Thanksgiving

How was your Thanksgiving? I hope you had a nice day. A day spent with good food, fun with your family, and time considering all you have to be thankful for.

I was talking to a friend last week about their holiday plans, and she told me about all that was going on in preparation - who was upset with who and how stressful the day usually was. As I was praying for them, it really struck me how easy it is to get caught up in the festivities and lose sight of the meaning of the holiday. We often talk about this at Christmas - you know, getting caught up in the hustle and bustle - but not usually about Thanksgiving. But for my friends family, they were so concerned with who was going to bring what dish to the meal and not being able to bring what they wanted to bring, that they couldn't even truly be thankful for the people that they were having the meal for and with. The thing is, that particular friend's family is not experiencing something unique to their family. I had 3 different other friends ask for prayer for their family celebration and the stress usually involved. It just seems so ironic to me that we could get so caught up in having this "perfect" meal and not even enjoy the reason for the meal.

We had a GREAT time at the Kane house. And thanks to one of Bruce's cousins, a time full of expressing thanks for one another. Earlier this year, everyone drew a name of someone in the family that was going to be in Hanford for Thanksgiving(there were 27 in attendance). Then, on Thanksgiving day each person expressed why they were thankful for the person that they drew the name of. It was a meaningful experience and I hope we do it again, because it made everyone focus on the true meaning of the holiday.

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Pride or Humility?

"When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom." Prov. 11:2

Why do we as people have such a hard time admitting wrong? Why is there always such a need to defend our actions?

My mom decided to come to Hanford for Thanksgiving and her favorite family tradition is going to see a movie with everyone. Since this is the year that all of Bruce's extended family from Southern CA came to Hanford, we decided to take my mom to the movie on Wednesday. We went to the small theater at the Hanford mall. Our movie, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, started at 11:50 and we got there about 20 minutes before the movie started to have plenty of time to get our popcorn and such. We sat down in the theater that had the sign above it showing our movie title and at about 12:20, after 20 minutes of previews, the movie This Christmas started. The movie was off center, so I didn't even realize it was a different movie starting when I got up to go tell someone to fix the screen. When I was talking to the employee at the concession stand another girl came to tell them that the movie was off center too, only she was talking about This Christmas. When I went back into the theater, I noticed that the sign above our theater had changed and our movie was in the theater across the hall. I went to where we were seated and told Bruce that I thought we were in the wrong theater, which he was starting to figure out himself (the title of the other movie hadn't come on the screen yet). We, along with several other families, gathered our stuff and moved to the correct theater to join the movie that was already 30 minutes in. This exact thing happened to us a few years ago on Christmas in Lakewood and I couldn't believe it would happen again. After I got my family situated, I proceeded to speak to the manager about this mishap. Now when this happened in Lakewood, the manager was stumbling over himself to make sure we were satisfied customers. They not only apologized, they gave us our money back and free tickets to come back and see the movie in its entirety (or any other movie). This time however, the manager immediately started blaming me (and the other people who were there talking to him). He said we must have arrived late. Arrived late? Duh! If we had arrived late, we would have been in the correct theater. It turns out that he was the one who changed the sign and neglected to go in and tell the people who were already sitting in there. I felt bad for him because, aside from the guy running the concession stand, he was the only employee there - and he had a movie that wasn't running correctly when he changed the sign. He did refund our money after I told him that it would have been nice if he would have just said "I'm sorry" instead of trying to blame us for his mistake. Honestly, I would have been waaaayyyyy more sympathetic to his situation if he had just admitted his mistake and said, "I'm sorry."

So I have been pondering how well I do at this and I have to admit that although sometimes I am the first one to admit my wrong and say sorry, there are other times when I feel I need to justify my actions and stand my ground. That is so prideful, but a normal human reaction. I was sharing with a friend what God had been showing me through this, and she said that God had been showing her the benefits of humility too, not only in how it disarms others, but in how it affects her witness - especially in a small town like Hanford. It is a very likely reality that the people we are in contact with on a day to day basis will walk into Epic on any given Sunday. Wow! I hadn't even thought about that aspect of the consequences of my actions. I have to consider that, if they did walk in on Sunday morning, would they see the worship leader and remember me for something positive or something negative that I did or said (acting in humility or pride)?

Even if my actions are justified, I need to see the situation from the other persons perspective too, but that takes quite a bit of humility. Its the whole "consider others more highly than yourself" (philippians 2:3) that is so hard. So I endeavor to be clothed in humility and consider what consequences my actions might bring for the Kingdom of God.

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Molly started on solids

Molly had cereal for the first time last week. She loves it and eats really well. It only took a couple of spoonfulls for her to get the hang of it. She was 24 weeks old yesterday - almost 6 months. I can't believe how quickly her first year is flying by.

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Halloween

I know it is kind of late, but here are some pictures from Halloween...



Epic doesn't host an event for Halloween. We encourage our church family to stay home and be a light for Christ in their own neighborhood. After all, it is the one day of the year that most of your neighbors come knocking on YOUR door. I didn't get any pictures of our yard, but we rented a jumper and served frito boats and bottled water with the candy we passed out. Bruce stayed home with some friends of ours while I took the kids trick-or-treating. He got to meet several of our neighbors and had some great conversations with a couple of them. I personally don't look forward to Halloween, but this year was a lot of fun.

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I'm back!

Ok, so I am finally back. I know, I know.... I haven't blogged in about a month. I'm sorry. I have been trying to get settled into our new house. And although we are not even close to being done, we are at least settled enough to be living without too much chaos. Here are some pictures...

Entry way...
Office area (The kids' TV with their movies and video game is in the office area too) ...

The boys' room...


Molly's room...

The master bedroom...

The living room...
The living/kitchen/dining rooms...

As you can see, nothing is really decorated yet. We still have touch-up paint and a few other things to do before we will start decorating. You can see blue tape on the wall in one of the pictures of the boys' room marking where some touch up paint needs to be done. And the backsplash in the kitchen is still waiting to be tiled. Bruce intended to get it done before Thanksgiving, but time is slipping away very quickly for that. I think he is a bit tiled out after all of the work on the floor, which is a lot of tile as you can see in the pictures. It was worth it though. We really love it.

Two of the chairs I am reupholstering are going in the living room on the side of the couch opposite the recliner. And the other two are going in the master bedroom. Hopefully, I can work on those next week.

This week I am working on Molly's bedding. I hope to finish it by the weekend. What you see in the picture is the bumper I made for Merritt when he was a baby. When I finish I will post a new picture.

One of our projects since we moved in has been making the closet and cabinet space effective. We really wanted to make the boys' closet as efficient as possible so that they would have room to play in their room instead of every spare inch being used for storage. Also, there isn't a medicine cabinet anywhere in the house and the linen cabinet in the master bathroom is really deep. It was not very usable space, so we worked on that too. Here are a couple of pictures of the finished work. The large drawers we installed in the linen cabinet are fully extendable.

So that is where we are at as of today. As we get more done I will post more pictures. Thanks for being patient with me!!!

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