It all started with re-reading old chats and e-mails from Aaron’s and my courtship and engagement days… It was fun and brought back many lovely memories from that hard but beautiful time.
But then the next day, between the into-everything toddler and the fussy baby
When I was eighteen, I went to India for two months… About eight months later, I moved to Thailand to assist an older missionary couple… Then, when I was twenty-two, I moved to New Zealand to live with some friends and help them with their four children five and under…
From the moment we found out we were pregnant with our first little one, we knew we wanted to have a homebirth. Many of of our close friends had had their babies at home and since there weren’t any factors prohibiting it (high-risk pregnancy, etc.), it was almost a given.
But then…the unforeseen happened.
A little over five years ago, YLCF posted a series of interviews. The YLCF team members answered questions that you, the readers, asked. I remember so enjoying reading these interviews as they helped me feel like I knew these girls a little better. I remember several “What! You, too?” moments as I realized more and…
For us, thus far, this month has been full of weddings. In the past two weekends, we’ve had as many weddings, and while the two weddings couldn’t have been more different from each other, they’ve been filling my mind with thoughts of weddings and marriage and honeymoons and other such lovely things. And very early this morning, when I was up nursing my little guy, I randomly started thinking of the wedding cards that we gave these two couples.
After personal experience and much thought about some of the things the Lord has been teaching me lately, I’ve come to a conclusion: politeness is a great destroyer of true fellowship and close friendships.
That may seem like a ridiculous thing to say…I mean, aren’t we supposed to be polite to each other?! Well, actually, according to the Bible, we are supposed to love each other. Jesus tells us that by this the world will know that we follow Him…”By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35). And before anyone argues that being polite to each other is loving each other…it’s not. According to my trusty Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, “polite” is defined as “having good manners, courteous…cultivated, cultured…refined, elegant”. Those are all nice things, but loving someone goes much deeper than just being courteous to them.
For a long time I was very disillusioned with the contemporary Christian music scene. When I was younger, there were certain artists who I was big fans of and collected their CDs, but in the last ten years, I’ve been very unimpressed. It seems that so many of the songs sound the same, and in general, the lyrics are rather weak and trite. Granted, there definitely are exceptions to this, but even among the exceptions, I couldn’t find any artists that I just loved. That is, until several summers ago…
“‘You have a traitor there, Aslan,’ said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking of himself after all that he’d been through and after the talk he’d had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn’t seem to matter what the Witch said.”
~C.S. Lewis; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I’m guessing that many of the readers here have read The Chronicles of Narnia and therefore know the context of this quote. The White Witch comes to demand Edmund’s life from Aslan. As stated, Edmund is a traitor and as such, by rights, his blood belongs to the Witch. The night before the Witch’s audience with Aslan, Edmund had been rescued from almost being murdered by the Witch, and that morning had a conversation with Aslan that “no one ever heard…[but] Edmund never forgot”.
