New and Improved School Room :)

This was our school room.

But before that, this room was our living room. 

The green tea walls went well with our couch, the pictures, and the curtains we used to have up. Not our favorite color for a school room, but with a few wall decorations...we made it work.

Although we had bookshelves along the back wall, they were not deep, there were no doors, and they always seemed cluttered.

So, Big J (my hubby) built us 2 large cubbies. This helped out tremendously, but over the years, they seemed small and cluttered as well. 

I love this window!!!

However, the kiddos were outgrowing their table. 

So, we decided it was time to make some changes :)

First came the painting.

Then, J and his father made me new, taller, deeper cabinets.

We also swapped out the small table for a larger, adjustable one all of the kids could fit at. We also added baskets to the cubbies Jason had built earlier. (Helps hide the messier sections)

Big J rigged up our prayer map so it raises like a curtain when you pull on the cords revealing our dry erase board underneath. Hey, when wall space is limited...you gotta be creative ;)

We still have a little bit of painting left to do and Big J's dad is working on making doors to hide all the CD's, tapes, and other small books on the shelves at the back of the room. We would also like to add another basket or two to the cubbies, put up a larger world map on the left wall where the small one currently is, as well as replace our globe that recently fell apart, but past that...our room is pretty much complete...and...

we are loving it!!! 

Forgotten God...

The title of this post comes from the book I have recently finished reading called, Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit by Francis Chan.



This is the follow-up post to what I had started writing about earlier on the Holy Spirit. You can find those posts at It Happens in a Flash: Show me how to die and It Happens in a Flash: My Mother's Legacy... .

In the months before my Mother's death, she told me, "P, the Holy Spirit tells me things. If you listen, you can hear him speaking to you too." That got me thinking...do I listen closely to what the Holy Spirit is telling me, or does the busyness of my life and my plans get in the way all too often? She also told me that, if she had not gone through what she did with her pain and her cancer, she would never have relied or leaned on the Holy Spirit as much as she did.  "What about me?", I though. It shouldn't take tragedies and hardships in life to bring me closer to God, I should have been doing it all along.

The Holy Spirit is just as much a part of God as Jesus is. We try to explain the Trinity with cutesy analogies like water/ice/steam or the 3 parts of an apple. Those simple explanations do help us and all, but they can never come close to even scratching the surface of understanding the Trinity. The reality is, we will NEVER be able to explain the Trinity. Our human minds can only take us so far and the rest resides in the mysterious awe and wonder of God. Think about it...If we could explain it all, then God wouldn't be God now would he?

I watched my mom closely in her final weeks. She was in constant prayer. Every ache, every pain, every pill she had to swallow, every step she had to climb...she prayed. She told me the Holy Spirit helped her, comforted her, guided her. Doctors were amazed that she was still alive; they wanted to know how she was still here, still able to breath, to talk, to get around. She'd tell them, "It's not me or anything I have done, it's Jesus. To Him be the glory. Praise God!" Then, they'd reply something like, "Well, it must be. Looking at your charts, you shouldn't be here."

Let's face it, there are lots of things we can do without the Holy Spirit. We can rely heavily on ourselves and get pretty far in life: we can attain the American dream all on our own. I don't want to be like that . In the Bible, Jesus explained to his disciples that he had to leave this earth so another could come in his place. One who could live in us and work through us and be with us forever. Wow! Jesus asked God to give us a helper and he came in the form of the Holy Spirit (John 14:16). That is just amazing to think about!

At one point through reading this book, I started to think back to where I know I felt the Holy Spirit telling me to act and I did not. To give this stranger a hug or to ask this person if I could pray for them right then and there. So many missed opportunities because they didn't fit into my plan or my schedule for that day.

As Francis mentions in his book, I don't want to be the kind of person who orders the Holy Spirit around and tells him to go where I want to go or do what I want to do. I want to ask the Holy Spirit if I can join Him, if He can lead me and guide me, not the other way around. I need to be brought to a place where people can see God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit working though me: not me working through me. One of the things that Francis Chan said in his book that really stuck with me was, "The God of the universe is not something we can just add to our lives and keep on as we did before. The Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is not someone we can just call on when we want a little extra power in our lives. Jesus Christ did not die in order to follow us. He died and rose again so that we could forget everything else and follow Him to the cross, to true life."

A few parting thoughts on the Holy Spirit from the Bible as mentioned in this book...
*The Spirit speaks when we do not have the words. (Luke 12:12)
*He is our comforter, advisor, encourager, strength. (John 14-16)
*The Holy Spirit draws us closer to God. (Romans 8:26)
*He convicts us of sin. (I Thess. 1:5)
*The Spirit is our sanctifier. (2 Cor. 3:18)

All of these thoughts fit so perfectly with the things that have been taking place in my life over the past several months, the things that God has been showing me, and what I am currently reading in the book Radical by David Platt. You can see more on this at It Happens in a Flash: The Winds of Change are Blowing

I have a long way to go, I don't fully understand everything, and I'm going to mess things up terribly when I get in the way (and I know I will), but God is helping me. My prayer from here on out is to allow the Holy Spirit to work in and through my life so that I might live in such a way that there is no way people could mistake what is happening in my life for anything other than God and His awesome power.


    

Makin' Changes and Makin' Rain

After the long Christmas break, this week back in school went surprisingly better than I had planned. My little brother, S, will be homeschooling with us from here on out now which brings along a few changes. He uses the Abeka DVD program and we do not. I beat my head trying to figure out how we could fit in all of the things my kids were doing plus the things he was doing. There was no way I could do it all and still keep my sanity! (We use Abeka too, but only for math and language. For history, Bible, and science, we use other curriculums. ) My dad has already paid for the entire year of Abeka DVD, plus S's grades are all sent stright to Abeka. (I keep track of my kids' grades myself.) Anyway, I didn't want to mess up S's records for this school year or anything, so I had to come up with some sort of compromise.

I think we've got a plan though. Since my husband does MFW Bible in the evening with my kids, we just get in the Abeka Bible lesson with S through DVD in the mornings. We are taking a break with our Apologia science (this was the hardest part for my kids because they loved learning about the planets) to finish up S's Abeka science with him through the DVD. We also do S's Health, Safety, and Manners Abeka lessons with him and he does MFW History with us. Soon, S's Abeka history lessons will start up and I think we will have to split up at that point and S do his history lessons with the DVD teacher while I do MFW history with J and A. I don't know...we'll think more about that obstacle when we come to it I guess. 

Now for what we did this week....

In history, we learned about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Sadly, we did not get around to picking the fake seeds out of the cotton balls though like we had planned, but some things just fall by the way side I guess. The kids did have some fun this week "making rain" in their science experiment though.


The steam coming from the boiling water represented a cloud.



The ice cubes in the dish represented cold air.



Warm, moist air (the steam/cloud) met up with the cold air (the ice cubes)...

...Thus creating "raindrops" .

And the "raindrops" begin to fall

All in all, it was a good week :)

The Winds of Change are Blowing

I've never been one for making New Year's Resolutions and I'm still not really, but God has been showing me a lot over the past few months and has really been speaking to my heart on a number of things. It is absolutely amazing how nearly every conversation, sermon, bible study, article in a newsletter, etc... has just all fit together and brought us back to the same point over and over. And I haven't even read the book Radical by David Platt yet!!! (My husband just finished it up last night and passed it on to me.)

After hearing our Sunday school teacher today and the message he brought, my husband laughingly said, "Do you think God is trying to tell us something?" There are so many things that God has shown and is showing me as a person and us as a family that we need to change...It just so happens that a brand new year happened to come around about the same time :)



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Show me how to die

Wait...what? (cue record scratching screech) Show me how to die? No, I don't mean a physical death, but rather a spiritual death of self. That can only happen when I move out of my way long enough to let God take the lead. He's ready and willing and waiting patiently - I'm the one with control issues.

This is something that he has been dealing with me on for a long time. I know it will continue to be a struggle throughout my life as it is for every Christian, but I would rather run this race with more of Him in the lead than me.

When I try to control things, it never ends up very good. And I know that is going to be the case every single time, but I still continue to jump in and mess things up. You'd think I would have learned by now! I know the plans he has for me are way better than anything I could imagine for myself, but I really do have a hard time letting go and letting God take the lead.

At the start of the school year, I had all these ideas in my head of what I wanted to do as far as school was concerned, of what I wanted to be involved in, what I wanted the kids involved in. I started out going strong with Him in the lead, but somewhere along the way, I moved back into 1st place and got on the wrong path all-together.

When my mom's cancer went to the next level a few months ago and she started requiring more one on one care, I think that is when more of me started to take over. I thought I could still do this and this and that, AND take care of my mom, AND take over my brother's schooling, AND do everything else in-between. I've had to let go of everything I wanted and focus on what God wanted. And believe me, I put up quite a fight (and still continue to do so).

God is showing me that sometimes it is the most basic and simplest of things He wants me to focus on. There will be a time and place for some of those other things, but that time is not now.

God is showing me that I need to stop giving Him my left-overs. If I start out giving Him the 1st part of my day and I end up having to cut something out at the end of the day...it won't be Him. Who really looks forward to left-overs anyway? 

God is showing me that deviations do not have to equal disaster. That no matter what road-block is placed in my path, he'll lead me around it, over it , or crashing straight through it, but He'll be by my side every step of the way.


God is showing me how to die...

The title of this post came from a beautiful song titled "Show Me" By Audrey Assad. Here is a piece of that song along with a link to hear it for yourself...Believe me, it is beautiful!

"Bind up these broken bones. Mercy bend and breathe me back to life. But not before you show me how to die. God, not before you show me how to die."

You might also want to check out this blog. The post on 11/30/10 titled "Decreasing" has really been an inspiration to me. And I look forward to reading more of her thoughts on this.