"Under His Wings"--and Jonathan's Birthday

A few weeks ago we celebrated Jonathan's birthday. I asked Crystal to decorate the table, and she did!

 We had Jonathan's parents out.

The birthday person gets to choose their favorite Scripture and hymn, so Jonathan chose "Under His Wings" for the hymn.

 I couldn't help snapping a photo of the puppy in Rose's arms while we were singing.

"Under His wings I am safely abiding, 

Though the night deepens and tempests are wild, 

Still I can trust Him, I know He will keep me; 

He has redeemed me, and I am His child.

 Under His wings, under His wings,

Who from His love can sever?

Under His wings, my soul shall abide,

Safely abide forever."

****

 While in South Dakota a couple weeks ago, I asked a missionary mother of eight children if the native Americans could improve their lives if they chose to. "It's difficult," the lady said, "when they have no incentive. They ask me, 'Don't you go to the post office every month and get a check?' I tell them, 'No, I have to work for the money I get!" Men do not have any concept of working for their pay, or of providing for their families.

Jonathan does. 

He works for his pay.

 This is just one of the jobs he is working on.

 The back of the house Jonathan and his crews built from scratch. 

I was over there a few months ago in Black Forest, helping to drag burnt tree logs and branches to load onto a trailer. (This house is being built where the Black Forest Fire burned several years ago.)

Here Jonathan's guys are siding the new house. 

Jonathan works for his pay, and I stay home most of the time so I won't spend unnecessary money.

(Plus right now I am writing books to not only have a writing ministry but to try to help out our finances, but it will take months to actually make a profit.)

Though every once in a while I will splurge, like yesterday, after a payment came to Jonathan, 

and will buy jalapenos and bacon for him, and organic BBQ corn chips marked down, and good lettuce and cilantro and an avocado, and butter and cream cheese, 

spending all of $38 to celebrate a payment coming in sooner than we expected!

God is good!

 

A Mother's "Mansion"

Mother's Day was a happy day for me. The whole family was together for all three meals, and we spent the evening with Jonathan's parents. Grandpa took this photo in their backyard, with an aspen and a little windmill behind us, in between us and the city scene. To the right in the lower corner, you can see Grandma's rhubarb coming up in her garden.

We had taken supper in for us all, and Grandma added fruit slices. 

Sunday morning after service, friends had brought this bag of fresh cut rhubarb, which they urged me to take. They have more than they need, and I didn't have to be urged twice to take the rhubarb. We turned it into two desserts this week. How I love fresh, homegrown food!

For my devotions that day, I read through this little book Mom gave me for my birthday, Fresh Cut Flowers for Mother.  

There's nothing happier for a mom than to be loved by her family, and to spend life with her family loving others. 

Life for me is not about having a spotless home or a perfect family, just as long as love is there, and forgiveness when we mess up, and lots of love all year long and not just on birthdays,

[like Carrie's, who wanted homemade pizza and icecream cake (since it was the tenth anniversary since she invited our friends the Goodwins to her 12th birthday and had an ice cream cake and pizza!)]

This evening I was really wiped out after a big day, including helping lug fencing down to a spot where our neighbors' steers keep jumping the fence and getting into our pasture. A couple children and I put up that piece of fencing and wired up several spots where fence was coming apart. It just wasn't something I was really strong enough to do, and though I kept going most of the day, I ended up crashing this evening--hence a new blog post, since I often blog when I'm too worn out to do anything else! 

 But anyway, Hannah noticed me just wiped out on the recliner, too weak to even sit at the computer in the office. She came over, sat down on the arm of the recliner, and put her arm around me.

"I love you," she said, patting my shoulder. 

"I love you, too!" I told her, patting her arm back.  

I hope my children won't "grow out of" loving their mother, or that I won't stop loving them. 

I hope it won't just be on birthdays that we love one another--but always.

When I was in South Dakota,  a missionary mother of eight children told me about how one native girl asked where she lived.

 "When I told her," the lady said, "the girl said, 'Oh, you live in that mansion!' Our home is two-story, and we don't have junk lying around. And inside the house I keep it clean. I cook food, and there is love there. They think we live in a mansion!"

Yes, where love is, the house is a mansion! Yesterday, our family got to share our little "mansion" with another Christian family. With five young children of their own and one adopted, they are one busy family. The military dad works in rather high circles regarding intelligence. Both parents have been in several countries around the world, and have a real heart for reaching out as Christians. We loved getting to know them better, and they envied our 5 acres and animals. The children got to pet kittens, puppies, and a new calf. 

 

They got to help gather eggs and gather chicks! They got to enjoy our daughter's birthday party, and join in our little family worship. "We've tried to do family worship," the dad admitted, "and it just falls apart!" We encouraged them to just do a few minutes but consistently.

Just a loving home literally is an amazing outreach. This family home schools, and while most military families around them view them as a little weird, the children in homes around them know where to go when they are lonely or needing a little love. They know which home has the mother at home all the time, and where real food is cooked. 

Such homes are mansions!

And I have one of them!

 

Broken Eggs--When Your Mistakes Are Messy

The other day someone [we shall not say who] accidentally spilled a dozen or so eggs on the living   room floor. These eggs were supposed to go to a customer. Instead, they ended up on the floor!

 

Crystal and Rose industriously set about cleaning up the mess. 

And it was a mess.  

Some of those eggs simply could not be sold now. Others that had ended up on the floor had to be thrown to the dogs.

 I got the worst broken eggs into a bowl. And Crystal and Rose cleaned up the slimy egg innards off the rug, which doesn't look any worse for the wear, since many other accidents have already happened on this same 20-year-old carpet.

(We are, by the way, hoping to replace the carpet before too long with a couple pieces that a carpet supplier said he could let Jonathan have for a fraction the usual cost.)

But no matter how hard we would try, we could never have those eggs all perfect and in one piece again, not even if we were masters at putting Humpty Dumpty together again!

 I was reading the beautiful one-chapter book of Philemon today. 

This little book contains not only the affectionate love of a spiritual father named Paul the Apostle, 

but it also hints strongly at the very real and obvious mess-ups of a runaway slave named Onesimus.  

Onesimus had run away. Maybe he had been a good slave before he ran away, or maybe he had kept doing a poor job and been punished and decided to run away, or perhaps he had been a bad slave to a kind master and then run away on top of his other bad behavior. Either way, he had been, according to Paul, an unprofitable person.

But now, converted under Paul's ministry, Onesimus had become profitable not only to Paul, but to Philemon, if Philemon wished to have him back. 

Either way, Paul exhorted Philimon to no longer treat Onesimus as merely a slave but as a brother in Christ. 

Onesiumus could not fix his past. He could not change that he had been once unprofitable, or that he had once run away, or that he had done any number of wrong things.

But now he was a new person, and Paul wrote to Onesiumus about the mercy of second chances as well as the goodness and rightness of accepting a contrite slave as a brother in Christ

on equal footing.

Sometimes a mess-up can be repaired, like this vehicle that had been in a fender bender. I saw this at the ladies retreat a couple weeks ago. The girl who owned the car simply painted a scene from Lord of the Rings and another scene from C.S. Lewis, I believe it was, after the wreck and after a new used bumper had been installed. She couldn't afford yet to have a professional repair job done. So she painted her own scene over the dents.

 Brilliant! She gets raves over it.  

But not every wreck and mistake can be fixed to where it get raves.

Sometimes the wreck and mistake and mess-up just can never be done over or fixed or painted over. 

But whatever it is, God loves to turn it all around for good,

even if the mess-up is a sin as bad as the murderous acts of Joseph's brothers who threw him in a pit to die and then sold him as a slave to the traders on their way to Egypt. 

I can hardly imagine a more terrible and purposeful sin.

Yet God cleaned up the mess and turned it around for a beautiful good.

Joseph tested his brothers and then forgave them and welcomed them back into relationship. 

Paul urged Philemon to forgive and to take his slave back into relationship--without charging him for the mess-up!

This is the heart of God.

When You Must Let Go of Your Sons

Little by little, I must let go of my sons.

Sometimes in small ways, like today, when Timmy headed out for a couple hours to work for an elderly veteran in Peyton who hires Timmy to clean the pens of his homing pigeons. I gave Timmy my new book to give this veteran friend, praying together over it that the gospel which is shared gently through stories might speak to his heart before he meets his Maker. 

Sometimes in bigger ways I must let go.

While we were buzzing through Nebraska and South Dakota a week and a half ago, Timmy had flown back to Pennsylvania to attend Campus Days at Penn View Bible Institute where he is applying to attend this fall. 

Since he attended campus days, he received a $1000 scholarship, $500 off each semester for his first year.

It's hard for me to keep up with all my children right now!  

Timmy will have to fend for himself somewhat back there in Pennsylvania this fall, so I am teaching him how to iron his own clothes.

                                

 Sometimes the boys go right along with us on our trips, such as back to IHC convention in April.

Timmy spent parts of a couple days milling hardwood lumber in Missouri at my brother's place on the wood mill that my brother-in-law in Michigan had sent down months ago.

I enjoyed the spring blossoms and budding leaves....

 And carpets of violets in Mom and Dad's front lawn.

I also enjoyed the bouquets put together by my nieces, one of whom has begun a job working at a local florist shop! What a providential provision for her to use her skills--arranging flowers, delivering, computer skills--nearly every last thing the shop was needing. We have to let go of our daughters, too! Her father was a bit nostalgic as she drove by one morning, honking to him on her way to deliver flowers somewhere!

 Laundry waving in the breeze. 

My brother's freshly plowed garden with dogwood blossoms over it. 

Many hands make light work!

Moving Elon's greenhouse frame.  

 And then moving the cover for it.

 

Saying goodbye as Elon carries their sweet little blind puppy back into the house.

 

 

Cowboy Trail Trestle and Smith Falls in Nebraska

Because the day we traveled to South Dakota for the mission project and ladies' retreat was my birthday, Jonathan made a plan to take us out to eat at a Mexican restaurant in North Platte, Nebraska. That way I wouldn't have to pack a lunch. Then we took a short hike along the Cowboy Trail which goes over this old train trestle near Valentine, NE, near the border of South Dakota.

We've passed this different times and didn't even notice it or know there was a trail across it. 

We so enjoyed the beautiful sunshine and bird songs as well as the views. 

We made a quick stop at a western wear shop, but the prices were out of our range. 

"On the eighth day, God created cowboys!" 

"Old cowboys never die," says the plaque on the left. "They just smell that way."

After that, on our way to try to find Smith Falls, we accidentally passed through a reserve where buffalo were roaming free.

They were even crossing the road!

We didn't find Smith Falls that evening, but we did see smoke from a fire not that far away, and when our van got stuck in the sand, we had to turn around. You never know what adventure awaits when you travel with Jonathan!

 We finally did find Smith Falls on our way home.

It was a pleasant little hike just a little ways back in to the highest waterfall in Nebraska!

 

 For Nebraska, this is pretty amazing!

Our beautiful daughter Crystal near the foot of the falls. 

Tree-hugging!

Believe it or not, this was Jonathan's idea!

Just for a joke!  

Wives who cooperate have loads of fun!