Halloween

People are often shocked to hear that I have never been trick-or-treating, my parents didn't want us to participate in this dark holiday. I never felt like we missed out because we always did something on Halloween. I have wonderful memories of going to our church's Fall Harvest party and the goal was to dress up as different biblical characters. As we got older, I remember dressing up as a family and then playing putt putt golf or driving mini-race cars.
Mark and I have talked a lot about how we want to do different holidays in our household and we have decided not to do trick-or-treating with our kids. Halloween has such darkness behind it and we want to live out our principles as we see best. This also means we won't be doing Easter bunnies or santa claus and while I know some think we are being legalistic what is the harm, it is our personal belief that we don't want worldly things to steal important holidays and the meanings behind them. I want our kids to celebrate Christ's birthday on Christmas and to understand the true meaning behind Easter. As an adult, I appreciate the creative ways my parents instilled the important meanings behind the holiday while making sure we didn't feel left out. I remember my grandma always had a birthday cake for Jesus on Christmas and on Easter, my mom would hide gifts around the house and attached to each gift was a bible verse relevant to the holiday. I hope Mark and I can instill these types of things into our kids. If you celebrate with trick-or-treating, easter bunnies, or santa claus, please know there is no judgement from our end. We all do things differently and that is perfectly okay, we simply wanted to explain why we will do some of the holidays differently.

I know Alex won't remember his first Fall Harvest at our church and he is too young to eat candy but who can pass up dressing up our cutie!

Calling

I recently had a friend tell me how admirable it is that we do foster care and the whole conversation made me a bit uncomfortable actually. You see, we didn't choose foster care, we were called into it and that makes ALL the difference. I would say the number one thing I hear from people is that foster care is not something they feel they could do. My response to that is that if I do foster care in my own strength, it's not going to go well and I've had moments of that. When I do foster care and lean on God for his strength, it makes all the difference in the world. That's not to say that this is an easy journey because it has tons of unique challenges BUT the rewards far outnumber all the challenges. I see foster care much like discipleship in that many avoid the calling because it's uncomfortable and can be risky. All I can say to that is that God doesn't ask us to do comfortable most times because it wouldn't require us to lean on him, He calls us out into the uncomfortable and then gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it!