And We're Off.....

"As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease..."

"Never again will I curse the ground because of man".....and so seasons go on and life along with it.  Things change, but one thing stays the same.  Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and forever!  We celebrated yesterday, last week, and tomorrow because we know that our Redeemer lives!  For us this was not just an "ordinary" Easter season, as the changes in life dictated a different way of celebration.  For us this year we have really gotten to see God in a "new" way.

Recently we were stressing over the nuts and bolts of life. Trying to figure out the who, what, and when's as we set off on this great adventure.  The more and more we tried to make things happen the more and more we saw doors remaining shut.  One of those real moments for us came from our house.  Like a good Martha would have been doing, we were busy trying to run-about scurrying to figure out what to do with it.. Sell...Rent....Fix?  In this market it is hard to make any discriminating decisions.  We went back and forth, then forth and back from one professional to the next, all the while worrying about what to do. Sleepless nights, Oh Yes!


And then in the midst of the chaos Amy came across Isaiah 30 pertaining to Israel and us.  As many of you know Israel was not the model of stellar faith when it came to the Lord.  That's why they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, and why in this passage we see Israel running to Egypt for help and protection from the Assyrians.  Yes, the same Egypt that had made them captive for years and who they fled across the Red Sea to escape, but when it came to being threatened and their physical demise was in sight where did they run?  Not the God who parted the seas, who delivered them from the hands of Pharaoh.  Not the God who they saw cast plagues on their captors, culminating in the death of all the first-born in the land as the angel of death passed over the homes of the faithful who smeared blood over the doorposts.  No, they ran to the Egyptians for help when the going got tough.  And as a result of their faithlessness God handed them over into captivity anyway while lamenting that:

In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it!   ~Isaiah 30:15

Thankfully, for us it hadn't gotten that far this time.  And in our silence and in our stillness when we decided to simply be still and let God be God, He showed up!  As we walked away perplexed and confused about what to do with our home, we decided to just let it be and allow God to do whatever He wished....  Then we got the email.  The email was from a missionary family who had been searching for a home in the area so they could complete the summer internship that they had signed up for.  However, after a long search they had not found any suitable housing for their family.  In their last efforts to find housing, they found out about our house and wrote to see if we could work something out.  And work something out we did, relieving the stress about our house, even if momentarily, and working out every detail for them even down to the crib and toys for their 13 month old.

After having this detail worked out, everything else seemed to fall into place.  And after a quiet Easter morning in our MAF apartment with just our family we found ourselves in Nampa, Idaho resting in beginning this new journey.  Capping off the first day of our non-tech training reminded of God's promise to the earth that He will never destroy it because of our own stupidity and lack of faith. That's a patience far beyond my comprehension.