Hoping
 

Last week it snowed here, in the middle of April, and I woke up feeling quite grumpy about it. I couldn't wallow in my self-imposed misery for too long though, as Alicia and Princess were jumping around shouting out, "Look Mommy! It's JESUS! It's JESUS!" as they pointed to the fat snowflakes littering our green lawn. "What are you talking about girls?" Alicia elaborated, "Remember how Jesus said He would wash away our sins and make them white as snow? Well when we see snow we remember that!" My children homeschool me everyday.

The doctor told me last week was my last to travel during this pregnancy, so my dad came down to bring me up to the Twin Cities to see my sister who just arrived from Venezuela. (I must be becoming less of a rebel, because when I was pregnant with Solomon I was told not to travel and I flew to Brad's brother's wedding in Arizona anyway where it stayed above 110 degrees, I hiked and fell on my rear in the Grand Canyon, and flew home and gave birth to Solomon the next day. I can relate to Gabriel who said, "Mom, why is it that when someone tells me not to do something, I feel like I want to do it all the more just to show that I can?" Of course I told him it comes from his father's side of the family…… :o)

Even though my sister is in a lot of pain, we still had the best time. When all three sisters get together we immediately regress to about the age of 12 or so. One fun game we play is the "ABC" game, where we go through the entire alphabet and pick a topic that starts with each letter and converse about it until it becomes obvious that it's time to move on to the next letter. Sometimes the topics are deep, sometimes extremely silly. We put a fun spin on it this time when we narrowed it to "A through Z embarrassing moments from childhood" and what one sister may have blocked out the other two remembered perfectly with each humiliating detail. We also did "A through Z" things we love about each other. Yes, Q is for "quirky". (the ABC game is also good for husbands/wives, and I taught it to Brad when we first married and would see couples in restaurants who had nothing to say to each other and would just stare out the window without a word. Brad and I made a pact that we would keep on touching and keep on talking so we didn't wind up like that. Although there never did seem to be a danger of either Brad or I not talking or touching…… :o)

I've been hearing a lot of ideas lately on why my sister is suffering right now and why she had to come back temporarily.

Because I am fluent in many denominational/doctrinal languages (although my accent in each is thick enough I'll never be mistaken for a native speaker) I can navigate where each person is coming from. Maybe it is God trying to teach her a big lesson…or satan is trying to ruin her……or both……or a myriad of other possibilities. I recall times when I've prayed and someone was healed……and prayed and someone died. The book of Job is a great reminder to me that a lot of times when people are suffering we just don't know why. I don't think Job and his friends ever got the "inside scoop" of what was playing out in the heavenlies during all his turmoil, and in the end they were all reduced to, "You are God, we are not, and we'll shut our mouths and trust You."

Because He is good and He is love, I can always have hope and I can always praise Him no matter what is going on:

Psalm 71: 14-15

But as for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more. My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long, though I know not its measure.

To help cheer my sister up, I made up all kinds of great endings for the story she's living in right now. Really funny, outrageous things God could orchestrate. We've come a long way from our childhood when we always leaned a little toward the tragic side of life and would end all our stories we'd make up about other people with, "And then they led lives of quiet desperation." We were nothing if not dramatic.

One true story that already happened is that on her flight home from Venezuela the girl sitting next to her starts telling her that she has tried Islam, tried Buddhism, but she just doesn't know how to tell which religion is right. So Christina had hours to share Jesus with this young Italian woman. Who knows but that God had Christina on that flight just to reach that one person?

Another story of hope (just to balance out all the stories of evil that get reported on in the news every day) is that Patience, the little Liberian girl who was on the verge of death a couple weeks ago, visited us yesterday and is already flourishing in her new home. This little girl is around 6, and weighed 15 pounds (she couldn't eat food because her esophagus was burned from a bleach- like mixture) but she is already gaining weight like crazy just from some good liquid nutrition. She is seeing the same GI doctor that Princess goes to for her Hepatitis, and we are praying she will soon be able to eat "real food." My children were so excited to meet her, and Princess remarked, "There are all kinds of Liberians in this town!"

Brad is teaching a class on Christlikeness on Monday nights in our home, and it was amazing to watch who God brought together. A young woman God just brought to our town to go though the House of Hope, a couple that knows our friends who are missionaries in Liberia and traveled with them throughout India on mission trips, a woman with bipolar, a foster family with lots of kids……it was good for me to see that God really can bring together people better than we can orchestrate something with our own reasoning. It had seemed a little risky to me at first to just have "whoever" show up, all people I had never met before. (for some reason meeting my unbelieving neighbors never feels as threatening as meeting church people I don't know)

Our two oldest boys participate a lot in the class, and I liked Gabriel's description last night of the Holy Spirit as "a small voice that tells me things that I sometimes don't want to hear."

When it was time for prayer requests Gabriel couldn't think of anything because, "Dad, I tell you and Mom what I need prayer for right away, I don't believe in holding it in and waiting until later." After class we had to spend a lot of time reassuring Sebastian that his faith was not weak just because he sometimes felt afraid to die. He really struggles (as probably many oldest children do) with carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. "I feel like I always have to do more!" is his lament, no matter how much we assure him that God isn't about performance and He is well-pleased with him just because Sebastian is His child.

We all have our issues. But we always have hope because we always have Jesus. May He be our all in all today as we live purposefully in His presence.

Love, Jenny

The humblest and the most unseen activity in the world can be the true worship of God. Work and worship literally become one. Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever; and man carries out that function when he does what God sent him into the world to do. Work well done rises like a hymn of praise to God. This means that the doctor on his rounds, the scientist in his laboratory, the teacher in his classroom, the musician at his music, the artist at his canvas, the shop assistant at his counter, the typist at her typewriter, the housewife in her kitchen -- all who are doing the work of the world as it should be done are joining in a great act of worship."   ---William Barclay