kim through
   the looking glass

… please pray for a family in my church. Their 4-year-old son has just been diagnosed with leukemia.

My friend Tammy is hosting a Mom 2 Mom Carnival on encouraging our kids’ relationship with Jesus.

If I’m going to be brutally honest, I’m not entirely sure how we’re going to go about helping our kids build a relationship with God!

One thing we currently do is pray before dinner each night. We try to pray for specific things and for specific people instead of saying a generic prayer. One thing I remember about growing up is that we generally only saud prayers by rote (ie. “Now I lay me down to sleep …”) so I was very uncomfortable actually praying out loud around other people since I’d had so little practice. I want to give Gwen the opportunity to pray out loud her own prayers in our home so that she becomes used to using her own words to express herself to God.

Another thing we hope to do is family Bible reading. I don’t yet know how best to do this and not make it a chore and boring, though, as that was most of Brad’s experience regarding family devotions as a kid!

I hope, also, to expose our kids to other Christian adults. Living in an intentional community in which we have deep relationships and intentional get-togethers (ie. weekly potlucks and weekly morning prayer) is a wonderful way to show our children the love of God through others. I think having positive adult role models who talk about their faith, their relationship with God and their walk with God is an awesome thing for kids to have!

All in all, I think the number one thing to do to encourage kids to have a relationship with God is walk with God yourself. Kids learn the most from what they see, and if all they ever see is a ‘Sunday Christian’, how can we ever expect them to move beyond that? That means that both Brad and I have a lot of work to do in how we live our lives and ‘walk the walk’. I hope, and pray, that we can rise to the occasion.

Please pray for a friend, Julie-Anne, whose 4-year-old son, Mathias, is quite ill.

So in my new Bible reading plan (which I’m going to post about every so often, helps keep me accountable!!), I just finished Jeremiah. It’s a book that’s made me go “Hmmm …”. Read the rest of this entry »

Crystle and I were talking the other night about how one goes about training up children in the faith. We were talking about how there’s two schools of thought on the subject:

1. “Age-appropriate” children’s messages based on Biblical truths, like devotional books.
2. The Bible is plenty age-appropriate and doesn’t need anything to “translate” it for kids - you just need to talk about the Scriptures as you read.

There may be other methods, or a combination of the two, but these were the two we were discussing. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe about something non-baby related?

So, we’ve been in our new house for about a week and a half. The move went VERY well - we had so much help we could hardly believe it!! We are truly blessed to have all the friends we did come and help us out. Read the rest of this entry »

Voila! Our new home! We got the keys yesterday at about 4:30 pm and had to wait for Brad to finish work and Crystle to get home before we could go over. We got there around 5:30, which is not the most wonderful time to take pictures - especially when one cannot find the lights in the house - or, at some points, the light switches were found, but there were no bulbs in the lights. That makes for one dark house!

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, today at some point in the afternoon a ridiculous amount of money will be given out by our lawyer to many different people, and an even more ridiculous amount of money will be forked over by the bank on our behalf. I can’t believe we are home owners!!

Dave will be picking up the keys to the house when they are available (our lawyer was assuming early afternoon) and we’ll be meeting at Brad’s work to walk over all together! We’re planning to pray over the house, sit and have some quiet reflection time, and then get some pizza and celebrate!! Graham and Emma will be over tonight too, as I think Emma wants to get started on the autocad drawings of the house for Graham’s dad (an electrician, who’s doing all our electrical work on Monday/Tuesday!).

It’s such a rush. I’ll be taking pictures tonight and will hopefully have them up tomorrow! I can’t believe the Kirkendall Cluster is actually beginning to take shape! Please pray for our growing community!!

(p.s. My ultrasound was moved to next Thursday, when I’ll be almost 19 weeks, since they might not get the cardiac views they want if they do the ultrasound before 18 weeks. I figured they’d move it, but I’m still sad! I did get to hear the heartbeat again, though, and that was lovely! I’m feeling June Bug move around a LOT now - not so many pokes/kicks, but a lot of tickles and swooshing and fun!)

Well, it’s been a long time in the coming, I just hadn’t quite come up with the perfect time to tell the story of how we came to own a house. However, Christine over at welcome to my brain posted about a book that led us to consider SERIOUSLY living life in common. Check out her post (linked above) to give your brain a refresher.

So, I’ll backtrack.

Read the rest of this entry »

I actually won something! Remember the Babylegs giveaway a few weeks back? Turns out that I won second place, so I get to pick out two pairs of Babylegs for our little one to have when he/she is born!! WUHOO!!! Just waiting for Mel from Our Blessed Arrows to contact me and let me know my options =) Thanks a bunch, Mel - I’m super excited to have won … I never EVER win things!!!

In sad news … my aunt’s surgery didn’t go terribly well. She was supposed to be released from hospital Wednesday morning, and she was finally released today. Apparently there was some internal bleeding and another surgery, but things are looking up now. I feel horrible that I didn’t call home earlier to find out - I kind of assumed my mom would let me know. BAD ASSUMPTION, KIM! Aunt Connie, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry to hear about the troubles and I’m so sorry I didn’t call and check up earlier!!! I love you and I hope you’re doing alright!! If anyone could join us in lifting my aunt up in prayer, that would be wonderful!