Happy Birthday, Jonathan!

Jonathan as he is today

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In 1981 our family was about to embark on one of the biggest adventures of our lives.There was a big recession beginning and people were losing their jobs and homes and moving across the country to try and find work. Before the economic news turned bad, Bern and I had decided, early in the year, that he should leave his job with the Navigators, where he had worked since coming to the US in 1973. We felt God was leading us out of the Christian bubble and into the "real" world and a greater dependency upon Himself. We were pleased to rise to that challenge, not realizing what a daily and hourly test of our faith it was going to become. No one knew how deep the recession was going to go at that time.

Bern went to a job he had been offered in a friend's company and within in two months we knew that was not going to work. That experience filled our summer months. In the fall he started to look for jobs in California and we sold our house to make ourselves more mobile. We banked the proceeds from the sale and were able to rent the house back from the buyer who had bought it to keep as a rental property. At that time interest rates were soaring so we put the our money into a Money Market account and were able to use the interest from it each month to meet our expenses. Bern began looking into the possibilities of supporting us as a free-lance writer (something he actually managed to do for the next two years).

As winter approached, we decided to relax and wait for our new baby who was due around Thanksgiving time. This was our third child and I fully expected it would be a boy.

We discussed names and settled on Jonathan Vernon,

Jonathan meaning Gift from God and Vernon honoring my father.

November 22 we called a friend to come and pick up Matthew and Andrew and we went to the hospital, praying all the way and thanking God for the gift we were about to receive. At 11:19 p.m. our newest little boy came into the world and I said,

"Thank you God! His name is Jonathan Vernon."

He was beautiful! He was probably the prettiest baby boy ever born.

Our "baby holiday" lasted through Christmas and I can hardly express the joy we all had in Jonathan during the long winter that followed his birth. I nicknamed him "Jonathan Joy" and used to whisper that name into his ear over and over, making him smile and laugh. He was a cuddler, with the most appealing smile when he wanted or needed something. Because it was winter in Colorado, he was usually bundled up like a little bear. He always wanted to be in the middle of whatever his busy older brothers were doing. He quickly mastered holding toys and became fascinated with putting things together.

This is how life started for Jonathan. He was eagerly welcomed into a home where his brothers, mom and dad were constantly present for the first two years of his life. Those early years were scary because of the pressure of work and worries about money, but they were also wonderful for all of us as we met life's challenges together. God used the time to teach us how to live by faith.

Now Jonathan is all grown up, married and a dad himself. 27 years have passed and he has continued to be a great joy to his family. There is so much I could say about his life and his accomplishments, his faith and how much I admire his walk with God, but here is what I will boil it down to:

Jonathan, I am so glad that you were born and that God gave me the privilege of being your mother. You have ALWAYS made me proud, but never more than right now. You are a wonderful disciple and servant of Christ, a loving and faithful husband and a delighted daddy of a beautiful baby girl. Congratulations on making the most of this life the Lord is giving you!

Happy Birthday to you!

I love you!!!

Mom

PS...Kristin, I thank God for you and what you have brought into our son's life. You are the best thing that ever happened to him! You exceed all of our hopes and dreams for our son.

Bless you...we love you.

Musing about marriage

Right around this time of November, 60 years ago, my dad became a Christian. My mom met the Lord 3 1/2 years earlier, when she was 12 years old and she was the one who brought him to the Billy Graham crusade where he heard about Christ. I am beginning to collect these stories from them as we move toward their 60th wedding anniversary July 9, 2009.

Mom and Dad's marriage is an example of a traditional marriage, the kind we more conservative people want to defend these days. They are one man and one woman who made a vow to stay together for a lifetime and raise a family that would have both a father and a mother present.

Now there is this huge struggle in our state about whether two men or two women can marry and make some kind of a family together. In the wings there may be even more reconfigurations of marriage waiting to be revealed. Those of us who never imagined marriage could or would be redefined in this way are struggling with what we consider the erosion of an essential institution.

However, as I have been thinking a lot about how the concept of marriage got to be so elastic and twisted, I think it began about 40-50 years ago. It started with the rising acceptance of divorce as a solution to unhappiness in marriage. We didn't know as much as we do today about how to help people make peace with each other. We didn't understand the devastation of various kinds of addictions and dependencies. Divorce was often seen as the only way out and it got easier and easier.

Broken marriages led to children of divorce whose trust had been broken. Those children matured and some of them introduced the idea of having no marriage at all, just choosing to live together "without the benefit of marriage" to see if they were compatible.

That put us on a slippery slope where living together became a matter of convenience and self-gratification with less and less expectation of commitment for the long haul. More and more children were born out of wedlock and the concept of the single parent became acceptable.

Once we accepted singleness in parenthood, it wasn't so strange to see people who had no intention of ever marrying becoming parents. If a single person could be a parent, why shouldn't he or she share a home and children with someone they loved, regardless of marriage? Once we had cobbled together enough homes where children were growing up with non-biologically related adults raising them, we were just a short step from gay couples adopting and raising families. If they could do that, why in the world couldn't they get married and be a "real" family?

And here we are today.

What baffles me is that the straight community, who has systematically eroded the concept of marriage for so many decades is now appalled that gays want to marry. The gays are in the curious position of promoting marriage as a desirable institution to a "straight" society that has increasingly disdained and forsaken it.

I am not in favor of gay marriage, but I am also not in favor of heterosexual marriages that break apart and leave children in the lurch. I am not in favor of heterosexual relationships that are based on narcissistic self-gratification with no intention of commitment for a lifetime. I am not in favor of "easy outs" through divorce, or of parents abandoning their kids because they are not personally happy.

In short I am not in favor of the way this society has watered down and made a joke of marriage generally. Why are we so incensed about gay marriage when we have allowed our country to become a disaster area of failed heterosexual marriages and distressed, confused and abandoned children?

We should have started a long, long time ago defending marriage. We should have protested and voted for marriage when divorce became so prevalent, when adultry became so "normal" and when playing house instead of building a lifetime commitment to one another became acceptable.

When having sex became the reason for getting together, engaging the heart and mind and soul went out the window. When the heart, mind and soul were abandoned we lost our way as human beings. Now we don't seem to have a compass to get us back to sanity.

Christians who understand and believe in the biblical concept of marriage are going to have to stand up with courage in the coming years. The pressure is going to be tremendous! I hope we are ready.

On Preaching

I began reading "Power Through Prayer", by E.M.Bounds again this morning. Within three pages I remembered why this book is so powerful. Here are some quotes that have to do with preparing to preach:

The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows.

The pipe must not only be golden, but open and flawless,

that the oil may have a full, unhindered, unwasted flow.

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The man makes the preacher. God must make the man.

The messenger is, if possible, more than the message.

The preacher is more than the sermon.

As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom is but the mother's life,

so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher IS.

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It takes twenty years to make a sermon because it takes twenty years to make the man.

The true sermon is a thing of life.

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The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above the man.

Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill.

Everything depends upon the spiritual character of the preacher.

Under the Jewish dispensation the high priest had

inscribed in jeweled letters on a golden frontlet:

"Holiness to the Lord."

So every preacher in Christ's ministry must be molded into and mastered by

this same holy motto.

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The gospel of Christ does not move by popular waves.

It has no self-propogating power.

It moves as men who have charge of it move.

The preacher must impersonate the gospel

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This morning I rededicated myself to frevent prayer for the work of the gospel that is being done, and will be done, by my children and their spouses. I began praying for the way to be prepared for present and future ministry, and for the path before them to be clear and bright so they know the way to go.

God bless the next generation.

Standing By...

I got my application into Fuller by September 29. My transcripts were there a few days later. My last reference arrived October 31. I called several times to make sure nothing else is required for my application and was assured all was in order. Then, Saturday, November 8 I received a snail mail letter asking for additional transcripts so that my application could be forwarded to the Committee by November 14.

Ha, ha! I called the schools in question first thing Monday morning and learned that since my records are stored on microfilm somewhere they would have to be hunted down, uploaded to a computer somehow, printed and mailed. Of course, Tuesday is a holiday so none of this is starting until Wednesday, November 12. What are the chances it will arrive by November 14?

I mentioned to Fuller that all of my academic records for the three community colleges I attended are in the transcript from College of the Sequoias, where I graduated, but they say that doesn't count. I asked if they could have let me know that a few weeks ago when I called them to check specifically on transcripts....

So, all I can do is wait and pray. If my transcripts miss the deadline for the winter quarter, my application will go into the pile for spring and I will have 4 more months of waiting to see if they will accept me as a student.

I have learned (again) that I lack grace when other people don't do their part. It gives me heartburn when I have finished everything I say I would do, met the requirements and then find that others dropped the ball. Grrrrrrrrr.

Anyway, this process has always been the Lord's hands and if I have a complaint, I have to talk with Him about it. He doesn't really care about my complaints since, once again, I don't even know how to ask the right questions. How do I know when (or if) I should start seminary? Only He knows.

I have a friend who is in seminary right now who never intended to go at all! She and her husband are both attending seminary, to their great surprise. A few months ago they were praying about what to do next in their lives, decided on a whim to visit Western Seminary in San Jose. They sneaked onto the campus to have look around, bumped into an admissions counselor "by accident" and before they left the campus that day, were enrolled in 3 classes each. Now she is up to her eyeballs in hermeneutics. She has no idea how she will use her seminary education, but she knows God wants her toget it. Go figure....

I Know!

A couple of weeks ago I was at our women's Bible study at CPC and we were singing when I had what Gerald Sittser calls a "waking dream". We were singing "Above All", which has the lines:

"Like a rose

trampled on the ground,

You took the fall

and thought of me

above all."

I was suddenly overcome with the image of Preston on the ground and my heart cried out silently,"Oh, Lord, that was Preston!" and in that moment, I forgot where I was and went off into the waking dream.

I felt like the Lord Jesus responded to my cry very gently, but urgently,

"I KNOW! I was there!"

For the next several minutes He and I had a conversation that has put some things into perspective for me.

As I thought through the scene at the accident I realized that there were at least three Believers present, Preston, Tara and the young woman driving the car, who is apparently a Christian youth worker from Washington. I was amazed to realize that these three people who wanted with all their hearts to serve the Lord found themselves in this circumstance.

And Jesus said,"I KNOW! They had no idea what was going to happen."

And I thought of all the re-writes this scene could have had that would have prevented the accident.

And Jesus said, "I KNOW, but those alternatives weren't in my plan."

I stood there, stunned, and considered this truth. I wasn't angry or upset, I was just stunned at the power of God to do what He chooses.

Then I remembered a blog entry Andy put up the week before. He talked about how the questions we ask God don't even make sense sometimes because we don't have enough information to frame appropriate questions. To God, our questions sound like, "What shape is yellow? Is it round or square?" or "How many hours are in a mile?" We mix up our facts and we don't know how to apply the right facts to the right situations.

The truth is that the Lord knew exactly what would happen and He let it happen. The facts that I am working with relate to Tara and her children being left "alone", when, in fact, they are more deeply in the palm of God's hand now than when Preston was with them. God has made special provision for widows and orphans in His Word because He cares so deeply for them. He promises to provide for them and He is.

Another fact relates to the grief we are all going through, but the Lord says, "Why is that a bad thing? Look at how you are growing through this! See what marvelous changes have happened in peoples' lives since the accident."

Another fact is that fear surges through all of us who remain here after such a tragedy and we are afraid of what might happen next to any of us. That seems like a hard way to live.

But the Lord says, "How will you ever know how much I am able love you and protect you if you never see Me in action? The thing Tara dreaded most happened, but I have not let her down. She has comfort even in her grief and I am meeting all of her needs. I have shown her that she belongs to Me, even more than she belonged to Preston."

Some of my Christian friends have refused to think that this accident was the Lord's doing. The facts don't line up with their perception of what God should be and do. I am now convinced that the Lord was in this and that He is revealing why and how He allowed it every day.

I KNOW I am a stronger believer because of this event. I KNOW I love Heaven more, that my faith in the goodness of the Lord has grown and that I love Him more than ever.

There was human error involved in this accident. The consequences were that an elk and a man lost their lives (I believe God cared about the elk, too) and at least three women found themselves bereft and weeping at the scene. Friends and family of those involved have carried a weight of care and sorrow in the days that have ensued.

But since then whole communities of believers have been touched and have mobilized to offer assistance. Many, many people have faced questions about their own relationship with God and taken action to make it right. Young believers are committing themselves to a lifetime of discipleship and are being guided by leaders who are more intent than ever on excellence in disciple-making.

I am not asking so many questions anymore because I know my questions don't make sense. I am now standing in awe of God and I am able to thank Him for the unthinkable, the unimaginable and the amazing things He allows and does.

Now I KNOW He is Lord of all.

Happiness

This past weekend Melody and Kevin drove up from Pasadena for the weekend. How amazing that they can do that now!

We visited Grandma and Grandpa Carson to wish them early happy birthdays since M & K will be moving to a new apartment Oct. 18 when we gather for the real birthday party. (There will be a dinner at G & G's home that evening.) Rick, Diane, Amanda and Dylan came over and we had a lot of fun hanging out. Kevin is a Lodi guy and EVERYONE in the valley relates to him! There were lots of inside Valley jokes.

Matt & Steph joined us Sunday for Peets coffee after church, followed by lunch at our house. You may be asking, "Where are the pictures of these great events?" Well, I left the chip out of my camera and couldn't take pictures for most of it, then I got busy and forgot to shoot pics when I could.

So, use your imagination. Think about lots of laughter and good-humored conversation and you will pretty much know what happened.

We really missed Andy and Whitney. I was lucky enough to see so much of my family last week that it made their absence even more poignant. God bless our famly, far and wide!

I got to go and visit the Thompsons in Tigard

First fire of the rainy season.

Susannah found her feet
and mastered rolling over
after which she looked up as if to ask, "Now what?"