Our Family!

Hello All,


Hope you all had a fabulous Christmas! As you all know ours was hectic but we got there in the end. Since I last wrote we have moved accommodation twice and been homeless once, lol. Praise the Lord He is a constant provider and a comfort in a time of storm. I thank God continuously that He is our Rock that never changes, and the only One who will never hurt or forsake us. We truly have a wonderful Lord.


I wanted to briefly share something that I was shown in the Bible not long ago. The Bible talks about us being the 'light of the world' and a light that 'cannot be hid'. The Bible talks about the lamps that were used in those times, with the oil and the wick. Any time I have heard about being the light of the world, people have spoken in reference to witnessing or being an example. In Leviticus God gives His requirements for His temple. Leviticus 24 says, "Command the children of Israel, that they bring unto thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamps to burn continually." In order to get the pure oil from the olive the men were required to beat the olive. Apparently if the oil is obtained in different methods it can cause smoke, but this being a temple for the Lord it needed to be perfect.


The Bible promises that we are the light, and sometimes in the trials I find it easy to be discouraged into thinking that there is no purpose, it is all "vanity of vanities" and why did I sign up for this? When I was shown these verses it reminded me that there is a reason, there is a purpose, and there is a higher calling than what we can see. It's all very well being a lamp and having a wick sticking out, but without the oil there can be no flame. As my body is the Lord's temple it is His right to have the beaten olive oil in His lamp, and the longer or greater the beating, the more oil the lamp will have and the brighter it will shine.


I have made up my mind about some things, and this is one of them: I love God enough to withstand some trials, but I do not love man enough. I think this is why the Lord advised us to work as unto the Lord, not unto man. For example, no man alive (pooooor Chris ;-) could make me get up and go to church every Sunday morning. That is something that I do for God. No man could make me wake up each night to a wailing baby, but if God asks me to do it there is a tiny extra reserve of strength just for Him. So I pray that with His grace He will give me the strength to get the olives beaten and in my lamp, so that one day after I am gone (if He tarries!) my little great grand kiddies can look back at the flame I left behind and say something that I cannot, that they had "a goodly heritage".

This photo was taken at Ricardo and Angela Portillo's wedding last week. I was so blessed to have been able to help with the wedding preparations, a long time dream of mine. Angela was very sweet and allowed me to visit florists with her, help find boleros for the bridesmaids, and have long brainstorming sessions over low-cal chocs. 

Chris and Manny were the two handsomest car parking attendants ever, and I was in charge of the self-catered reception (sooo fun!), but the greatest blessing was that I was asked to be in charge of the procession, making sure that the littlies walked at the right time and that the doors were open and shut on cue. This came with the honour of preparing the bride before she entered the church, adjusting her dress and making sure she was ready for her entrance.

Ang and Ricardo have since returned to the States so that he can finish his college education at West Coast before they go on deputation in preparation for going to El Salvador. We miss them and wish them all the best :-)

An Update in Photos

Hello all!

I know, I know, it seems like I've tumbled off the face of the planet but no! I live still!

At the moment I find myself in a puddle of Christmas Cards and presents, tearing around after a nine month old who can both crawl and semi-walk (what's up with that?) and designing a site for an older Christian man who is very lovely and very computer illiterate! So if I've accidentally not been updating as much as I ought, or not emailing as much as I should... well, you try having a mini-Chris for a son - in one room with a terribly dangerous deck attached (try three metres off of the ground)! Lol! Gotta laugh or we'll cry, haha.

So anyway, here is a brief update in pictures. Yup. We are fancy today!

Item One: We have been busy running craft clubs, creches, and Sunday Schools. Well, I mostly watch Chris and Manny run them. My job is to stand by and smile sweetly and make milkshakes and cookies on command. Right about here Chris was asking, "So who was Jesus' father?". The kids all started hollering "God!" "Joseph!" Finally a little ragamuffin with curly hair all over his eyes screamed out excitedly, "It was Moses!" Haha! Gotta love it :-)

 

Item Two: We have been busy making Manny into a meat eater! Here he is trying his first ever savoury mince meal. He loved it! After I'd taken his portion out of the frying pan I added pasta sauce and voila! Food fit for a hubby into the bargain! Things are getting much easier now that Manny is old enough to eat the same food as us and new allergies aren't cropping up at every turn. Although it does mean that I get to eat considerably less food than is on my plate to start with... ;-) Overall our little fella is a good eater, so good that he's on to three full meals a day, two snacks, and still breastfeeding well.

 

Item Three: We have been busy chopping a fringe! One morning I looked in the mirror, brushed my long fringe over my eyes and thought, "I wonder what I'd look like without that hair there?" It must have been exhaustion thinking because at the time it seemed perfectly logical to get the craft scissors out and snip-snip. Only when I realised I hated it did I notice that the hair was no longer attached! Whoopsies! Note to self: don't ever try hairstyling again at 5:30am. However, after I woke up a little more (about 3pm the next day) I got out my fabulous-free-hairdressing kit (oh yeah - I scored an entire bag of hairdressing equipment while helping a friend clean out her rental property. Always do good deeds!) and had another little snip and feather and this is the final product. So although Chris still claims I "look like a bus kid who got the scissors and attacked their own hair cos it was in their eyes" I am happy with it. So there Christopher :-P

Manny - The Little Bear!

Our Thanksgiving

Ahhh Thanksgiving with your turkeys and sweet pies! Ahem. And Thanksgiving of course ;-)

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I decided to have a small (tinsy tiny) Thanksgiving lunch and invite two other friends along. It had to be tinsy tiny because Chris was working (I wanted to throw a full blown dinner and invite a few more people but we had to go to a building job at 7:00pm), and we don't have a real dining area, and my oven is one of those little single tray things that can cook a maximum of six cookies at once. Thanksgiving morning I woke up at 6:30am and had the oven going right through until 12:30pm just to make sure the food all got cooked! I kept thinking, "What am I doing?" And then I remembered that verse, "She hath done what she could" and the story of feeding the five thousand. I figured I'd cook what little I could and God could do the multiplication ;-)

Of course, two guests or twenty, I wanted things to be yummy and pretty. We had roast turkey (ok fine, it wasn't a whole turkey. All I could fit in the oven was one of those Thigh things that come frozen in a box. It worked!), roasted baby potatoes, roast pumpkin, honey buttered beans, fried baby carrots, roast corn, cornbread, and sweet potato pie.

Sorry this photo's fallen over but Blogger keeps doing that to me and I'm too tired to fix it, lol!

My favourite part was dessert! I wanted to be a little american and have something that Chris and I would associate with that part of our Life's Journey. So we had smores! I wrapped up little packages containing sticks, biscuits, marshmellows and chocolate (I had to melt down a big block and reset to get it thin enough - no Hershey's around here? What's up with that?) and laid out my long candleabra for us to melt our marshmellows on. Plus of course we also had a fruit platter, ahem. Which a certain Little Indian enjoyed very much...

For favours, our guests got a brown paper bag with a fancy label that read, "Thankful for You!" (and of course I forgot to take photos) each with six of my now-famous-Toll-House-cookies inside. And they were certainly lucky to get that many. Chris is still roaming around the cupboards looking for more!

For our Family Thanksgiving Tradition we have a Scrapbook, with the meaning of Thanksgiving and a page each for Daddy, Mama, and Manasseh to fill up with pictures of things that they are thankful for...

...and we have a Thankful Chain...

I laid two links at each persons place and between the main and dessert we each wrote out our  Thankful Lists onto our links. Then we looped 'em up and made a decoration! Soon I will take it down, unstaple each link and put them in a pocket at the back of the scrapbook. Every year we will add to the chain and we will look back and remember all the Thanksgivings that the Lord has allowed us and the friends that have come and gone.

So that was our Thanksgiving. It was small but it was fun :-) Next year, Lord willing, I'll have a real oven and Chris will have the evening off work and you'll all be invited! Ha! We can but dream :-)

Disclaimers: The drink is sparkling grape juice, lol. Seriously.

Disclaimer Number 2: Enjoying Thanksgiving in Australia means we can kick out the boring old oranges and browns. This year I picked a lavender purple and a lovely green :-D Then I got three bunches of pink roses for the table. Haha! Summer thanksgivings are the best!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

As Kiwi as I am, I have celebrated Thanksgiving for five years now (except last year, when I was seven months pregnant in 45 degree filipino temperatures... all I could be thankful for that year was our tinsy tiny little aircon unit!). Now I know some of you are gagging over this but please hear me out. Thankgiving is not, or rather should not, be "An American Thing". It should be a "Christian" thing.

Have a little read of this:

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...On January 1, 1795, our first United States President, George Washington, wrote his famed National Thanksgiving Proclamation, in which he says that it is…

"…our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue is… our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we experienced…"

Thursday, the 19th day of February, 1795 was thus set aside by George Washington as a National Day of Thanksgiving.

Many years later, on October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, by Act of Congress, an annual National Day of Thanksgiving "on the last Thursday of November, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens." In this Thanksgiving proclamation, our 16th President says that it is…

"…announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord… But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, by the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own… It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people…"

So it is that on Thanksgiving Day each year, Americans give thanks to Almighty God for all His blessings and mercies toward us throughout the year.

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Like it or not folks, America has been one of the world's superpowers for many years. It's a free nation where people can kneel down and pray on the street if they really want to. It's also the nation that helped us beat Hitler and tends to win wars. Lincoln raises a very good point, it's the nations whose God is Jehovah that are blessed. I have talked to many ladies who have recently converted from Islam and have now permanently left Iran. They talk of the religious bondage of their people, the wicked lies that they are told to create fear (one young girl grew up believing that if she questioned the Quaran demons would pull her hair and drag her down to Hell) and the unhappiness in their country. I have seen the gross poverty and hunger in the Philippines. Truly, we are blessed! And yet Christians do not take the time to prepare one short day a year and dedicate it to thanking the Lord for all that we have been blessed with.

You know, God never asks for very much. He says, "If my people [that's us folks - not Joe Smith down the road who drinks and doesn't know any better], which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

Our countries are floundering with gay marriage, later and later staged abortions, the removal of certain religious freedoms. God has already promised that if WE pray and realise that we need Him then He will heal our lands. A step in reaching this is acknowledging that every blessing is from Him and it is only because of our nation's Christian heritage that we are free to live such priviledged lives. Too often I think of this freedom as a right, but it's not. It really is just a priviledge, one that could disappear in the blink of an eye.

So now I've probably put you off with all my preaching ;-) But wouldn't it be wonderful if one day we could say to an Aussie or Kiwi friend, "Want to join us for Thanksgiving?" and they didn't screw their noses up and say, "What are you? American?" Instead, they could say, "Thanksgiving? What are you? Christian?"

Can You Guess How Many Photo's It Took To Get This Shot?

An Update

Hello all!

I know I've been remarkably pathetic with the posts lately so I thought I'd make up for it with a photo of our little Manny.

The latest news on our lad is that he crawls (except he can't quite figure out what to do with his right leg so he pulls it in frog-like and drags it around uselessly, lol!), he walks quite well so long as he has something to hold, he can stand still without holding anything, he eats for hours at a time (no kidding, he'll just sit there gulping down sandwhich after yoghurt after vege-mash), he imitates speech (so far he has said His First Word, which I am too embarassed to tell about, Dadda, Hello and Tracy. No Mama so far!) and in general he's just super cute! I enjoy taking him out, people quite literally stop me in the streets and tell me he is "so beautiful", "oh, he's just goooorgeous!", "what a lovely child!". One lady was smiling at him, so he folded his head down bashfully and she told him, "You're gonna hafta get used to the girls looking at ya, you're quite a looker!" Ahh, yes! Now I just have to teach him the things that his Uncle Jim used to say and we'll really be in trouble (When Jimmy was introduced to a lady when he was about four, he looked up at her in adoration and said, "Your hair is exquisite!" To this day we have no idea where he got it from, but from then on he just used his fancy speeches to charm ladies. He's nothing but trouble!).

Now, if you can't tell already from my rambling, I'm exhausted so I'm going to bed now.

Goodnight world!

P.S Thanksgiving is coming up on the fourth Thursday of the month. Many NZers snobbishly consider it "an american thing" but it's sooo not. It's a family day dedicated to thanking the Lord for religious freedom and for His provision. Not to mention that it's a great excuse to make cornbread and sweet potato pie (ok, so it can be a little american...). I've celebrated Thanksgiving for about five years now and I think you should too! After all, we got alot to be thankful for :-) More on that soon...