No Ordinary Thaw

Bethany recently entered an art contest for teens here in Woodbury, MN and won first prize in the drawing category!

The drawing she entered is a color pencil of Aslan with the following quote of Mr. Beaver telling the children of the prophecy of Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. We love this part of the book/movie as it IS what we Lovers of Jesus are longing for with every heartbeat! The Day our Jesus comes in sight and sorrow and sin meet their death! And most of all, we will have Spring in our hearts forever with Him, face-to-face!

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

~susy

So I think we are settled down a little bit.  We’re all back from traveling, the latest foray was up to camp again.  I didn’t go but Susy, Beth, and Seth went with another sister in Christ, Tina, and her son “Zeke” (zee-key) was with them.  They took the van.

So the first day I got back to work on site — I drive the van down to the bus stop, usually — I open the back door of the van to put my laptop bag in the back and… there’s grass all over the place.  Lots of it!  At first I’m like, “What in the world!?” and then I remembered Zeke.  And I laughed. Continue Reading »

Wow.  What a month July was.  Trips galore (mainly to FPYC with one in progress and another planned for Labor Day work weekend, if we can afford the gas!!)  Not a single post.  We were just so busy.  But there’s all kinds of things going on we could share and probably will, retroactively.

A few “highlights” for us:

• Two more books to recommend or at least talk about — Heavenly Man and The Shack.  Heavenly Man was especially good, but The Shack as well (or so I have been told by Susy).  A lot of friends have read The Shack, so this is probably no real news to anyone reading this, but we’ll offer some quick comments at some point, for whatever they are worth.  By the way, the author of The Shack is at least an acquaintance if not a friend of the author of Pagan Christianity, which we have also recently read and highly recommend.  (Pagan Christianity chronicles thoughts and historical facts to which Susy and I have given thought for about 20 years.)  Both books very much beg the question, “Why oh why do we keep doing what we are doing?!!??!”  Albert Einstein said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and yet expecting different results!”  Jesus said a “tree is known by it’s fruit.”  We have to take a serious look at the fruit as Jesus said to do.  It’s too important not to!! :-)
• Several trips to FPYC with friends needs to be chronicled.
• A trip by Bethany to the northern boundary waters, which was also chronicled here on the St. Paul Urban Ministry blog page — friends of ours for sure.  (“No, they kidnapped her and made her have all that fun with people she obviously didn’t want to be around.” :-))

And we’ve received quite a number of encouragements from other places that probably would be encouraging to pass along…  There’s a story I read recently in Sports Illustrated (while waiting at the doctor’s office for a yearly checkup) about “The Greatest NFL Game Ever” that was really impressive and encouraging seen with the right “eyes”… It’s just been a busy month.  As I’m sure it has been for you.

Just wanted to say, we’re here; just WAY behind on posting stuff.  We should catchup this month.

~chris