Hands in the Air

A friend's recent miscarriage made me start thinking of the time we lost our first baby.  On a Saturday night, just a day or two after losing the baby I was in such grief.  Matthew was sleeping peacefully next to me.  I remember being angry that he could sleep so well having just lost our child.  I was in torment for hours and finally took myself out to the family room, where I wrestled with God for some time.  I cried and raged and cried some more.  Sometimes the crying would ease up, until a fresh wave of grief hit me and the tears started again.  I was so angry that He would take our first child from us.  As I continued in this state, the song "Hands in the Air" by The Waiting came on our CD player.

When I heard that song, I knew that I had to stop fighting Him.  I had to surrender my will, my dreams and hopes.  I had to die to them.  I had to submit.  Fresh tears began, but these were tears of healing and release, not anger and self-pity.  When the tears stopped, my heart was at peace.  I was able to sleep and have never struggled with anger over that loss again.  Grief, yes.  But not anger.

That was almost fourteen years ago.  The date I lost the baby was around February 11, 1998.  In May of 1998, we became pregnant again with our oldest living daughter.  She will be 13 in one week.  She is such a blessing and joy in my life.  I often wonder if the Lord allowed the first baby, which was not planned, to be conceived to prepare our hearts for parenthood so that Rebecca would be born.  You see, at the time of our first pregnancy, we were using birth control.  Our first pregnancy was an "accident".  But by the time we lost that one, we had become excited about being parents and were eager to be pregnant again.  That is why we got pregnant with Rebecca.

But for whatever reason we lost that baby, I know it taught me an important lesson in submission to the Lord in every circumstance.  Furthermore, as I have grown to know Him better, I have become convinced that He is good and I can trust Him in the midst of every storm.

He Has Done Great Things!

I heard someone say that they are happy to leave 2011 behind.  It's not because it was a bad year for them.  They just felt like they were in a holding pattern, neither going backward or forward.  As I pondered that, I realized that 2011 for me was a monumental, life-changing year!  So I thought I would make a list of the things that happened this year and see how long it gets.

1. I got really tired of wanting to be a godly wife, but not knowing the right way to do it.
2. God brought a wonderful Titus 2 woman into my life to mentor me.
3. I read the book "So Much More" by Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, which completely rocked my world.
4. I began applying the principles I learned from that book and the Word of God to my calling as a wife and mother.
5. As I committed to walking in obedience to the Word of God, I found that bondages to fear and anger that I had struggled against for years were broken.
6. Because of the dramatic change I experienced through simple obedience to the Word, I began to have a love for the Word like I had never known before.
7. I had more and more desire to know what the Bible says and do it.  If simple obedience to the Word of God causes so drastic of a change, I want to apply that word to my life as much as possible!
8. I began to understand who I am in Christ.
9. I continued to read and learn from books like "On the Other Side of the Garden" by Virginia Fugate and "The Excellent Wife" by Martha Peace.
10. I began to focus more and more on my home as my center of ministry through discipling my children, ministering to my husband and hospitality to others.
11. I started to set my house in order, beginning with a family closet and expanding through the rest of the house.  I still have not finished everything I want to do, but I'm always getting closer to my goals.
12. I began to look at gardening as not only a fun hobby, but also a legitimate way to become more self-sufficient and save money.
13. I began to study home making skills such as bread baking, canning and knitting.
14. I started to view myself as my husband's help meet, instead of him being mine.
15. As I did that, my heart turned toward my husband and I began to love and appreciate him more deeply than I ever had before.
16. I began to find myself blissfully happy throughout the day, as opposed to mostly discontent, which would have been my normal state of mind.
17. I found myself daydreaming about what a wonderful husband I have.  I could actually see that now.  He's always been wonderful, but I was blind to so much of it.
18. With my husband's blessing, I and the daughters of our home began to dress more modestly and femininely.
19. I saw my oldest daughter blossom as she began to learn alongside me what it means to be a godly woman.
20. I got to attend an Above Rubies conference in Lake Tahoe with my daughter, sister and a dear friend.
21. I found a wonderful mentor in Nancy Campbell, founder of Above Rubies, and began to read her materials with great interest.
22. I continue to be challenged to grow in my walk with the Lord and am so excited to allow Him to continue His work in me.

For years, the verse in the Bible that I most related to was Proverbs 14:1.  "A wise woman builds her house, but a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands."  It was the foolish woman that I most related to.  I wanted to be the wise woman, but I just did not know how.  But God is teaching me how to be the wise woman and I have such hope for the future of my family because I know that we are on the right path.

Oh, and one more thing.  23. I made plans with my dad to start keeping bees.  We got to tour two different hives.  He is building our first two hives next weekend with my kids.  And our bees are on order for April!

God is so good and I give Him all the glory.  He has done great things!

On My Mind

This has been quite a week!  Rebecca and I returned from a fantastic conference in beautiful Lake Tahoe on Sunday afternoon.  On Monday, my dad went into the hospital having had a mini stroke.  He's going to be ok, praise God.  Tuesday, Sarina started throwing up and blessed the rest of our family with illness for the rest of the week!  All but one of us have had this stomach virus to varying degrees.  We tried a couple of interesting things to combat the virus this time.  First, we all started taking activated charcoal to try and nip the sickness in the bud.  You see, activated charcoal adsorbs (not absorbs) all sorts of viruses and toxins.  So if you ingest it, it will bind to the bad things in your gut and take it out.  My hope was if we all started on it right away, the virus wouldn't be able to get established in our systems.  No such luck.  The charcoal may have lessened the symptoms, though.  Most of us only threw up four or five times, and some not at all.  And recovery seemed to be quicker, too.  So it wasn't the miracle cure I was hoping for, but it seemed to help some.

The second really cool thing I did was give enemas to my really sick ones.  I know, it sounds weird.  But I felt it was worth sharing, because it made a big difference.  The logic behind giving an enema is that if the patient cannot hold fluids down, you can introduce fluids into their digestive tract from the other direction.  I just put some electrolyte, honey and charcoal into an enema and then squeezed it into my patient's rectum.  I can't say they were so excited about this treatment.  But I noticed that for those who were very sick it kept them from getting dehydrated.

I also made homemade electrolyte out of 1/3 calcium water (boil a whole egg for 20 minutes in water and the shell will let calcium into the water), 1/3 juice and 1/3 hibiscus tea.  I also added honey to sweeten it.  Then I put in salt to taste and there you go, no yucky artificial sweeteners in my electrolyte!

So that's what's been on my mind.  Nothing too profound, but maybe the info will come in handy for you sometime.  And, hey, when you're surrounded by puking people, your thoughts don't go too deep anyway!  :)

Surprise!!!

I wasn't sure that I would ever write on this blog again.  But reading my friend's blog has inspired me, so I'm going to post.

I have been learning so much about godly womanhood and God's plan for families and it is having a huge impact on my family.  There's way too much for me to write about in this post, but suffice it to say that we are focusing on our home being our center of ministry, not only for our family but also as a way to reach out to those around us.  We're cutting out activities that do not support our family vision and beginning to make our home a center of industry.  Rebecca and I began a foray into canning this last week, with decent results but a lot of room to grow!  At least our strawberry jam is edible, if not a little weird.  We also want to learn to sew.  And I want to improve the gardening situation in our back yard and bring the kids into my gardening projects.

But all this industry takes time, and when we are doing school until 4pm every day (including piano practice) we don't have time for any additional projects.  So we have decided to start doing year-round school.  I never expected to be excited about such a thing.  But I am thrilled at this prospect.  I think that we will have so much more flexibility in our year because we won't be pushing to be finished by a certain date.  When the grandparents want to take the kids camping and it goes over a week day, I won't be worried about their school.  And if they don't get everything done in one day, I will know that we have many more days to work on it without the deadline of the end of the school year looming over us.  It will also keep their minds from turning to mush over the summer, so that's a good thing.  If all goes the way I think it will, we will have academics in the morning, Bible and music practice in the afternoon to be done by 2:30.  Then we'll have our project time from 2:30 till 4:30 or so where we can work on whatever we have going at the time.

The other change I want to share is that we are converting one of our bedrooms into a family closet!!!  In short, all of our clothes, shoes, bedding, etc. will go into one room on hangars, shelves and bins.  Once I have the project done, I'll (hopefully) post pictures of it.  But you can google "family closet" if you want to read more about it.  You can probably imagine what a chore the laundry is around here.  And then there are the bins and bins of off-season clothes and in-between sizes clothes.  Oh my, it's a job.  This should greatly simplify the challenges of getting laundry clean and put away for me, as well as help me to see at a glance what our clothing needs are.  And in the end, it will greatly increase the storage space in the rest of the house.  So a major overhaul is coming at the Stroup home in more ways than one!

Merry Christmas

Oh come let us adore him,
Oh come let us adore him,
Oh come let us adore him,
Christ, the Lord.

What should I do?

Over the past couple of months, it has come to my attention that some stores that I frequent are either directly or indirectly supporting Planned Parenthood.  I was very disappointed to hear about this, since I like one of the stores so much I actually have their store credit card.  But knowing what I know, I could not knowingly support a store that is contributing to the holocaust of our children.  In the past, I was involved in the big Target boycott, which lasted a decade.  It eventually ended in Target removing their support for Planned Parenthood.  So I have seen how a boycott can change the course of a company's decisions.  Therefore, my husband and I have decided to join the boycott of these stores until they change their policy.

Someone recently told me about a pet store chain that had been getting their animals from places that were not humane.  I guess this fact made the news and within something like a week that pet store was out of business because people were so indignant that the pet store would support such an atrocity.  One week!  It took us ten years to get Target to change their policy, but a pet store was put out of business in one week!  Where are our priorities?  Why is it that a child is seen as less important than a dog?  And what are we going to do about it?  Let's wake up!  You might not be able to change everything, or address every injustice.  But do something.  Ask God what he wants you to do and then obey him.

Inspired

For some reason I'm inspired to write a blog post tonight - at 11:30 when I should be in bed.  But I thought I'd better grab the inspiration when it comes.  (Maybe I should drink black tea with lunch more often...)

I have not told the story of Sarina's birth yet, so I'll give that a quick summary.  We were supposed to be induced on June 9th.  But we really didn't feel peace about it.  After praying about it, we decided to go with my doctor's recommendation and proceed with the inducement.  However, we were praying that God would close the doors if it was not his will.  The 9th came and there were no closed doors, so off we went to the hospital.  We checked in, got our room, I got dressed in the gown, IV, everything.  The bag of pitocin was ready to go and the midwife walked in.  First things she asks is how I feel about having the baby today.  So I was upfront with her and told her that I wasn't feeling so sure about it.  After much discussion and some tests on the baby to make sure she wasn't under stress, I walked out of the hospital still pregnant!  I never would have thought that I would be happy to leave the hospital one week past my due date and pregnant.  But I felt so much peace that it didn't matter that I was physically uncomfortable.  I glorify the Lord that he was able to close the doors for us so late in the game.  He sent us just the right person to enable us to follow his plan.

We went back to the hospital the following Friday, the 11th.  I can't tell you how differently I felt driving there.  On Wednesday I had been feeling dread, fear, worry, but this day I felt excitement and anticipation - all of the things I should feel when I'm about to meet my baby.  The inducement on Friday went off without a hitch.  Pitocin started at 7am.  Although the contractions were progressing, it was nothing big until my water broke at 9:20.  Then everything took off like a rocket.  Sarina was born at 9:55 am.  So that was almost three hours from start to finish.  Not bad.

Now she's four months old, rolling all over the place, smiling, laughing and delighting us all.

Our school year is going great!  Every year seems to bring new improvements over the last one and this year is no exception.  I am learning better time management skills, as well as learning to accept that even if I don't get everything done in a day that I would like to, God knows what I need to do and everything else can wait.  The older two kids are learning how to manage their time better, too.  And we're all learning how to work together to keep our home a nice, clean place to live.

One more bit of news before I go.  We just found out that there is another home school family living in our neighborhood with a large family like us.  I actually had met them before, because they own a used curriculum book store that I shop at.  But last Monday, Rebecca came rushing in exclaiming that the people who own the book store lived just down the street.  So we literally dropped everything, piled the babies in the stroller and went to introduce ourselves.  We all had a blast and the kids went back over today to play again.  Matthew and I had just been talking last week about how our kids don't have other kids in our neighborhood to play with.  I remember at the time of that conversation submitting my heart to the Lord's plan for our children and reminding myself that he knows what they need.  So the timing of meeting this family was so sweet to me because the Lord was answering the cry of my heart.

God is so good.  He fills my life with so much joy.  I love living for him.