Changes are afoot

What a beautiful day we had! I was sitting outside reading my bible and thinking, wow, my brain sure did need these sun rays! Its amazing how much better life can look when the sun is shining.

I had a very productive day. It didn't start out that way. I fell back to sleep on the couch and didn't wake up until 8:30! I hate it when that happens! I feel like half my day is gone by then. I got up though and got going. Lets see, there was this awful pile of sleeping bags that Aaron had brought home from camping out in the rough on Friday night. When the rain hit in the middle of the night it got all their bags wet and they had to ride the four wheeler out of the "canyon", which got stuck and apparently dropped all their stuff into the mud. They made it up to the vehicle they went into the woods in, threw their stuff in the trunk and laid the seats back and went back to sleep. Oh the rest of the young! Two days later, the wet and muddy bags and clothes came meandering out of his trunk and into my laundry room, smelling like nasty mud and cow manure! OH YUCK!!!! I thought to myself, "boy, life just never gets boring with this kid around!"

So today, I washed those sleeping bags, one of them TWICE, and folded lots of baskets of clothes, cleaned out the refer (Matthew eats our leftovers so with him gone...) and scrapped some cards. I even took coffee to John, Jerry and Aaron down at one of their jobs. It was a good good day. I thought a lot about the church remodel that we hit the first stages of yesterday. Ryan and I were chatting, as we often do when we get the chance, and he told me, "yesterday felt really weird mom, I mean, I 've been going to church in that building (green carpet and all) for 20 plus years, even though I'm excited for the new look and the way the church WILL be, I'm sort of freaked out by the fact that it will never look like it has for all these years." Oh did I know what he was talking about. A few times yesterday I thought, holy cow, all these years and we will finally see this place look like a church. A few times I felt this sense of melancholy, not like I want it to stay the same, but that there will be those who won't remember that we started out there with it being so very different and little by little the Lord has moved through us to take more and more territory, more for Him, more to serve Him in. It was in the upstairs nursery that I sat with two sisters and prayed to get pregnant with our third son, which we did not too long after that. It was in the middle of the room downstairs in the sanctuary where my husband sat, shaking, crying and whispering a prayer of repentance and surrender to the Lord. I would have missed it that night had the Lord not told me to go back to my seat as I knelt at the "altar" doing my own business with Him. It was there that I heard Bethany Lawrence Allen sing "Breath of Heaven" as a young teenager and had so many of us weep watching this beautiful young woman sing a song of the virgin Mary. It was there that our good friend Alyson got married to a wonderful man of God after years of waiting for him. It was there that we said goodbye to Mike and Nancy and hello to Arte and Julie. There I learned to worship, pray, be spirit led, spirit filled and fed, where I watched our kids grow up, some of them learned to walk on those floors and climbed on the pews, built life long friendships that continue to this day and learned how to walk a walk of faith...so although I am very excited for these changes, God is SOOOO up to something, it is with a brief sense of, well, maybe loss, that I looked around and thought, okay, we can do this, we can do this...we WILL do this!!! God is good, God is awesome!
The next time we have church in that building it will feel like a whole new building!!! Heck it will just about BE a whole new building!