staff Christmas party

In case you have forgotten, Terry is a youth pastor. ;) Therefore he works with other pastors and staff at our church. We are so incredibly thankful and glad to be here. So it was fun to once again gather together and celebrate a little bit for Christmas. 

This was the first year we hosted the party at our house. It just sounded cozy. It was!

The kids all exchanged Christmas socks with one another.

Noah's weren't "Christmas" socks, but since they were Star Wars...well, who cares? They were awesome. 

There's Noah's buddy Jack opening his socks. Lauralee and Pastor Dave are behind him . 

Russ and Denise watch Zeah open her socks. 

And our silly Evie. 

The kids on the stairs was our first attempt to get a group photo of them. It didn't work so well. But you can see Samuel's socks here. He calls them his video game socks.  

Much better. 

Terry took the ladies photo while he was setting up the tripod for the full group. 

Rachel, Lauralee, me, Carol, Jana, and Denise

That's us. And Snap dog ;)

Left to right: Receptionist Rachel with husband Aaron, Lauralee is the Director of Educational Ministries, Terry and I, Paul is the Director of Connections and his wife Jana, Senior Pastor Dave and Carol, who also helps in the office, Worship Pastor Russ and his wife Denise. 

Evie's Christmas loft

When we bought this house three and a half years ago, it had just enough bedrooms for the five of us - three. We planned for Evie to have the small office like bedroom once the baby, Samuel, no longer needed it. I painted it yellow to match the Potterybarn quilt a friend in Gburg gave her years ago. And then I got pregnant with Ezra and all our plans went out the window... or rather they were changed and accelerated. 

We needed another bedroom. The first thing that had to be done was a new free space for all the storage in our unfinished fourth level basement. So we build a loft in our two story garage. Next we needed to put our big couch and toys in the unfinished basement so we could turn the den area they had previously resided in into a fourth bedroom. So we finished the basement, aka, dungeon. Then we needed that fourth bedroom, so, of course we did that too. 

Wow, we've done a lot. I sort of forgot. 

So our new plan was to have Samuel and Ezra in the green room next to ours, Evie in the nursery/office and Noah in the den area downstairs; his room would act as a guest room at need. One night a couple months ago Samuel kept Noah up late into the night for one reason or another and we decided perhaps it was time to make the great bedroom switch. It was not simple.

Evie had been in the green room by herself. After all, one girl with three brothers needs a little space.

Ezra had been in the nursery/office since birth when he kicked Samuel out of there.

Our plan was to put Evie's bed in that little nook where the crib was. However, the room was so small that it would have been very tight with her bed and two dressers. Terry's solution was to build a loft for her new bed. He spent time browsing plans and pictures on Pinterest and figured out what he wanted to do.

 The day Nathan and Ana left, Saturday December 19, we got to work. We moved Ezra's crib into the green room with Evie.

For five days they slept like this. A queen bed, crib and three dressers. Geesh. 

It was actually good training for Ezra to learn to sleep with someone who could talk better than Samuel. 

I had Evie lie in the place her loft would go.  

Then I got to work on my nemesis - popcorn ceiling texture. I've de-popcorned the master bedroom and bathroom, hall bathroom, school room, laundry room, Noah's bedroom - and now Evie's room. All that's left is the green bedroom and the main floor, which might never happen. 

As long as the popcorn hasn't been painted over, it's incredibly simple. All I do is scrape with a drywall spatula.  

It's the mess that's a pain. 

Then I painted the ceiling. 

I painted two walls pink with paint leftover from Evie's Gburg bedroom. 

I did all of that in one day. It was incredibly busy and I was exhausted. Terry got bored and decided to build the loft in the garage instead of in the room like he had planned. By that evening he had it done. What a productive day!

The following day, Sunday, Terry wanted to nap all afternoon. I booted him off the couch and we got to work installing the loft. And by "we," I mean Terry. I took pictures.

Terry made the loft to very exact measurements and it fit perfectly. We had to push it down into place and rough up the drywall a little but then it just stayed there, suspended in air, because it was such a tight fit. Most impressive. Then all he had to do was level it out before securing it to the wall.

There was only one leg supporting the loft from the floor (the ladder). When Evie first saw it she was alarmed, thinking she would fall to the ground. But Terry screwed the loft lumber into every single stud. This thing is solid. It don't need no legs.

Once he finished screwing the loft to the wall, he attached the ladder. Then it was time to call Evie. This is the first picture of her on the loft (Noah followed her right up of course). 

Next we had to decide how to do the rails. We wanted to be sure about where to put them so we carried Samuel's mattress all the way up the two flights of stairs and held up three different boards to make our choice.  

I guess we sort of forgot we didn't want to have a rail around the bottom of the loft so we decided to cut the second hand rail of the ladder off. 

One more thing left to do that night.

We had been up in the air about how we were going to do shelving under the loft. Evie had been saying for weeks that all she wanted for Christmas was a book shelf. At first we were going to buy just a generic shelf and call it good. But since we were going to do an entire loft we thought we'd combine the two ideas. In the beginning we were going to do little cubbies behind each ladder step. Too much work. We decided to do a plain table and add some shelves above it later.  

Terry screwing the table supports into the studs.

Boom baby! Not bad for a Sunday afternoon!

And actually, that evening Terry filled in his screw holes and I sanded the whole thing down. We kept Evie and Ezra awake too late in the next room.

The following day, Monday, we were hosting our staff Christmas party at our house. Man I had a busy day. First I cleaned my house and then I primed the whole loft, ladder and table. After the Christmas party I put a coat of white semi-gloss over the primer. That afternoon and evening Terry spent a ton of time out in the garage working on the shelves. 

On Tuesday I put a second coat of semigloss down and then one coat of polyurethane. Overkill perhaps but I just didn't want the thing to get chipped up. I hope it helps. That evening Terry implemented what he had spent all that time working on in the garage. Evie had begged for a drawer under her table and even though she didn't need one (she has nine dresser drawers!), daddy did it for his baby girl. Just when I thought I was done painting I had two shelves and a little boxed drawer to finish as well. It didn't take long and was done by the following evening.

By Thursday, Christmas Eve, we were done. And that had been our plan. It was her gift to be able to sleep in her new loft on Christmas Eve. That day was the most work out of everything. We had three bedrooms worth of furniture to move up two flights of stairs. Then there was the moving clothes and closet stuff, cleaning, organizing and installation of bedroom wall stuff. Finally we were done. I was exhausted that night. Christmas was the next day!

Here is Samuel and Ezra's new room. Ezra is still getting used to sharing...

And Noah's. All of the bedrooms but Evie's are incredibly bare. Maybe I'll get around to hanging something up...someday.

Now before the "after" pictures, keep in mind how plain it was before: 

Boom baby! There it is in all its glory.

This is the view directly to the left when you walk in. We added those two little hooks for her small things to hang on. 

Her pretty dressers from Grampa B have plenty of room. 

And here are the shelves and little drawer. The table is supposed to be for coloring or writing, and she probably does do that, but most of the time it's just a play area for her Legos. 

Ignoring fabulous Noah, let me point out the blackout curtains I made a year and a half ago and that still go well in her new room. 

The loft looks great and she really loves it.  Actually, I'm a bit jealous of how great her room is. It's better than ours!

Those four little pictures came with the bedding set, along with the translucent curtains, and a couple hooks. 

There are hooks. I wanted to get rid of the poster (it came with the house) but Evie insisted it stay. 

The video:

on trust

For the last several months I have been reading Timothy Keller's new book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. It has been phenomenal. I mean so, so good; such an encouragement to me.

Though I do not have a tremendous amount of pain and suffering in my personal life, I have difficulties like everyone does and real hurts from my past; we all have our own temptations and struggles. Or I like to think we do, despite the image of perfection we project and encourage each other to maintain. Also, and more deeply, I had been discouraged by the world I live in. Evil. Evil was really bothering me. ISIS chopping off innocent people's heads; government greed, over reach, and corruption; North Koreans being tortured for only speaking to their neighbors about believing in God; Christians being hunted, jailed, and tortured by governments around the world. It all just got very depressing for me and I wanted to understand how to deal with the problem of evil.

I did a little research, reached out to someone, but then finally stumbled upon this book through a Google search. I had read Keller's The Prodigal God when Terry had his Nebraska Mexico mission team read it. I and loved it (I need to read it again). This book is even better than The Prodigal God. It's so deep, meaningful, thoughtful, eloquent. Every single time I sit down to read it, I end up crying. It just comes out of nowhere and hits me, wham bam, in the heart, piercing deep. That's what I've come to know as God's Spirit pointing things out to me. It's like an extra nudge or exclamation, like my eyes get opened up bigger to see with more depth.

I am not a poet. I'm trying too hard here and I think when I do that I just end up sounding lame. People on amazon have left way superior reviews than me, but nonetheless, this book has been very meaningful to me. So much so that I've been sharing little tidbits on facebook; my favorites quotes from each chapter. Today's chapter was just so good that I couldn't justify such a long facebook post and decided to put it here.

Chapter 13 was about trusting God. That is exactly what I have been learning to do the last couple years. The Lord has brought to my attention through my reaction to less than ideal circumstances that I really struggle with trusting Him. I say I do, but I totally do not. Where the rubber meets the road in real living when difficult life circumstances happen, I don't trust Him. I don't think I can, that He won't be there for me, that He's out to get me, that He'll let me down. All these lies and more. So naturally, this chapter hit home. It was about Joseph.

Joseph started out as a punk bragging to his brothers about how much better he was than them. His dad favored him, his brothers hated him. All of them were selfish. So his brothers threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery, was falsely accused of sleeping with his with master's wife and then put in prison. All of this took place over 20 years and it's undoubtable that he cried out to God for help in his trouble but received no answer. For 20 years God was silent. Was he inactive though?

"Standing where we do, we can look back and ask whether God was really 'missing in action' all of those years when he seemed to be absent from Joseph's life. When Joseph prayed for his life in that cistern, did God really not hear him? And all those years when absolutely everything seemed to go wrong for Joseph, was God not there? No, he was there, and he was working. He was hidden, but he was also in complete control."

Keller then goes through all the "coincidences" that led up to Joseph rescuing his family and the entire nation of Egypt and the surrounding countries. God was at work from the very beginning, from when Jacob sent Joseph out to seek his brothers, that Joseph just happened upon a random man that told him where his brothers went, that this place was desolate enough for his brothers to get away with selling him, that Pharaoh's cupbearer was in jail with Joseph, etc., etc., etc. The entire story was orchestrated by God all the while people were making sinful choices. "Unless every one of these little events had happened just as they did - and so many of them were bad, terrible things - Joseph would have never been sent to Egypt... Now, we have looked at the theology of this before. According to the Bible, God is sovereign and in control, and at the same time, human beings have free will and are responsible for their choices. There it is as a theological proposition, but how much more vivid and powerful it is when seen in an actual story. If the brothers had not betrayed Joseph and sold him into slavery, the family (and Joseph) would not have been saved from disaster and death. It was obviously part of God's plan. God was present at every point, and was working even the smallest details of the daily lives and schedules and choices of everyone. So this shows that 'all things work according to the counsel of his will' (Eph 1;10-11; Rom 8:28)."

"How did all this come? It came through suffering. Suffering for the brothers and Jacob, terrible suffering for Joseph too. The terrible years of crushing slavery for Joseph, the terrible years of debilitating guilt for the brothers, and the terrible years of grief and depression for Jacob, were all brought about by God's plan. Yet how else could they have been saved physically and spiritually? He 'disciplines us for our good.' After the pain, comes a 'harvest of righteousness and peace' (Heb 12:10-11)."

"It is perhaps most striking of all to realize that if God had given Joseph the things he was likely asking for in prayer, it would have been terrible for him. And we must realize that it was likely that God essentially said no relentlessly, over and over, to nearly all Joseph's specific requests for a period of about twenty years. Most people I know would have given up and said, 'If God is going to shut the door in my face every time I pray, year in and year out, then I give up.' But if Joseph had given up, everything would have been lost. In the dungeon, Joseph turns to God for help in interpreting the dream. Despite all the years of unanswered prayer, Joseph was still trusting God."

"The point is this - God was hearing and responding to Joseph's prayers for deliverance, rescue, and salvation, but not in the ways or forms or times Joseph asked for it. During all this time in which God seemed hidden, Joseph trusted God nonetheless. As we saw, in the dungeon, Joseph immediately turned to God for help to interpret the dream. He had an intact relationship with the Lord - he had not turned away from him. We must do the same thing..."

"Very seldom do we glimpse even a millionth of the ways that God is working all things together for good for those who love God..." Unlike a person I know who always "knows" all the ways God is working in their life.

A letter from John Newton to a grieving sister:
"Your sister is much upon my mind. Her illness grieves me: were it in my power I would quickly remove it: the Lord can, and I hope will, when it has answered the end for which he sent it....I wish you may be enabled to leave her, and yourself, and all your concerns, in his hands. He has a sovereign right to do with us as he pleases; and if we consider what we are, surely we shall confess we have no reason to complain: and to those who seek him, his sovereignty is exercised in a way of grace. All shall work together for good; everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds...
"You have need of patience, and if you ask, the Lord will give it. But there can be no settled peace till our will is in a measure subdued. Hide yourself under the shadow of his wings; rely upon his care and power; look upon him as a physician who has graciously undertaken to heal your soul of the worst of sicknesses, sin. Yield to his prescriptions, and fight against every thought hat would represent it as desirable to be permitted to choose for yourself.
"When you cannot see your way, be satisfied that he is your leader. When your spirit is overwhelmed within you, he knows your path: he will not leave you to sink. He has appointed seasons for refreshment, and you shall find that he does not forget you. Above all, keep close to the throne of grace. If we seem to get no good by attempting to draw near him, we may be sure we shall get none by keeping away from him.

"Newton's statement - 'everything is needful [necessary] that he sends, nothing can be needful [necessary] that he withholds' - puts an ocean of biblical theology into a thimble. If the story of Joseph and the whole of the Bible is true, then anything that comes into your life is something that, as painful as it is, you need in some way. And anything you pray for that does not come from him, even if you are sure you cannot live without it, you do not really need."

"The Joseph story tells us that very often God does not give us exactly what we ask for. Instead he gives us what we would have asked for if we had known everything he knows."

"We must never assume that we know enough to mistrust God's way or be bitter against what he has allowed. We must also never think we have really ruined our lives, or have ruined God's good purposes for us. The brothers surely must have felt, at one point, that they had permanently ruined their standing with God and their father's life and their family. But God worked through it. This is no inducement to sin. The pain and misery that resulted in their lives from this action were very great. yet God used it redemptively. You cannot destroy his good purposes for us. He is too great, and will weave even great sins into a fabric that makes us into something useful and valuable."

Summarizing Romans 8:31-38, "All the powers of evil inside of you and all the powers of evil outside of you cannot separate you from the love of God. Once you give yourself to God through Christ, he is yours and you are his. Nothing can ever change that."

And finally he turns to Jesus. It seems to me that Joseph and his story is almost like a type or shadow of what Jesus went through.

"Centuries after Joseph, another came who was rejected by his own (John 1:11) and was sold for silver coins (Matt 26:14-16). He was denied and betrayed by his brethren, and was unjustly put into chains and sentenced to death. He too prayed fervently, asking the Father if the cup of suffering and death he was about to experience could pass from him. But when we look at Jesus' prayer, we see that he, like Joseph, says that this is 'the Father's cup' (John 18:11). The suffering is part of God's good plan. As he says to Pilate, 'you would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above' (John 19:11). Jesus finally says to the Father, 'Thy will be done' (Matt 27:42). He dies for his enemies, forgiving them as he does, because he knows that the Father's redemptive loving purposes are behind it all. His enemies meant it for evil, but God overruled it and used it for the saving of many lives. Now raised to the right hand of God, he rules history for our sake, watching over us and protecting us."

"Do what Jesus did - trust God. Do what Joseph did - trust God even in the dungeon. It takes the entire Bible to help us understand all the reasons that Jesus' death on the cross was not just a failure and a tragedy but was consummate wisdom. It takes a major part of Genesis to help us understand God's purposes in Joseph's tribulations. Sometimes we may wish that God would send us our book - a full explanation [I did/do. I remember exclaiming in high school that I just wanted to the blue print for my life so I could make correct decisions. What I didn't realize at the time was that desire was so I wouldn't have to trust God.]! But even though we cannot know all the particular reasons for our crosses, we can look at the cross and know God is working things out."

Kveene Christmas 2015

Like I mentioned in the last post, Nathan and Ana came to Rapid the week before Christmas for a very quick trip in order to pick up a van they were buying for their growing family. The first night they were here Terry and I went to see The Force Awakens (on opening night!) after they went to bed. The second night my folks came over and we did our Kveene Christmas. We had scrumptious Kveene snacks that spoiled our dinner and Kveene pizza which we ate anyway and loud Kveene fun.

Four crazies and one cousin.

Awww. What a cute little family they are. Can't wait to meet their baby girl in April!

Terry and I have adopted a couple Kveene traditions, one of which is that the kids hand out the presents.  The next thing we've carried over from my childhood is opening gifts one at a time, starting with the youngest. We even do it that way at Terry's parent's house now. It's more fun that way since you see what everyone receives and it extends the excitement.

Theo's big box was a Little People slide track. 

And Ezra. He's still cute too. 

Bows on the head are just bound to happen. 

Theo opening our gift. 

Nathan was especially happy with the baby books ;) 

I can't remember what this gift was, but he doesn't look too excited yet. 

Some doll accessories for her look alike American Girl doll from Gramma K last year. 

We got dad some sort of cord adapter he asked for. He forgot he gave me this idea and after I already ordered it he suggested I just give him cash. Ha! 

You can't have too many Legos right? Evie appears to disagree... "Really?" ;)

Ezra loved his remote control Dusty Crophopper. 

Cute little bow-ed Theo watching Grampa. 

Sleepy baby. 

Nathan and Ana got the kids Star Wars t-shirts. Oh yeah! That way they could wear them to the new movie when we took them the following week.

Noah had to put his Lego set together before bed. And then he couldn't even take his eyes off of it. ;)

My dad just loves animals. He's a cat and dog whisperer. Snap prefers to sit with him over anyone else when they visit, like this photo from Noah's birthday last year. This cracks me up.