Earlier concept for Mt. Rushmore

...would have included more of the president's bodies.

Four Great Leaders

...sure are inspiring with 60 foot tall faces carved in granite.

Isn't it Ironic?

Here lately, Candice and I have been singing lines from "Ironic"--the Alanis Morissette song that was popular when we were in grad school. We've had two waves of inspiration for singing this song:

First Wave

We're trying to sell our house. A family we know has been working with the same realtor we have told us at church that they held an open house alongside a garage sale and it generated activity on their house. A few days later, their house sold.

We called our agent the next day and asked if we could add an open house alongside the garage sale we had planned. She agreed to arrange an open house for 9-to-noon on Saturday. For the first time ever, we decided to have a two-day garage sale, starting on Friday. The traffic on Friday was brisk--people were waiting curb-side when we opened our doors at 7:30 AM. That traffic motivated our kids to set up a coffee and lemonade stand on Saturday (with some help from our entrepreneurial neighbor).

Early Saturday morning, we set up for day-two of our garage sale and worked hard to stage everything for our open house. We opened the garage door with gusto, ready to get to work. But no one came. We waited for more than an hour--an eternity in garage sale time. Eventually a trickle of people came through, but hardly any wanted lemonade or coffee--and no one showed for the open house.

At noon, we moved everything back into the garage and closed the door. We apologized to the guy who was manning the open house and went inside to get lunch and put our little guys to bed. In the process, Candice noticed there was a message on our voice mail. Someone wanted to see our house in 30 minutes. We scrambled to make a lunch to-go and spent an hour at the park.

Second Wave

We were a two-car family for a long time, but we sold our Jeep on Craigslist a few weeks ago as part of our "clear the decks" mission. We're now down to our minivan. Because we plan to travel cross-country soon, we asked a mechanic we've been working with for years to give the van a tune up. (Ironically, he was working on the van when we got a call requesting a showing on our house. We ended up borrowing car seats from our neighbors to put into the mechanic's 1980-something conversion van and drove off ruffled and unshowered so that we could get everyone out of the house).

Our mechanic did the tune up and made a couple of minor replacements. "If you haven't changed your timing belt, I would have that done," he added. We thought he'd already done that so we looked through our paperwork in the glove box. We couldn't find anything and his records weren't turning up anything.

We made an appointment to have the timing belt replaced and prepared to come up with the $600 or so it would cost. Then we made a more intensive search through our paperwork to see if we could find a record of the work being done. We looked through binders of paperwork for each of the past ten years. We couldn't find a couple of those years but reviewed enough to assume the work just hadn't been done.

Yesterday morning I drove the van to the repair shop to get the work started. Around mid-morning, I felt motivated to start cleaning out our storage room. It was there, in the midst of old photos and memorabilia. Piled in a Whole Foods bag with some stray papers was a binder for the year 2007. A few papers in, I found an invoice from our mechanic, along with a record of our timing belt being replaced December 6, 2007.

I called the guy who was replacing our timing belt, but got his voice mail. I left a message asking him to stop the work. He called back later to say he would stop but that he was already a third of the way into the complicated repair and that we'd have to pay for the work he's already done. He ended up giving us something of a break, but we still had to pay $180 with nothing to show for it.

These ironies hurt a little more when we're already feeling vulnerable in a time of transition. And yet we trust God's goodness and provision. Something tells us we're going to look back on these challenges some day and laugh at how this transition chapter unfolded.

The Hope and Heartache of Babies

"Do you really want to bring a child into this crazy world?" That's the opening sentence of our "Hope" chapter in Start Your Family. We go on to say,

News stories constantly tell us how unstable our world is--our global relationships, our economy, our political processes, our environment. Closer to home, couples everywhere face concerns in their corners of the world--they worry about their jobs, their health, their neighborhoods. Many worry about family relationships--especially those who have experienced the shrapnel of divorce. These concerns cause anxiety even among couples that are expecting healthy babies. The prospect of a problem pregnancy, miscarriage, delivery problem, still-birth, or a baby born with any number of health challenges or disabilities can almost paralyze a couple. ... While fear and anxiety are a natural emotion for would-be parents, the choice to be fruitful is an eduring and courageous encounter with hope.

We had our own share of reasons to be anxious about becoming parents. But nothing like what many couples go through. In the past week, Sarah and Matt Hammitt (of Sanctus Real) began walking out an extreme version of challenge with their newborn son, Bowen. A few weeks ago I blogged about Matt's song "Lead Me." Lately I've been following their family blog, reading about their faith in the midst of great challenge and the ups and downs of a critically ill newborn.

Their courage is inspiring, their journey far from over. Please read their story and join the many believers who are praying for Bowen.

UPDATE

I love what Matt wrote this morning on Bowen's blog, with the dawn of hope, about the messiness that can come with new life:

This morning is the last time I’ll get to peer through the window to Bowen’s beating heart. I can’t believe, that in such a short amount of time, it’s become normal for me to look down at my son with his little chest wide open. A friend told me that I’ve seen too much, but I’m realizing that I might not see enough. Everything I’ve watched happen in this hospital, all the pain I’ve felt, is deepening my faith, strengthening my marriage, and molding my character. As I lovingly stared into Bowen’s eyes just before midnight, my face only inches from his chest, I thought, “this love is an awesome mess.” I know I’m not the first person to think or to say something like that. ... I believe it’s because tension is the place where the worst of life and the best of true hope meet to unveil our eyes to God’s artistic work of redemption.

Family Camp Rocks!

Prior to saying yes to speak at the Ozark Conference Center, I knew next to nothing about Family Camp. I’d heard my friend Julie mention Family Camp, but figured it was just an outing her church did. Boy did I have a lot to learn!

Our friend John Thomas provided the perfect opportunity. He asked if we'd like to spend Labor Day in Solgohachia, Arkansas, talking to 20 families in the mornings, then spending the rest of the days doing Family Camp.

Not only is Family Camp bigger than one church and even one denomination, it's a fast growing, nation-wide phenomenon. (Ok, maybe not a phenomenon, but it is popular!)

Our induction to Family Camp was here, in Solgohachia, AR, at the Ozark Conference Center (OCC).

In it's early days, OCC's mission was to bring inspirational speakers such as J.I. Packer, Jerry Bridges, and Elisabeth Elliot to the spiritually hungry in Arkansas. We were humbled thinking about the speakers who had come before us, but we felt God's anointing in presenting the things He's been teaching us about fruitfulness, God-oriented parenting, and living intentionally.

It's not a ritzy getaway. (This tractor was our transportation. And that's John--Camp Director, pastor, and chief tractor driver.)

But that's the point. Instead, it was a long weekend of making new friends

alongside swimming,

games,

archery and turns on the zipline and scream swing,

meals in the mess hall,

morning devotions and worship, evening prayers under the stars, and more.

We played a Family Camp version of Survivor.

We painted our faces, gave ourselves a name (Rockin' Dynotastic Anacondas), and competed hard for the prizes. (Not sure what they were, but we had fun trying!)

Most importantly, we enjoyed it all together as a family.

We sure hope to do it all again next year...and maybe even meet some of our readers there.