My brother kindly informed me yesterday that we have not blogged lately. It’s not that we haven’t been doing fun things, I just haven’t felt like blogging about them. So instead, I’m going to try to finish the posts I’ve started over the last couple of weeks that I never finished/had the guts to put up. Warning: this is full of a pregnant lady’s ramblings. You’re in for a treat!

Things are about to get emotional around here; by this I mean that things are emotional around here. Big time. I can’t go to church without tearing up, especially right now when we’re in the beginning stages of a vision campaign that includes sharing Christ’s love by caring for 2,000 orphans, helping set free 1,000 slaves, planting churches and working in communities to help combat HIV/AIDS and MOST IMPORTANTLY sharing the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ that compares to no other.

If you know me at all, the idea of children suffering or not being provided for on account of my American selfishness is a huge issue for me. We are rich. No matter how you calculate it, we are rich. Jonathan and I have enough. More than enough. In fact, I invited some friends over for dinner last week and I didn’t need to go shopping for much in the way of extra groceries because we already had everything required to serve dinner for five people. This, coupled with the fact that there are so many friends and family members we love and enjoy spending time with makes us rich in my mind. Yes, I would really like it if we got swanky new appliances and had a washing machine that maybe didn’t like to eat little holes in my shirts (and why MY shirts?!?!? Why not Jonathan’s?), but I’ve never had to wear those holey shirts because I didn’t have anything else. I just wear them because well, it’s usually one of my favorites that gets the hole and I’m not ready to give up on it yet. It’s funny how things snowball. I go from thinking about replacing the shirt, to replacing the washing machine and dryer and then to new flooring in the laundry room and then thinking about the kitchen appliances and how nice it would be to have a dishwasher that had the spinny washy bar thing on the top to really scrub the items on the upper shelf. Then, I remember that in just a couple of weeks, Jonathan will be seeing this:

Cato Manor. Durban, South Africa

Photos such as this help me to quickly forget my wants and remind me of the BIG work God is doing through his people in South Africa and how glad I am that God is doing the same thing here. Big things. Life changing things in my life and in the lives of my friends and family that I CAN SEE happening! God is setting people free from slavery everyday. Maybe for me my chains of slavery aren’t illness, poverty and despair, but things like fashion, image and comfort. Maybe God doesn’t want me to be comfortable because it’s in those times of discomfort that I am able to remember that my life is not my own.

And the Lord brings to my heart Scripture like this: ”Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed.” 1 Timothy 6:17-18

What was it I wanted again?