Mission:Ghana?

Okay, so in the last post I mentioned that we are not going to Mozambique anymore. That was a shock to the system, as we had spent the last 7 months planning for that trip. We had become comfortable with our plans and didn't bother looking for other possible trips. Then the news came and we were all "HUH?!" and then Tiffany was all "we should find another trip to go on," which, in Tiffany terms, means "Luke, you should find another trip for us to go on, and then show me what you find and I'll say yes or no as I look for trips myself." Then, just a few days ago Tiffany was talking to Dr. Fanka at church and he mentioned that he and another gentleman were planning a trip to Ghana sometime this fall to work with leadership training and church planting. Though I'll be into my semester by that point, I will only be taking two BE classes, and we'll only be gone for a couple of weeks, so it looks like we may be going to Ghana in September/October with a little side trip over to Togo for a couple of days for a mini-seminar. From Togo, Dr. Fanka will head down to Cameroon to attend to some family business while Tiffany and I return to Ghana and possibly spend a few days casting vision for potential future ministry. We're still working out the details, but we spent some timing picking dates for the trip this morning, so we're pretty excited. We'll keep y'all posted. And by "y'all" I really mean Tiffany, as she's the only one that ever reads this...

We serve a sovereign God

Soooo much has happened since the last post. Christmas, for instance (and all of its joys and stresses). We also traveled to Denver in early January for the CRI board and staff meeting, and we were greatly encouraged and excited about the trip to Mozambique when we returned to Dallas. It was just a few days later, however, that we received word that we would not be going on a trip with CRI this summer for a number of reasons. Mostly, we agreed that CRI is not the best fit for us at this point in our life.

So that was crazy "what do we do now?" news #1.

THEN, a week later Tiffany found out that ProStaff was doing a major down-sizing and mass layoff, and she was one of the "victims." That said, Tiffany entered the job-search world again (doing the very thing she had helped other people do--find jobs). Things are looking good, but nothing has fully come through as of yet.

And that was crazy "what do we do now?" news #2.

Yet through it all we praise God, for His plans transcend anything we could imagine. We thought we had everything planned out for the next several years of our lives, and God completely shakes things up.

And that can be good.

Hard, but good.

Indeed, it can be very good. With the insanity that is my work/school schedule, having Tiffany at home during the day has proven to be--oddly--a blessing, as I have gotten to see her more than before. Sure, the circumstances behind her being home are less than our ideal, yet God has an ideal for us that far surpasses our own plans. We truly serve a sovereign God...and we like it that way.

Tears on Sundays....

Okay, I just want to say that I was a rock until August of 2005. I hadn't cried in probably 10 years until my grandma died that August. That's when the floodgates opened. And now I'm a flipping emotional basket case. But I just wanted to clarify that it was not always that way.

Now, with that said, if I have Sunday nights off of work there is probably a 99% chance that you will see me cry if you are in my apartment between 7 and 8 pm. Why? you ask. That's easy. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I don't know what it is about this show, but it never fails to make me cry. This Sunday's episode was the 100th family, and boy was it a whopper. The family actually had a nice house to begin with, so they were able to donate the windows and trim and appliances and a lot of other things to other families in need. It didn't seem like this family needed to be chosen, but it turns out that four of the 7 (soon to be 8) children were actually the mom's sister's kids. These kids lost their dad 6 years ago in a car accident, and their mom had a hard time dealing with it. She began to get past it when she started to date a guy and then broke it off. He did not take it well and went to her house and attacked her with butcher knives. She survived this attack, but the lunatic did not spend much time in jail. The mom began to date another guy and the first guy came to her house again and shot both the mom and the boyfriend, killing them both. So these four kids, the oldest of whom is now 13, lost both of their parents in 6 years and were taken in by their mom's sister. Their aunt/new mom has devoted much of the past year to serving as an advocate for women and children effected by domestic abuse. That's why this family was chosen.

If that wasn't bad enough, other families from previous episodes came and helped this family's build. They gave updates on these families, and their stories were so powerful I cried every time they showed clips of past episodes. Like I said, emotional basket case.

All this to say that Dr. Kreider was right. The secular world gets it when the church may not. The church has been called to be the body of Christ, sharing His love to the nations. The problem is we are really good at sharing His love with ourselves and not reaching out to those outside our comfort zone. But we can see evidence of God's love outside the church. I realize I haven't articulated it very well, but it is deeply convicting to realize that others are stepping out to love the hurting when the church has failed. As the Casting Crowns song says, if we are the body, why aren't His arms reaching? Why aren't His hands healing? Why aren't His words teaching? ... Why aren't his feet going? Why is His loving not showing them there is a way?

Allergies

I wish I knew what I am actually allergic to. Most people I know that have weird food allergies know what they can't have. Take my brother. He knows that if he drinks milk or has any sort of milk product, he'll have a nasty case of projectile vomiting. Though we thought it was funny when we were growing up, I don't think it's as funny seeing a 16-year-old vomit all over. It's a lot more nast to clean up. Then there are the people who can't have peanuts because it makes their throat close up. And the people who can't have gluten because it does something bad. But me...we don't know what I'm allergic to. But whatever it is, man does my face get swollen when I eat it. I've had this "problem" since I was a teenager, but we have never been able to figure out what causes it. Granted I've never had formal tests done, largely because the swelling happens so infrequently, but lately it seems to be happening a lot more often. On Thanksgiving of all days my mouth got HUGE.




I wish I had the picture Dan took....he's holding the camera I'm looking at in this picture. I'm sure you can see the grotesque-ness of it better from his angle. But, if you look at the left side of my mouth, it's noticeably larger than the right side. It doesn't hurt, but it's really annoying and it makes it difficult to drink. They took a picture of me drinking because I had to drink out of the right side of my mouth because my lip on the left side wouldn't go around the cup. Then we thought that maybe it would be a good idea to ice it. I mean, when you hurt your ankle and it gets all swollen, you ice it. Naturally, it would make sense to add ice to the swollen lip as well. That's the reason behind the other picture. It kind of looks like I got into a fight or something. Or maybe I lost a tooth in the food. Or the cat bit me. Or something. SO, we have decided to come up with a story as to why my lip was swollen on Thanksgiving and necessitated a large pack of ice being placed on my face at dinner. The story is we got a little carried away when we were passing the food around the table. I was the "end" of the table and got the job of putting the excess food on the secondary table (that part is actually true). Apparently I was going to slow and Tiffany actually tossed the casserole dish of yams at me. I turned around from nicely placing the mashed potatoes on the secondary table to see a big dish of orange flying at my face. I got my hands up in time to catch it and prevent any mess from occurring, but not in time to prevent a generous blow to the face. Lucky for me, the teeth that the dish hit are fake and so no dental damage was done, only extreme swelling in the maxilofacial region. That's my story. So much better than allergies.



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Now playing: Chris Rice - Smell the Color 9
via FoxyTunes

Reading Week is GONE!

So, I realize that this post is similar to the last couple...or, rather, it's almost a combination of the two-ish. Reading Week is already over, and man it went FAST! It's now fall break, which means another week without class. Supposedly I'm working on all the homework I didn't do last week. I don't necessarily think that I'm being unproductive, considering we are almost done with a huge group project that we had barely talked about before break started. And I've read most of the articles for theology. So I've done stuff....but I have a lot more stuff to do and the time that I need to do it is basically not there. Oh well....I know that it will get done. And relationships are more important than book smarts anyway.

Okay, enough procrastinating. Off to read Humanity and Sin, by Bob Pyne.