priceless

Matt and Dr. Blakemore are having such sweet days in Haiti...their class is going well, they have some students (like Ezechiel in Baron, Nosebin in Difour) we've walked alongside for many years, Matt's gotten to visit with lots of good family,  and he's having many opportunities to meet with administration and continue to help equip and empower them through the huge job that is day-to-day running a university/ministry!  I'm just so thankful for this time, and you know it's killing the five of us a bit not to be there with him.  THANK YOU for your help in keeping us funded and prayed for for such vital, equipping, investing, encouraging trips like this!

Meanwhile, I have been really thankful for some of the ways the Lord has been providing opportunities for our kiddos to be involved in people's lives (including my own!)

Friday night they spent a few hours at a church in Jackson with special needs kids, adults and siblings to provide a "respite night" for parents...and they haven't stopped talking about it.  Lily was paired with a precious young woman with cerebral palsy, and Sofie with a few children her age, and since then it has been research papers on some special needs they previously knew nothing about, prayers for people I've never met, and Sunday Lily brought home a stack of "please come visit our church" cards, added the phrase "wheelchair accessible" to the bottom, and has been anxious to invite her new friends to church. Her dearest friend at our church since week one has been blind since she was a toddler, and I love how Lily and Sofie see others as potential friends, and are not hesitant or self-conscious in loving people well...I want to be like them.  I also love having friends who are willing to involve my children in "helping", even when it adds an element of work to the work!

Sunday family dinner was a precious one...our first with Henry since his wife's death. We all talked about memories of our mamas, Lady Jane and Henry's both born in the 1890's!...talked about dear Mary Jane, talked about death, cried over pie, laughed over Ben, worried all over one another.  We're a motley crew, Stacey, four kids, recently widowed neighbors on both sides, and our dear piano teacher, but how much we all have to offer one another, just in sharing Him and dinner.

We've been rather overwhelmed lately with just broken brokenness in the lives of men and women and children around us that we hold so dear, and as I mentioned my concerns for another sister later to Sofie, she thought for a few minutes and finally and carefully said, "Mom? I think that the best thing is to talk to God about that, and I think that will be the thing that helps."  How humbled I was to be reminded by my free-spirited daughter, who believed what she said with all her being, and who is right.

Go love people open-handed like potential family, join us any Sunday evening for family dinner, and in all the broke brokenness, prayer - the thing that helps.