though.” Hopefully, as you read that statement, your face kind of cringed up like you were watching an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos, because it’s a pretty dumb thing to say, especially when you’re dealing with God!

Anyway, inevitably in those situations my first shot—don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that I’m some sort of super-great golfer, but I usually can hit the ball fairly straight, especially when I’m not full out swinging. And if I don’t hit the ball fairly straight, it usually just means that I topped it so it goes skipping off across the ground some where. OK, so inevitably in those situations, my first shot literally flies out of the yard every time, in ways that shouldn’t even be possible. I’m talking, I hit the ball in a way I never did before to make it go out of the yard. Or, worse yet, I hit the ball 10 feet away and walk towards it only to discover that it’s nowhere to be found. It’s really pretty incredible. And every single time, right after I lose the ball, I feel God do his little nudge thing in my spirit and say, “Would you like to go do what you’re supposed to do now?” So I go back inside with my tail between my legs and a smile on my face, knowing that God cares enough about my day to day activities that he won’t let a fun, albeit fairly useless activity such as golf ruin my day if he knows that it shouldn’t that day.

I guess the conclusion of this is that I’m really excited about where me and Jess are going with God. We’ve connected with Lou Engle (as has been previously said in a post) in a major way in our hearts and we’re thrilled that the 40 day nation-wide fast has finally started (for those of you who don’t know, it began May 28^th. It’s not to late to start!). Both of us are so sick of being so cold hearted and so out of touch with God and we want more of him. I almost did a little jig the first time it was revealed to me that God was stealing my golf balls because I realized that I had allowed him one step deeper into my life. Yes, God is sovereign, but he has given us a level of dignity and personal responsibility in our lives that is unthinkable. He will only take us as far as we want to go, and as for me and my house, we want to go all the way. So, with that being said, I think I’ll sign off for the night.

May the Lord continue to consecrate us and make us into burning hearted lovers of him!

To anyone out there who was expecting my blog yesterday or even today, I am completely unable to get to it for some reason. I’ve been working on Building Restoration, Inc.’s website as well as trying to pin down all of the final things that need pinning down with the Department of Treasury. I missed my Sabbath this week, which is when I write my blog, and have had to relocate it to either Tomorrow or Saturday. It’s probably going to have to be tomorrow simply because that’s the only day that I have no ministry event for the rest of this week.

Pray for me, dudes and dudettes!

So it’s Sunday (my “official” blogging day) and we’re on our way to our youth group’s band practice. It’s absolutely gorgeous outside :-) We had Jaclyn’s bachorlette party Friday and Saturday- we went to Six Flags. It was my first time and I thought it was a pretty impressive theme park. It’s huge! And we got some cool pictures with Bugs, Taz, and Porky the Pig :). God was really with us the whole day in little ways. The tickets, which were originally $65, we got for $30 because a rather suspicious lady approached us upon entering the park and offered to sell us her tickets. I was a little nervous at first, (especially when she pulled out 2000 tickets out from her stroller) but she offered to walk up to to the ticket place with us so I said sure and it turns out the tickets worked! Amy got her $15 lunch for free (the food distributor gave it to her and told her “you just keep that beautiful smile on, girl”) and when we were looking for a table that wasn’t covered with rain a random man approaches us and shows us where a dry table was… and it really wasn’t like he was hitting on any of us- like he really just wanted to show us where a dry table was. Things like that happened all day, which was awesome! So even though we were entertaining ourselves all day in a park where it was far from God-focused, it was cool to see God blessing us.

I had an awful morning because I’m tired of pressing on and persevering. And I was writing my dreams down and I just have no idea how to interpret them, and it’s been like that for a couple of days now, and I just didn’t want to give my morning to God so I threw my book across the room and made sure I took a shower to spite God. I feel like I have three things I could do… I could go back to what I used to do and waste my day watching TV, working on scrapbooks, cleaning… just doing things that might be ok but don’t really profit me anything, or, option number two, I could sit around all day and worry about my relationship with God but not do anything about it (which is what I feel like I’m doing right now) or, my third option, I could press on and keep running. I think I’ll do that because it’s really the only one that leads to life, even though all three options are just as frustrating and I hate it. I’m wondering when the good will come. I feel like I must “put up with God” and He’ll give me something. “Look, God! I spent TWO hours muddling and thinking about these Scriptures… I think I’ve earned my cool, prophetic word now” isn’t that awful? I’m trying to break free of that mindset. I have to remind myself that God can’t love me anymore than He does and He’ll usually give me more when I don’t deserve it in spite of myself. Grrr.

I want so badly to be the John the Baptist and I want it to happen yesterday (I think I could settle for today though, hehe). I want to burn with God Himself inside of me. I want the fullness of God and I feel like I have this huge boulder of pride in front of me. I’ve been told to speak to it so that’s what I’m trying to do but it just seems like its taking forever. But I’ll keep pressing on because I really don’t have a choice if I want to live, and I’m fine with that :-). I know that God isn’t some scary bear but a loving Father who loves me with an everlasting love. And I’m not doing Him any “favors” by putting “up” with Him, I just need Him and He upholds me by the power of His Word.

…6-7 hours have passed…

I don’t need to feel condemned! Jesus was condemned for me! YAY! God is good! I just listened to a message by John Piper that God DEFINITELY led me to listen in an answer to my prayer and tears :-) Now I’ll put this up on the site.