The Light in My Window

The Light in My Window

Monday, August 31, 2015

Remembering, Rejoicing, Restoring

Hi there! The end of the summer sure has been busy around here! It is hard to believe that Labor Day is coming up, and there is a hint of fall in the air as the days are growing shorter. I thought I would give you a peek into what has been going on in my life the past week....
Remembering: It started with a get-together with some friends that we had not seen for over 20 years! We recently reconnected on Facebook (there ARE some benefits to Facebook!) and then my friend messaged me that she and her husband were going to be in our area and would love to see us again. We set it up and were so excited. It was so strange...the voices and the personalities were the same, but we all looked different! There have been a lot of changes in our lives in 23 years to catch up on, but as we talked it was like time melted away. We just picked right up where we left off. It was a fun time of remembering the many great times we had shared.

The remembering continued a couple days later as my hubby and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. Again, it does not seem possible that 40 years could have passed since we said our wedding vows as a very young couple one very hot August day in a church in eastern Pennsylvania. We have been through a lot together - good times, bad times, illnesses, surgeries, deaths of both his parents, many moves and some major life transitions, several house purchases and sales, serving in ministry together, having and raising 3 children, their graduations and weddings, and now 7 grandchildren! We had hoped to celebrate our 40th with a special trip, but due to my husband's knee replacement surgery this summer he was not quite ready for that yet. We will continue our celebration next summer, but for now we had a wonderful time having a special dinner and a sunset cruise aboard a schooner ship. God gave us the perfect evening and a spectacular sunset!

We also have had a week of rejoicing...for a couple reasons. God answered a prayer for us that we have been praying for almost three years! More about that in a later post. Another time of rejoicing came as we were able to enjoy the company of one of our sons and his wife and three children for a few days. It was our "last hurrah" before they begin school and we embark on a hectic fall schedule, and what wonderful times of joy we had! We played on playgrounds, read books, spent a day at an indoor water park, another day in Colonial Williamsburg, and our last day at the beach! My husband was only able to join us for one of these excursions, but we agreed it was a perfect week of fun with our grandkids. God was so good to give us such a wonderful week.

 
On to the restoring...last summer when we prepared the home where my husband grew up for sale (see my post The End of An Era, if you missed that), we rescued an old lawn swing that was in their yard which was in very poor condition. We almost decided it was past saving, but we brought it home and my husband set about completely restoring it. It needed to be completely taken apart, stripped and sanded, put back together piece by piece with all new hardware, and totally refinished. It took him almost a year of working on it off and on, but this week he finished it, and it is beautiful!
Why am I thinking and writing about remembering, rejoicing, and restoring? I think it is partly because we have been through a stormy year. With my mother-in-law's passing, my husband's knee surgery with complications, and a lot of difficult ministry situations this has been one of the hardest years in our 40 years of marriage. It is precious to me to realize that God lovingly brings us times of rejoicing. Those times are such an encouragement. Even in the midst of storms, we can rejoice in the Lord. It starts with remembering God's faithfulness to us through the years. In talking about the children of Israel, God said in Deut. 8:2, "And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou would keep His commandments or not." Psalm 143:5 ' "I remember the days of old, I meditate on all thy works, I muse on the works of thy hands." When we remember all God has done for us, even if we are going through a stormy time we can rejoice. There are so many good verses on rejoicing I had a hard time picking just a few! Psalm 9:2 - "I will be glad and rejoice in the Lord, I will sing praises to thy name, O most High!" Psalm 35:9 - "And my soul shall be joyful in the Lord, it shall rejoice in his salvation."  And then comes restoring. Just like restoring the swing brought it back to its original good condition, God wants to restore us into a right and close relationship with Him. That's why the Psalmist says in Psalm 51:2 - "Restore unto me the joy of my salvation."

Whether you are in a storm or it is smooth sailing for you right now, remember all God has done for you, rejoice in His goodness, and be restored into a joyful relationship with Him!

Joyfully,
Kathi




Monday, August 17, 2015

Another kind of anniversary

Sorry about the delay in my blog being posted this time! Last week was VERY busy around here, with Revival Services at church, a youth activity at our house, and a bridal shower! Whew!

Just six days from now, my husband and I will be celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary. Even though we got married when we were very young, that still seems incredible... how can it be 40 years? But when I consider that we have three adult children and seven grandchildren, as well as a few more pounds and wrinkles.....well, it's true!  I will probably be writing more about our special anniversary in a later post.

As I was thinking about our upcoming anniversary, I realized that we also have an anniversary of another kind this year. It is the 25th anniversary of my husband's yielding to the call of God to preach. My husband was called to preach later in life. He had been a businessman for 15 years, and quite a successful one at that. We both went through a time of resisting God's call on our lives. As you can well imagine, it meant HUGE changes in our life - selling a beautiful home with several acres of land, quitting a secure job with good pay and benefits, and moving our three children to another state in order for my husband to study for the ministry. But through all of that, God gave me peace and this one primary desire: to invest my life in others. We all invest our lives in something. But only investing our lives for the Lord counts for eternity. During this time, God especially used two verses in my life: One was my life verse in 1 Samuel 12:24 - "Only fear the Lord and serve Him with all your heart, for consider what great things He has done for you." The other is from Luke 12:48b ' ..."for unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required..." God has blessed me with so much, and now He was asking me to give back to Him.

Over these 25 years since we made that decision, we have learned a lot. A lot of what you do in the ministry is never taught in the classroom! I have had some fun remembering some of the things we have done through the years: dressing up in various costumes for VBS, grilling a lot of hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken (sometimes in the rain!) for church picnics, installing and painting drywall and putting a new roof on our church in Illinois, building sets and rehearsing skits, giving out brochures and New Testaments, playing a lot of crazy games (and not just with the teens!), moving the church office from our home into a new (to us) church building, setting up a church library from scratch, building bonfires and driving tractors for hayrides,  hosting Christmas Open House in our home for the whole church, building the base for a giant banana split, taking youth groups and kids to and from camp and retreats....and that's just the things I can think of. You could say we definitely believe in being a "hands-on pastor."

But above all, we have learned that ministry means one thing: investing your life in people. There have been many, many hours of doing that in many different ways. We have taught, discipled, mentored, and most of all loved the people that God has sent our way. There have been surgeries and serious illnesses that we have sat and prayed through, deaths and funerals where we comforted the best we could. There have been tough family situations requiring hours of counsel. We have laughed with them, cried with them, and spent countless hours praying with them. In short, we have knit our hearts together with theirs. That is what God called us to do.

And yet...whenever you invest your lives in people, you are taking a risk. The risk is that the very people who you have spent hours ministering to and investing your lives in can hurt you. We have discovered over the years that it seems like the ones we poured ourselves into the most also hurt us the most. People will misunderstand you. They hear things and don't come to you about it. People reject your counsel and your help. They decide that they want something other than what you have to offer them. And it hurts. And hardest of all, some of them make choices that take them away from God.

But even in this, I have learned. We may think we can protect our hearts from being hurt by avoiding building relationships with the people God sends us. The temptation to do that is great. However, when we do that, we are not really investing our lives in others. We are protecting our own interests and focusing on ourselves. That is NOT what God intends for us to do.

The other truth is this: when we are hurt by people, it makes me think of Jesus. There is no one who suffered more greatly or more unjustly than He did, and there is no one who gave of Himself more than He. It shames me to realize how I sometimes disappoint or turn away from the One who has given His very life for me. When you consider all that He does for us, it makes what we do for Him seem so small and trivial.

What - and who - are you investing your life in? When all is said and done, what will you be known for? A saying that I learned as a child has stayed with me all these years, and the older I get, the more it rings true for me:

Only one life, 'twill soon be past.
Only what's done for Christ will last.

Lovingly,
Kathi

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

This and That

I thought in this week's post that rather than writing a devotional I would do something a little different and just give you a glimpse into what I have been doing this week. But don't worry - I have included something inspirational at the end, so if the rest bores you, feel free just to skip to the end!

What I Have Organized

One thing I love to do is to organize things! Over the years I have found many great ways of organizing our home, but one thing that always drove me crazy was the freezer.  We have a chest freezer which is filled with packages of meat, vegetables, fruits, baked goods, and so forth, and I hated having to dig through everything trying to find that one item that I was needing. Often I would wonder if I had used it or I just couldn't find it. Or I would buy something, only to find out later I already had it. So, I went to Dollar Tree and bought  5 brightly colored plastic baskets - 3 large and 2 small. Total cost: $5. I unloaded the freezer and brought everything into my kitchen, and I sorted it and organized it by baskets. I used the 3 large baskets for chicken, pork, and beef. I put all my frozen vegetables in one of the smaller baskets and frozen baked goods (breads, muffins, cookies that I have made and frozen) into the other. And voila! It is working wonderfully! Now when I need that package of chicken breasts or frozen peas, I know EXACTLY where to go to find them. An added bonus is that I can easily see by looking at the various baskets when I am low or out of something before I go to the store!

Where I Went


Since my husband had his knee replacement surgery and subsequent complications in June, this summer has kind of been a blur of hospitalizations/PT/ recovery (which is still ongoing), and we hadn't gotten to do anything even remotely "summer-like". I was so excited that we had a free Saturday and that my husband was well enough to be up to a trip to a nearby beach! It was an abbreviated stay and it was the bay instead of the ocean, but hey, it was the beach! I wiggled my toes in the sand and swam in the waves and walked on the beach and LOVED it.

What We Celebrated


If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that we have SIX beautiful granddaughters, all very close in age, and one handsome grandson! Two of our granddaughters had birthdays this week, within a day of each other. M. turned 3 and K. turned 4. (Another of our granddaughters turns 2 this coming week!) One of the disadvantages of not living near our children and grandchildren is that we seldom are able to spend things like birthdays together. We send presents in the mail, and we are thankful for cell phone and FaceTime and Skype so we could talk to the birthday girls and sing to them!

What I Baked

I know, you are not supposed to be turning on the oven and heating up the kitchen in the summer when it is 100 degrees outside. I just have a really hard time refraining from baking! One of the things I made this week is Zucchini-Pineapple bread. I have seen many recipes for zucchini bread, but this one just can't be beat. It is moist and absolutely delicious. I originally got the recipe from one of the ladies in our church in Illinois and in case you would like to try it, here it is:

Zucchini-Pineapple Bread

Mix together:
3 eggs
2 c. sugar
1 c. oil
1 tsp. vanilla

Sift together and add:
3 c. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon

Mix well by hand. Add 2 cups of peeled, shredded zucchini, 1 c. chopped nuts (optional) and 1 15-20 oz. can of crushed pineapple, well drained. Mix well. Grease 2 8 inch loaf pans or 6 mini loaf pans, fill, and bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes for regular loaves, 35-40 minutes for small ones.

Keep refrigerated, or freezes well. Try with whipped cream cheese spread!

Last but not least, What I Read


I absolutely LOVE it when I find a book on my shelf that I had forgotten I bought and never read! And it is even better when it is an unread book by my favorite author! And the icing on the cake is when the Lord uses that book to clearly direct me! I have been doing a lot of praying about what study I am going to teach in our upcoming year of Ladies Bible Study classes. I was pretty sure the Lord was directing me to teach a study on Discipline, based on another excellent book by Barbara Hughes, Disciplines of a Godly Woman. Now that study will be enriched by this newly-discovered book by Elisabeth Elliott. As you know, Elisabeth Elliott went home to be with the Lord on June 15. She was one of my heroes of the faith and has impacted my life in more ways than I can count. I highly recommend reading anything by her that you can get your hands on.

In chapter 6 of this book, Elisabeth writes: "It is the willingness we must emphasize here. We pray "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." God's will is always willingly and gladly done in heaven. Willing obedience is a very different thing from coercion. God does not coerce us to follow Him....He tells us what to do, and we find our happiness in doing it. God will never disappoint us. He loves us and has only one purpose for us: holiness, which in His kingdom equals joy. If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. Discipline is the glad surrender."

Hoping you have a good week knowing the faithfulness of your God,
Kathi