Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the day the A level results are published.  My daughter is engaging in serious distraction activity, so far today she has cleaned the house, turned out her bedroom again, all done whilst singing very loudly.  It is amazing how someone who can sing beautifully can sound so dreadful when singing along to an iPod.   I have baked her lots of cookies to keep her going this evening.   Sadly for her UCAS have announced that Track, which would have given her information about whether she has got her university place just after midnight, is not going to be available until mid-morning tomorrow.  To my mind that is not necessarily a bad thing, there is no point staying up until after midnight and no disrupted sleep due to great excitement or great disappointment.   She is just going to have to wait until she gets those results tomorrow but breakfast is going to be a very tense time.

How will God answer prayer?

After being made redundant for the third time several years ago, my husband turned to temporary work on a contract basis rather than being unemployed and trying to claim benefits.  For several years this worked very well and he worked constantly but with the downturn in the economy came cut back in his field of expertise, and employers are less willing to pay for agency workers so last year for the first time he was unemployed for several months.  With the help of savings and a large overdraft we got through it although singed round the edges.  He is now in the second week of unemployment again and we do not have the resources we had last time.  The fact that my dear husband decided to seek work wherever and however he could get it (i.e. by contracting)  means that we are not entitled to any benefits and the mortgage protection insurance policy we had paid throughout our marriage had become invalid.  We could have just claimed on it when he first became redundant but we decided to work to pay the mortgage instead  so it seems pretty unfair but those are the rules.  This is incredibly hard and we don't know what is going to happen but we do trust God to provide for our needs.  Sometimes though we question the level of our trust and ask ourselves repeatedly how God is going to get us out of this one.  It becomes so easy and so tempting to try to second guess God or even (!) make suggestions about how he might to it to Him.  The presumption is staggering.  I'm sure you must have heard the old adage about the way to make God laugh being to tell Him your plans!  Today our daughter came to me and showed me what God had prompted her to read today.  She had read John 11:6 where Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was sick but instead of rushing to his side and healing him, Jesus stayed where he was for another two days.  Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus were perplexed that Jesus didn't come until their brother was dead and buried.  Jesus could have healed him of his sickness but he chose not to.  Would healing Lazarus have been the answer to Mary and Martha's prayers?  Most definitely.  Would it have demonstrated God's glory?  Undoubtedly.  By waiting and restoring their brother to them from the grave rather than from a sickbed God bestowed so many more blessings.  He demonstrated his glory and power in a far more potent way, He showed Mary and Martha that He is able to do far more than we ask of Him, and he gave the greatest gift of all to His friend, Lazarus; He showed him that death is not the end for Christians, He made clear that He is there with us even at that final hour in this world and gave Lazarus the great blessing of absolute confidence that there is nothing whatever to fear in death.   In this God demonstrates so clearly that He does not answer our prayers in what we think are the obvious ways but in His own good and perfect way, and sometimes in very strange ways.
So for us in our situation - we still do not know what God is going to do, we do not know how God will provide for our needs but we do know that He is able to do more than we can ever ask for or hope for.  One of the evident blessings which God has given us already is the way He has upheld and boosted the faith of our daughter.
I would love to be able to post here in a few days that God has provided work for us and that we have a regular and secure income but if that doesn't happen then I pray that God will give me the grace to rejoice in Him for His own sake,  to continue to trust Him,  to continue to seek His will for all our lives and the wisdom to discern His leading.  

Cold feet and warm fellowship

Last week on Facebook we saw a friend appealing for help with a Christian camp on the East Coast as they were desperately short of staff  so my daughter volunteered her help,  got herself packed and ready to go in just 2 days.  She has been to camp many times but this was the first time as a leader, she has had a great time with many blessings and has enjoyed it immensely despite the cold nights and wet days.  
We did get a desperate phone call at 7 on Wednesday morning.  The previously fine weather had turned wet with a vengeance and her trainers had sprung a leak.  Wet feet are not a good idea for her as she suffers from Raynaud's syndrome, hence the plea for us to go over and take her waterproof boots.  I added some pairs of thermal socks to the boots for good measure.  
We were invited to stay for the evening meal which was lively and very loud but we enjoyed the atmosphere and company of the children.  Everyone was grateful that we had taken the boots - I guess she might have moaned about her feet a bit, or maybe they were just concerned about her. 


Me?  I'm just glad they were on the East Coast and not in Wales!

Back online

I have been struggling with my laptop for some time.  For some unknown reason I had virtually no memory left and my nephew who is a computer whizz and keeps our computers and laptops in working order couldn't find out why.  It was difficult because I didn't have enough memory to run all the programs.  A few days ago the anti-virus program stopped working and I was unable to get it restarted, so once again my lovely nephew came to my rescue.  He took my laptop away to his computer hospital (otherwise known as his house) and when he brought it back today it was like having a new laptop, he even managed to keep all my emails and contacts etc.  Sadly he thought I was using Internet Explorer so he saved the bookmarks in there but not the ones on Firefox which is the browser I was actually using so I guess I will find out in time what I have lost.  Not to worry because I now have enough memory to run my programs and it was very kind of him to help out - again.

Summer holidays

Ok so it's day 2 of the school summer holiday.  So far we have slept in one morning, and suffered the headache for it, I have done a humungous pile of ironing, dodged the rain with the washing and taken my son to his physiotherapy appointment. 
Gosh what an exciting life we lead.

Happy Birthday Beth

On Tuesday of this week my daughter had her 19th birthday.  It is so hard to believe that the tiny baby of yesteryear is now a grown woman.  I may well be turning into my mother but however old she becomes, this young woman will always be my baby girl.

We had a good day, her friends came over for lunch (pizza - what a surprise) one of them stayed until well into the evening just to be with her on her birthday because the others had to go for various reasons.

She is a bit miffed because her 15 year old brother has already matched her in height.  She had realised that he was definitely going to be taller than she is but she had hoped that she would have a little longer as the taller one.

Weekends - I do give a fig.

We don't often get to the windows at the back of the house to look out over the garden, the children's bedrooms are at the back and I am not always brave enough to enter.  When we did last get a good look out there we discovered that the felt on the roof of the shed was in a poor state, hanging off in places and torn in others.  It needed re-doing pretty quickly.  The trouble with that was finding a small enough roll of felt.  I could have bought a roll in one of the DIY sheds but it measured about 20 metres and cost upwards of £30, which is a bit much for one small shed.  We never go near e-bay but a friend found a roll which was only 5metres long by 1  metre wide, it cost less than £8 and as it was not too far from where David is working he was able to go and pick it up.  One up for ebay.  I spent yesterday evening hanging from a ladder removing the old felt and trying to get the new stuff on.  That may not seem like a difficult task except that the shed is in a corner of the garden, tight up against the fence so there wasn't a lot of room to get a ladder in and where I could get it in, it was pressing up against the side boards of the shed roof - just the boards which I needed to be able to ease back to get the felt down the sides to hold it in place. This is where the hanging from ladders comes in as I leant back and pulled the ladder away from the shed whilst still standing on it.

I've also managed to get lots of planting done and the garden is now looking much tidier.

I was given a fig tree earlier in the week and it has been in my south facing garden for the rest of the week  and now I have a ripe fig which I haven't yet picked.  I am looking forward to that.