To commune ...or not...

Ok so I'm seeking a bit of free advice here.
What are your thoughts on children (who of course have made a decision to accept Christ as their Savior) taking communion? What's a good age? What are signs of their readiness?

Last week our church had communion and since we have discussed this with Jaedon before he knew what it was about and started crying when I told him I'd rather him not take it today. I am of the train of thought that it is a time of rememberence and repentance - not to be entered into lightly.
After whispering questions to Jaedon to see why he was crying he said "he wanted to remember Jesus too." How could I say no to that? I ended up sharing my bread with him and let him take part in the juice however I was not thrilled that he licked his lips and said "yummy" after the drink.
So would that make you cringe because of the "irrevarance" or chuckle at the innocence?

Weeding, Feeding and Heeding

In my current Bible study I wanted to share something that I couldn't highlight or underline enough. Our verse that this stems from is Psalm 126:5 "Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy." Many truths can be drawn from this like 1. You have to sow in order to reap - profound huh? Well, if you don't learn to feed yourself the truth how can you expect to reap a life full of the Holy Spirits power? You can't. 2. Tears will come but so will joy - it's a promise not just a nice thought.
But the one thing that we camped on for a while was a story the author shared. She and her husband were in Africa doing some relief work- serving food to people in some villages. Their translator said "One of the most frustrating things is that in villages where they receive seed, they often eat the seed rather than planting it and bringing forth the harvest."
Aren't we just like that? We attend our church service moved- maybe even to tears- by the music, life story, baptism or message. We agree. We say Amen. We may even raise our hands.
Then what?
We eat the seed. We swallow it whole- filling up our little bellies with truth that sits there. We don't see a harvest because we didn't sow the seed thrown to us. "Many times we apply biblical truths to our theologies without applying it to the actual practicalities of life. His word is meant to be applied to our reality."
So what seed is being thrown your way recently? Will you fill your belly with it or get on your knees, dig in the dirt and reap a harvest?
With the grace of God- me too.

Take aim

Watching my 4 boys in their daily wrestling matches I was reminded of a Psalm I read a few days ago ...

Psalm 127:3 "Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth (30 is still youth right?!?!) Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them." (ok so some of you may not consider THREE exactly a full quiver! ;)

Brad and I talked about this verse on a recent date night and tried to come up with analogys of children and arrows. Brad came up with some very deep, thoughtful ones like "they have to be stored head down." and "they're not always the sharpest one in the quiver."

Yes, thanks dear. =P

But as we attempted to think it thru one thing came to us: Arrows are meant to fly. We can spend a lot of time trying to shape, groom, straighten and perfect our arrows but that's all useless if we just tuck them away in the quiver where they will be "safe". Another thing about arrows- they need an archer- someone willing to shoot them (ideally to the target!).

So as we sat eating our (oh so yummy) Chicken queso burrito - we pondered our 3 precious "arrows" and our target practice.

How blessed I am.

My chunky monkey...

10 1/2 months old already.

Nesting

Jaedon and Seth have had lots of fun discovering the newness of Springtime- pointing out the bazillion robins, squirrels, rabbits, debris etc... One certain robin has decided our porchlight would make a great home for her family. At first I thought she was in need of some GPS - she kept flying- what looked like- right into our back door. Then I watched as she carefully inspected our yard for nesting materials- of which was there was PLENTY to choose from. We watched her weave her pieces of yard waste into a neatly packed home. It was actually quite interesting to watch and it got me to thinking...
"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them (provides for them and designed them to know what they would need in order to make their own home) Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"

More Easter pics

Little men...
These were a BIG hit!

Coloring eggs...let's see...how do we do this again?!?!

Katelyn Rose on our egg hunt.

Our passover meal - notice the very tasteless and flat unleavened bread ;) They thought it was cool that Jesus ate meals on the floor!

Hope you all had a reflective Easter as well.

Now, back to life...

Relecting on the Redeemer

Intentional.

It's the mantra around our house that resonates deeply inside of me as a mom.

I want to be intentional.

Along with a host of other things it means I can't think that my kids are going to learn all about Christ from the hour they spend in church each week. We as parents are their primary disciplers - whether we're working at it or not- we are.

To wrap up our weeks of Easter preparation we talked about sin - what is sin? Why do we sin? What are some of our sins? We wrote a whole list of sins on some boards, took it outside and nailed it together. Jaedon commented that the list of words on the wood didn't look very nice - I agreed. Then the cool part that Jesus' blood and ONLY his shed blood can wipe our sins away!

Oh may we always remember that he forgets!

"And this is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us."

Back to PA

Ok so this is a VERY small assortment of pictures documenting our Spring Break. 1. because it wasn't YOUR spring break so you probably don't care that much and 2. it just takes too long to download.

These pictures are not in any order either. I'm so helpful huh?

So we made the trek out to PA for Spring break because we were not planning on making a trip out this summer (which now is null and void but that's a whole other lonnnnnng story!) We started the trip by surprising the kids and taking them to a hotel for a night. Of course a requirement for hotels these days is that it has a pool- so for $50 we spent the night at a nice hotel in Toldeo (3 hours into our trip) and had a lot of fun with pool time. The water was a bit cool though so the hot tub was a big hit! We got up in the morning and did some more pool time then packed up to head to PA (it was a this point in our trip that we realized I forgot to pack the kids COATS! oh yeah...)

In my humble opinion, Sunday was about a perfect day as they come. We went to church in the morning, had a nice turkey with all the fixin's meal, had some ice cream cake to celebrate my sister in laws 3*&%(ish birthday, played some Quiddler OUTSIDE while the kids went on (several) egg hunts. It was awesome.

We were able to spend some time with my Grandma Rice. She had cookies coming out of the oven as we walked in...why do Grandma cookies always taste so good?!?!

We also spent an entire day at my brothers house (minus the brother b/c of work!). THe cousins had a LOT of play time and I'm happy to report....NO HOSPITAL VISITS (this time!) YAY!

It was a fun "break" but nice to get home again too... like always.

Ps - this picture with Jaedon in his swimgear is my absolute FAVORITE!

Da Boyz

I know I know! I do this too much- but it's my blog so I can!

Brad and Mini me above (only Brad is younger than what Seth is pictured at.)

and Owen at 10 mon. and oh yes that would be Jaedon holding the truck. That one never ceases to amaze me. Only I am recently discovering that while Owen resembles his older brother he is tending to ACT more like his ...uh...other older brother. hmm.... =)