Tonight we finished a seven week book club on The Shack, by W.P.Young.  Twenty people, more or less, showed up at our house every Sunday night to discuss this incredible piece of fiction.  M made up questions for two-three chapters per week, we divided into two groups for the sake of improved interaction and discussion and we had a short time as a large group for more general observations and sharing.  If you haven’t read The Shack yet, it is about how tragedy confronts eternity, in other words, how God shows He cares about someone entrenched in hurt and confusion.  

Every person attending our discussions, from resident to short term staff to long termers, have painful experiences to share.  Of course there are huge variations in those experiences, but the book gave us a framework to discuss who God is, how we perceive Him, and how we live in relationship (or not) with Him.  The story challenged many of us to re-evaluate how we live out faith and even more, how to do that in community.  ”If anything matters, everything matters!”, means that the trickle down from my attitudes and actions definitely impact others around me, whether I see results or not.  

This novel is stirring people’s souls across our continent and around the world.  I’m just thankful it reached our little corner of the world, for the deep heart struggles it produced and for its honesty about how life hurts sometimes, sometimes more than we can bear.  But there is hope for the hopeless and we got a front row seat in helping some young people regain some hope despite their brokenness.

Many of you know that we have been trying to sell our home.  After 5 months, lowering the price x3, and re-carpeting the upstairs, on Tuesday, we got our first offer and 12 hours later a second one.  Yesterday after dialoguing with our wise, sharp and thoughtful real estate agent we made a counter offer to the family that seemed most excited about our home but couldn’t pay quite as much.  Strange thing but felt very “right” whatever that means.  All we know at this point is that it is a young family with two young children, 2 and 5 years old.  They have accepted the counter and in 24 very busy hours (phone calls and faxes back and forth) our home is well on the way to being sold. 

We stand back and are amazed at the timing, the blessing, and the freedom that this brings.  Yes, it hasn’t closed yet but all parties are anxious and excited.  More than anything else, God has taught me and us to trust Him for our finances and resources.  In recent weeks money has been very tight, but we always had enough, just enough, and we had a couple of gifts at just the right time to tide us over. This sale, of course, will make a huge difference, but we don’t want to begin trusting in the proceeds from the house instead of the God who is our Provider.  I cannot express how good it is to experience God in this process.

The Harvest Party was on Wednesday, 29th and the pie baking was on Monday, 27th. All the Long Term Staff homes are used for the pie baking, we provide the ingredients and recipe but let the guys or gals do all the work. We had all guys for our pie baking group. 3 staff and 2 residents, it was lots of fun and quite interesting to do this pie baking business. We baked pumpkin pie, by the way. I’m going to tell a secret about our pies. We made 4 pies in 2 hours!! Yes, it’s true. Also, one of the pies wasn’t pumpkin, it was buttercup squash. One of the pies was like 2/3 buttercup squash and 1/3 pumpkin. One of the staff brought a recipe called Impossible Pumpkin Pie. It’s called impossible b/c the pie makes its own crust. You mix all of the ingredients up into a blender, blend it well, then pour the mixture into a pie pan and stick it in the oven. We made two crustless pies and two pies with crust. So we ate like one and a half that night plus brownies. The other half we split and sent home with some of the staff. So we had 2 pies left. One pie to submit and we shared another pie with dinner guests last night.

Now, I bet that you’re wondering, which pie are we submitting? The one with the crust or the one without? We tried both of them and decided to submit the crustless pie. You have to make up a name for our group so we’re the Extreme Pie Bakers. The idea came from something else that we did. We made videos of extreme pie baking. So one of the guys was mixing in a bowl really, really fast (there was nothing in the bowl though), D was rolling out dough on the table really, really fast. Another video was one of the guys holding a rolling pin saying in a monotone, “Extreme Pie Baking. 4 pies, 1 team, 1 night.” Then 3 other guys were like roaring and stuff like that. Then the last video is one of the guys holding a rolling pin and saying, “Just like your mommy used to make.” We used iMovie and managed to link all of the videos together. It would be great if we could post the movie on the blog, it would be so funny!! But we’ll have to see.

The Harvest Party was totally awesome! We finally had all of our costumes figured out. Dad was a washing machine and D was a box of detergent (like Tide or something like that) to go with him. I was a bat, the mammal, my sister was a ladybug, my mom was a sunflower and my youngest brother was a motorcycle dude. Now, in one of my other posts, I said that the categories for costumes were something on the hill (the His Mansion campus), a harvest related object, you be someone else or a Biblical character. Well, you would think that there are no motorcycle dudes on the hill but actually there are. A few of the LTS (Long Term Staff) guys do go riding on motorcycles so I guess that it counts. Dad took a ton of pics. There were some great costumes and some very creative ones. There was also square dancing and I think, a Virginia reel. I took some videos of the dancing and it was really fun to watch. Our pie didn’t win anything in the pie contest, unfortunately. But that was okay. There’s always a next year! We got to try a piece of pie after they had the judging. The pie that I tried was really good.

To comment on the things that Mom wrote about in recent happenings. Tae Kwon Do is fun, painful and always interesting. We have learned different kicks and punches. We do lots of exercises. Running back and forth, doing push-ups, working on our stomach muscles, flexibility exercises. I don’t like the flexibility exercises, they hurt. I’m not that flexible so I can’t spread out super far. I don’t like spreading out my legs in the V shape when you’re sitting down. Our instructor tells us to lean forward as far as we can in that position. My sister can touch her forehead to the floor. I’m nowhere near to that. It just hurts too much to go down that far. We’re still working on it. 

Cider pressing is really cool. In the picture that was on Mom’s post, that’s me turning the crank. The fresh apple cider tastes amazing. There’s nothing like it. Sweet, tangy and a delicious flavor of freshly squeezed. The store bought cider can’t compare to freshly squeezed cider. You’ll have to come out and visit us sometime in the fall! We also got some windfall apples, Mom made some applesauce. Our next door neighbor made some first and kindly sent over a small dish for us to try. One thing is that it’s definitely not as sweet as store bought. It has an interesting flavor to, not as sweet but still delicious. We really like it.

The mouse was an interesting experience. My youngest brother was really scared of it. I’m not trying to make fun of his fear though, Mom said not to. He just got scared of going places by himself. We tried to convince him that he was a lot bigger than the mouse and that he could step on the mouse if he found it. He wasn’t scared though once we caught the mouse so we’ll see. Dad hasn’t reported any more mice sightings so I hope that all of the mice are gone. Mom already mouse-proofed part of the pantry. This is getting to be a long post. Signing off. -DL (Dog Lover)

Early one quiet AM while M sat reading downstairs he spotted a black mouse scoot by in the living room.  A few days later when I went to scoop rice from our open twenty pound bag in the pantry I noticed that the small bag of brown rice sitting beside the giant bag had been “opened” by a rodent visitor.  Looking more closely in the same closet I discovered the corner of a new bag of tortilla chips was also torn and the contents tasted.  (a mouse on a health food kick, as chocolate chips, granola bars and cookies packaged in plastic went untouched…)

I had put off serious efforts at mouse-proofing the pantry as the weather as been warm and dry (60F hi/40F low) until about 10 days ago.  I guessed when the weather changed to hard frosts and wetter that we’d see the mice move indoors.  My search for hard plastic food containers proved quite fruitful.  There’s no easy way to move 15 pounds of rice off the pantry floor, so although almost everything else from oatmeal to crackers is out of taste, our visitors could certainly get a good grainy meal.  

We borrowed a trap from next door (actually from the family on the other side of our house, they’ve already caught three and charged us to catch this one) and caught the first mouse that same night.  But it was white/gray, which is why I say the first mouse…who knows how many more are out there?!

P.S.  Child #3 was so moved by the dead mouse we had to formally bury it.