My random thoughts

I was going to put an explaination of why I'm not blogging much these days, but it has just taken forever to into being able to do this. Maybe God is telling me that my blogging days really are over.

I realised that the reason I started blogging was that I had all these things inside my head that I wanted to share with someone, anyone. I felt frustrated that there was no one immediate I could share with and so I took to blogging stuff. And also I was a bit shy of sharing with people in the flesh in case they thought I was crazy. Well the thing is since being with Ian I have been able to share even my wildest thoughts and dreams with him, and in doing so, in being able to voice stuff, it has given me more confidence to speak out to others, to say what is in my heart. Almost like if I say things and someone hurts me I have someone I can trust that I can go back to to be comforted, encouraged. It is like I am not alone any more.
Dont get me wrong I am not saying that everyone needs to be in couples because actually I did enjoy my single time and am going to miss it. But I know being with someone has made me a different person. Someone told me recently that I seem softer now. Its like I feel safer to be me now.
So I may not blog much more as I have an outlet for my thoughts, but it has been a good time.

So I get married on 27th Jan in Frome and then move to Bradford on Avon, me and Ben and Tabi, to live with Ian, to get established as a family and to wait on God for what He has planned for us next. Life is going to be very different. We are turning a corner that we cant see what is round this bend. It is good and its great to know that God is in control.
And who knows maybe God will get me blogging again.

Sorry for not blogging for ages. There is just so much going on what with practical stuff for the wedding and combining two homes and 4 lives, and lots of emotional stuff for all 4 of us that I have been lost in other things. But I'm slowing down for Christmas and also lots of other practical things are coming together which is giving me a bit of head space to thing of stuff worthy of sharing with others!

I have been pondering the above question - is Jesus all we need? Or do we need people too? And I have come to the conclusion that God made us to live in relationship with each other, as well as with Him, but that He didnt make man to live alone. So yes Jesus is the pinicale of relationship, that we shouldnt try to gain our idenity from anyone other than Jesus, shouldnt look to people to meet our needs, but also we shouldnt ignore people.
I have discovered in my life as a mother I have learnt about how God parents us, how He forgives us, how He disciplines us, as I have grown into doing this more and more with Ben and Tabi. I have also learnt how He has to let us go to make our own mistakes so we will come back to Him. With Ian I have learnt how to be loved by a person, how to learn to trust totally another person with my life. It is like I am learning about the lover side of my relationship with Jesus as Ian and I are getting closer and working towards that ultimate statement of commitment.
Also I have discovered that God uses me more when I am with Ian. That the two of us can talk to and reach people better as a couple than singularly because we have very different giftings. Also at the moment God has been doing amazing things in my spirt when I go to gather with other Christians on a sunday morning. It doesnt happen when it is just me alone, but when I touch Ian's hand I start to weep. It is like God can use me as a vulnerable person because I am not alone, but am connected.
Also He said an interesting thing to me this sunday as I was struggling with the tears and of the whole sunday morning thing and of feeling different - that I can only be different when I am connected in with other people. It is like if I am different on my own or with a group of people who are also different then actually we arent being different but with others He can use that difference along with the differences in others to make some changes in the heavenlies.
So yes Jesus is the ultimate in who we are and our destiny but we do need other people otherwise God wouldnt have made us the way we are.

It is being a hard time for us, this inbetween being engaged time. And it has struck me just how much easier at times it would be not being a Christian!!!
Ian and I have been very much convicted that we are not going to sleep together, that the first time we go further than kissing will be on our wedding night. A very interesting thing for 2 people who have been married before. But we both feel this is what God is saying to us. But the tension, not so much of the not sleeping together, but of the fact that there is the whole thing of the having to get the whole moving in together to coincide with the date of getting married, which of course has a knock on effect of Ben and Tabi and their home ed, and social lives. But all this has to happen at the same time. Whereas if we didn't have this conviction then we could be moving over piecemeal, could be spending time at each others houses more and more. All sorts of stuff like that. This isn't easy. I can so see why people would move in together before they get married, start sleeping together, etc. It is a real tension.
But as I was thinking this God brought to mind the verse about not being yoked with unbelievers and took me to another dimension on this. That as well as it meaning not to be married/partnershiped with those who don't believe in Jesus as the son of God, etc, etc, it can also mean not to be yoked with those who don't have the same convictions from God as He has given you. That all this with not sleeping together would be even more of a strain if both of us hadn't had this conviction. Whereas now we can support each other, stop each other from falling. If we believed in different ways of walking out our walk with God then the tensions would be even greater.
Actually this period I am in, of very much just building relationship with Ian, and establishing us 4 as family, is also a time where God is opening up His word to me in a very different way, of showing me scriptures that I have known, heard preached on, even taught on myself, and just giving them a different twist. It is all very interesting and exciting.

Hey! Have just come back from town and wanted to tell someone, so thought I'd blog. Its about God and how He just orchestrates things.
We're back on the whole home school thing again and trying to get Ben and Tabi to be a bit more self-motivated I've got them doing some project work themselves and their own research. Well Tabi decided that the library was a good place, Ben decided to go with her, and I realised I needed to pay some money in the bank so might as well walk down with them. I left them in town and was walking back up and got chatting to someone that I recognized by sight as being very into new age stuff, thinking she was a mermaid at times, etc. I just said Hi and she started pouring out her heart about loads of stuff. Well as we walked up it turned out she was going into the local CofE coffee shop because one of the men in there, who is connected with the Citizens Advise bureau was helping her to get a grant. And she was able to say how they were Christians and she appreciated that, so I said I was a Christian too and that I would pray for her. Didn't feel it appropriate to pray there and then as it might have compromised the guy in the coffee shop who had started chatting to us. Prayed as I continued my walk!
Well then walking back up the road, just about opposite my house I see the vicar's wife of said CofE church, who have been really great to me, also who have large and lovely church which is my parish and would be dead easy to book for the wedding, but Ian is a bit reluctant because of various things. Anyway the vicar's wife and I haven't seen each other for ages so get filling in about various news and when I say I've got engaged she offers their church and her husband. So we get to have a little chat about how flexible he would be, etc, and is a very flexible man. And she has invited Ian and I round just to chat things over with him.
But its like by just going with Ben and Tabi into town, God has managed to use me to pray for someone and help them to talk, and also to be blessed myself and be able to open doors for us for the future. He is a great God and so in charge of so much.

Well I really do have to let the whole world know - Ian and I have got engaged!! Hurrah!!
It was all very romantic! He woke me up at dawn to climb High Neb, a peak in the Peak District, in the pouring rain, and had made me a friendship bracelet. So we aren't doing the normal thing like rings but have swapped friendship bracelets and will save the rings thing till we get to wedding rings. We are having all the normal hassles of certain people thinking they know what would be the best thing for us, but we are coping with it all.
We are now waiting to see what plans God has for us, and knowing that there is something special with all this as He is showing us things that He is calling us to in being able to minister in His way to His people - which of course means those who already know Him and those who haven't yet got there.
But its very strange now to have gone from the hoping this was going to happen to now a place of knowing that we are going to be certainly married one day.
Watch this space!

I was reading this morning in Hebrews 11, how if we have faith and are looking towards the promises and the destiny He has for us then God will not be ashamed of us, which got me to thinking - if He has to say that if we do this He isn't ashamed of us then does that mean if we don't do these things then He is ashamed of us? So anyway as I was pondering this the verse about "The joy of the Lord is my strength" and so often we have been taught on this that we have to be joyful, give off something of joy no matter what the circumstances, then for one those who don't know God will want to because we are showing we can be joyful with Him no matter what (which I do worry makes us look like we are slightly crazy!), and also that if we are joyful no matter what then it will give us the strength to get through. WELL - after today's thought I have got another perspective. I wonder if its the fact that we are, no matter how struggling, to have faith that God is in control, that we are struggling to seek His will in whatever - good times and bad -, we are looking to that greater place of God that actually it is Him who has joy in us.
So it is His joy in us and what we are doing that will give us the strength to make it through. As with a child who is really having trouble grasping something or doing something, that when we as parents show them our joy in the fact that they are trying, show them our joy that we believe in them, then that is what gives them the strength to go on.
To me that is such a release because all I need to do is keep my eyes fixed on God and that will give Him joy and so it will be His joy in me that will be my strength. Well cool!!

I am a day dreamer. Its true. Ben says that I must stop voicing my thoughts because when I do it seems to but a jinx (oh am I allowed to say that word as a Christians?!?!?!?)on them and then they don't happen.
But I've been thinking over another round of expectations that didn't work out just as I expected, of the ache I'm having to deal with, and pondering that whole thing of dreaming big dreams with God/for God, being given the desires of your heart. Now surely that means you need to dream, need to have desires, need to be thinking big and outside the box. But it just seems that once again there are the disappointments that go with that.
Also I was thinking of how my dreams have changed. Maybe I'm fickle. No I don't think so. But so many of my dreams do change as my circumstances change or as I believe I hear various things from God that talk about stepping out. Oh man, when God tells me to do something that involves stepping out, and then gives me just a snippet of the next stage, boy do I start to daydream then, and then that is when I get disappointed.
But those daydreams have changed. A while back with Ywam it was of doing stuff with them, then of going to Greece to connect with people there, then God moved us back here and there was all this prayer stuff He popped in my head, then there was the whole thing last year of stepping out of conventional church and I'd read all the books and dreamed the dreams, but none of that happened. At the moment my daydreams are very different and are fixed round one human being!!!
Hey and don't think that I'm going to let him go but I do know as things move on with us and stuff happens that God has shown me then the focus of my dreams will go on to other things, to us things, but for now of course I don't know what they are, same as I didn't know what the daydreams of now would be.
Should I stop daydream? I don't think so! Should I stop expecting these daydreams to come true? I'm not sure there. Should I stop being disappointed when my expectations aren't what I was expecting? A definite yes there! Or maybe I'll just learn to pass this test and to hear God clearer and to be willing to keep giving those dreams and expectations to him.