Luke has been making this face several times a day for a while now.  We don’t know where he got it.  But he was doing it yesterday and my mom was like, you better get a picture of that while he’s still doing it and I got the perfect one.  I think it’s funny that when we just want him to look at the camera and maybe give a smile we have to take 86 shots, but this was the first and it captures his new stinker grin perfectly.

Yesterday, Baby Luke was dedicated to God at Hope Community Church!

Wearin' a suit!

Baby dedication was a chance for us to stand before family, friends, and the church and make vows to raise Luke in the ways of the Lord.  We made five specific promises:
1. Do you today recognize this child as the gift of God and give heartfelt thanks for God’s blessing? We do!
2. Do you now dedicate Luke to the Lord who gave him to you, surrendering all worldly claims upon his life in the hope that he will belong wholly to God? We do!
3. Do you pledge as parents that, with God’s fatherly help, you will bring up Luke “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord,” making every reasonable effort, with patience and love, to build the Word of God, the character of Christ and the joy of the Lord into their lives? We do!
4. Do you promise to provide, through God’s blessing, for the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs of Luke, looking to your own heavenly Father for the wisdom, love and strength to serve him and not use him? We do!
5. Do you promise, God helping you, to make it your regular prayer that by God’s grace Luke will come to trust in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of his sins and for the fulfillment of all his promises to him, even eternal life: and in this faith follow Jesus as Lord and obey his teachings? We do!

Standing before the church

Of course, Luke looked SO handsome in his suit from Grandma Shell and Grandpa Chuck.  And he, as always, was very talkative, screaming, “BAH!” as Pastor Steve talked.

Bless you, Luke, you are dedicated to the LORD!!

Kaelin and I are taking a church planting assessment at the end of June.  They assess our skills, abilities, experiences, and God’s calling and then give a recommendation for whether they think we should plant a church or not.

As part of the preparatory paperwork, I had to fill out a sheet disclosing a lot about my past.  It asked about drug and alcohol abuse, sex and pornography – all of which I struggled with.  Struggled with isn’t even the right word, it would be more appropriate to say I pursued them with wanton vigor.  Writing out my past was a humbling experience.

Now, we’re all sinners… but I ranked quite high up there in terms of terribleness.  I was hit hard by how much Jesus has rescued me from.  Rescued me from things that I was hell-bent on pursuing and enjoying.  Earlier this year I was having difficulty extending grace to people and loving others.  Really, it was because I had forgotten how much grace, mercy, and love God gives me!  

I finally understood why Pastor Steve kept reminding me: “Remember where you came from”.  Thank you Jesus for all you’ve done!

(Posted from our April Newsletter)

Joanne prayed over us

This month was been rough!  We’ve been to the ER twice – once to get 10 stitches in my finger and once for Kaelin’s still unidentified stomach pain – and all three of us had colds for a few weeks.  God has been putting us to the test, which has pushed us to further understand His goodness in ALL situations.

We started off the month crazy busy and really overworking ourselves.  We were spending a lot of time preparing for our new married’s small group, which was set to start February 8th.  Paul, while splitting carrots for snack that night, cut a sizable chunk off the end of his left-middle finger and had to go to the emergency room.  Thankfully, our friend Hannah was there to help take Paul to the ER.  They stitched the chunk back on with 10 stitches.  It is now healing up fairly well.  He had a bunch of dead skin on it that he pulled off to reveal a new finger tip.  It still doesn’t have feeling, but it is coming along.

Starting on that same Sunday, all of us came down with a cold.  Luke especially had it bad and he got really congested in his chest.  So we had to cancel most of our activities that week as we tried to recover from sickness and injury.  After a little over a week Luke and Kaelin were fine, but Paul had it for another few weeks.

And after all this, Kaelin started experiencing severe stomach pain.  We thought it was due to specific foods.  It got really bad last Sunday, so we went to the ER.  They think it may be acid reflux but are not sure (which might make sense given the amount of stress we’ve been under).  We’re going to see a gastro-intestinal doctor next week.  Please be in prayer for her.

Needless to say, there’s been a lot of affliction.  But through this, we’re learning to enjoy God more.  His goodness does not depend on our comfort!  Please pray that we continue to see how God is so incredibly good to us and that all this is temporary and that eventually we’ll be worshipping God for eternity with glorified bodies without any suffering, pain, or tears.

Whoa there!  I’ve seriously been slacking behind on getting our updates to our website.  The last few months have been pretty crazy.  We are eager for some time this summer to get our lives in order a bit!

A big thing in April was going to the Exponential Church Planting conference.  That has really inspired us to continue on the path of planting a church!

Check out our May Update letter (click picture to open PDF)

May 2009 Update Newsletter

We also have some great stories in our March 2009 and April 2009 newsletters.

A man is brutally struke down for boasting about himself.  He is struke, eaten by worms, THEN he dies.  Is this an example of peace?

We would probably say No.  We’d be wrong.

Scripture tells us that “God is not  God of confusion, but of peace” (1 Cor 14:33) and says repeated that He is the “God of peace”  (Rom 15:33, Phil 4:9, 1 Thes. 5:23).  This is of course only one way to describe God, but it is an important one.

How do we describe then, this story:

20 Now Herod was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon, and they came to him with one accord, and having persuaded Blastus, the king’s chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country depended on the king’s country for food. 21 On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and delivered an oration to them. 22 And the people were shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” 23 Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last. (Acts 12:20-23)

Normally we’d look at this and say “here God is showing his justice or his wrath”, which is indeed true.  But also, this is the God of peace, sending an angel to strike down a man because of his pride.  He does not stop being the God of peace when this happens.  He does not stop being the perfect model of peace when this happens.

Take a closer look at the passage.  Note that Herod was “angry” because these people were starving and they wanted “peace” in order to get food from his country.  Herod uses this as an opportunity to flaunt his power over them.  God uses this as an opportunity to actually bring peace, both physically for the people of Tyre and Sidon and spiritually to all those who are able to recognize God’s work in this act.

God’s vantage point is way bigger than ours.  To us, something may not look like peace or love or goodness, but from God’s viewpoint, it is. 

From our perspective, God becoming a man and then getting brutally tortured and murdered doesn’t seem like the way to bring peace to the world.  And yet, this is exactly what Jesus – the Prince of Peace – did in order to bring us peace with God (see Rom 5:1)

Q: What does Kaelin love more than her sleep?

A: The beach!  So getting up at 6am after a full day’s travel was how we began our intensive conference week.

Ah, the ocean.

We're all sunscreened up!

Luke was very afraid of the waves rushing in at his feet!

Oh no!

Then we went for some long days at First Baptist Church Orlando.  So this was what we had been waiting for for months.  When we first learned that we were being invited to the conference, both of us were nervous about what we would do with Luke.  We thought about who we could maybe ask to take him for the week.  When I thought about it, my stomach churned.  Especially because he isn’t yet weaned.  I even cried one night about it, thinking that I had made a big mistake in agreeing to go!  I thought I had wasted ours and the church’s money!!  But, we finally decided that Luke just had to go with us.

Some of it was definitely character building for us, and especially for me! Luke is now on a pretty regular nap schedule and the conference building was very unfriendly to those kind of needs.  So I had to get creative.  Here’s Luke in the random sound room I got a security guard to open so I could lay him on this mat:

Nappin' in the sound room

Once I navigated through nursings and sleeping (Luke even slept in a pew once) the rest of the days were pretty exciting.  I discovered there were a lot of other church planting wives who had their babies with them, too.  Whew!

Paul soaked up every session he could get to.  He loved learning from the great men of God.

First business dinner with Daddy

Here we are at dinner with the people from the BGC (Baptist General Conference) having dinner.  Luke matched his Daddy that day with a white button up and khakis.

Luke started to learn how to wave that week so he was quite the social guy at the conference.  Paul took him so I could fully attend one of the spouse’s sessions and I came out to find him smilin’ and wavin’ it up to all the passerby!

Lunch outside

Mmmm florida oranges

I feel at least a certain level more certain now that God is in front of us for church-planting.  This whole week was just orchestrated all too providentially!

Team Ireland

He even sent us there as a family…. as we will be doing God’s work as a family.

The week for me could also be summed up by the comment I made to Steve Treichler, our Pastor at Hope, at the airport: “Paul really proved this week that he knows how to manage his family well!” (1 Timothy 3:4)  That he does.

It’s been a week since we wrapped up our Beth Moore study on the Fruits of the Spirit at Hope, which I helped Naty and Jeanie lead.    I realized that I really enjoy being a Helper.  Amongst the zillion other crucial lessions I learned from our dear Mrs. Moore!  Miss you ladies!  Looking forward to another

I know it’s been a while since… but I wanted to share some of the highlights from my fabulous birthday, which started out looking like this:

Happy Birthday Momma

Here are my boys in a Happy Birthday Momma card making studio.  Now I really know for sure that my mom must have loved all the little cards I drew because this was just the most heart-melting sight I have ever seen.

Later, I got some of these:

which smelled up the whole house with a gorgeous fragrance.  We went for a long walk outside, and then I went to study God’s word with the girls at Hope Community Church:

Couldn’t have asked for much more!

I have a 9 month old!  

My first Mother’s Day started with baby Luke and Daddy waking me up with a gift.  It was this framed photo of our handsome little man:

He even wrote me a card.  This is what it said:

“Dear Momma, Happy Momma’s Day!  I love you so much Momma!  I wanted to tell you, but all I can say is “Bah”.  But when I say “Bah,” I really mean “Momma, I love it when you play peek-a-boo with me, I love when you give me hugs and kisses, I love playing on the floor with you, I love taking naps with you, I love all your silly faces, I love it when you sing and dance, I love how excited you always are to see me, I love how you always care for me, help me, feed me, bathe me, and love me.  I love you!   -Baby Luke”

I think he got a little help from his very creative Daddy.

We also had Study Day today at church, where we serve college students all day long with rides and food and places to study at Hope for their finals.  I fall in love with my husband a little more every time I see how hard he works to serve people and to serve the Lord.  

Study Day

Being a Momma is fun, especially since we have this Daddy…

 

Here's an oldie

Could there be a better career????