Navigating Summer

What a beautiful weekend. One of my favorite things about this new life of ours is that time doesn’t seem to rush by so fast. When we were living at camp, we would blink, and it would be August.

Living in Niverville makes summer feel about three times as long, in the most positive way imaginable. I am thoroughly enjoying myself. Unless we visit camp. Then I cry. Obviously, my emotions are at war with themselves, and just need a little time to get things sorted out.

Anyway.

This weekend was filled with wonderful things.

We picked flowers:

We worked on our deck:

And we enjoyed some time with people from camp:

*******************

The more time we spend here, the more I realize how much “normal life” (whatever that actually is), is a balancing act. How much time do you run around socializing, and how much time do you need to stay home and regroup? Or just do some housework for a change?

At camp, the whole summer was busy, but it was all busy in the same direction – you just give’er till the end of August, and then you collapse a little bit.

Now we have choices, and I am starting to understand how tricky it is to be intentional with time.

So good luck to all of you as you navigate through your wonderful summer in the best way for you and your loved ones.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a special little announcement about my next blog series!

Making This “Ours”

Alright, everybody, today it is time to update you all on what we’re doing to make Niverville “ours”.

1) The boxes are being conquered, one by one, and the dishwasher is installed! (Ben has actually done many wonderful things to make our home feel more settled, but this is the only picture I took…)

2) The backyard has been tramped through.

There are killdeer birds everywhere around here, and Anika desperately wants to see one pretending to be injured, to lure us away from it’s nest. So she tried to chase them in our yard, and Kaylia ran around, talking about “killrobins”, and thought the whole thing was great.

Now what other kinds of adventures can we think up??

3) We are socializing! Anytime we see people we know, we practically beg them to please come visit! I’m realizing how much we grew accustomed to people dropping in at any time of the day when we lived at camp.

So if you live in Niverville, and need friends, please let us know! We are so up for friends right now! 🙂 And we are so very thankful for everyone who has taken the time to visit, or have helped us clean and unpack. We love you all!

4) All three play structures have been explored. It has been officially decided that there is no one favorite, but rather, we will be enjoying the variety of all three locations.

5) The sky saves me every day.

I used to look out at the trees each day, but now I look at the sky. I didn’t see it much at camp – the trees blocked the view. But now, it is beautiful and glorious, and I can sit on our couch and watch the sunset.

*************************

And then last night, we went for a walk, and suddenly I felt like we would be okay. Maybe it was the water, or maybe it was stopping to watch the ducks swim by, or maybe it was just enjoying an evening together as a family.

Somehow, it felt like a little, old, familiar piece of what we used to have, tucked away among all that is new.

Whatever it was, it was a good feeling.

We’ll make this “ours”, a little bit at a time!

Is There Beauty After Camp??

I’m in pursuit of it every day.

I’ve always looked to nature for reminders of the beautiful in the midst of the ordinary, but now that I feel like I’m on a time-limit out here, I’m even more conscious of it.

We went outside on one dreary, dreary day last week. I didn’t even know if any of the pictures I took would turn out. But when I looked at them again in the evening, there was still something strange and lovely about dead leaves and a grey sky.

How does God do that?

The air was crisp and clear, and I sat there in the snow, breathing all that fresh air in, while I gazed up at the tree tops.

Does this mean Niverville might have beautiful moments, too?!

There’s nothing wrong with Niverville – we thoroughly enjoyed living there before we moved to camp. But for scenery, it can’t really compete with the Whiteshell.

And that depresses me a bit. But I keep reminding myself that it is possible to find beauty anywhere. My dad says I’ll just have to look a bit harder from now on.;)

Why We’re Leaving Camp

Thank you all so much for your kind comments, emails, facebook messages, etc. It’s been hard to share our news with everyone. We’re excited about what the future holds, but also know that we will miss camp and all the people very, very much.

A number of you have been asking about what’s next, and how it came to be, so I thought it might be good to share a bit of the process we went through in reaching our decision to leave camp. In the years that Ben and I have been in ministry, the topic most people seem to be struggling with is figuring out what God’s will is for their life. I’m sure most Christians have wished, at one point or another, that God would speak in a loud, obvious voice, and reveal “The Plan”.

But when is it ever that easy?

However, I have learned from our past experiences that there are many blessings to be found in the search for God’s will. Times of facing the unknown have led to growth and deeper trust in my Father who knows what is best. These times force me to rely on Him in the way I should be all the time.

Ben and I have had to make a number of tough choices over the years, which I’ve written about in my blog series “Chucking the Five-Year Plan”.

But this time, the decision seemed even harder than others we’ve had to make in the past.

Although Ben and I always wanted the chance to work at camp, and have loved being here, it has been hard in a lot of ways. There were a number of concerns we’ve had, in regards to how long we would stay at camp, including:

1) Anika’s schooling and being involved in various opportunities as she gets older

2) My health challenges and the need for very regular appointments with my beloved chiropractor, physio and massage therapists

3) Finances (we were spending a lot of our savings on getting to appointments in the city), and different choices for our future

4) The demanding schedule and symptoms of burn-out sneaking up on us, even though we love the ministry we do

One of these reasons alone would not have been enough to convince us to leave camp. But before Christmas, we spent many evenings sitting on our couch, talking and praying about what we should do.

During that time, Ben’s dad came along and said, “Want to work for me?” And Ben said, “Maybe I will.” To which Ben’s dad replied, “Are you serious??“

This is not the first time the idea has come up, but every other time, our answer has been no. We have absolutely loved being involved in full-time ministry. Ben knew that at some point in his life, he wanted to get involved in business in some way, but until now, the time never felt right.

Even though we were interested in the idea of Ben working with his dad, we still had no idea if that was what we were supposed to do. We didn’t know if it was the right time to leave, or what God wanted us to be doing once we were done at camp. We had no idea where we wanted to live.

All along, I had imagined that when it was time to leave camp, God would miraculous produce some kind of awesome, exciting new ministry opportunity that was obviously such a perfect fit, we’d have to be blind to miss it. That’s kind of how He’d done it in the past! I was expecting a repeat.

One evening, in the midst of our confusion, I was expressing my frustration with God to Ben. I went on and on about how I had imagined God would reveal Himself, and how I just longed for the perfect solution to come along – the right job, in the right place, the right fit for our family, and why was God not producing this for us? Right now? And suddenly, I realized that He already kind of had – it just wasn’t a job in ministry.

The opportunity to work with Ben’s dad provided answers to many questions we had. It fit very well, in many different ways. It just wasn’t what I had always expected we would do.

From that point on, I allowed myself to be more open to whatever God was going to reveal, even if it meant that we would, for the first time in almost 11 years, not be involved in full-time ministry.

Details started falling into place, and as Ben and I talked and prayed, we began to see more and more reasons why taking a break from ministry might be a very good thing for our family. Camp is a bubble. It’s a wonderful bubble, but it’s still a bubble. Along with many other positive things, living here has provided us with the opportunity to pull away from a lot of the pressures of our culture, giving us the space to figure out what we want for our life, our family, our faith, and it’s been good.

But it would be unhealthy to live in a bubble forever. We are trying to minister to real people who live in the real world…that we ourselves haven’t been a part of for five years.

I want to have neighbors, and I want to minister to people, not because I’m paid to do it, but because as a follower of Jesus, there is no other way to live.

So we sat there talking on our couch, realizing there was a door of opportunity open before us, but we still didn’t know if God wanted us to walk through it.

Then at Christmas, we listened to an amazing message by Bruxy Cavey, in which he talked about the birth of Jesus.

He spoke about how it had been prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem many, many years before it actually happened. It had to happen that way. And yet when the time came, Mary and Joseph did not receive a miraculous sign, or an angel telling them to go to Bethlehem.

They went to Bethlehem because a census was being taken, and that was just where normal life brought them. The wise men followed a star, and the shepherds got a choir of angels, but all Mary and Joseph got was a census.

Sometimes, God’s will is accomplished just by living an ordinary life. By simply making logical choices.

I keep expecting things to be crazy, exciting and miraculous all the time, if God is truly in it.

But the truth is, a lot of the time, He’s in the ordinary stuff. And He makes the ordinary stuff crazy, exciting and miraculous, because He is truly in it.

I still can’t say, with absolute certainty, that I know how to determine God’s will. Ben and I have talked about how we turn it into this big, “One Right Decision” kind of a thing. But it’s life, and we’re not perfect, and God knows we’ll make mistakes. He gave us the ability to think logically about things, and He gave us the freedom to choose.

We hope that we’re making a very good choice. We feel as though God has guided us in this choice. We also feel that life in general has pointed us in this direction. We’ll take the open door, and we’ll keep trusting and looking to God for the crazy, exciting, and miraculous.

And it turns out that we will be doing this in Niverville. Who would have thought? Not me! Life is full of surprises.