Simulcast 2009

What a weekend.
Friday night and Saturday morning I had a Beth Moore event to attend. What a blessing. She always rocks my world and gives me loads to think about. But this time felt different. Not sure how yet. Maybe had something to do with how she had us worship with ALL our longings (not just the ones you can tell out loud) out at the feet of Jesus. That part came near to breaking me wide open.
Maybe it was when she looked right at me. I know, it's a simulcast, she couldn't see me really, but God could and he had Beth's eyeballs pointed right at me when she asked if we needed to know that God really did love us personally. I stopped taking notes right there. I'm still near to crying just typing it out. I need to spend more time on that one. anybody got any good verses or insights on how to personally feel and know the love of God is really for you as an individual?

Saturday morning we had more Beth and Travis (thanks for the shout out to Snellville Travis. We screamed really loud when you did that. Could you hear us?)
Oh and we had a lovely breakfast....including a Beth Moore favorite: Moon Pies. Yes, moon pies for breakfast. See? I have photos to prove it:

After being blessed with teaching for a few more hours, I then went home and had a glorious birthday party for my beautiful adopted baby girl who turned one on August 29th.
I'll be posting photos of that event on my other blog soon.

• Missy has asked for people to help her know what to say to an infertile couple.
  This is hard. I was one. I was once one of those walking bundles of pain and anguish who wants to hold a child so badly that it colors everything.
  I have freinds who say that "the infertile woman inside your head never goes away, even once you have children" ... I disagree. I am deleriously happy with my one little girl. She came to us through adoption and I simply don't know if I could love any child more than I love her. We have a wonderful relationship with her birth parents and our whole extended family embraced adoption as a perfectly understandable way of having a child join our home.
  We are lucky. Very lucky. God Healed a lot of things. Not the least of which was my heart.
  But back when I was going through the whole IVF process, after the second try failed, a dear freind pointed me to a post by this woman named Missy. It was a Christmas post about how Mary hadn't expected to give birth in a stable. It was powerful.
  I liked her writting style. So I read more. Then I took a deep breath and contacted her. Even though you would think that someone with four kids under four wouldn't really appeal to a woman who was aching to have a child. But we connected. What did she say that made me feel better? that made her my freind and not the enemy?
  She didn't act like there was anything wrong with me as a person.
  She reminded me CONSTANTLY that God loved me and He had a plan and that it was Good.
  She listened EVERY time I needed to whine or cry.
  She CRIED WITH ME
  she didn't claim to have answers to the physical struggles, but she applied the balm of scripture to my heart. Reminding me that God ALONE was my rock.
  And if we had lived in the same state she would have let me hold her kids. This one is big. Women who are infertile sometimes have a HUGE sense of restraint when it comes to holding children. I can't speak for everyone, but for me I was terrified of holding my arms out to a child. What if they laughed and ran away? I KNOW that toddlers do this all the time. But for a woman who already is feeling like maybe God is saying "you are unfit to be a mother" having a child run away from you can very nearly feel like a physical blow. So mostly I didn'thave the courage to hold my arms out. I would wait for someone to place their child in my arms. It was much safer. Much less chance to rejection.
  So moms of many kids - show confidence in your infertile friends as people. Love them for who they are apart from the issue of childbearing.
  Directors of worship - find ways to celebrate mothers day without making it about biological motherhood. Try celebrating the act of mothering, rather than the miracle of conception.
  oh, and whatever you do, don't earnestly assure them that if they just relax it will happen. Look. That has nothing to do with it. Conception and birth is a miracle that ONLY God controls.
  And do yourself a huge favor. Read this blog post from a friend of mine. It address some theological and cultural hurdles that infertile women face in the church. It may help you see some of the hurt in a different light.
  Thanks Missy for doing this post.
  oh and there is nothing wrong with encouraging folks to consider adoption. We did. And I would not have missed out on my Ginny for all the "biologcally mine" children in the universe.
  

Jesus saves. over and over again

I can't really tell you the scripture this comes from, but I am convinced that Jesus doesn't just save sinners.

He saves me, every day, every moment. Each time I turn to Him when I feel small, or petty, or discouraged, or angry. He saves me from that and sends me in another direction.

Right now I'm in one of those places in my life where I can fall into sin a lot.

the sin of pride - stiff necked and too prideful to accept help. I keep telling everyone we are fine.

the sin of greed - I know we can't afford things right now. but I still want stuff. Mostly plane tickets. And the occasional meal out. But there is plenty in the pantry. I just have to learn to be more creative.

The sin of unbelief - as I try to take over planning how to get Martin a new job and how to make our finances stretch and how to cope....There is nothing wrong with putting in effort, but the fact is that I'm not doing anything to help the situation...I'm just worrying at it inside my brain all day. and worry is a sin. It indicates that I think I can somehow fix something better than God can. Hello? God or Deirdre, who do you think is the better, more experienced problem solver? Which one of us has the greater set of resources to draw from? Which one of us knows the whole plan and what will be for the greater good?

um...that would be NOT me, but God.

There's a great little mini sermon found on Travis Cottrell's most recent CD. The Live album that was recorded in Woodstock, GA back in January. Beth Moore talks about Praising God in difficult times.

I listen to that piece every time I get in the car nowadays. Just to jerk my brain back into the proper track.

God. Is. In. Charge.

God. Is. Good.

and I WILL praise His name. Whether I feel it right this instant or not.

Oh, incidentally, I'm not being morbid here, but when I die, please make note, I want everything from tracks 10 through 14 of that CD played at my funeral. The sermon by Beth, and then the songs that follow it. Go ahead and have the eulogies first and let Phillip Shoultz sing my favorite hymn "And Can it Be" but then, after that, just put in the CD and let it run. My funeral may start off as being about me, but it will end being all about GOD. There will (hopefully) be people at my service who may never have darkened a church door before, and I want them to walk away knowing beyond any doubt that my hope is in Christ Alone.

Anyway.

um....back to my regularly scheduled blog....

actually, you know what? I think that was a good place to stop.

In Christ Alone, my hope is found.

'nuff said.

re-newing the gratitude list

months ago I was posting a list of ten things to be grateful for every week.

Sometimes it was simple stuff, like oatmeal cookies.

Sometimes I tried to be profound.

I got lazy after a while and stopped posting those lists.

Well today, in the face of my husband losing his job to the concept of “reductions in force” I thought it might be a good time to dust that gratitude list idea off, and bring it back to my blog.

1. Money not spent – Saturday we looked at a phone upgrade, but decided to hold off because a better one for our “needs” was coming out in a few weeks. Now we are very glad that we didn’t spend the money.

2. Money not spent (part 2) - I have been bugging my husband to buy our plane tickets for an upcoming wedding in October and a Christian Women’s event I want to go to in January. He had put it off one more week…and here again, we are very glad because that money will be needed to pull us through. I still desperately want to go, but I’m gonna have to trust God that if HE wants us to go, He will make it happen.

3. Scripture – Monday morning, before we knew anything was going to happen, I choose (or the Holy Spirit chose for me?) a memory verse for the next two weeks: Exodus 33:18 “Lord I pray thee, show me your glory”

4. Health - We are all healthy. When I think of all the things that could have gone wrong in our lives, when I think of families out there who only have one income…..I am so grateful that nothing worse happened to us.

5. Friends – people have been very supportive. Some folks I was expecting, and others that I wasn’t. It’s a nice suprise when people tell you they care.

6. Sense of humor – Martin has an amazing sense of humor. He has been constantly engaged in cheering me up. He even invented a game while we were snuggled down, each reading a separate book, that you have to kiss your partner in order to start a new chapter. My husband is so silly, and sweet.

7. Songs from the past – Monday morning I put in a CD that I haven’t heard in years. Twila Paris’s “The Warrior is a Child” It blessed me Monday. But it blessed me even more today when I had to drive to work on my own, without my best friend, my Martin, in the car.

the drive this morning was hard. Martin has been there with me (since we worked at the same campus) for the commute for over five years. That’s almost 4000 hours of relating, talking, singing, devotions, and just plain old enjoying eachother’s company.

This is where depression kicks in for me. I’m a people person. and Martin is one of my favorite peoples.

Still……I’m saying all the right things.

“yes, we are gonna be fine”

“God will provide”

“God is good, even in this.”

and I do mean them.

but I occasionally feel sorry for myself. Which is wrong. And it is why I’m writting this list of things to be grateful for. To try to re-adjust my brain.

Please be in prayer for a teenaged friend of ours. She was tree climbing and fell from about three stories up. She has had one surgery already and many more are in future. Pray for her family. Her name is Caitlin. She is in high school.

which goes a long way to putting my “situation” in perspective. So many worse things could be happening in my life than to have a husband who has to stay home for a week or two and find a different job.

So Thank you Lord. And please lay your healing hands on Cait and wrap your comforting arms around her family.

amen.

sometimes God freaks me out

God is in the details.
This was first posted on my regular blog back in July of 2008.

A recent post on the Living Proof Ministries blog got me thinking about it again and how marvelously God worked out so many details that lead us to Ginny (our adopted daughter who is about to turn one year old this month). There were many many details, but this is the one that just gives me goose bumps. Every. time.
Read on. and enjoy.

"sometimes God freaks me out"

Like this weekend for instance.

Ya’ll all know that we had an adoption match that “went south”

The birth-parents went AWOL, we found out the extended family didn’t support the adoption, all kinds of stuff happened to ensure that the match was one that we would walk away from.

But through all that happened last weekend we came away from it with an absolute conviction of the integrity of our Kansas agency and we made some incredible friends. God is good.

But not only is God good, His timing is…..well downright spooky.

Our first match fell through on Monday, July 7th. The point at which we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that things had gone horribly wrong is when our birth mom didn’t show up for her scheduled sonogram. We were there, at the doctor’s office, with the agent, waiting. hoping against hope that they would show, but they didn’t. That appointment was for 9:30 a.m. Monday, July 7th. (remember that date and time, okay?)

We came home to Georgia. We cried. We prayed. we sent out the disappointing news via email. We praised God for His plan that we knew was going to be good, no matter how disappointed we were at that moment.

The very next day, Tuesday, we got a call about a another couple. This one was 30 weeks along. Healthy, married, 23 yrs old, blonde………..And then came THE QUESTION:

Do you want to talk to her?

Well…….Yes, of course. And also …….. no. We were scared. What if this was too soon? Were we grasping at straws? hooking up with the first thing that comes along? Is it like re-bound from a boy friend breakup? do you need to wait?

and then sense re-asserted itself. NO, there is nothing holy about waiting. And if God is in charge (and we believe that HE is) then HE was the one that placed this couple in our path, so we should talk to them.

We got the dossier/file, did the conference call, and we really got along well. It helped that all four of us are into the same obscure sport: Disc Golf (which I have posted about here before). The guys are more into it than we girls are, but that’s okay. Mel and I had other things to talk about (and before anybody goes off the deep end on me, yes, we have her permission to use their names, they call themselves the birth-parents and they are already calling the baby “your baby” and calling her by the name we have picked out) .

We went out to Kansas to see them and really had a wonderful time together. If we could, we would adopt Steve and Mel along with their baby. These two are really motivated and active and honest. They even refused gifts that we wanted to give them, which is very different from the last couple let me tell you.

So we are matched again !!!!! We have met and loved the birth-parents. We have rubbed (at her request) her beautiful pregnant belly, and we are all holding our breath hoping her little girl stays in there for the full term (just nine more weeks to go ya’ll!)

Here’s a photo of us with Steve & Mel from this weekend:

Deirdre, Martin, Mel(and Ginny), Steve

Isn’t God just amazing?

Now here’s the spooky weird part. The EXACT time that our first couple was supposed to be getting their sonogram………..

Is the SAME DAY AND TIME that MEL was having her sonogram.

9:30 a.m. Central Time, July 7th, 2008

Like I said, sometimes God just freaks me out!