Sam and Caitlyn in Africa

With their permission, I am delighted to share a few pictures of Sam and Caitlyn's trip to Africa. Caitlyn's older sister has lived there in Africa as missionary with her husband and now four children. I believe they have started at least four churches. Sam partly credits them with how he ended up getting together with Caitlyn, even though he had already met Caitlyn at the church he attended in Kiowa. 

About two and a half years ago, Sam volunteered to join a medical missions team that went over to spend time visiting villages that Caitlyn's sister and husband were involved in. Josh and Megan and especially their four children came to really like Sam, and Megan began letting Caitlyn know in no uncertain terms that she needed to get to know Sam. At the same time, Sam learned a lot from Megan about her family back there in Colorado who had lived not all that far from our Lucas family on the eastern prairie. So many similarities, he discovered! His curiosity was piqued.

Well, two and a half years later, Sam has not only married Megan's sister but is returning to Africa with her and their new baby, Charlie! I can't get over how very happy Sam looks in the pictures. He is so proud of his dear wife and now his very own son! And I, the mom, find it still hard to comprehend that my son is actually finally married and has a little boy of his own!

In these pictures, the little boy belongs to Megan and just loves to watch "Uncle Sam" working. 

He tries to "help" of course, and just wants to be in on everything. I love how my children let little children be included in their lives and work. 

Megan had prepared the boards for this "barn door" style sliding closet door, and Sam got busy the first day they were there putting the doors together and helping Josh hang them. 

So pretty! It's such a blessing to be able to help missionaries with things they have had on a back burner, things that will lift their load and make life nicer for them. Sam helped Josh hang drywall for another closet as well. 

Here are some other pictures they shared of visiting a fire station there!

I'm sure Sam found the local fire station very interesting!

Quite different from America!

The two families together. What a joy it is for me to see a son willing to take his wife and go help missions clear across the world. It's an extra blessing that the missionaries are family!

They got to visit famous falls. 

And little Charlie, they said, did so well all through the long journey across the ocean both ways. People raved about him as he slept most of the time and smiled at people much of the rest of the time. 

And he got to be in sight of the Statue of Liberty at just a few months old--when Sam and Caitlyn and he had some time between flights to enjoy the sight of the great statue that has meant so very much to so many people. 

"I'm Going to Try to Live by That," He Said

"Did you tell Mom about the call you got yesterday from [a rancher friend]?" Jonathan asked Danny this morning. 

"No," Danny said, as I turned around from where I was putting his lunch sandwich together. His face had broken into a huge smile. I knew something was up.  

The rancher friend, who had listened to Danny's message from Micah 6:8 Sunday morning, had called him yesterday to ask Danny to remind him what his three points were. They had come straight from the Scripture. 
"What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Rancher friend also asked where that Scripture was found. 

"I'm going to try to live by that," the rancher said.

That is what brought a big smile to more than Danny's face, but also to Jonathan's and mine. 

And I feel quite sure,

God's face. 

This rancher friend is simple and sincere in his desire and decisions to honor God. Coming alone to church of all his family, he has tried to make it each Sunday ever since he had a stroke about 8 or 9 years ago and nearly died. Our pastor's wife was on the ambulance crew at that time, and our rancher friend gratefully and publicly credits her with saving his life. 

Since then, he has been more and more concerned about what God wants of him.  It has been a delight to know him, and to know that God is moving not only on the native reservations here but in the prairie fields and valleys of the South Dakota ranchlands. 

Busy with bulls, branding, and baling hay (pray that his hay that has been lying damp for two weeks will dry out and be able to be baled and used) he still prioritizes showing up at church, supporting it financially, and eagerly fellowshipping with the church folk at the carry-in meal after service. He sits right down across from native people with zero concern what color of skin or ethnicity and just visits and enjoys hearing about others' lives. 

"I'm going to try to live by that," he said of this little Scripture in a very small book of the Bible, but I think God loves people like this rancher friend from way back in the boonies of South Dakota. 

Our RV Upright Again!

Saturday Jonathan and Danny tackled trying to right the blown-over RV. They had thought and thought, planned and figured. 

They bought a winch which they connected to the front of the mission truck and they bought pulleys.

Danny single-handedly raised each of two thick, long, heavy beams which they strapped to the axles, hoping they would stay in place so the skid steer could catch them as the trailer was winched upright--at least if all went according to plan. 

No one knew, of course, quite how it would go. I was imagining a grand failure, a crunched or tipped RV, or any sort of disaster. However, as the winch worked and the RV began to rise up from being on its side, I cheered from the house deck. I was thanking Jesus over and over as we watched that RV come up perfectly!

The skid steer caught the beams just as it was supposed to, and the RV thudded into place. I found myself running over there to cheer and brag on my men. Danny opened the door of the RV where a rug, blankets, and other paraphernalia were piled against it. I started handing out the big bag of sheets and making my way inside after Danny. 

To our amazement, not a single window was broken. The glass door to the microwave was shattered, and the collapsible counter next to the sink had broken. The main table was upside down and seat cushions and blankets and sheets were all over, but otherwise, nearly everything in the main area and bedroom of the RV was intact. Because of the pile of items in the way, I could not reach the slide-out bedroom in the back, which is probably the part most damaged--except for the steps up to the door which are dreadfully messed up. Still, we are very grateful that with a little fix-up, this RV is probably still usable for overflow company. 

Thank You, Lord!

One more step in the direction of fixing the many things gone wrong in our lives right now!

The 

David, Goliath, and Mozzarella Cheese

About a week and a half ago, Hannah tried her hand at making mozzarella cheese--and it turned out really well!

Our making of cheese from our goat milk made an article I read a couple days ago more pertinent. It was talking about how the story of David and Goliath really started, not with David's bravado, but with cheese. 

"I feel like we have done David and Goliath a slight disservice by leaving out one extremely important detail when we tell this story--" the author wrote, "--the cheese."

It said how David did not wake up that morning and think, “Seems like a good day to fight a giant.” He was tending his father’s sheep when his father interrupted his day by asking him to do a grocery delivery, including taking ten cheeses to the captain of the army. David simply did what his father asked him to do.

He took the cheese.

I don't know if it was a hunk of soft goat cheese like I normally make, or if it was mozzarella cheese, or just hunks of curds like cottage cheese, whatever they made in those days. But David set off, doing the thing his father had asked him to do. 

Upon arriving at the battlefield, David discovered the giant--and the cheeses he had delivered were quite forgotten. 

"Imagine spending forty days challenging an entire army," the author wrote of the giant, "and eventually somebody says, 'Fine. We found someone,' and out walks the teenager who arrived earlier with the cheese."

David didn't know the rest of the story when he left home that morning, the article said. As far as he knew, he was just delivering cheese. 

"We spend so much time looking for the enormous thing God wants us to do that sometimes we underestimate the ordinary thing He has already put in front of us. We want the calling written across the sky. We want God to explain where this road is going before we agree to walk it. We want to know why we are at this job, why we met this person, why plans changed, why we are being asked to do something that seems completely insignificant, and how any of it could possibly matter. 

Meanwhile, sometimes God just says, take the cheese."

God wants us to "do the ordinary thing in front of you. Be faithful where you are. Show up. Take care of what He has already given you. You may have absolutely no idea what God is positioning you for while you are doing it."

"David didn't leave home looking for Goliath. He left home carrying ten cheeses. The giant was waiting at the end of an ordinary act of obedience."

"Maybe that is something we need to remember when life feels painfully ordinary. You do not have to see the battlefield from where you are standing" or "understand why this particular assignment matters. You do not have to know what God is doing three steps from now.

You just have to be faithful with the step He put in front of you. Sometimes that step looks like facing a giant. And sometimes it looks like carrying the cheese." 

For me, it looks like making the cheese, about three times a week, even on a Saturday afternoon or a Monday morning like today.

But it's a blessing to have it, such as today when goat cheese was one thing I could eat with cucumber since my mouth ulcers are so bad I couldn't bear to eat much of anything. 

I could make cheese, eat cheese, and share cheese with our friends who stop by weekly for milk. I shared milk and goat cheese, and they shared beets and onions from their garden.

No giants today, just ordinary cheese!

"I Feel Free!" and His Face Glowed

Yesterday's afternoon service at Martin Lakota Chapel was crowned with the salvation of a drunk!

The service concluded the weekend revival services with Larry Poe speaking. The revival had been short and sweet--and blessed. John Bush, lay pastor of the church there, had been worried about the song leading, so Jonathan had offered to help with that. Since there were no singers, we asked if the Bushes would like our family to have some special songs. They said yes. Crystal practiced lots of arrangements for the preludes, and she and Hannah provided piano duets for offertories. Our family spent several evenings practicing various songs including "Jesus Is All I Need/In Times Like These," "Springs of Living Water," and "Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet."

At the last minute, Josh Hooper from Montana had felt strongly drawn to travel all this way to attend. He brought his guitar and Keith Lavery (fill-in pastor) asked him to also contribute a special song each evening which he did. His singing was anointed. When I die, (although Rose told me 3 years ago that I wasn't nearly dead yet), if we are still part of SIM, I would like Josh Hooper to sing something at my wake or funeral. 

Just letting everyone know five or ten or twenty years ahead of time. 

More people attended than I expected--including a somewhat inebriated man who had responded to Larry Poe's Prayer Station in the middle of town earlier in the day. He came to service and during testimony time kept getting up to say how glad he was to be in church. He said he hadn't been in church since something having to do with his mother. "It feels good," he said. "It feels as if I belong."

The leadership up front assured him he did belong.

At the end of the evangelistic service based on John 3, the man went forward to pray and ask for forgiveness of his sins. A good group of believers gathered around to pray with and for him. Before long, his face was upturned, glowing. 

"I feel free!" he said. 

"I feel free!" he kept repeating, rising, and swinging his arms over and over again as if they had been chained. 

What rejoicing!

The Pine Ridge man in the blue plaid shirt in the photo above (he's hiding Jonathan in the photo) had testified earlier, too. Jonathan told me he had never heard him testify before. This man was in tears, saying how the services had helped him and it meant so much to him to feel that God loved him/them and that people cared. 

What the different missionaries had done to come and boost as well as others coming in was a huge encouragement to the people there, we believe. But most of all, God's presence was there. 

One thing I found amazing was Saturday evening when Larry Poe's text was Psalm 34, especially the verse, "O taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him."

I couldn't help thinking back only an hour and a half earlier when Crystal and I had been on our way to Martin, and we were praying together for the service, for us, for the community. 

"Help the people of this community to taste and see that You are good!" I had prayed. 

And then there was this text!

It felt as if the Holy Spirit had not only inspired the speaker, but even the prayer that had happened ahead of time, me completely unaware of the text. 

And I am not sharing this so anyone will think I am some sort of super spiritual person, but just because it is part of the story of the weekend that encouraged me with the 

reality of God in our lives. 

And I absolutely love Psalm 34. 

A Slice of Hawaii, the Navy, and My Uncle Jack

 A couple Saturdays ago, we'd been invited to the 80th birthday party of the mother of the pastor of the Nazarene church up the hill. It was a chance to connect with quite a number of neighbors and acquaintances, even some folk all the way from Pierre.

 I had just been reading a book about Rev. Rowan Fay, a pastor and hero in our ranks, who was and still is always encouraging people to reach out and connect with others in order to help them come to Christ or to encourage them in their walk with God. He would find every way possible to reach people, even though in his younger years he was not a people person. Rowan prays every day that God will help him to love God and love people, and when you love people, you do not avoid them; you try to connect with them. 

So we went. The party revolved around a colorful Hawaiian theme, decorated with real coconuts and other bright decor. A person could have his choice of coconut drink or pineapple. (I chose coconut because I love coconut and can't eat pineapple.) Besides pulled pork sandwiches, servers supplied lightly grilled shrimp and pineapple kabobs, coleslaw and chips. 

I sat with a native lady on one side of me and a neighbor on the other who broached the subject of Hawaii. She started telling us how her dad was a navy man during the war, and he was personally involved in the trainings and practice related to the A-bomb, as our neighbor called it. He was one of two men in 1946 who were involved in operating the Geiger machine that measured radiation out in the middle of the ocean during practice called Operation Crossroads. Tests were set off in the Marshall Islands to study the effects of nuclear bombs on naval ships. 

Back in those days, they did not know how dangerous the radiation from the bomb was. Her father was just told that when they saw the mushroom cloud, to just duck down behind the rail of the ship or whatever they were in. Later in life, her dad ended up with skin cancers that had to be removed from several places on his face and even in his throat from the radiation. 

I wrote up our neighbor's interesting stories of her dad for my uncle Jack who was also in the Navy long years ago. He has just passed his 91st birthday but is fighting renal cancer and my thoughts are often with him and his family. 

I have mostly only positive  memories of this special uncle who took time with me and my siblings through the years--taking us when we were little for rides in a wagon behind his riding mower (without mowing, of course), taking us as teens for boat rides in his boat in Florida, and showing my own Lucas family around his place in Florida about 13 years ago where we got to pick grapefruit from his own tree.

Please pray for my uncle Jack and his family as they navigate these days of stormy water, as it were.

I sent him the hymn, "Jesus, Savior Pilot Me," in the hopes it would be a blessing to him as a former Navy man. 

Jesus, Savior, pilot me,
Over life’s tempestuous sea;
Unknown waves before me roll,
Hiding rock and treach’rous shoal;
Chart and compass come from Thee:
Jesus, Savior, pilot me!

As a mother stills her child,
Thou canst hush the ocean wild;
Boist’rous waves obey Thy will
When Thou say’st to them, “Be still!”
Wondrous Sov’reign of the sea,
Jesus, Savior, pilot me!

When at last I near the shore,
And the fearful breakers roar
’Twixt me and the peaceful rest,
Then, while leaning on Thy breast,
May I hear Thee say to me,
“Fear not, I will pilot thee!”

"The hymn text “Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me” was written in 1871 by Edward Hopper (1818–1888), pastor of the Church of Sea and Land in New York Harbor. Hopper ministered to sailors coming and going, many of whom became lost at sea; his was thus a transient congregation, and one well acquainted with grief and uncertainty.

This is the only hymn of Hopper’s to have survived. It uses nautical imagery to speak of how Christ guides us through life’s stormy waters, all the way safe to the other shore, heaven. It is a petitionary hymn that beseeches Jesus to be present and active, but it is also a hymn of consolation."

(the above song and comments are from https://artandtheology.org/2022/07/26/jesus-savior-pilot-me-three-tunes-multiple-stylings/

All My Bones Intact

I am sitting down just now, trying to recuperate from a very-near-fall about an hour ago. 

Home from two days away with medical appointments in Sioux Falls for Jonathan, I was carrying a big basket of laundry outside to hang and thoughtlessly decided to pick up the dog's dish of scrap food to set outside the door all at the same time. 

Well, this did not create good balance, and as I moved sideways out the door, my foot caught on something and I very nearly fell on my shoulder--except that I didn't. 

Just barely did not, but the whiplash of catching myself 

pulled things in more than one place inside this body of mine and left me almost crying and yet thanking God out loud all at the same that I didn't actually fall and break something. 

I had just been meditating on the last few verses of Psalm 34 earlier.

And the verse, "He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken," had stood out to me. 

I had asked God to please allow Jonathan and me, through the medical issues we both are dealing with right now, to "keep all our bones." Within an hour, God answered that prayer--and I still have all my bones intact!

Other things may not be quite so intact--muscles feel pulled, my stomach is teetering on the edge of nausea (which means I need to go make myself some lunch), and we've had one thing after another happen today, but--

when we try to listen to God and hear His voice and pray His own Word over our lives,

He listens, and He does exactly what He promises!

Danny's Googly-Eye Birthday

Here I am between medical appointments for Jonathan this time, with my old laptop set up to send email updates to family and maybe blog a little. 

Last weekend we celebrated Danny's birthday. 

Crystal made the BEST EVER blueberry tapioca cream pie (sweetening the berries with stevia and the cream part with agave nectar) and we had spur-of-the- moment guests. 

True to form, Danny drew googly eyes in the condensation on the plastic pie cover. 

It must have been a premonition about the Googly Eyes game we gifted him that I'd picked up recently at a Goodwill for just 99 cents! Danny also liked the shirts, but especially the FOOD!

"Food!" he cooed ecstatically as he reached into one gift bag after another, finding special treats like dried mango, his favorite.

Hannah's favorite of Danny's gifts was this book I got for some cents at another Goodwill, called How to Live With Your Parents! It looked hilarious, but also food for thought. 

A few days earlier Jonathan and I chose some various scrap metal at the home of a friend who let us go through some of the junk in the shed so we could gift some unique junk to Danny, who is making all sorts of scrap metal crafts. He was pretty tickled for everything from a motor part to old spark plugs to a bicycle wheel. We also gave him a roll of welding rod for the projects he welds. 

A gift I give my son daily and not just on his birthday is the gift of meals made with love. He has been struggling to figure out how not to feel sickish in the morning, and what foods work the best for him especially in the morning--whether proteins or fruit or granola, etc. He finds that eating later in the morning works better, so I boil eggs to make deviled eggs to send for morning snack. These egg yolks were so bright yellow I just had to take a picture of them! 

How we do love and appreciate our son Danny!

Horse Mosaic from Scrap--Glorifying God with His Gifts

Last Thursday after my infusion at the cancer center, Jonathan and I took a closer look at a horse mosaic outside the entrance. 

This beautiful work of art had been created from scrap metal--from the stand made from a wheel to the nose made from bent spoons!

We looked it over from side to side. 

I can't even imagine what it would be like to have talent like that. 

A friend sent us more pictures of these scrap metal mosaics made by the same man. 

Here is another sculpture with a cowboy on the horse! I am in awe of such imagination and skill. 

This mosaic was made by the same man who teaches others, and his students made the leaves for this "tree."

It seems everyone has his own gift, some this and some that. While getting my infusion, I read this article in a Country magazine of a man who hand paints woodpeckers for people to attach to trees to bring a splash of all-season color to their properties. He has made thousands of these, all painted by hand. 

Hannah uses her skill with flower gardening to bring a beautiful late summer bouquet of marigolds and daisies to church. 

Another's gift may be the gift of humor, such as the lady at the cancer center check-in desk who usually has fresh plaques or some kind of humorous decor at her desk. She also has pictures children or friends have drawn with Christian notes on them, which makes me think she must be a believer. 

The lady who hosted Jonathan and me a week and a half ago on our way to Jonathan's surgery had the imagination and vision to turn an over 100-year-old, dilapidated house into a beautiful air BnB. 

Whatever gift God gives us, may we use it for His honor and glory. We may think all we have is scrap metal or lemons to offer God. 

We may think we are damaged goods or too weak with disease or pain to be any good.

But God loves to take scraps and junk and worn out things to still make something amazing.

May we just let Him do with us as best pleases Him!