Monday, September 17, 2007

erinsdailystuff.blogspot.com

That's right, I have another blog. This time I hope to dedicate the space to my goals etc. If you feel so inclined, I am posting my well earned knowledge and other stuff at the address listed in the title.
I'll also include it on my homepage that way you can jump right to it! Yea!
As you know the church has always been a big part of our lives. We have found ourselves most joyful when we are pouring ourselves into the service of the Lord and His church. It has been exciting to look back on all the different ways God has led us to serve and all that we have learned along the way. We consider our work along the way, not for our gain, but for the greater good of The Kingdom.

We have never been disappointed in where God has landed us in the way of serving the church. I'm not saying we have not been discouraged and frustrated along the way, but when we have been confident of His direction, we have not been disappointed. After all, God does not promise the life of service to be without trial, but He does promise to reward those who are faithful. Please understand that I'm also not suggesting that I or we have been perfectly faithful either. In fact, my faith is like shifting sand, changed by every wave (to quote a lyric by Caedmon's Call).

In coming here, we were confident that God would lead us to the place he had preordained for us. We were more confident than ever in this, following such tremendous leading along this most recent journey. It should have been no surprise to us that the church we would call home was just a 5 minute drive drive from our new home. Pathway Community Church is a growing, thriving church in Fort Wayne and we are thrilled to begin this leg of our walk at this church.
I will post the website on my blog's homepage if you would like to check it out.

This past Sunday, the pastor gave a message that was incredibly relevant to our lives now. And many other's lives I am certain. To illustrate his message that dealt with how easily we put everything else in front of God and other things vital to our joyful existence, Pastor Rob used Covey's stones in a jar demonstration. It goes like this, first he pours sand into a jar that represents all of the things that we consider important in our lives and set as priorities. Things like work, school, practices, meetings, events, cooking dinner, grocery shopping, doing laundry, etc. All things important. Then, once the sand filled the jar nearly to the top, he used tennis balls to represent God, our physical and mental selves, our marriages, and other things that should take priority in our lives. With the sand that filled the jar, there was no room left for the tennis balls. The object of this lesson is that if we put the tennis balls in first--our God, our health our marriage, and then put the sand in after those things...it all fits quite perfectly. Though I've seen and heard this demonstration a few times, this time it made a different impact.

When we moved here, Eric and I both said at different times, "this is our chance to make a fresh start." The unfortunate part is that we are finding ourselves falling right back into our old ways. Praise God for His timing and that our hearts were ripe for this particular message.
It is time for us to get our priorities straight. Putting God first has been our way of life for a lot of years now, but we are constantly faced with the spiritual battle that rages in this world and in every part of our lives. My prayer is that God would help us fight the good fight and that we, with Him in the lead would reign victorious. Our hope is to raise our three children to be Christ followers and to love and serve Him in a much greater way than we ever have. To see this type of fruit in our lives, we must put God FIRST!

A hard lesson learned

A humbling situation:
If you read my blog regularly (though I know I've been MIA for a little while), you know that I take a lot of pride in my writing. If you don't read regularly, you should know that I take a lot of pride in my writing to understand the full impact of this story. Writing is an outlet for me. I find myself a lot more peaceful when I write. I don't just writ in my blog, I write in many other places. I have this public blog as well a few private blogs (just for me) and a couple ongoing Word documents too.
If you read a few posts back, you know that we recently went through a pretty major relocation from Chicago to Fort Wayne, IN. The circumstances that surrounded the relocation were absolutely nothing short of divine. During that time I experienced God siting after God siting. Thankfully, I was also inspired to journal each step of the way. It was a prompting from the book that inspired me to pray about our geographic place in life. It was exciting to look back even days after to see how God was continuing to move us...literally.
I was broken and humbled when, shortly after our move, our laptop crashed and our hard drive got fried. Literally, lost every last thing that was on there. Including of course my accounts of the last few months. Our research into recovering hard drives revealed that it would cost us up to $4000 to get the information back. So, we wait.
I tell you this tragic story because it is the precurser to why I plan to publish my journaling on my blog, some of it public, some of it private. I figure this way I'm less likely to lose my content. I understand that I should have backed everything up and so forth, but hey, chalk it up to a really hard lesson learned!

My hope is find myself doing a lot more writing and NOT losing it!