Sunday morning – post “slumber party!”

Most of my older kids are out of town at a homeschool debate tournament, so we decided to have 2 of our granddaughters (Elaina 5 & Lily 3) over for a slumber party. At the current time, we have about an hour before we leave for church, so I’ve been enjoying watching the girls crawl under the hide-a-bed fort they made.

It’s funny how much more relaxed I am with my grandchildren than I would be with my own children. Years ago, when my children were small, I would NOT have allowed a fort on a Sunday morning. How nice it is the 2^nd time around and to have a different vantage point.

Last night Laurel (our youngest…now 10) built the girls a fort using chairs, blankets and heavy books to keep the “walls” up. I got a little disturbed at her (okay…a lot disturbed!) for making such a mess when the books didn’t hold and the blankets all fell in! When the girls discovered this new found way to make a fort using the sofa bed, Elaina said to me, “Nana, you should have thought of this for a fort.” Oh, the little joys of life - we can thank the Lord for such small delights and take a moment to enjoy them!

It’s 6:00 am and the house is quiet (at least for now!) Well, since I can’t sleep anymore, I may as well get up. I think my time clock is sort of “off” due to the activities of the past few days. As our new granddaughter arrived home from Africa the welcoming activities included moving our daughter and son – in-law while they were away (escrow closed on their new home while they were gone!), getting things ready and settled to help them be calm so their little girl could adjust to her new surroundings. It also included a late night flight / arrival and “Nana” staying over to help out with the children. All I can say is that it’s a good thing the Lord’s grace does not run dry, for we have needed it in these past few, glorious, days!

So, there I was lying in bed and I started thinking of the value of children and the legacy our family has started...eight children...eight grandchildren AND only three of them married! You know, it is sort of a novelty in our day and age (not so much amongst home educating families) to see large families, so I thought our readers might like to know why we had eight children! In fact, when we would be out in public people would often say, "Are they all yours?" Folks often think maybe we always wanted a large family and we did…we wanted four, which IS a large size family today, but that’s not why we ended up having eight children.

I have an interesting birth history: I had my first child normal, my 2^nd and 3^rd by C-section and then when I was pregnant with my 4^th, I had a successful VBAC. But since it was likely that I’d have another C-section, we were considering a tubaligation. During my pregnancy we heard a speaker talk about the value of children. It was the first time we had ever considered that God might have an opinion on the subject. We started reading God’s Word and discovered that He never said anything about NOT having children, but only said what a blessing they are and that mankind should be fruitful and multiply…that sons are a heritage and that the fruit of the womb is a reward. He said that a dearth (a decrease in population) is the ruin of a prince. In short, we realized we had only considered what we wanted or what we thought was best and decided, for now, that we would not make any permanent decisions about the future of our child bearing and decided to pray about the matter.

Four children later, we wonder what life would have been like without them had we decided to stop having children for each one is unique and amazing! It really was not out of our desire to have them, but it was out of obedience to God that we had them. True, it makes for a busy life and a lot of hard work so we’ve had to have “kingdom perspective”  in order to deal with the daily demands of a large family. People wonder how we do it financially – Jim is self – employed and even though we live in a rural area we can attest to God’s goodness in providing constant work for him all these years. Now, before you go feeling sorry for our children for having to sacrifice, let me tell you that each of our children love being in a large family. They lack for nothing and have more stuff and more activities than is needful!

Now that our children are having children, we see that they have the same perspective on valuing children and the correct biblical view which is that we don’t live to serve ourselves and do what pleases the flesh, but rather we live to serve others which requires self sacrifice and some inconvenience. We didn’t “drill” this into our kids – but rather lived it out before them and somehow they “caught” it! Our recent family picture (see About Us for our picture)- has lots of people! It started with two, grew to ten, some got married and now those “two” have grown and grown. We are blessed and we praise God, but the bigger picture and our prayer is that each one would bow their knee to Christ and live a life that is pleasing to Him, that others may come to know Him by the testimony of their lives and by the “real” love of God that they display to others as they love people like Christ loves people.

Each of our children love the Lord and each of our married children have committed their marriages to Christ and have set up their households to be “embassies of God’s kingdom” – this is our family legacy and the scripture that comes to mind and the one that we cling to, is “Do not grow weary in doing good for at the proper time, you will reap a harvest if you do not give up.” Galatians 6:9

The idea that the world is overpopulated and in need of reducing the number of consumers who are damaging the earth and using up the resources has been promoted for a long time. But this is not a biblical world view, because if you’ve ever flown in an airplane and looked down, you can see that there are vast amounts of land area and only small clusters where cities are located. The scriptures are correct (as always!) Many countries are now realizing their mistake in reducing their population and are trying to encourage families to have children. The trouble is, it’s hard to change the mindset of a couple of generations who have been told, in essence, to live for themselves!  It takes 2.2 people to replace the existing population which means with fewer people being born there will be less people growing up to fill the work force and with more people growing old – there will be fewer younger people to care for them.

“Lo children are a heritage of the Lord, the   fruit of the womb is His reward.”  Psalms 127