Our holiday time in July was reasonably R & R, but our first week saw us sending off No.1 son to Australia for a year's study. (He's settling in nicely and not far from his grandparents.)
The rest of the time we supported No.2 son who has spent 6 weeks picking cherries and pears, although there was a lot of rain which spoiled crops. And with No.3, our daughter, we did odd-jobs around the house, outings, just hung out and read.
Back at work since first week of August; and our main preoccupation - what should our priorities be given that we think we are going to have to change churches at the end of this new school year. Too many ideas of what we'd like to do and see happen, and not enough clarity in what God sees as priority. It's not easy to cope with. It's not helped by a real lack of ideas/initiative/even expressed desires from our main congregation whose numbers have dropped to 25 regulars.
So my first priority is to pray with as many of these people as possible and to be part of a specific group which prays as a ministry in spiritual combat for our area. There are many people to reach here with the Gospel, many relationships that could be encouraged.
Example: one of the local café owners is very open to discussions. Pascal and I decided to have a coffee there once a week over summer to have time for ourselves and the owner kept coming to our table to chat.
Example: I know several women (through our children) who could be invited to a Bible discovery type coffee morning, but I wanted another woman at least from our church to be involved .... hard to pin down.
Example: our former chapel and manse were sold to a local artist/journalist who has stated publicly that he and his partner feel negative energies in the manse! There is a real opportunity to go and investigate this with him and to bring the Holy Spirit into the affair! But the reaction of our church members was very passive: they don't believe these things and were more inclined to ignore the opportunity because they didn't agree, rather than confront the issue and work through it. Where is our Christian testimony ? Where is our difference ?
Before
After!
Pray for France - a lot of searching for spiritual truths, but not enough Christians taking on the challenge of being a viable alternative (so to speak!)
