Jodilightful!

I have a confession to make.  Sometimes, as much as I know that Heaven will be a home beyond my wildest dreams where there will be no tears or sickness or death, I find myself feeling quite comfortable in my happy little life here and not in much of a hurry to get there.  It’s probably a pretty common ailment among those of us Christians who are blessed to live in a safe, stable, affluent country where we face very little real persecution and are free to live “peaceful and quiet lives” (1 Timothy 2:2).  But there is one thing that always reminds me how fantastic Heaven is going to be, and that is being separated from dear Christian friends.

Trevor and I realized not long into our courtship that we were going to spend our lives missing people.  First, we were missing each other for most of the  20 months we were dating and then engaged.  (That was particularly lousy.)  Then I was missing all my friends and family at home while we lived in the UK.  Now that we live in America, we have been blessed to rekindle old friendships and form wonderful new ones, but we long for dear freinds we grew to love while living in Scotland, and Trevor’s family are all an ocean away as well.

I have often thought and said, especially when we or friends are in times of transition or relocation, that I wish I could just have everyone I love in the same place.  It’s a long list, though, and I have a feeling not everyone would cooperate with my plan.  And so, with that in mind, I look forward to the day when we will be reunited with so many Christian friends we have loved over the years in Heaven, where sin will no longer taint our relationships and death will no longer snatch them way.

This past Monday, Memorial Day, we were able to catch a tiny glimpse of what all those reunions will be like.  Our dear friends, Andrew and Carol, and their two precious children, Tabitha and Oscar were “in town” for one day only, and we seized that day!

Once upon a time, the two of us couples were acquaintances, working together every Friday night at a children’s outreach called One Way Club at our church in Scotland.   But after a couple years of working alongside each other, we found ourselves no longer just partners in ministry, but wonderful friends.  We played and laughed together and  shared our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows.

In 2004, just a month before Pippa was born, they moved back to their home in Northern Ireland to pursue the ministry the Lord was leading them to in Mexico City.  Though we’ve stayed in touch and even managed to have a couple of visits with them while we were still in the UK, once we moved here, we wondered if we would ever get to see them again.

Enter Swine Flu.  God does work in mysterious ways, doesn’t He?  Thanks to scary times in Mexico, Andrew and Carol and their family went home for a short, unexpected visit to Northern Ireland, and on their return trip to Mexico this week, had a 24-hour layover in New Jersey: still a good hour and a half from where we live, but tantalizingly close compared to the thousands of miles we were used to.

So we piled our gang in the van and off we went.  We picked them up at the airport and had a practically perfect (and I only say practically because with sixchildren under the age of five, some things are bound to be less than perfect!) afternoon, evening and morning with this dear family before seeing them back off to the airport.  Every moment was precious, even though we spent almost all of them in our two adjoining rooms at the airport hotel.

When Tabitha saw Pippa and Romilly across the airport, all three of them ran to each other and gave huge hugs.  After a van-ride with “Baby”, as she called him, Beatrix and Oscar were soon the best of friends, too.

After letting the kids exhaust themselves playing (it didn’t take much for poor jet-lagged Tabitha, who just wanted to go to sleep all afternoon!) and ordering in pizza for dinner, we got all six little ones to bed by about eight.  Then we grown-ups spent the next two hours whispering in the dark in Andrew and Carol’s room with the adjoining door cracked so we could keep an ear on our girls.

We never did get around to playing Phase Ten dice like the good old days, but we had a rich time of sharing all that the Lord has been doing in our lives in the nearly three years since the last time we were together.   We laughed over old times, and talked about the future.  What a joy to see them, and an even greater joy to know that we will see them again one day!

The Last Agnew-Young Playdate, July 2006

The Most Recent Agnew-Young Playdate, May 2009

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.   But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.”

1 Timothy 6:6-8 (NIV, emphasis mine.)

Romilly Cake Dance 5/09

Our crazy, crazy Romilly.  We love her to pieces.

Have a lovely weekend!

Egg in a Bottle 5/09

Brought to you by The Young Christian Academy for Girls (YCAG).

…Make robots!

The girls each got a new pair of sandals for the wedding (and for the summer), and this is what we came up with to do with the empty boxes.  Pippa wanted  to make a traffic light again, this time with the green light on the bottom (My husband still teases me about the last one.  Oops.), but that seemed like a one-time-only craft, so we did this instead.  I don’t think I could really recommend this project for under fives.  The only parts Pippa could really do were drawing/cutting/gluing the facial features and twisting the pipe cleaners around markers to make them curly.  Romilly just played with the scissors and the glue.  So yeah, it was pretty hands on for Mommy.

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

One week before the wedding of my best friend’s eldest brother, we were planning on leaving the three “big girls” with my mom and having a nice relaxing day at the wedding with just the baby.  That was before Mary called me on Sunday night to ask if Beatrix could be the flower girl… in six days!  A quick rethinking of the situation made us realize we would regret taking just the little two if Bea was going to be given such a special honor, so we decided to take the whole gang.  We were so glad we did!  We even managed to find a perfect dress and shoes to borrow from a friend. (Thanks, Laura!)

Bea did a wonderful job, and all the girls all had such a blast at the reception.  There were other babies and other big kids, and we would totally have missed our girls had we left them home as planned.  Here are some of the highlights, starting with Bea’s ten seconds of stardom.  Ain’t she sweet?

Bea’s Big Moment 5/16/09

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

Each Monday morning, our very first order of business after breakfast (often while we still have our PJ’s on!) is to introduce Pippa’s homeschool memory verse for the week by doing a little craft or illustrating some aspect of it.  This week’s verse was long for the girls, and full of words and concepts that were foreign to them and difficult to explain.  Here’s the verse in its context and in Grownupese (ESV):

19Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

(from Matthew 6)

My girls don’t know what moths are, and to describe one to a little girl as a “brown butterfly”,  I learned, only serves to arouse her deepest affections and sympathies rather than conveying the true destructiveness of these pests.  They didn’t know what rust was either, but now they understand it’s something that eats cars.  Treasure, they do understand… and they like it!  So amid two excited little girls’  questions of, “Talk more about the moth-es, Mommy” and “Can I go get my “Pip book” so that moth-es don’t eat it?” I somehow had to try to unravel the deep truths of this verse and impress them on their little hearts.  Yikes.

Somewhere in all of my rambling and refocusing, I started to really get what this verse is saying.  I mean it started to really sink into my heart.  What it boils down to (I think) is this: We cannot keep anything from this life – to Pippa’s horror, not dolls or clothes (“But we can wear clothes in Heaven, right Mommy?” Trust Romilly to totally derail a theological discussion with a perfectly reasonable yet extremely tricky-to-answer question.) or cars or any of our stuff.

So what will there be in Heaven? I was pleasantly surprised that my girls did (with a bit of prompting) know the answer to this question.  There will be God and there will be people.

It wasn’t for nothing that Jesus said, when asked which was the most important commandment, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.  The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. ” (Mark 12:30-31, ESV)  Indeed, every single commandment given in the Bible is fulfilled in doing these two things with all of our whole-hearted fervor.

God and people are the only things worth loving because they are *the only* things we will have with us after this fleeting life is over.  They are the only treasure worth having, because they are the only treasure we can keep.  Everything else in this life is only valuable as a means to those ends.  Everything.  Else.

So how do we “store” the “treasures” of God and people in Heaven?   Well, God is already there, of course, waiting and longing for each and every one of us to accept His free offer of grace and an eternity with Him, not because of our own righteousness, but because of Christ’s death on our behalf.  We can invest in the treasure of God by every day spending the time with Him, in prayer and in diligent study of His word, that it takes to truly draw near to Him and experience that close fellowship that we, as His children, are privileged to have.  What better way could there be to spend one’s time than getting to know the One who created you?  (And I am *completely* preaching this to myself here!)

And how can we “store up” people?  The sad truth (but the truth no less) is that God’s word tells us not everyone will be in Heaven.  We would do well to remember this with reverence and trembling as we invest in the lives of others.  As controversial and narrow-minded as this may sound in this age of “tolerance”, Christ is, the Bible tells us, *the only* way provided for man to be reconciled to God.  Those who reject Christ’s offer of salvation, whether by active refusal or by passive indifference, will not be ours “to keep” in Heaven.  If we love our friends, we are compelled by that love to plead with them, as we have opportunity, to recognize the truth of the gospel.  (Ahem, Self?  Are you listening???)

I will leave you with some recent photos of four little souls that I long to know will one day spend eternity with the Lord (and with their Mommy).

… About my mom:

1. That she is alive and (relatively) well.
2. That she lives close enough to see every week, a blessing that after six years in Scotland I will never take for granted.
3. That she loves the Lord and taught me to do the same.
4. That she will, without hesitation, give me any article of clothing or pair of shoes of hers that I compliment her on, right there on the spot (you know, as propriety permits!)
5. That she faithfully spends her Wednesdays chasing after me and my girls and helping us run our errands, even though it is usually her only day of the week to run her own.
6. That she has always brought fun into my life, even when circumstances were not so fun.
7. That she has taught me …to see the good in every person and in life,
8. …to find a way to make any situation work,
9. … and to be able to laugh at myself when that pesky flakiness gene rears its ugly head.
10. That she is the president of my fan club: she thinks I look skinny and beautiful even when I’ve just had a baby, and tells me I’m a great mom even when I’m feeling totally overwhelmed and frazzled.  Her love for me is totally unconditional, and the older I get, the more ways I see that shining through.

I love you, Mom, and I thank the Lord for you, today and every day.  Happy Mother’s Day!

Happy SSA Stats Day to fellow name nerds, far and wide!  Yes, that’s right, once again, the high holiday of the baby naming community has rolled around, bringing some interesting news with it.  For the first time in over a decade Emily is *not* the number one name for baby girls…   Emma is!

For anyone who doesn’t remember my post last year, every year right around Mother’s Day, the Social Security Administration releases the official, accurate, only-reliable list of the 1000 most popular names for boys and girls of the previous year.  Lots of websites claim to have the goods from about January onward, but they don’t know what they’re talking about, because they’re using a sampling of data primarily gleaned from a certain demographic of computer-literate moms.  If you want to know what’s really going on in names, this list is the only one worth reading.  It can tell you, for example, exactly how many Nevaehs  (or Beatrices, for that matter) were born in America in 2008 (5,990 and 336, respectively.  Isn’t it shocking?).  I know you’re starting to feel all atwitter now, right?

Okay, here’s the list.

Naturally, eveyone’s first inclination is to look for their own children’s names (reading 2000 names takes a while, so I recommend the Search function in the Edit menu).  Shockingly, not one of my girls’ first names made an appearance on the list.  Not one!  But, importantly, Beatrice and June were there.  Beatrice was down slightly from last year’s rank of 833 to 897 (though actually, there were 30 more Beatrices born, which just means, in a nutshell, that more people are giving their kids weird names), and June reentered the charts for the first time in a few decades at 863 (maybe thanks to Little Einsteins?), so potentially, my girls could run into other little Beas and Junies on the playground once in a blue moon.  I could probably live with that.

I don’t know that I’m going to have time to do the sort of in depth number crunching I did last year, but for now, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this year’s stats.  Anything jump out at you?

As a starting point for novices, why not tell me the rankings of your own kids’ names, or your own name, and whether they surprised you at all.  You may also want to compare stats from the year they were born to this year’s.  Anything interesting?

And finally, since we’re talking names, I’ve compiled a short list of favorites and unfavorites from our local hospital’s birth announcements for April.  (These are for you, Lindsay M. Since I know today is possibly an even more exciting day for you than for me, think of this as a little SSA Day present!)  Best of Boys: Everett, George, and Dorian (sorry, no middle names were given.)  Worst of Boys: Braylin.  I can’t decide if it would be better or worse on a girl.  Best of Girls: Camilla, Caroline and Penelope.  Worst of Girls: Cydney.  Why oh why?