sweet days north

 We've been burning the candle at all ends, but for those who aren't facebookers, I wanted to catch you up brief!  

What sweet days.

FRIDAY:

I want to be Aunt Lori Buckner when I grow up.

Her house is where there is always a pot of hot coffee on, where you can eat homemade spaghetti and meatballs (or whatever she knows you love) for breakfast, where there is a thoughtful little birthday cake after ten hours on the road, where you can be grouchy or happy or heartbroken or at peace...just as you are is just right.

There’s lots of laughter and stories and transparency and unoffendability, and everything is right where you left it last time. There are really no rules at Aunt Lori’s house beyond loving one another well.

She and Uncle Terry’s home is so laced with prayer that it feels sacred just walking past their armchairs, and this little house will always be a place of peace because Terry and Lori take care of it and pour it out like it’s HIS alone. There are houses ten times bigger (wouldn’t be hard!) not worth nearly as much.

What a gift to have and make memories with our kiddos in such a place with such people. I want to be people like that.

Saturday:

Tonight was as special as it could have been.

Haylie and Ethan Heckman are simply always going to have chunks of our hearts, moving in next door at 12-and-13 years old and growing with us in so many ways.

To celebrate Haylie-girl and Braden tonight, to have good time with two of the missionary families and their precious children that we lived with for so many years, being with the Heckman/Hepners who hemmed us in and whom we have loved and often prayed, catching up-real with lots of our Sharptown Family...man alive, there are just people you pick up like you never left off!!!

We were blessed by so much tonight...but most: if we are isolated and simply follow the news and social media and what “people” say, there is so SO much broken darkness that you’re tempted to be totally overcome by it.

But when you spend time in community with LIGHT....with men and women and brothers and sisters who are walking in His light and grace, following Jesus...and you hear and see how GOD is at work in and through their lives—it pours out courage and family. It inspires us to carry on faithful, IN all that broken darkness.

We are NOT alone. We are NOT working alone. We are not fighting a losing battle, we are NOT a flicker in darkness. We are—we must be—a fighting family, united by Christ, and we must not believe the lie for one second that we are alone, that He isn’t overcoming, that we’re working alone, that no one understands, that no one cares.

LET EACH OTHER IN, friends. Share your broken story, hold out your broken heart, listen to the fragments. Ask how you can pray, and ask for powerful prayers! Show up sacrificial and intimate and weird, let others—beg others—to do the same for us!

What a joy to be together in His hands, for His glory, and to celebrate tonight God bringing people TOGETHER.

Sunday:

At LEAST every Wednesday this crew hung out together from 3-5:30 while all the adults got together to pray and study...for six years. All the American holidays. Lots of weekends. All the birthdays. A hundred dinners.

They were sometimes-voluntary and sometimes-mandatory brothers and sisters and cousins and friends all mixed together.

To have a gaggle of MKs together—no matter where they are in the world—is just home.

Mamas are storing all these things up in our hearts.

Matt preached two parts of a four part series today on Spiritual Warfare, one this morning and one this evening and it was just GOOD.

We gotta be READY to do the WORK... more on that soon :)

Tomorrow is cousin day, and part three tomorrow night!