Weekly Update: 07.25.10

First and foremost let me congratulate my wife on getting accepted into the Culinary Arts program at SMCC! She is very excited to start taking classes in the fall, and I am very excited to reap the potential benefits of her homework (they do have to practice their recipes at home, right?).

This has been quite a crazy week for us at the ol’ Allen Homestead. Wednesday some severe thunderstorms and, believe it or not, tornadoes came through our area. We lost power due to the storms and were without it for about 18 hours. With three very young children that kind of thing never goes over well. The kids were pretty scared of the thunderstorms and had a hard time sleeping in the dark with no “white noise.” Our fire alarms kept going off every couple of hours to remind us they were running on battery backup. This really scared our oldest daughter, and she is still very nervous about sleeping in her bedroom away from Mom and Dad.

Thursday brought a whole new set of obstacles with our middle daughter getting sick, our washer not working, and none of the kids wanting to take naps with the power out, but we survived!

What does any of that have to do with our “church” life? Well nothing and everything. Nothing in the sense that it all has to do with our personal life, we weren’t gathered with others through this time so directly it had no impact on any fellowship or gathering. But then again, it had everything to do with our church life in the sense that I realize more now that every issue and “hiccup” in our lives affects the way we interact with others. If we were content to go to an institutional church gathering for two hours on Sunday morning as an end-all be-all then the issues we faced during the week would not weigh in on how that gathering went, but where we seek to have genuine relationships with other believers, hoping God will use them and us to help each other grow closer to him, the things that we face every day will effect those relationships and what we share with them and how we respond to what they share with us.

Well, now lets move on to more concrete “church” type things:

• We weren’t able to get together with our friends who recently moved back to Maine from PA due to conflicting schedules but are planning on having dinner together this coming Friday; we are very much looking forward to that!
• I had a great email discussion with a good friend in regard to my post, Industrial Christianity, I will be sharing a series on this conversation at some point in the next couple of weeks.
• I met with a guy named John, from Freeport (about an hour northeast of us) for lunch on Friday. It was a great time of fellowship and delicious food at the Great Lost Bear!
• We were able to give our Jeep to a young lady who needed a vehicle. I’m not sure if this was a blessing to her or a curse since the vehicle needs quite a bit of work, but we are hoping it works out for her and are happy to see that the Jeep didn’t end up in the junk yard or rotting away in our driveway! I got to meet her dad and had a good conversation with him when he came to pick up the Title. It turns out his son is going to the same college that I went to, Southeastern, so I may try to connect with him and share my experiences with him.

What’s next?

• Well like I said we are meeting up with our friends who recently moved back to Maine to talk about the church. That should be really encouraging. They have young children and want to have real community with other believers.
• Stephanie has orientation on Thursday so I will be taking a half day off of work and assuming we can find a babysitter (any takers?) I will be going with her. Taking classes will be a great opportunity for her to meet a lot of new people so hopefully this could be something God uses to help us meet some other believers!
• Other than that we will see. We have no other plans as yet. There are a couple other people we would like to get together with soon so we may have opportunity to do that next week.

Here are some pictures of our awesome children! :

Please continue to pray that we are able to develop relationships with the people around us, and that we don’t get so caught up in the everyday issues of life that we loose site of our goals: namely knowing Christ better through sharing our life with other believers.

Also Alan and Danny are still in Ethiopia, continue to pray for them and the work God is doing there. You can keep tabs on them in the RSS feed: “Alan and Danny in Ethiopia” in the right column of this blog.