Mar 7, 2010 | Baby Photos, Stories
I normally don’t have a post for you on Sundays (I think it’s good to take a blogging break!) but I do have a quick little thought to share with you. (Tomorrow I’ll have the post with pics of the great gifts from last week! Promise!) So.
This is my beautiful big sister, Dodi:
(it rhymes with Jody and does NOT sound like dotty)
(Photo credit: Lindsay Lee Hartsell)
This is her funny hubby, Andy:
(That photo was also by the talented Lindsay Lee Hartsell.)
Tomorrow, Dodi and Andy will have one of these:
(Photo by the talented Hero Hubby)
Unless she goes into labour today.
I am so excited to celebrate the arrival of this little one, Dodi and Andy’s first child, my first niece or nephew (I think niece) and the Bear’s first cousin! We don’t know whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl, which I love. Surprises are great! Especially good ones!
I just thought I’d write to quickly ask for prayers for them. If she doesn’t go into labour today she’ll be induced tomorrow. Please pray that everything will go smoothly, that they won’t get caught in a blizzard on the way to the hospital or anything, (they live in Telluride, Colorado 🙂 ) and that she will have a safe and peaceful delivery of a healthy baby boy or girl who eats well, is smart and happy and obedient and sleeps through the night very soon. (Doesn’t hurt to ask!)
I hope to share photos and details once the little prince or princess arrives! Yay! Thanks for your prayers in the meantime!
xCC
Mar 6, 2010 | Baby Photos, Stories
As promised…I have a great story to share! Part of the reason it’s great is because of readers like you! Shall we get started?
So. My Mom sent a gift, a Happy 18 Months, Bear! slash we didn’t get to see each other at Christmas slash Happy Valentine’s sort of gift. She is great like that. And as I shared with you previously, there was drama surrounding the receiving of said gift, involving a very high customs and duties fee being demanded by South African Revenue Service (SARS). We were at the end of a tight month, really working to stay inside our budget, and five days away from payday, the thought of the gift being held ransom was rather discouraging. And I shared all that with you.
What I hadn’t shared yet was that over the course of those few days when we were discouraged and trying to figure out what to do, I was spending time reading the Bible (I like to do that, ya know) and I found myself in I Peter 2, which has a discussion of the importance of submitting to government. For a few days we’d been speaking with FedEx and their South African partners Supaswift, we’d been on the phone to SARS, and we’d been on the internet trying to discern whether we were actually being correctly charged for my Mom’s gift, since they were asking close to 70% of the gift’s declared value. At one point, FedEx made the suggestion that we could change the customs form to read ZAR 200.00 (meaning 200 South African Rand) instead of $200. And then no customs would be due. To say the least, this felt dodgy.  We also considered sending the package back to the US and having friends who are coming next month bring it over. But that didn’t seem much different.
So back to 1 Peter 2. This passage says, Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good. It goes on to say Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the King. I flipped over to Romans 13 after reading this, to be reminded again that the Lord does indeed instruct us to submit to government. And then I remembered when Jesus and Peter were visiting the temple and they were asked to pay the temple tax. Even though Jesus was greater than the temple, being the Son of God and all, still he sent Peter to the lake to catch a fish, and the fish had a coin in its mouth which would pay the tax.
All of that combined to indicate to me that we should pay the fines, even though they seemed exorbitant and ridiculous. The prayer that followed this was: Lord, You provided the coin in the mouth of the fish for Peter to pay taxes, even though it didn’t seem right. Will you please provide for us to pay the taxes due for the gift from my mother? Help us to submit and properly obey the government here.
And so He did. Without seeing it in any way connected, I shared with you my discouragement about what was going on. Five minutes after this blog post hit the web, I received a Facebook message from a friend who said “Do you have a PayPal account? I’d like to send you some spendable encouragement.” Within twenty minutes we’d been blessed with a financial gift which was just $40 shy of what we needed for the taxes. ENCOURAGEMENT, HELLO OLD FRIEND! But the story doesn’t end there!
The next morning I received an email from other friends who said they wanted to pay for us to be able to receive the gift, and they asked how much we needed. I wrote them back and sad “We’ve already been blessed with this much, and we only need this much more, but really we can cover it ourselves. If you really want to give you can, but you don’t have to worry about it.” There was of course other dialogue and thank you’s but I don’t need to tell you that since you know how long winded I am. I had been encouraged by the gift the night before, and all your emails and comments and messages, and I was full of trust that it was going to come together fine.
AND THEN! The next day I had a voicemail from my Mom saying “Your big brother read your blog and heard about what happened with your gift and he was upset that you were discouraged! He is going to put thus and such in your bank account so don’t you worry! You’re going to get your present!” As you can imagine, this brought me to tears. I didn’t even know my brother read my blog! haha Seriously, I was just really, deeply blessed by this. It has been lonely at times being in a new country, far away from family, friends and familiarity, and this moment just made me feel so surrounded and in community, even if a lot of it is virtual community right now.
Hear me out on this: You might like to chalk this up to coincidence or serendipity, but I have experienced too much coincidence in my life to call it that any more. We told God we would trust Him and walk in His ways, and we asked for His help so that we could do so. And with exceeding abundance, He provided more than enough…in more ways than one!
On Tuesday, my Mom’s gift finally arrived…along with two others! My friend Amiee also sent us a gift, maybe two or three weeks before my Mom sent hers, and Samaritan’s Feet sent us some documents and copies of our founder’s new book…and all of it coincidentally arrived on Tuesday. We opened our gifts and were just so blessed by so much generosity at a time when things have been tight…it was like a second Christmas!
To me, all this is a demonstration of God’s blessing and provision for us when we choose to walk in His ways. Although submitting to the government and paying those fees seemed like a rubbish idea at first, yet the Lord did provide for us to do so, and allowed us to walk with Him through the process. And that, my friends, is the Sermon in a Nutshell.
Since this post has gotten a little long (no surprise there) I’m going to “to be continued” to fill another post with good cheer, happy photos and general prezzie merriment! To arrive in your browser or inbox or google reader very soon! Thank you for your prayers and encouragement. Again and again, thanks.
xCC
P.S. If you’re wondering why the Bear’s outfit changed from picture 1 to picture 2, it’s because we had a little accident that necessitated a gear change and we decided he should sport his new gear for the next set of photos! 🙂
Mar 3, 2010 | Baby Photos, Stories
At first I spelled that “Sneek Peak” and then stared at it and wondered why spell check didn’t agree with me. Anyway! When it rains it pours. And yesterday, the gift heard ’round the world arrived. And. We received not one, not two, but THREE packages from the States on the same day. Crazy, I know.
I have to make much ado about it and put together a big long post because #1 There’s a great testimony behind it. #2 Do you know how much it costs to send anything from the States to South Africa? #3 My Mom is awesome and you could probably create a whole other blog just about her. #4 My friend Amiee sent a surprise gift (three weeks earlier) which miraculously arrived on the same day and was also DELIGHTFUL. #5 Who doesn’t want to see pictures of a second Christmas, in March?
Now a post like that is gonna take some time to put together. I mean I have pictures of the Fed Ex delivery guys for you and everything. And you are probably aware that I’m not good at making a long story short. But in the meantime, I thought I’d give you a Sneak Peek (or a Sneek Peak if you rather) because this picture was just too darlin’ not to throw up on the internet asap.  So here’s your Sneek Peak!
Now you can get back to whatever it was you were up to before this came across your screen, and I’ll have some more Christmas-in-March-delights to share with you soon.
xCC
Feb 26, 2010 | Baby Photos, Stories
Guys and gals, you are awesome. Seriously. I feel like I’d almost forgotten what it was like to interact with people you’ve known for longer than six months. If you were one of the folks who decided to say a prayer, send a message or leave a comment, thank you thank you thank you. I am truly encouraged. It was a privilege to receive your kind and thoughtful words and just to be reminded that other folks are going through the same stuff. I am looking forward to replying to each of you to thank you personally!
A lot of cool stuff has happened since my last post. I am very glad I decided to be real! Literally within a few minutes someone sent us a gift of “spendable encouragement” and then I woke up the next morning to messages and comments and good old encouraging love! Then some friends offered to pay the cost of duties and customs for the gift… and it was finally the beginning of our new fiscal month and we went grocery shopping (that always helps) … and today we had lunch with Rob & Brenda Young, two pastors and wonderful people visiting from Scotland who are very dear to us … and I am starting to sound like a six year old who just got home from school and wants to tell you everything that happened.
Needless to say, the box situation has almost resolved itself… bar some additional paperwork… we’ve spent time with dear friends (pictures to come)… the Blogher network is going to let me run ads for them and I even trimmed the Bear’s hair a little (pictures to come) and there I go again I should be typing with a lisp. Not a lot has really changed in our life situations, per se, but the opportunity tough moments give us to get a change of perspective and an opportunity to thoughtfully choose our attitudes with a little help from our friends… that’s where the good stuff happens. If that made any sense. And today’s sermon in a nutshell is: If you are trying to live life as a Christian and you don’t have a community to live it in… you need one!
I hope to have more pictures, encouragements and general-feel-goodness coming your way very soon. But I’m going to work on doing a better job of being real. Why does my grumpy real-ness get more retweets that anything else? In the meantime, I just want to say thank you again and again, and again, for being an encouragement to me!
Here’s the Bear’s before shot in the meantime…more to come!
xCC
Feb 16, 2010 | Stories, Travel..ling Tuesdays
Before the Bear came into our lives, we enjoyed a lot more beer. I kid, I kid. But we did visit Beer. Hopefully that’s why you’re here…to see shots of Beer. The rhyming is contagious, isn’t it? Sorry. We were in the US raising support for ministry in Scotland and two of our very good friends were planning on gettin’ hitched in the south of England. We prayed about whether we were supposed to go, felt like we should only consider it if we could find flights for thus and such…and flights for thus and such we found! I am so glad we were able to be there. It was an awesome wedding of two awesome people who are so dear to us. They’re now happily married with a little girl (who was born just after we left Scotland…we’re really looking forward to meeting her!)
We flew in to London and took a wee trip down to the south west of England for the wedding. We took a few days and saw some gorgeous sights and had some memorable moments along the way…but you’re here for Beer! Sorry.
So this in me in Beer! In case you haven’t caught on, Beer is a village in the south west of England. If my face looks chubby, it will be explained, posthaste…
Take a closer look at these beautiful cliffs!
Hero Hubs took some beautiful shots of me on the beach. Not that I was particularly beautiful…the beach was! And the photo composition.
Wasn’t that great? You know what else is great? Me. Well I was great. In the photo I was great, with child. You can perhaps tell here:
That one feels like it should be a CD cover or something. The Brotha’s got soul.
Beer also has beautiful boats!
Do you love their colours? I do.
And now, I shall provide proof that there is indeed a village in south west England called Beer. In case you haven’t googled it already.
I don’t know what a Luggers Club is…perhaps lugging beer back and forth? Well you’ll be glad to know Beer has one.
In case you’re still not convinced, and you think it’s just a Beer-Luggers Club, I will now share with you the invitation I personally received to the Beer Social Club. Ahem.
Must be easy to be social with so much Beer.
Well friends, I hope you enjoyed having a beer together. And in case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t have a beer in Beer. I was great with child, remember! 😉
Happy Trails! And may the road rise to meet you wherever your journey takes you next!
Feb 15, 2010 | Stories, The Good Word
Have you cried any tears of joy lately? Like, have you had a good happy cry in a while? I have. I thought I’d take two seconds to share it with you because I see it as a testimony of God’s goodness. And by two seconds I mean I intend to take two seconds, but I’ll end up taking five hundred and seventy-two, because, as we all know, brevity isn’t my strong suit.
As I’ve shared before, HH and I have been working diligently to be good stewards of our finances. This has meant tightening our belts pretty tight. I can’t remember the last time I bought an article of clothing, although I think it was a pair of hiking shorts last September or October. (That’s kind of a big deal for me — not the hiking shorts, the not shopping). My parents did bless me with new clothes the last time I was home…so I really can’t complain about that. We hadn’t eaten out for a long time, until yesterday.
My Mom sent a little Valentine’s gift our way (she says it’s little, but to us it’s big) and we decided to spend part of it on a *very* reasonably priced meal out last night, meaning we’ll still have some left over for other things. The Bear indisputably loves fish, but that shouldn’t surprise us…he’s a bear! And as you know, we’d hoped to go home for Christmas, and when that didn’t work, instead in April for the wedding of two very dear friends (the one where they hoped the Bear would be their Ring Bear), and to meet my sister’s baby, but due to finances and our convictions about throwing things on the credit card, we decided against making those purchases. Can you guys stand reading this when I use so many run-on sentences? We don’t have TV…we don’t go to movies…I am very careful with our grocery budget…These are just a few examples of what tightening means for us.*
Here’s where this gets CRAZY. I don’t share any of this with you as a complaint, and I genuinely mean that. I can honestly say it and mean it when I say The boundary lines have fallen to us in pleasant places. Yes, I miss my family like crazy. And yes, I am dying to meet the little one that my sister will be delivering very soon. And yeah, I wouldn’t mind having a couple of new options in my wardrobe.
BUT. In this season I have learned thankfulness like never before. I have learned the value of a dollar — a Rand, as well — and I have learned how incredibly blessed I am to have a roof over my head, shoes on my feet and food in my belly. Do you realise you’re probably in the top ten percent in the world if you have more than 5 shirts in your closet? My heart is full and thankful, and I am overjoyed that the Lord has been feeding us our allotted portion, and teaching us so so so much along the way. It really is better to have a little and be thankful than to have a lot, and still covet more. (Yes, covetousness is still something I’m thinking about!)
So about the joyful tears… Good thing I warned you I might not be brief. We spoke with my Mom last night, and she’d been looking at flight prices and considering coming to visit us. This was news to me, as I wasn’t expecting to see her, honestly, before Christmas this year, and I wasn’t expecting her to visit South Africa until maybe 2011. She found flights to South Africa for a very good price, and decided to book them before they went up. So, she will be here to visit in six months!
I can’t tell you how much this felt like a reward from the Lord. I don’t know if that sounds like a strange thing to you. But the Bible holds these promises it mentions over and over again, like: If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the good of the land. (Isaiah 1:19) and Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:3 & 4).
I can honestly say our hearts have been chasing after God in this season — we’ve been expressing a desire to walk in His ways, spending more and more time with Him, and working to be obedient to His leadings and the direction we find in His Word. And I don’t say any of that to toot my own horn — I am a sinner just like you. But God…He is so good, so true and so faithful to His Word. If we walk in His ways, we’ll see His goodness. And seeing my Mom in six months’ time — that is goodness, and a major desire of my heart being fulfilled!
So when my Mom shared the news last night that she would be visiting us, clearly, this was a good reason for tears of joy. It was an amazing Valentine’s gift. A heartful of joy hand delivered! Or delivered over the phone. Well, the computer…via skype. You get the idea. I thought I’d share the joy with you, and a picture from the last time my Mom and the Bear were together — our trip to the States over his first birthday. Now she’ll be here to celebrate his second! YAY!
I hope you had a great Valentine’s Day! If you had any cause for tears of joy, I’d love to hear about it! If you had a cause for regular tears, I am sorry, and I’ll be happy to lend an ear about that, too.
xoxoCaroline
*Tightening may look completely different for you. I am not trying to preach or guilt trip or sneakily ask for ministry support! I am just sharing where we are along the journey, as a means of sharing how good God has been to us! He is good!
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