Sunday, November 14, 2010

Our New Siblings in Christ

Yesterday I quoted Acts 2:42-46 because it was relevant to my blog post. Today, I have the pleasure of quoting the very next verse of the Bible, "And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved." because, again, it's what we are living.

Chris and Jenna were baptized today. We met at Terry and Maria's house so we could use their pool. It was cold but they didn't mind. Now they are new creations and children of God. We rejoiced as their new family. Wedding plans are underway for December.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Everything in Common


Acts 2:44-46 says, "All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts."

Today we hosted a yard sale to benefit the single mom in our house church who struggles financially. Many people donated items that were sold to put money in her pocket. This afternoon the family down the street who is also a part of our house church came down to spend the second half of the day with us, and the single mom made a wonderful dinner for all of us while our kids played together. It was a good day.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Renovations

We've been discussing the possibility of renovating our house. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, we really like it just the way it is, but we're not going to be able to fit many more people in here before we outgrow the place. As it is, the whole church meets here on Sunday morning and every other Wednesday night. Friday night is Bible study night for the women. We started out saying it was just for grown ups but the kids like to play together so much that the whole clan is here every Friday night too. On any given weekday we usually have at least one of those families here just to talk or visit. So, we're feeling the wonderful yet stressful dilemma of not enough space.We rented a building for a while in the beginning but that proved to be expensive and very undesirable to most people. So we're trying to keep it at home in hopes that it will not always be in our home, but that someone will step up and offer to take a group into their own living room. We recognize that may take some time so we are looking for an answer to how to fit them into our space until that happens.

Because we ran out of room indoors, the kids' class meets on the back patio. We talked about enclosing that because it will eventually get too hot to meet there. For that matter, it may get too cold if last winter is any indication. We also entertained the idea of taking out the wall between the living room and Andy's room to make a larger area for the adults to congregate. If we did that we would also convert the garage so Andy would get his room back. We don't have the money to do all this but we know God does so we have been praying about it.

Last week Ben's carpet was wet. We thought the boys had spilled something, but day after day it wouldn't dry and turned out to be a leak from the bathroom. It must have been there for a while because the plumber found black mold. The operation to remove that is much more extensive than we had realized - like a crime scene cleanup. There went the money we didn't have for renovations. Maybe that's God's way of telling us not to worry about taking down walls or enclosing porches but it doesn't yet address the problem of limited space.