Enlisted!

I just finished reading a great book to the kids entitled, Teddy's Button. It was originally written in 1890 and is about a little boy who dreams of being a soldier. His father was a soldier who was killed in battle and the boy wants desperately to follow in his footsteps. His pastor explains to him that he can start being a soldier for Jesus right now by enlisting in God's army. The boy decides that he wants to do this and learns that he must constantly be fighting his number one enemy, the bad side of himself, who he has decided to name "Bully." He is always getting into trouble but continues to ask Jesus to help him fight Bully, and love people that he doesn't want to love, and be a brave soldier for the King.

Anyway, the reason I'm giving the short book synopsis is because Jake said to me tonight as I was putting him to bed, "I just enlisted in God's army." When I asked him how he did that, he said that he asked God to forgive him for his sins and that He heard God tell him yes in his mind. It was so cute and sincere and he was so excited about it, and so was I.

We have never said anything to our kids about "praying a prayer" in order to be saved. We know that they would very readily say, "Sure, I'll do that." But, we want them to really understand what it means to follow Christ. We want them to understand what He has done for them and their need of His forgiveness, and we don't want to relegate it to simply praying a prayer and thinking that they have their ticket to heaven...because it's so much more than that. It involves repentance and faith and heart change. Unless I'm missing something in the gospels, I don't think that Jesus ever once said anything about praying a prayer and asking Him into your heart in order to receive salvation. He spoke of belief and repentance and following Him. So, we have never specifically taught our kids that they need to "ask Jesus into their heart." We have tried to teach them, however, that we need God's forgiveness of our sins and what it means to have a relationship with Jesus, and we have tried (very, very poorly) to lead by example.

So, I'm hoping that Jake's declaration of "enlisting in God's army" involved sincere repentance that will bring about a gradual heart change in him as he learns more about what it means to follow Christ. I'm excited to see what sort of battles he is going to fight and win for Jesus!

Faith Like That

My wonderful friend, Katie, sent me a message the other night reminding me that our God is big and that this pregnancy is in His hands. But, no matter the outcome of the pregnancy, He is still the same God. It made me think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who, when faced with the blazing furnace, said, "If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. BUT EVEN IF HE DOES NOT, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold that you have set up." (Daniel 3:17-18)

I want a faith like that. I want a faith that doesn't demand my own way or expect nothing less than miraculous deliverance, but that trusts in our good and faithful God regardless of the outcome. My sister and my mom have both been recently reading the autobiography of Corrie Ten Boom (I'm picking it up from the library today!), whose family harbored Jewish refugees in a secret room in their home. They ended up sacrificing everything because of their faith in God and obedience to His call. My sister posted here about it, and asked the question, what gave her that kind of courage and faithfulness?

Our amazing friends, the Goodfellows, just sold almost everything they own and moved their family of 6 to Peru in order to be obedient to God's call and to live out the gospel with passion. Here is a picture of our kids with three of their kids on the day that they left, with everything that they own.

There are so many of these examples of ordinary people with extraordinary faith. I want faith like that. So, along with my sister, I will ask the question, what gave them the courage and the faithfulness? And, if I had that sort of faithfulness, in what extraordinary way could God use me?

Redeeming the Season, Part 1: Rethinking Santa

I'm going to try to post a couple of blogs with ideas for ways to point this Christmas season to Christ. (I already posted about Rice and Beans for Advent a few days ago.) Before I begin though, in case I come across as someone "holier than thou" because we don't do Santa around here, don't be fooled. We're just trying to be intentional about putting our focus where it should be and doing the holidays a little bit different than the norm. I wish I could say that my focus is where it should be all the time, but that would be far from the truth. That's why I need to put these little things in place...to help me to try to remember that Christ should be at the center of all that we do. I wish it just came naturally to me all the time, but, unfortunately, it doesn't. So, if anybody else needs some help with that too...

Rethinking Santa

Santa Claus doesn't visit the Herron household. (Gasp!) I'll give you a minute to reread that, let it sink in, and feel sorry for our poor, deprived children. Okay, now I'll explain why he doesn't and why we don't feel like our children are missing out because of it. First, I don't think that Santa is bad. Afterall, the idea of Santa comes from the real Saint Nicholas who is famous because of his amazing generosity to the poor and his love for God. Our kids know all about him and that he was a real person, and they also know that Santa is not a real person. They know that God is the only one who "sees them when they're sleeping and knows when they're awake," and that the gift of God's son is not for those who are good enough, but because none of us are good enough. God actually does "know if we've been bad or good," (bad!) but His gift is for us anyway. And that is what we want to focus on at Christmas - God's amazing gift to us, not Santa's.

Because we are bombarded with Santa at Christmastime though, we have chosen to use the opportunity to teach the kids about who Saint Nicholas really was and what he did for Christ. Our hope is that that will spur them on to want to be like him and to also want to give generously for Christ. When they see someone dressed up as Santa, they assume that it's because that person wants to emulate someone who was such a generous and caring person. Each year on or around December 6th (which is actually St. Nicholas Day), we have our own little St. Nicholas party with a few friends, and the kids get to pretend to be him. We usually do some sort of craft related to him and read some of the true stories about him, and then the kids get to deliver goodies in secret to people in the neighborhood. We choose a few random houses to leave something at the door, and then they ring the doorbell and run away. And they love it. In doing it this way, they get to focus on the joy of giving like St. Nick, rather than the joy of receiving from St. Nick.


I know that there are people who think that we are somehow stealing an important part of our kids' childhood from them because Santa doesn't come down the chimney and deliver presents to them on Christmas Eve. I completely disagree. We just choose to make different memories that include leaving presents for Jesus rather than cookies for Santa Claus. I know that we should be focusing on what we can do for Jesus all year long, but shouldn't Christmas, when we celebrate His birth, be a time to ESPECIALLY focus on Him and what He did for us? That is the main reason that Santa doesn't visit our house. There are some others, but it is mainly because we don't want Jesus to just be the side story to Santa and reindeer and presents. I want the kids to be excited that Jesus is in the manger, not because Santa came down the chimney and left them lots of goodies. I want Jesus to be THE story and THE reason that we celebrate.

In a future post, I will give some ideas of how we try to get the kids excited about Jesus in the manger. (For those of you who couldn't care less and just want a few pictures of the kids, I'll try to get those up first!)

Rice and Beans - Our Advent Conspiracy

A large focus in our family over the past year and a half has been on learning to live more sacrificially and give more generously. I say LEARNING because we are certainly not there yet and have such a LONG way to go. This does not just involve our finances, but that is obviously a big part of it. When it comes to money, I have never been a very generous person, so it has been a long road for me. Although we have always given "our 10%," for me, in the past it has always been because that's what I feel we should do and I did it out of obligation- not because I was doing so cheerfully and because it brought me joy to serve God in that way. I would never have dreamed of going above and beyond what I felt was necessary just for the joy of giving. Jay is far more generous with money than I am though, and I have slowly learned to be more so. I have started to learn that it really does bring joy to give money away. Really. That is especially true when we can see the direct impact of giving on a personal level, outside of just the monthly check to our church.

Another reason for the gradual shift in my attitude is because I have become increasingly aware of how much excess we live with. Yes, there are MANY times when I love our excess, and when I am so selfish and want so many things that I absolutely don't need. But, becoming more aware of what the majority of the world lives without, and seeing it firsthand, makes it far more difficult to justify gratifying my selfish desires when so many others are living without basic necessities. I am learning that we have been blessed in order to bless others, not so that we can hoard the blessings for ourselves.

So, in keeping with our family theme of learning to give sacrificially, last year during the advent season, we wanted to make an effort to try to reject the typical consumeristic mentality of the Christmas season, and to actually make the focus of Christmas be Christ and His birth and how He gave so sacrificially for us. We, along with other friends, decided that one way that we would attempt to do this would be to eat rice and beans for dinner every night from the day after Thanksgiving up until Christmas Eve. We would then take the money that we had saved by eating only rice and beans and give it away. It was a way for us to sacrifice something in order to have the ability to give more than what we would ordinarily give. It was also a great way to allow Jake and Addi to be directly involved in the giving...and the sacrificing. They were as much a part of it as we were, and some great things and wonderful lessons came out of it. It really helped us to be able to teach them to take the focus off of themselves and what they wanted to get for Christmas, and instead put the focus on Christ and what we could give Him. One verse that we really tried to focus on was Matthew 25:40, "The King will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for Me."

So...we are gearing up to do it again this season - another advent season of rice and beans. Now the question is...Does anybody want to join us??!!

Safe Families For Children

Our church is partnering up with an organization that Jay and I have been involved with called Safe Families for Children. Actually, the organization is Olive Crest and the program through Olive Crest is Safe Families. It is separate from the foster care program through Olive Crest. Basically, they have started partnering up with churches and volunteers to care for at-risk children who are not a part of the foster care system. According to their website, "Safe Families for Children is a movement of compassion designed to reduce child abuse and return the church to the forefront of caring for children, as it had been throughout history."

Our pastor has asked us if we would be willing to briefly share a bit of our experience at an upcoming service in order to encourage others to get involved, and I am finding it tricky to try to figure out what to say. Yes, we need others to get involved and it is a great organization to get involved with. At the same time, the experience has been a very difficult one for us and has really tested and tried us and our faith. That is a good thing, but not necessarily what will encourage others to come running for the same experience! I want to be honest about the reality that it might be difficult, but let people know that THEY SHOULD DO IT ANYWAY.

The child that we were caring for is no longer with us and I have not written about that here for a couple of reasons. One, I don't really know how to put into words my feelings about it all; and two, I want to respect the privacy of her situation. This online world is a crazy place and I don't know who will come across this blog. I ended up removing another post that I had written while she was with us, just because I don't know that it is appropriate for me to be sharing in this place things about her or her family or her time with us. I want to be careful with that.

So, without going into too many specifics, here is what I think I would like people to know about our experience and why I think it is important to get involved...

There's no nice, neat ending to our story, and it has actually been really difficult all the way through. I would love to say that the experience has been rewarding and amazing, but the more honest reality is that it has stretched our family and tested us like nothing else. That is a good thing too - so please don't let that thought be what keeps you from getting involved. Caring for a child who is not your own and who also has some very special needs is really hard, and our family faced some of our darkest times over the past few months as we dealt with this.

THAT SAID...we also began to see an amazing transformation of a little girl, and we saw our own kids loving her like a sister and learning to care for others. We were given the opportunity to love a child that desperately needed to be loved, and watch her learn to love and trust us in return. That was the amazing and rewarding part and why I would encourage others to get involved and do the same thing. Or, even if you can't take a child in, you can support others who are doing so. That's actually the current role that we are taking on - supporting another woman who is in the same spot we were in. Jay and I felt very alone in what we were doing and that's why we eventually reached out to Safe Families for their support. (Our involvement was a little bit backwards. We first took the child in, and then later found out about Safe Families as we were struggling through things. At that point, they came alongside us in what we were already doing.)

Ultimately, the reason that we chose to do what we did was because it was a real, tangible, sacrificial way for us to love "the least of these" with the love of Christ. The little girl in our care absolutely needed (and needs) to be loved and to know that she is loved. And, for two and a half months, we were able to do that, and are now able to do it indirectly by supporting someone else. Like I said, there's no nice, neat ending to our story, and it was messy and it didn't go the way I envisioned. I am the ever-optimist and dreamer, and I envisioned our story ending with this child becoming a permanent part of our family. That's obviously not the way it went. But, again, we provided something that she so desperately needs even though it was temporary, and we were stretched and we grew and we learned more about ourselves in the process. And, we learned more clearly than ever that we are not in control (an ever-present theme for us!), but God is. We cannot force things to go the way we think they should go. All we can do is be obedient to Him and trust Him in the process.

Bigger Is Not Always Better

I recently found out that a friend of mine is pregnant with her third child. She and her husband had always just planned on having two, and thought that they were done. Recently, however, they began discussing it more and decided that they wanted to have another.  And so, shortly after that decision, she got pregnant. She is now in her second trimester and things seem to be progressing as they should...which is wonderful!! I have to say though, that world is a little bit foreign to me. Oh, if only it were so easy! It's as though they live in a world where they actually have control over what happens in their lives. That's not the world I live in.  I try to be in control of it, but continue to learn more and more that I most certainly am not, nor should I be!

As I'm sure anybody who reads this blog already knows, I have always wanted a big family. I married someone who also wanted a big family, and so I never imagined that we would have any fewer than 4 kids...that was the minimum! Growing up, I always loved coming from a large family and having built-in best friends and constant playmates. I wanted the same for our children. I wanted Jake to have brothers to do boy things with and Addi to have sisters to do girl things with. I wanted them to develop certain character traits that I think are more easily learned when you are part of a large family and not constantly the center of the universe. I had very specific dreams of what I wanted our family to look like and what I thought it should look like. It has been painful for me to not see those dreams realized and extremely difficult to let go of those plans that I had for our lives. I am surrounded by friends and family whose families I have watched continue to grow, and sometimes, that has been difficult too. There has been a part of me that has wondered why they continue to be blessed with children, while we do not.

I have continued to learn the hard way, however, that I have very little say in the matter. But still, I have remained hopeful that more children are coming and have adamantly resisted allowing us to exit the "baby stage." I held onto our stroller and highchair and baby clothes for dear life, and have remained mentally and emotionally ready for more babies. So although I have learned very well that I am not in control of when the Lord would bless us with more children, I have really continued to believe that, at some point, He would give us more, whether they be biological or adopted. I have spent much time worrying about the gap between kids getting bigger and bigger and have continued to try to relinquish control and trust that God's timing would be perfect. I have continued to hope that eventually our family would start to look a little more like the family I had always envisioned. And, each month, I am hit with the reality that we are another month farther away from a "better" family.

But suddenly, for the first time, I am beginning to realize that a bigger family does not necessarily mean a better family. God really does know what is best for our family and, for us, that is obviously not having our own built-in baseball team...and that's okay. After almost four years of trying to to add to our family; almost four years of ovulation kits and pregnancy tests; almost four years of surgeries and miscarriages; almost four years of hopefulness and disappointments; I am suddenly and inexplicably at peace with, and actually ready to embrace the fact that our family is probably complete. I am realizing that I have wasted time being dissatisfied with our family because it is not what I envisioned it was going to be, rather than being so incredibly grateful for the amazing family that we have. For so long, I have struggled to try to release my grip on what I wanted for our family and what I thought it should be and would be, and had even felt at times that I had let it go. But this time, the difference is that I actually feel joyful that God has chosen to make our family what it is, and that is a huge difference. I feel like I am ready now to instead embrace the freedom that comes with not being tied to nap schedules, feedings, and diaper bags. Instead of continually wishing that I also had babes in strollers and carriers when I am with those that do, I am suddenly feeling grateful that my kids are now more independent and that we have the ability to do things that would be difficult to do with little ones in tow. That gratitude has not come easily or quickly, but, nevertheless, I am starting to feel it.

I won't be ignorant enough to say that our family is definitely complete because I never seem to be right about what the future holds, but I am finally content and at peace and happy with the fact that I believe that it probably is. I believe that our family is just as God intended it to be while we are here on earth, and I look forward to heaven where we will have that large family that I envisioned because there are 4 more babies waiting there for us -  babies who have never had to experience the pain and suffering of this world and who will only know me as a perfect mother, rather than the very flawed one that I am here on earth. Until then though, I am ready to simply enjoy the two amazing children that we have here, and try to take advantage of the time that I have with them - training them, enjoying them, and pouring as much love into them as I can, and simply being grateful for them.  And, finally being able to replace desire and longing with contentment and gratitude is a really wonderful feeling.