Caleb and Legacy Five!

Last week the gospel group Legacy Five, gave a concert in a town near us. Sadly we were not able to attend, but some friends of ours who have a family singing group called Great Adventure Family Band did go. Their youngest son Caleb got the chance to sing a song with Legacy Five during the concert! This is such fun to watch!! Caleb is an amazing singer!

~Alyssa

Out the kitchen window...

~Alyssa

Froemming Family Concert!

Saturday evening we went to hear the Froemming family give a music concert at a church not too far from us.

They were amazing!!

Elsie playing the banjo.

Carl singing "The Long Black Train"... he was quite a hit!

They have a beautiful pipe organ at the back of the church, but I especially liked the banner over the door... :)

~Alyssa

One Little Thing....

"Sometimes God opens the door for us; and we ruin it because one little thing gets in our way, one little fly in the ointment, one little regulation, one little problem that we don't see how we can possibly overcome.  

And leadership that is effective is leadership that knows when God opens the door for you, you go through that door. And if you know the door is open, and God has opened that door, then your responsibility is to deal with each of those tiny little problems that get in the way. 

And when you do that, you're going to find that God opens doors for us to go through and not for us to argue about how difficult it is to go through the door."

~ Woodrow Kroll

The above quote is from a radio  program I listened to yesterday morning as I was waiting in the car for Mom and Ana who were in the post office. It really stuck out to me since we've been praying for the past couple months about attending the Sempor Reformanda conference in October.  The Lord has provided house sitters and even kind friends who offered us a place to stay near the conference. We are so thankful!  But now we are up to "one little thing in our way".  Somehow it doesn't seem so little, but are we making the difficulty bigger in our mind than God?

"Lean not on your own understanding...He will direct your paths."

~Alyssa

Way Back When-sday

"Homemakers Creed"

 

I BELIEVE

homemaking is a noble and challenging career.

I BELIEVE

homemaking is an art requiring many different skills.

I BELIEVE

homemaking requires the best of my efforts, my abilities, and my thinking.

I BELIEVE

home reflects the spirit of the homemaker.

I BELIEVE

home should be a place of peace, joy, and contentment.

I BELIEVE

no task is too humble that will contribute to the cleanliness, the order, the health, the well-being of the household.

I BELIEVE

a homemaker must be true to the highest ideals of love, loyalty, service, and religion.

I BELIEVE

home must be an influence for good in the neighborhood, the community, the country.

 ~Alyssa

Baby Shower!

A few weeks ago we went to the baby shower for Rachel T. and baby Christine. 

One of the moms who has 11 children of her own spoke about being a mother.  Since Rachel's husband is in the Marines, she used their motto: The few. The proud. The Marines. and changed it to something like: The few. The humble. The strong.  Oh wow! She did an amazing job, I wish I had taken notes. (I also wish I had gotten a good picture of the baby....)

While Rachel opened gifts, we ate lemon cake and visited. :)

We enjoyed the opportunity to be with good friends we don't get to see very often. :)  And of course it was fun to be around Christians who love children and babies, and see them as a blessing!

~Alyssa

Way Back When-sday

When I was staying with Grandma W. for a few days early this spring, we spent several hours looking through her photo albums.  I loved to hear her tell about the people and places in the old black and white pictures.  This was one I liked of Grandpa and two other men (I can't remember who they are) with their little ones on the porch.  Grandma thought they were probably waiting for dinner to be ready. :)

~Alyssa

Housekeeping

"To the contemporary mind, the idea that happiness depends on good housekeeping might seem quaint or odd. A century or two ago, and in fact until the past few decades, it was taken for granted, and the quality of housekeeping was not beneath the attention of such great novelists as Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy."

-Cheryl Mendelson, from: Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House

Fitting in?

Avoid Being Culturally Relaxed

~By Tullian Tchividjian

Becoming “all things to all people” does not mean fitting in with the fallen patterns of this world so that there is no distinguishable difference between Christians and non-Christians. While rightly living “in the world,” we must avoid the extreme of accommodation—being “of the world.” It happens when Christians, in their attempt to make proper contact with the world, go out of their way to adopt worldly styles, standards, and strategies.

When Christians try to eliminate the counter-cultural, unfashionable features of the biblical message because those features are unpopular in the wider culture—for example, when we reduce sin to a lack of self-esteem, deny the exclusivity of Christ, or downplay the reality of knowable absolute truth—we’ve moved from contextualization to compromise. When we accommodate our culture by jettisoning key themes of the gospel, such as suffering, humility, persecution, service, and self-sacrifice, we actually do our world more harm than good. For love’s sake, compromise is to be avoided at all costs.

As we have already seen, the Lordship of Christ has a sense of totality: Christ’s truth covers everything, not just “spiritual” or “religious” things. But it also has a sense of tension. As Lord, Jesus not only calls us to himself, he also calls us to break with everything which conflicts with his Lordship.

In an article titled “Calling Christian Rebels,” journalist Marcia Segelstein describes the cost of being a Christian in our current culture: “It means taking unpopular stands on highly charged issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and divorce. It means risking derision, humiliation, and scorn. It means looking at the way things are and—when they undermine the Word of God—challenging them.”

In this sense Christians will often be troublesome to our culture. Devotion to God’s authority will bring us into conflict with any authority that challenges his. Loyalty to God’s standards will inevitably cause us to clash with the standards of this world.

In seeking to “engage” and “connect,” Christians must remember that God hasn’t called his people to be popular. He has commanded us to be faithful, even in the face of mockery, criticism, and persecution. The truth is, many in this world will not take kindly to those who follow Jesus, as Jesus himself pointed out (Matthew 5:11). Since he told us the world would hate us, something’s dangerously wrong if we achieve popularity with the world. Contextualization without compromise must be our goal.

The greatest model for this is, of course, the incarnation of Christ. Here God “contextualized” himself by taking on human flesh. Jesus Christ became fully human—one of us. He entered our world, spoke our language, and met us where we are, making deep contact. Jesus completely “engaged” us. But because he was without sin, his contact resulted in collision. His refusal to “fit in” eventually led to his execution. He contextualized without compromise right to the bitter end.

As we come in contact with the world, we, too, must always resist its ways. The ideas, values, and passions of the kingdom of God will always collide with the ideas, values, and passions of the kingdom of this world. And where this collision happens, we need to stand our ground.

We could summarize it this way: instead of being culturally removed on the one hand or culturally relaxed on the other, we should seek to be culturally resistant. We’re making contact with the world while colliding with its ways. We’re culturally engaged without being culturally absorbed. We’re to maintain a dissonant relationship to the world without isolating ourselves from it.

Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute outlines the tragic results when we fail to maintain the tension between purity and proximity:

Being salt and light demands two things: We practice purity in the midst of a fallen world and yet we live in proximity to this fallen world. If you don’t hold up both truths in tension, you invariably become useless and separated from the world God loves. For example, if you only practice purity apart from proximity to the culture, you inevitably become pietistic, separatist, and conceited. If you live in close proximity to the culture without also living in a holy manner, you become indistinguishable from fallen culture and useless in God’s kingdom.

We must not fear being different. If we do, we’ll never make a difference. It’s only as we faithfully refuse to “fit in” that we unleash God’s renewing power in this world. So, in our attempt to make contact, we must always beware of leaning over so far that we fall in.

 

Way Back When-sday

"I believe laughing is the best calorie burner."  

~ Audrey Hepburn

~*~ "Happy Trails" Quilt ~*~

A few years ago a fabric company came out with a "Happy Trails" collection, and I was so delighted to find Roy, Dale, and Trigger on fabric!  This quilt took a long time to complete since I got a little carried away when I was making it - it turned out much bigger than I had originally intended when I started. Therefore the quilting also took what seemed like forever.  But now it is completed!

Roy and Trigger!

 The words for both verses of "Happy Trails are embroidered around the edge. :)

Now I need to find a large wall to hang it on.... :D

~Alyssa

Children of Caesar?

"Whoever is teaching our children is also discipling them. Dr. Baucham persuasively argues that Christian parents need to take the initiative in their children's education and stop turning them over to the anti-God environment of the government school."
Get the DVD here.

Way Back When-sday

‎ "Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself."   

~ Susannah Wesley