Thursday, December 3, 2009

Yes, Virginia, God is sill alive and well...

Gotta love days where God's providence is readily apparent! A friend who has been trying for several years to get (and stay) pregnant just announced that they're 13 weeks pregnant and due in June!

AND...

One of my advisees is having a really rough semester for personal reasons--two of his sisters are very sick (both with a condition that requires a bone marrow transplant, and one with stage 4 cancer) and are at the NIH for treatment. His grandpa is in hospice. And if that wasn't enough, he was involved in a four car pileup, and his car is now totalled. I've been blue just thinking about his circumstances. It's his birthday on Saturday...and the other night he was compelled to pray for a car. It's hard to get home or to the "Be the Match" events he's been running to help his sisters without a car.

And God gave him a car. Not knowing his prayer (and I'm not even sure if he's a Christian), a professor gave him an old car. It needs some work, but is fine for a college kid.

Taking away

Hope has developed definite opinions on what she likes--especially hair brushes, remotes, phones, and anything that remotely resembles a phone (all of the previous objects she holds up to her ear and says "allo?")

Sometimes she chooses an object that isn't safe or that we don't want her to have. But rather than just take it away from her, we try to offer her something else before taking it away. It's a win-win, fewer tears approach to toddler life.

We don't do that with Henry and Harmony. They're old enough to understand that some things aren't for them. Sometimes we give them something else later; sometimes they're on their own.

I realized the other day that I guess we're not toddlers anymore. Every other time we've felt called to leave a church, we've waited until we've had somewhere to go. Even when we moved back from Ithaca, God provided the next church before we left.

That's definitely not what happened this time. We've been church-less for approximately a year, with no good options in sight.

I guess that means that we're no longer toddler Christians...