Arriving on the island at the base of Mt. Purgatory:
"Around this little island at the base,
down there, just where the waves break on the shore,
you will find rushes growing in soft sand.
No other plant producing leaves or stalk
that hardens could survive in such a place--
only the reeds that yield to buffeting."
--Dante, Purgatorio, Canto I
We read this again in class today and it really struck me as beautiful. Only the flexible-stemed reeds can survive the abuse of the waves. Isn't that a beautiful picture of submission to God's will? So often we want to be rigid and insist on our way-- but the rigid plant would break. May I be like the reed, content with the Lord's plan, trusting in His ways completely.
"A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth." Isaiah 42:3
Monday, February 27, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Sad, Angry, and Overwhelmed
http://www.lifenews.com/nat420.html
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hb4446_sb307
Those links will take you to some articles regarding the latest battleground in the abortion war: ultrasounds. Many crisis pregnancy centers have begun offering free ultrasounds, and many for-profit businesses have begun offering 3-D ultrasounds. The 3-D ultrasounds are incredibly detailed. You can actually see what the baby looks like. But the FDA has suddenly decided that ultrasounds may not be safe, despite years of ordering at least one routine ultrasound for every pregnant woman. Many high-risk mothers receive them on a monthly or weekly basis. Yet the FDA is concerned that a non-medical ultrasound is so unsafe that it may need to be banned. As one article notes, "The FDA said, 'Ultrasound is a form of energy, and even at low levels, laboratory studies have shown it can produce physical effects in tissue, such as jarring vibrations and a rise in temperature.'Because of that, the FDA said, 'Prenatal ultrasounds can't be considered completely innocuous.' A few limited studies have linked ultrasounds to speech delays in children."
Women have been reassured over and over again by their doctors that ultrasounds are completely safe. Why now the change of heart?
I think that there is concern that if ultrasound becomes widely available on demand it will become increasingly difficult to deny that an embryo/fetus is a living human being. I saw my baby's heart beating at 8 weeks post-conception on the ultrasound machine. Unfortunately, even if you can get a person to admit that a woman who is pregnant has a baby inside her, they still can argue that the mother's life is more valuable than the child's or that in inutero the child is the mother's property for her to dispose of according to her whims. Allowing free access to ultrasounds (i.e. no prescription required) won't cause abortion to disappear. It is disgusting to me to see how hard certain policy-makers will work to stifle the flow of information. I thought they were all about a woman's free choice?
I really don't understand the passion behind the abortion movement. I'm passionate because I believe that innocent people are being killed. Why does it matter so much to Gloria Feldt that women have the right to kill their children? That is a question I need to answer to truly enter into this discussion. Why is the value of a life-- the right to life ---judged by whether or not someone wants you? That's what euthanasia and abortion are all about. Who has the right to decide that your life isn't worth living for you?
I came across an article and a snippet caught my eye: "The right to life does not come from the government". Isn't that what this country is all about? Unalienable rights given by God to men that cannot be granted or taken away by men. And anyone who claims to be able to grant or revoke anyone's rights is a tyrant-- an unjust, unlawful ruler. I often tease my husband about being the revolutionary in the family, but when I spend any amount of time thinking about this subject I'm about ready to agree that time to make a change has come. But perhaps tis better to "rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?"
All I can do is pray. Pray that God will send His Spirit to the people of this country, and that they would experience His redeeming love. Pray that in my life I would honor Him and be a good testimony to His name. Pray that God would show me how to compassionately discuss this sensitive issues with women of a different mindset without being being combative, but instead compelling! The war is too big for me to fight. I'm glad that the battle belongs to the Lord. I pray He would make me faithful in little things.
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hb4446_sb307
Those links will take you to some articles regarding the latest battleground in the abortion war: ultrasounds. Many crisis pregnancy centers have begun offering free ultrasounds, and many for-profit businesses have begun offering 3-D ultrasounds. The 3-D ultrasounds are incredibly detailed. You can actually see what the baby looks like. But the FDA has suddenly decided that ultrasounds may not be safe, despite years of ordering at least one routine ultrasound for every pregnant woman. Many high-risk mothers receive them on a monthly or weekly basis. Yet the FDA is concerned that a non-medical ultrasound is so unsafe that it may need to be banned. As one article notes, "The FDA said, 'Ultrasound is a form of energy, and even at low levels, laboratory studies have shown it can produce physical effects in tissue, such as jarring vibrations and a rise in temperature.'Because of that, the FDA said, 'Prenatal ultrasounds can't be considered completely innocuous.' A few limited studies have linked ultrasounds to speech delays in children."
Women have been reassured over and over again by their doctors that ultrasounds are completely safe. Why now the change of heart?
I think that there is concern that if ultrasound becomes widely available on demand it will become increasingly difficult to deny that an embryo/fetus is a living human being. I saw my baby's heart beating at 8 weeks post-conception on the ultrasound machine. Unfortunately, even if you can get a person to admit that a woman who is pregnant has a baby inside her, they still can argue that the mother's life is more valuable than the child's or that in inutero the child is the mother's property for her to dispose of according to her whims. Allowing free access to ultrasounds (i.e. no prescription required) won't cause abortion to disappear. It is disgusting to me to see how hard certain policy-makers will work to stifle the flow of information. I thought they were all about a woman's free choice?
I really don't understand the passion behind the abortion movement. I'm passionate because I believe that innocent people are being killed. Why does it matter so much to Gloria Feldt that women have the right to kill their children? That is a question I need to answer to truly enter into this discussion. Why is the value of a life-- the right to life ---judged by whether or not someone wants you? That's what euthanasia and abortion are all about. Who has the right to decide that your life isn't worth living for you?
I came across an article and a snippet caught my eye: "The right to life does not come from the government". Isn't that what this country is all about? Unalienable rights given by God to men that cannot be granted or taken away by men. And anyone who claims to be able to grant or revoke anyone's rights is a tyrant-- an unjust, unlawful ruler. I often tease my husband about being the revolutionary in the family, but when I spend any amount of time thinking about this subject I'm about ready to agree that time to make a change has come. But perhaps tis better to "rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?"
All I can do is pray. Pray that God will send His Spirit to the people of this country, and that they would experience His redeeming love. Pray that in my life I would honor Him and be a good testimony to His name. Pray that God would show me how to compassionately discuss this sensitive issues with women of a different mindset without being being combative, but instead compelling! The war is too big for me to fight. I'm glad that the battle belongs to the Lord. I pray He would make me faithful in little things.
Pain: God's Gift
This is a wonderful article by Dr. John Piper, who has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. May the Lord bring glory to Himself through Dr. Piper's trial, and I pray God heals him.
Don’t Waste Your Cancer
Pastor John Piper
February 15, 2006
I write this on the eve of prostate surgery. I believe in God’s power to heal—by miracle and by medicine. I believe it is right and good to pray for both kinds of healing. Cancer is not wasted when it is healed by God. He gets the glory and that is why cancer exists. So not to pray for healing may waste your cancer. But healing is not God’s plan for everyone. And there are many other ways to waste your cancer. I am praying for myself and for you that we will not waste this pain.
1. You will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God.
It will not do to say that God only uses our cancer but does not design it. What God permits, he permits for a reason. And that reason is his design. If God foresees molecular developments becoming cancer, he can stop it or not. If he does not, he has a purpose. Since he is infinitely wise, it is right to call this purpose a design. Satan is real and causes many pleasures and pains. But he is not ultimate. So when he strikes Job with boils (Job 2:7), Job attributes it ultimately to God (2:10) and the inspired writer agrees: “They . . . comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (Job 42:11). If you don’t believe your cancer is designed for you by God, you will waste it.
2. You will waste your cancer if you believe it is a curse and not a gift.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). “There is no enchantment against Jacob, no divination against Israel” (Numbers 23:23). “The Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11).
3. You will waste your cancer if you seek comfort from your odds rather than from God.
The design of God in your cancer is not to train you in the rationalistic, human calculation of odds. The world gets comfort from their odds. Not Christians. Some count their chariots (percentages of survival) and some count their horses (side effects of treatment), but we trust in the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7). God’s design is clear from 2 Corinthians 1:9, “We felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” The aim of God in your cancer (among a thousand other good things) is to knock props out from under our hearts so that we rely utterly on him.
4. You will waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death.
We will all die, if Jesus postpones his return. Not to think about what it will be like to leave this life and meet God is folly. Ecclesiastes 7:2 says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning [a funeral] than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.” How can you lay it to heart if you won’t think about it? Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Numbering your days means thinking about how few there are and that they will end. How will you get a heart of wisdom if you refuse to think about this? What a waste, if we do not think about death.
5. You will waste your cancer if you think that “beating” cancer means staying alive rather than cherishing Christ.
Satan’s and God’s designs in your cancer are not the same. Satan designs to destroy your love for Christ. God designs to deepen your love for Christ. Cancer does not win if you die. It wins if you fail to cherish Christ. God’s design is to wean you off the breast of the world and feast you on the sufficiency of Christ. It is meant to help you say and feel, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” And to know that therefore, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 3:8; 1:21).
6. You will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.
It is not wrong to know about cancer. Ignorance is not a virtue. But the lure to know more and more and the lack of zeal to know God more and more is symptomatic of unbelief. Cancer is meant to waken us to the reality of God. It is meant to put feeling and force behind the command, “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). It is meant to waken us to the truth of Daniel 11:32, “The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action.” It is meant to make unshakable, indestructible oak trees out of us: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:2). What a waste of cancer if we read day and night about cancer and not about God.
7. You will waste your cancer if you let it drive you into solitude instead of deepen your relationships with manifest affection.
When Epaphroditus brought the gifts to Paul sent by the Philippian church he became ill and almost died. Paul tells the Philippians, “He has been longing for you all and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill” (Philippians 2:26-27). What an amazing response! It does not say they were distressed that he was ill, but that he was distressed because they heard he was ill. That is the kind of heart God is aiming to create with cancer: a deeply affectionate, caring heart for people. Don’t waste your cancer by retreating into yourself.
8. You will waste your cancer if you grieve as those who have no hope.
Paul used this phrase in relation to those whose loved ones had died: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). There is a grief at death. Even for the believer who dies, there is temporary loss—loss of body, and loss of loved ones here, and loss of earthly ministry. But the grief is different—it is permeated with hope. “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Don’t waste your cancer grieving as those who don’t have this hope.
9. You will waste your cancer if you treat sin as casually as before.
Are your besetting sins as attractive as they were before you had cancer? If so you are wasting your cancer. Cancer is designed to destroy the appetite for sin. Pride, greed, lust, hatred, unforgiveness, impatience, laziness, procrastination—all these are the adversaries that cancer is meant to attack. Don’t just think of battling against cancer. Also think of battling with cancer. All these things are worse enemies than cancer. Don’t waste the power of cancer to crush these foes. Let the presence of eternity make the sins of time look as futile as they really are. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25).
10. You will waste your cancer if you fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ.
Christians are never anywhere by divine accident. There are reasons for why we wind up where we do. Consider what Jesus said about painful, unplanned circumstances: “They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness” (Luke 21:12 -13). So it is with cancer. This will be an opportunity to bear witness. Christ is infinitely worthy. Here is a golden opportunity to show that he is worth more than life. Don’t waste it.
Remember you are not left alone. You will have the help you need. “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).
Pastor John
Don’t Waste Your Cancer
Pastor John Piper
February 15, 2006
I write this on the eve of prostate surgery. I believe in God’s power to heal—by miracle and by medicine. I believe it is right and good to pray for both kinds of healing. Cancer is not wasted when it is healed by God. He gets the glory and that is why cancer exists. So not to pray for healing may waste your cancer. But healing is not God’s plan for everyone. And there are many other ways to waste your cancer. I am praying for myself and for you that we will not waste this pain.
1. You will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God.
It will not do to say that God only uses our cancer but does not design it. What God permits, he permits for a reason. And that reason is his design. If God foresees molecular developments becoming cancer, he can stop it or not. If he does not, he has a purpose. Since he is infinitely wise, it is right to call this purpose a design. Satan is real and causes many pleasures and pains. But he is not ultimate. So when he strikes Job with boils (Job 2:7), Job attributes it ultimately to God (2:10) and the inspired writer agrees: “They . . . comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (Job 42:11). If you don’t believe your cancer is designed for you by God, you will waste it.
2. You will waste your cancer if you believe it is a curse and not a gift.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). “There is no enchantment against Jacob, no divination against Israel” (Numbers 23:23). “The Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11).
3. You will waste your cancer if you seek comfort from your odds rather than from God.
The design of God in your cancer is not to train you in the rationalistic, human calculation of odds. The world gets comfort from their odds. Not Christians. Some count their chariots (percentages of survival) and some count their horses (side effects of treatment), but we trust in the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7). God’s design is clear from 2 Corinthians 1:9, “We felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” The aim of God in your cancer (among a thousand other good things) is to knock props out from under our hearts so that we rely utterly on him.
4. You will waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death.
We will all die, if Jesus postpones his return. Not to think about what it will be like to leave this life and meet God is folly. Ecclesiastes 7:2 says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning [a funeral] than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.” How can you lay it to heart if you won’t think about it? Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Numbering your days means thinking about how few there are and that they will end. How will you get a heart of wisdom if you refuse to think about this? What a waste, if we do not think about death.
5. You will waste your cancer if you think that “beating” cancer means staying alive rather than cherishing Christ.
Satan’s and God’s designs in your cancer are not the same. Satan designs to destroy your love for Christ. God designs to deepen your love for Christ. Cancer does not win if you die. It wins if you fail to cherish Christ. God’s design is to wean you off the breast of the world and feast you on the sufficiency of Christ. It is meant to help you say and feel, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” And to know that therefore, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 3:8; 1:21).
6. You will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.
It is not wrong to know about cancer. Ignorance is not a virtue. But the lure to know more and more and the lack of zeal to know God more and more is symptomatic of unbelief. Cancer is meant to waken us to the reality of God. It is meant to put feeling and force behind the command, “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). It is meant to waken us to the truth of Daniel 11:32, “The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action.” It is meant to make unshakable, indestructible oak trees out of us: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:2). What a waste of cancer if we read day and night about cancer and not about God.
7. You will waste your cancer if you let it drive you into solitude instead of deepen your relationships with manifest affection.
When Epaphroditus brought the gifts to Paul sent by the Philippian church he became ill and almost died. Paul tells the Philippians, “He has been longing for you all and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill” (Philippians 2:26-27). What an amazing response! It does not say they were distressed that he was ill, but that he was distressed because they heard he was ill. That is the kind of heart God is aiming to create with cancer: a deeply affectionate, caring heart for people. Don’t waste your cancer by retreating into yourself.
8. You will waste your cancer if you grieve as those who have no hope.
Paul used this phrase in relation to those whose loved ones had died: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). There is a grief at death. Even for the believer who dies, there is temporary loss—loss of body, and loss of loved ones here, and loss of earthly ministry. But the grief is different—it is permeated with hope. “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Don’t waste your cancer grieving as those who don’t have this hope.
9. You will waste your cancer if you treat sin as casually as before.
Are your besetting sins as attractive as they were before you had cancer? If so you are wasting your cancer. Cancer is designed to destroy the appetite for sin. Pride, greed, lust, hatred, unforgiveness, impatience, laziness, procrastination—all these are the adversaries that cancer is meant to attack. Don’t just think of battling against cancer. Also think of battling with cancer. All these things are worse enemies than cancer. Don’t waste the power of cancer to crush these foes. Let the presence of eternity make the sins of time look as futile as they really are. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25).
10. You will waste your cancer if you fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ.
Christians are never anywhere by divine accident. There are reasons for why we wind up where we do. Consider what Jesus said about painful, unplanned circumstances: “They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness” (Luke 21:12 -13). So it is with cancer. This will be an opportunity to bear witness. Christ is infinitely worthy. Here is a golden opportunity to show that he is worth more than life. Don’t waste it.
Remember you are not left alone. You will have the help you need. “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).
Pastor John
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child
There are so many verses in scripture about children! It's amazing. I'm trying to read through a few and meditate on them. I must say that I take great delight in Proverbs 23:13-14:
Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die.
Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death.
Please don't think it is because I delight in the thought of bringing pain to my son-- that will be difficult. It delights me because it is such a contrast with modern parenting "wisdom" which advocates discussions, empathy, and ignoring bad behavior. Ok, I'm a lawless little tyrant who wants a cookie instead of dinner and refuses to go to bed or bathe and you think you're going to stop me by telling me you "understand how I feel" ? That's great, since you're so understanding where's my bleepty-bleep cookie?
Do people really think that letting your child act as if he is your equal is really going to make him into a responsible adult? Scripture says it won't. Pyschologists say spanking your child will damage him. Scripture says it will save his soul from hell.
Cancel my subscription to Parents.
Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die.
Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death.
Please don't think it is because I delight in the thought of bringing pain to my son-- that will be difficult. It delights me because it is such a contrast with modern parenting "wisdom" which advocates discussions, empathy, and ignoring bad behavior. Ok, I'm a lawless little tyrant who wants a cookie instead of dinner and refuses to go to bed or bathe and you think you're going to stop me by telling me you "understand how I feel" ? That's great, since you're so understanding where's my bleepty-bleep cookie?
Do people really think that letting your child act as if he is your equal is really going to make him into a responsible adult? Scripture says it won't. Pyschologists say spanking your child will damage him. Scripture says it will save his soul from hell.
Cancel my subscription to Parents.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Happy!
My best friend in the whole world is back home! Brian was gone for 4 days this past weekend and I missed him dreadfully. I'm not sure if pregnancy hormones made it worse, but I just had to stay busy or I'd start crying! He went out to Los Angeles for a conference put on by the Acton Institute. He got to meet a lot of like-minded people and have lots of stimulating discussions. He got home last night at 3 am!! YAWN. So we both slept in this morning and spent some time together which was delightful. I'm so glad that he is home safe and sound! Thanks be to God!
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
My beefy valentine
Ok, so not only is this child a BOY, due 6/6/06, but he is also a little carnavore. I think I'm in for some serious trouble! Ever since food started looking good again all I have wanted is meat-- especially BEEF. So last night I was craving beef like crazy and Brian and I the great idea to go to Jack's Hamburgers. Isn't that where every woman wants to spend valentine's day? :) Brian was laughing because he had always heard that when your wife is pregnant she is going crave crazy stuff in the middle of the night and make you go get it. He has decided that he likes my cravings and that I should get pregnant more often!
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
The gift of contentment
That's something I'm always struggling with. But if I could just remember my theology, I'd be fine. God is all-wise, all-powerful, all-good, and works all things according to His purpose. What a blessed comfort. Anyway, a friend sent me this article on time management (or rather time submission-- ha ha!) and it was a really helpful reminder of who really sets our schedules.
Schedule, Interrupted Discovering God's time-management. by Mark Buchanan
"Teach us to number our days aright," Moses asked God, "that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (Ps. 90:12).
There is a right way to tally up days. There's an arithmetic of timekeeping, and God must tutor us in it. Wisdom is not the condition for learning this arithmetic. It's the fruit of it. Wisdom comes from learning to number our days aright. You don't need to be wise to sign up for God's school. But if you're diligent, attentive, and inquisitive in his classes, you'll emerge that way.
It's easy to get this wrong. God's school is not like most. It's not regimented, age-adjusted, fixed in its curricula. The classroom is life itself; the curriculum, all of life's demands and interruptions and tedium, its surprises and disappointments. In the midst of this, through these things themselves, God hands us an abacus and tells us to tally it all up.
Meaning?
Meaning, work out where time and eternity meet. Pay attention to how God is afoot in the mystery of each moment, in its mad rush or maddening plod. He is present in both. But too often, we are so time-obsessed that we take no time to really notice. I have a pastor friend in Toronto who one day after a Sunday service received a note: "Pastor Peter, I would appreciate it if you prayed shorter prayers. Your pastoral prayer this past Sunday was 12 minutes, 43 seconds in length. Please strive for greater brevity."
The note was unsigned. The only thing we know about this man, woman, or child is that the writer is so bound by time—counting the minutes—that he has never learned to number his days. This person can tell time, but not discern seasons.
Miss that, and you miss wisdom. For only those who number their days aright gain a wise heart. Only they become God's sages: those calm, unhurried people who live in each moment fully, savoring simple things, celebrating small epiphanies, unafraid of life's inevitable surprises and reverses, adaptive to change yet not chasing after it.
The Ironic Secret
I write this at a time when the church talks much about being purpose-driven. This is a good thing, but we ought to practice a bit of holy cynicism about it. We should be a little uneasy about the pairing of purposefulness and drivenness. Something's out of kilter there. Drivenness may awaken purpose or be a catalyst for purpose, but it rarely fulfills it: More often it jettisons it.
A common characteristic of driven people is that, at some point, they forget their purpose. They lose the point. The very reason they began something—embarked on a journey, undertook a project, waged a war, entered a profession, married a woman—erodes under the weight of their striving. Their original inspiration may have been noble. But driven too hard, it gets supplanted by greed for more, or dread of setback, or force of habit.
Drivenness erodes purposefulness.
The difference between living on purpose and being driven surfaces most clearly in what we do with time. The driven are fanatical time managers—time-mongers, time-herders, time-hoarders. Living on purpose requires skillful time management, true, but not the kind that turns brittle, that attempts to quarantine most of what makes life what it is: the mess, the surprises, the breakdowns, and the breakthroughs. Too much rigidity stifles purpose. I find that the more I try to manage time, the more anxious I get about it. And the more prone I am to lose my purpose.
Truly purposeful people have an ironic secret: They manage time less and pay attention more. The most purposeful people I know rarely overmanage time, and when they do, it's usually because they're lapsing into drivenness, into a loss of purpose for which they overcompensate with mere busyness. No, the distinguishing mark of purposeful people is not time management.
It's that they notice. They're fully awake.
Zigzags and Detours
Jesus, for example. He lived life with the clearest and highest purpose. Yet he veered and strayed from one interruption to the next, with no apparent plan in hand other than his single, overarching one: Get to Jerusalem and die. Otherwise, his days, as far as we can figure, were a series of zigzags and detours, apparent whims and second thoughts, interruptions and delays, off-the-cuff plans, spur-of-the-moment decisions, leisurely meals, serendipitous rounds of storytelling.
Who touched me?You give them something to eat.Let's go to the other side.
Jesus was available—or not—according to some oblique logic all his own. He had an inner ear for the Father's whispers, a third eye for the Spirit's motions. One minute he's not going to the temple, the next he is. One minute he refuses to help a wedding host solve his wine drought, the next he's all over it. He's ready to drop everything and rush over to a complete stranger's house to heal his servant, but dawdles four days while Lazarus—"the one he loves"—writhes in his death throes (John 11:3), or fails to come at all when John the Baptist—"the greatest in the kingdom of heaven"—languishes on death row (Matt. 11:1-11). The closest we get to what dictated Jesus' schedule is his statement in John's Gospel: "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit" (John 3:8).
The apostle Peter, after declaring that Jesus is "Lord of all," describes the supreme Sovereign's modus operandi: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and … he went around doing good" (Acts 10:36, 38, emphasis mine). So that's it, the sum of Christ's earthly vocation: He wandered, and he blessed. He was a vagabond physician, the original doctor without borders. His purpose was crystallized, but his method almost scattershot. "My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted," Henri Nouwen said near the end of his life, "until I discovered the interruptions were my work."
Paying Attention
No, Jesus didn't seem to keep time. But he noticed. So many people along the way—blind men, lame men, wild men, fishermen, tax men, weeping whores, pleading fathers, grieving mothers, dying children, singing children, anyone—captured his attention. He stopped to tell a lot of stories, many of which arose out of interruptions: "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me" (Luke 12:13); "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 10:25); "Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Matt. 15:22). What's more, he invited others to go and do likewise. Those driven to get and spend, to judge and exclude, he called to attention.
Look at the birds!Look at those flowers!Do you see this woman?Where are the other nine?Why do you call me good?Who do you say I am?
Life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions, Jesus warned. And then he told a story about a rich fool who noticed all the trivial things but was oblivious to all the important ones. What matters, Jesus concluded, isn't being rich in stuff: It's being rich toward God. He explained the essence of such richness elsewhere: It's having eyes to see, ears to hear. It's to notice, to pay attention to the time of God's visitation. "The dream of my life," Mary Oliver writes,
Is to lie down by a slow riverAnd stare at the light in the trees—To learn something of being nothingA little while but the richLens of attention. Jesus was that "rich lens of attention."
To live on purpose means to go and do likewise. Purposefulness requires that we pay attention, and paying attention means, almost by definition, that we make room for surprise. We become hospitable to interruption. To sustain it, we need theological touchstones for it—a conviction in our bones that God is Lord of our days and years, and that his purposes and his presence often come disguised as detours, messes, defeats.
I came to you naked, Jesus says. I came to you thirsty.
"When, Lord?" we ask, startled.
When he wore the disguise of an interruption.
Think a moment of all the events and encounters that have shaped you most deeply and lastingly. How many did you see coming? How many did you engineer, manufacture, chase down? And how many were interruptions? Children? You might have planned as meticulously as a NASA rocket launch, but did you have any idea, really, what it would be like, who this child in your arms really was, who you would become because of him or her? The span between life as we intend it and life as we receive it is vast. Our true purpose is worked out in that gap. It is fashioned in the crucible of interruptions.
The Crucible of Interruptions
The movie Mr. Holland's Opus tells the story of a man with a magnificent ambition. He wants to be a great composer. But he still has to pay the bills, so he and his young wife move to a small town where he teaches high school music, strictly for the money. All the while, he works on his masterpiece, his opus, laying the ground for his real calling. The plan is to teach for a few years, then step into his destiny.
But life keeps intruding. One year folds into two, into five, into fifteen. And then one day, Mr. Holland is old, and the school board shuffles him out for early retirement. He packs his desk. His wife and grown son come to fetch him. Walking down the school's wide, empty hallways, he hears a sound in the auditorium. He goes to see what it is.
It's a surprise.
Hundreds of his students from his years of teaching—many now old themselves—dozens of his colleagues, both current and former, hundreds of friends, fans, and well-wishers: The room is packed. All have gathered to say thank you. An orchestra is there, made up of Mr. Holland's students through the years. They've been preparing to perform Mr. Holland's Opus—the composition that, over four decades, he hammered out and tinkered with, polished, discarded, recovered, reworked, but never finished.
They play it now.
But of course he knows, everyone knows: His opus isn't the composition. His real opus, his true life's masterpiece, stands before him, here, now. It's not the music. It is all these people whom his passions and convictions have helped and shaped. It's all that was being formed in the crucible of interruptions. This is his work. This is his purpose.
Finally, after all these years, he's learned to number his days.
In 1973, the comedian Johnny Carson nearly caused a national crisis with a single wisecrack. That was the year North America's long flight of postwar prosperity fell to earth like a shot goose in one ungainly plummet. There was runaway inflation. There were oil and food shortages. All the abundance that Americans had come to see as their due, their birthright, suddenly seemed in jeopardy.
And so, on December 19, 1973, at 11:35 p.m., when Johnny Carson walked on the live studio set of The Tonight Show and quipped, "There's an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States," it wasn't funny. The joke had a toehold in reality: Earlier in the day, Congressman Harold Froehlich from Wisconsin had warned that if the federal bureaucracy didn't catch up on its supply bids, government agencies would run out of toilet tissue within a month or two. Carson took this shard of trivia and played it for a laugh. Then, as was his trademark, he swung at an invisible golf ball, took a commercial break, and got on with the show.
Not so the nation. Twenty million viewers flew into panic. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of frantic shoppers lined up outside the supermarkets of America, poised to dash to the paper aisles and stockpile rolls, fighting over bundles of two-ply and four-ply. There were brawls in the aisles and scrums at the checkout. Some store managers tried to limit sales to four rolls per customer, but they had no way of monitoring how many times a customer came back, and most came back repeatedly. By noon on December 20—mere hours after Johnny's flippant remark—America was sold out.
Johnny Carson's offhand gag line had sparked a national run (no pun intended) on toilet tissue.
We're generally gullible about news of scarcity. We have, it seems, an inbuilt skittishness about shortfall. This has been with us a long while, since the garden, by my reckoning.
Most of us live afraid that we're almost out of time. But you and I, we're heirs of eternity. We're not short of days.
We just need to number them aright.
Mark Buchanan's latest book, from which this article is excerpted, is The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath (Word, 2005).Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2, Page 43
Schedule, Interrupted Discovering God's time-management. by Mark Buchanan
"Teach us to number our days aright," Moses asked God, "that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (Ps. 90:12).
There is a right way to tally up days. There's an arithmetic of timekeeping, and God must tutor us in it. Wisdom is not the condition for learning this arithmetic. It's the fruit of it. Wisdom comes from learning to number our days aright. You don't need to be wise to sign up for God's school. But if you're diligent, attentive, and inquisitive in his classes, you'll emerge that way.
It's easy to get this wrong. God's school is not like most. It's not regimented, age-adjusted, fixed in its curricula. The classroom is life itself; the curriculum, all of life's demands and interruptions and tedium, its surprises and disappointments. In the midst of this, through these things themselves, God hands us an abacus and tells us to tally it all up.
Meaning?
Meaning, work out where time and eternity meet. Pay attention to how God is afoot in the mystery of each moment, in its mad rush or maddening plod. He is present in both. But too often, we are so time-obsessed that we take no time to really notice. I have a pastor friend in Toronto who one day after a Sunday service received a note: "Pastor Peter, I would appreciate it if you prayed shorter prayers. Your pastoral prayer this past Sunday was 12 minutes, 43 seconds in length. Please strive for greater brevity."
The note was unsigned. The only thing we know about this man, woman, or child is that the writer is so bound by time—counting the minutes—that he has never learned to number his days. This person can tell time, but not discern seasons.
Miss that, and you miss wisdom. For only those who number their days aright gain a wise heart. Only they become God's sages: those calm, unhurried people who live in each moment fully, savoring simple things, celebrating small epiphanies, unafraid of life's inevitable surprises and reverses, adaptive to change yet not chasing after it.
The Ironic Secret
I write this at a time when the church talks much about being purpose-driven. This is a good thing, but we ought to practice a bit of holy cynicism about it. We should be a little uneasy about the pairing of purposefulness and drivenness. Something's out of kilter there. Drivenness may awaken purpose or be a catalyst for purpose, but it rarely fulfills it: More often it jettisons it.
A common characteristic of driven people is that, at some point, they forget their purpose. They lose the point. The very reason they began something—embarked on a journey, undertook a project, waged a war, entered a profession, married a woman—erodes under the weight of their striving. Their original inspiration may have been noble. But driven too hard, it gets supplanted by greed for more, or dread of setback, or force of habit.
Drivenness erodes purposefulness.
The difference between living on purpose and being driven surfaces most clearly in what we do with time. The driven are fanatical time managers—time-mongers, time-herders, time-hoarders. Living on purpose requires skillful time management, true, but not the kind that turns brittle, that attempts to quarantine most of what makes life what it is: the mess, the surprises, the breakdowns, and the breakthroughs. Too much rigidity stifles purpose. I find that the more I try to manage time, the more anxious I get about it. And the more prone I am to lose my purpose.
Truly purposeful people have an ironic secret: They manage time less and pay attention more. The most purposeful people I know rarely overmanage time, and when they do, it's usually because they're lapsing into drivenness, into a loss of purpose for which they overcompensate with mere busyness. No, the distinguishing mark of purposeful people is not time management.
It's that they notice. They're fully awake.
Zigzags and Detours
Jesus, for example. He lived life with the clearest and highest purpose. Yet he veered and strayed from one interruption to the next, with no apparent plan in hand other than his single, overarching one: Get to Jerusalem and die. Otherwise, his days, as far as we can figure, were a series of zigzags and detours, apparent whims and second thoughts, interruptions and delays, off-the-cuff plans, spur-of-the-moment decisions, leisurely meals, serendipitous rounds of storytelling.
Who touched me?You give them something to eat.Let's go to the other side.
Jesus was available—or not—according to some oblique logic all his own. He had an inner ear for the Father's whispers, a third eye for the Spirit's motions. One minute he's not going to the temple, the next he is. One minute he refuses to help a wedding host solve his wine drought, the next he's all over it. He's ready to drop everything and rush over to a complete stranger's house to heal his servant, but dawdles four days while Lazarus—"the one he loves"—writhes in his death throes (John 11:3), or fails to come at all when John the Baptist—"the greatest in the kingdom of heaven"—languishes on death row (Matt. 11:1-11). The closest we get to what dictated Jesus' schedule is his statement in John's Gospel: "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit" (John 3:8).
The apostle Peter, after declaring that Jesus is "Lord of all," describes the supreme Sovereign's modus operandi: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and … he went around doing good" (Acts 10:36, 38, emphasis mine). So that's it, the sum of Christ's earthly vocation: He wandered, and he blessed. He was a vagabond physician, the original doctor without borders. His purpose was crystallized, but his method almost scattershot. "My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted," Henri Nouwen said near the end of his life, "until I discovered the interruptions were my work."
Paying Attention
No, Jesus didn't seem to keep time. But he noticed. So many people along the way—blind men, lame men, wild men, fishermen, tax men, weeping whores, pleading fathers, grieving mothers, dying children, singing children, anyone—captured his attention. He stopped to tell a lot of stories, many of which arose out of interruptions: "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me" (Luke 12:13); "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 10:25); "Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Matt. 15:22). What's more, he invited others to go and do likewise. Those driven to get and spend, to judge and exclude, he called to attention.
Look at the birds!Look at those flowers!Do you see this woman?Where are the other nine?Why do you call me good?Who do you say I am?
Life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions, Jesus warned. And then he told a story about a rich fool who noticed all the trivial things but was oblivious to all the important ones. What matters, Jesus concluded, isn't being rich in stuff: It's being rich toward God. He explained the essence of such richness elsewhere: It's having eyes to see, ears to hear. It's to notice, to pay attention to the time of God's visitation. "The dream of my life," Mary Oliver writes,
Is to lie down by a slow riverAnd stare at the light in the trees—To learn something of being nothingA little while but the richLens of attention. Jesus was that "rich lens of attention."
To live on purpose means to go and do likewise. Purposefulness requires that we pay attention, and paying attention means, almost by definition, that we make room for surprise. We become hospitable to interruption. To sustain it, we need theological touchstones for it—a conviction in our bones that God is Lord of our days and years, and that his purposes and his presence often come disguised as detours, messes, defeats.
I came to you naked, Jesus says. I came to you thirsty.
"When, Lord?" we ask, startled.
When he wore the disguise of an interruption.
Think a moment of all the events and encounters that have shaped you most deeply and lastingly. How many did you see coming? How many did you engineer, manufacture, chase down? And how many were interruptions? Children? You might have planned as meticulously as a NASA rocket launch, but did you have any idea, really, what it would be like, who this child in your arms really was, who you would become because of him or her? The span between life as we intend it and life as we receive it is vast. Our true purpose is worked out in that gap. It is fashioned in the crucible of interruptions.
The Crucible of Interruptions
The movie Mr. Holland's Opus tells the story of a man with a magnificent ambition. He wants to be a great composer. But he still has to pay the bills, so he and his young wife move to a small town where he teaches high school music, strictly for the money. All the while, he works on his masterpiece, his opus, laying the ground for his real calling. The plan is to teach for a few years, then step into his destiny.
But life keeps intruding. One year folds into two, into five, into fifteen. And then one day, Mr. Holland is old, and the school board shuffles him out for early retirement. He packs his desk. His wife and grown son come to fetch him. Walking down the school's wide, empty hallways, he hears a sound in the auditorium. He goes to see what it is.
It's a surprise.
Hundreds of his students from his years of teaching—many now old themselves—dozens of his colleagues, both current and former, hundreds of friends, fans, and well-wishers: The room is packed. All have gathered to say thank you. An orchestra is there, made up of Mr. Holland's students through the years. They've been preparing to perform Mr. Holland's Opus—the composition that, over four decades, he hammered out and tinkered with, polished, discarded, recovered, reworked, but never finished.
They play it now.
But of course he knows, everyone knows: His opus isn't the composition. His real opus, his true life's masterpiece, stands before him, here, now. It's not the music. It is all these people whom his passions and convictions have helped and shaped. It's all that was being formed in the crucible of interruptions. This is his work. This is his purpose.
Finally, after all these years, he's learned to number his days.
In 1973, the comedian Johnny Carson nearly caused a national crisis with a single wisecrack. That was the year North America's long flight of postwar prosperity fell to earth like a shot goose in one ungainly plummet. There was runaway inflation. There were oil and food shortages. All the abundance that Americans had come to see as their due, their birthright, suddenly seemed in jeopardy.
And so, on December 19, 1973, at 11:35 p.m., when Johnny Carson walked on the live studio set of The Tonight Show and quipped, "There's an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States," it wasn't funny. The joke had a toehold in reality: Earlier in the day, Congressman Harold Froehlich from Wisconsin had warned that if the federal bureaucracy didn't catch up on its supply bids, government agencies would run out of toilet tissue within a month or two. Carson took this shard of trivia and played it for a laugh. Then, as was his trademark, he swung at an invisible golf ball, took a commercial break, and got on with the show.
Not so the nation. Twenty million viewers flew into panic. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of frantic shoppers lined up outside the supermarkets of America, poised to dash to the paper aisles and stockpile rolls, fighting over bundles of two-ply and four-ply. There were brawls in the aisles and scrums at the checkout. Some store managers tried to limit sales to four rolls per customer, but they had no way of monitoring how many times a customer came back, and most came back repeatedly. By noon on December 20—mere hours after Johnny's flippant remark—America was sold out.
Johnny Carson's offhand gag line had sparked a national run (no pun intended) on toilet tissue.
We're generally gullible about news of scarcity. We have, it seems, an inbuilt skittishness about shortfall. This has been with us a long while, since the garden, by my reckoning.
Most of us live afraid that we're almost out of time. But you and I, we're heirs of eternity. We're not short of days.
We just need to number them aright.
Mark Buchanan's latest book, from which this article is excerpted, is The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath (Word, 2005).Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2, Page 43
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Here's my boy!
Ok, so I am finally posting one of Iain's sonograms. They are hard to see, but when I scanned it, it lost even more quality. This is his 23 week ultrasound. The top picture is his profile, the middle is his face straight on, the bottom left is his arm(he's waving hi mom!), and the bottom right is the foot.
I am so thankful for my little boy. I'm overwhelmed too, at the thought of raising him to be a godly man: a loving warrior for the church and a tender protector for his family. We're praying and talking a lot these days, and reading books. Anybody have a book child-raising or christian manhood that they love? We'd like to read it.
I am so thankful for my little boy. I'm overwhelmed too, at the thought of raising him to be a godly man: a loving warrior for the church and a tender protector for his family. We're praying and talking a lot these days, and reading books. Anybody have a book child-raising or christian manhood that they love? We'd like to read it.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Sweet Joy
My mom and I went to Babies R Us on Saturday to do my baby registry. We met for breakfast first and I showed her the baby book I've started for Iain. We both fought back tears. Tears for the pain of infertility, tears for the joy of this new life, tears for the loss of two babies we'll never meet, tears of amazement at what God has done and what He has taught us. So many feelings. Registering was so much fun. And I didn't cry in the store, for which I am thankful! I always have fun buying shower gifts for friends, or oohing and awing over tiny booties but what a blessing it was to go and pick out things for MY baby. What a joy.
We had another ultrasound yesterday, which is always neat. This was the first time that I wasn't worried beforehand either, since I can feel him move now. Little Buddy is 1 pound 7 ounces now, and according to the tech, has long legs. While sitting in the high-risk doctor's office for 4 hours (no, that wasn't a typo) I had time to reflect on the Lord's graciousness. So many of the women who go to that office are on bed-rest, or are facing having children with severe disabilities. There are tons of birth announcements for preemies on the walls, including one for a little girl who was born at 24 weeks (I'm 23!) and only weighed 1 pound 14 ounces! But I don't seem to be in any danger of delivering early, at least not at this point. They just want me to come every month so they can measure him to be sure that he is getting enough blood and nutrients flowing to him. But it seems to be more precautionary than anything else.
I am so very blessed.
We had another ultrasound yesterday, which is always neat. This was the first time that I wasn't worried beforehand either, since I can feel him move now. Little Buddy is 1 pound 7 ounces now, and according to the tech, has long legs. While sitting in the high-risk doctor's office for 4 hours (no, that wasn't a typo) I had time to reflect on the Lord's graciousness. So many of the women who go to that office are on bed-rest, or are facing having children with severe disabilities. There are tons of birth announcements for preemies on the walls, including one for a little girl who was born at 24 weeks (I'm 23!) and only weighed 1 pound 14 ounces! But I don't seem to be in any danger of delivering early, at least not at this point. They just want me to come every month so they can measure him to be sure that he is getting enough blood and nutrients flowing to him. But it seems to be more precautionary than anything else.
I am so very blessed.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
The Belated Blogger: Boston, Doctors, Etc.
I started this post a week ago (heh heh heh)... Anyway, my computer has been giving me fits at home, so I'm posting this from work and I will insert the pictures into this post soon! Sorry!
Well, my most interesting and exciting piece of news is: I resigned from my job! My last day is going to be March 9. It will be sad in a way because I've been really blessed to work at Knox, but I'm SO excited about being to devote my full attention and energy into the home sphere. My family needs me there. And our home needs the attention and oversight of a full-time caretaker. Plus, that's where my heart is and has always been. I think we will all be happier, healthier, and better able to serve the Lord under this arrangement. Now I just need prayer that I will be diligent in my new duties.
As promised, here is a picture of me and my ever-expanding belly! What an amazing blessing. This is a picture of a woman who never should have been able to get pregnant. And in her belly is a baby that she and her husband could not have made on their own. This baby is uniquely chosen by God for us. Not made of our flesh and blood, but our child. The child we would have never had if things had worked out "perfectly" for us.
Boston was really great, but I'm glad that we didn't put the trip off. We were walking quite a bit and I was tired! So that limited what we could somewhat, but we still got to see everything that we wanted to see. Our hotel was lovely and very convienently located and had the world's comfiest bed. We walked the Freedom Trail, ate in Little Italy, went to a hockey game, spent an entire day in the Museum of Fine Arts, visited Harvard, and checked out some of the shops. Very fun. Here are some pictures:
This is our hotel lobby. We stayed at the Omni Parker House and really liked being close to everything.
Here is Brian with kindred spirit and fellow trouble-maker, Sam Adams. Beer and a riot, anyone? :)
This me on board the USS Constitution in what I thought was "a pretty little sunroom", only to have the tour guide inform me that it was the privy!
Here's Brian onboard the Constitution. He really looks the part, doesn't he?
I thought this was so funny that I left the bathroom and got the camera from Brian. Out of order since 1908?!?!
Boston was great. We especially enjoyed the Museum of Fine Art. We got a ton of pictures there, but I won't post them here. It is so neat to see how clearly art reflects worldview.
I'm going to a new OB now, praise God! He is the doctor I originally wanted, but he was too busy when I asked for him. After calling my old OB trillions of times about this spotting problem and getting absolutely nowhere, a nurse noticed that I had seen this other doctor before I got pregnant and asked me if I'd like to switch. Not only did she get permission for me to switch, she also got me an appointment for the next day, which was the last day before our trip. So the doctor saw me and was able to reassure me that it really was ok to go. I was so very relieved. It was such an answer to prayer. He also gave me a lot of other information, including the fact that this spotting is likely to occur again because of the blood thinner I'm on. He gave me information on what to do if that happens. It is so nice to know and be prepared. He also told me that I'm going to have to be induced because of the heparin. (When was my old OB going to tell me that?!?!) They have to induce because I shouldn't be on heparin during labor, but Iain shouldn't go too long in the womb without it. So they'll have me stop the injections 12-24 hours before labor. I was less than thrilled about the idea, but I understand why it has to be done.
Ok, so that is the update!
Well, my most interesting and exciting piece of news is: I resigned from my job! My last day is going to be March 9. It will be sad in a way because I've been really blessed to work at Knox, but I'm SO excited about being to devote my full attention and energy into the home sphere. My family needs me there. And our home needs the attention and oversight of a full-time caretaker. Plus, that's where my heart is and has always been. I think we will all be happier, healthier, and better able to serve the Lord under this arrangement. Now I just need prayer that I will be diligent in my new duties.
As promised, here is a picture of me and my ever-expanding belly! What an amazing blessing. This is a picture of a woman who never should have been able to get pregnant. And in her belly is a baby that she and her husband could not have made on their own. This baby is uniquely chosen by God for us. Not made of our flesh and blood, but our child. The child we would have never had if things had worked out "perfectly" for us.
Boston was really great, but I'm glad that we didn't put the trip off. We were walking quite a bit and I was tired! So that limited what we could somewhat, but we still got to see everything that we wanted to see. Our hotel was lovely and very convienently located and had the world's comfiest bed. We walked the Freedom Trail, ate in Little Italy, went to a hockey game, spent an entire day in the Museum of Fine Arts, visited Harvard, and checked out some of the shops. Very fun. Here are some pictures:
This is our hotel lobby. We stayed at the Omni Parker House and really liked being close to everything.
Here is Brian with kindred spirit and fellow trouble-maker, Sam Adams. Beer and a riot, anyone? :)
This me on board the USS Constitution in what I thought was "a pretty little sunroom", only to have the tour guide inform me that it was the privy!
Here's Brian onboard the Constitution. He really looks the part, doesn't he?
I thought this was so funny that I left the bathroom and got the camera from Brian. Out of order since 1908?!?!
Boston was great. We especially enjoyed the Museum of Fine Art. We got a ton of pictures there, but I won't post them here. It is so neat to see how clearly art reflects worldview.
I'm going to a new OB now, praise God! He is the doctor I originally wanted, but he was too busy when I asked for him. After calling my old OB trillions of times about this spotting problem and getting absolutely nowhere, a nurse noticed that I had seen this other doctor before I got pregnant and asked me if I'd like to switch. Not only did she get permission for me to switch, she also got me an appointment for the next day, which was the last day before our trip. So the doctor saw me and was able to reassure me that it really was ok to go. I was so very relieved. It was such an answer to prayer. He also gave me a lot of other information, including the fact that this spotting is likely to occur again because of the blood thinner I'm on. He gave me information on what to do if that happens. It is so nice to know and be prepared. He also told me that I'm going to have to be induced because of the heparin. (When was my old OB going to tell me that?!?!) They have to induce because I shouldn't be on heparin during labor, but Iain shouldn't go too long in the womb without it. So they'll have me stop the injections 12-24 hours before labor. I was less than thrilled about the idea, but I understand why it has to be done.
Ok, so that is the update!
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