This has been a truly amazing week.
There are some times in life you absolutely should look back on for months and years to come. Miracles leave an impression if they're examined and acknowledged. Unless you deliberately keep those memories alive they disappear; but if you keep them alive, they go into a folder in your brain that sticks around for a long, long time. I have a friend who calls certain events “God's fingerprints” because they're something you can point to and say, “I saw God here today”. Many times when people ask a Christian person to talk about God, we're tempted to pull out the Bible and point to all the reasons why God is and why we should respect and worship him; but God himself urges us to look at the things we ourselves have seen God do and to pass those memories on to our children. It makes a huge difference to say, “This is what I saw God do” compared to, “This is what God did for some people a few thousand years ago.” Please don’t get me wrong: I don't want to sound in any way like I'm devaluing anything God has done, whether it was two minutes ago or two thousand years ago. But an eyewitness is nowhere near the same as something from history. The friend who looks for God's fingerprints suffered full cardiac arrest while out shoveling snow this week. He is only 69 years old and was obviously feeling healthy enough to grab a shovel and start clearing the front walk in sub-zero weather; but while he was out there working his heart suddenly stopped and he collapsed on the ground practically in mid-sentence of a conversation with his daughter-in-law. Before this story goes any further, there are two important things to point out: the first is that people who have a cardiac “incident” of this kind outside a hospital or without EMS already on the scene have a bad, bad, bad chance of ever recovering. I think the statistics were something very dreary along the lines of 2% - 9% discharge from hospital. This is because a person's brain begins to die the second it's deprived of oxygen: by 7 – 10 minutes, there is so much damage the person may never even regain consciousness. However, the second important thing is what changed this particular man's chances drastically. It's his philosophy of life, the basic understanding that drives his outlook and therefore the decisions that have shaped him and his family. One facet of this philosophy is the absolute belief that God looked at man and said, “It's not good for man to be alone.” It sounds simple enough. I doubt you’re going to find very many God-fearing folks who'd disagree God said this. It's right there in the first chapter of Genesis, right at the founding of the Human race. It was the understanding that prompted God to create a woman for the man he'd just made. However, most of the same folks would look at that passage and conclude it was good for a man to be married. It is good for a man to have a wife; but sometimes he had a wife and lost her, and sometimes he’s not old enough to have a wife, and sometimes it’s been difficult to find one, and sometimes he has a duty in life where it would be better for him not to be married. All these situations exist: but God did not say, “Usually it’s not good for man to be alone, but in some cases…” Nope: God said, “It's not good.” Period. And when he made a woman, he actually ensured that no man ever has to be alone. Because the woman meant children. Children meant a family. A family is made up of grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and second-cousins and eventually a huge network of men and women all capable of preventing any member of the gigantic Human family ever being alone. It's not good for us to be alone, whatever our marital status may be. Because this man believes God and thinks about God probably more than anyone I've ever met, the outcome of his life has been different than anyone else I've ever met. Because he has this firm foundational belief, here is what we understand was his situation the day he collapsed out on the front walk: his daughter-in-law and another woman who's become a daughter to him were standing out with him having a conversation, which is the usual way he does any activity including weeding the garden. I'm not sure I've ever seen him do anything where he was just working on something. He is always with someone talking about something while he's doing the most basic tasks. Not only were his daughters with him, but two of his three adult sons were working on constructing a house probably less than a hundred feet away, with their families spending the day in an RV parked on site so the children could take naps and live normal daily life close to their fathers. When he collapsed, one of his daughters ran to find the sons, who immediately ran back and began doing CPR on their father. As near as they can tell, CPR began within two minutes of his collapse. Perhaps within one minute. He began breathing again almost immediately, which doesn't usually happen in cardiac arrest outside of hospital because there often isn't anyone around to respond, let alone this quickly. It’s not good for man to be alone. Meanwhile, an EMS crew was only one mile away and was able to reach him within four minutes. They were able to shock his heart into a normal rhythm when it arrested again and he reached the hospital – one of the best heart hospitals in the state that “happened” to be only a few blocks away – with his heart already returning to a normal rate. It's been a long week as we waited for news. He's been unconscious for most of it, since one way to allow the body to heal from such a shock to the system is to be sedated and kept very cold for a time until healing can take place. We still don't know how long he'll take to recover or what his full condition will be when he does, but right now the signs are extremely hopeful. It looks as if God did a miracle and is preserving this life -- and this mind -- for us (though I think that was a kindness to the rest of us more than to him or God, who would be delighted to be together). There have been many “small” miracles over the course of the week, like the first time he opened his eyes and smiled in recognition at his son. There were other beliefs and truths that played into the situation and created their own miracles, such as that a complete reliance on God really does impart a peace that passes understanding. While our friend was still unconscious and no one knew for sure if he could even wake up, his wife – who loves him very dearly – peacefully took a turn being home and was met bringing the laundry upstairs for folding with a smile on her face. If that isn't peace that passes understanding, I'm not sure what is. However, a huge part of the miracle of this life being preserved happened long ago and in tiny steps leading to that moment in the snow. The real miracle was the revelation that God really meant it wasn't good for any of us to be alone. It was the tenacity of belief, the conviction of this truth, that created a situation where the nearly-unsurvivable became survivable. And it's a big reason why this has been a very amazing week. Because we got to see the fruit of this belief one more time: and it's good and beautiful and very desirable for eating. It was a fingerprint of God, the mark of his hand on someone's whole life. We are very privileged to have witnessed it; and we do not want to forget. Abigail told her first recognizable lie yesterday.
I say “recognizable” because it took so long for her to admit she wasn’t telling the truth that I think she’s been fibbing about this particular thing for a while and I just didn’t notice. She’s gotten into the habit that when she’s standing by something and falls over, she lies on the floor crying until I pick her up and tell her it’s no big deal. I noticed a few days ago that it’s kind of odd that she just lies there instead of trying to get up, but yesterday I noticed that it wasn’t just odd, it was a dramatic production being staged for my benefit. Not the fall, which was perfectly genuine, but the way she lies pitifully on the floor with her arms and legs all spread out and cries until I get her up. It’s like when you see basketball players making a big deal of how terrible that fall was so the other guy will get a foul – you always know that can’t be real. Now, drama is a big problem in my family. It’s probably not surprising it took me so long to notice she was being dramatic, but then I thought I was discouraging the drama by not making a big deal of her falling and simply scooping her up with the reminder that all was well and she didn’t need to make a big fuss. Apparently that wasn’t enough. That became obvious when she fell yesterday and rather than getting up, she laid there all splayed out looking at me from across the room and crying. I said, “Come on over here and I’ll pick you up, Abigail.” She cried harder and didn’t move a muscle. And for a second, I saw the strangest thing: I saw some of her grandmothers lying there doing exactly the same thing. Several of Abigail’s grandmothers have had a problem with feeling sorry for themselves. This means it's a characteristic I can fall into also, but it's easier for me to see when it's become aged and it's in someone else. It’s not an attractive quality in and of itself, but even worse it can actually kill a person. I know I said my family has a problem with drama and that was a very dramatic statement. If I hadn’t seen it happen, I would think it was a ridiculous thing to write. But it’s true: one of my grandmothers self-pitied herself to death. She died for no real reason at all except that she felt so sorry for herself that she refused to do anything except sit in a chair and mope until she gradually lost the ability to do anything else and just…died. It took two or three years, granted, but she should’ve been around at least another ten years in reasonable health. She was a tough old lady besides the feeling-sorry-for-herself problem. Now today I have a beautiful little ten-month-old girl with a big bright smile who likes to lie on the floor and pretend she can’t get up so Mom will feel sorry for her. If I let her, someday she’ll be an old lady who sits in a chair and pretends she can’t do anything and ends up dying when she should’ve been around to see her great-grandchildren grow up. And that’s after she has a miserable marriage and children who don’t really want to be around her because she lets self-pity and bitterness eat away at her. There is a natural sweetness and sunnyness to her that we can either polish up and encourage or we can let get tarnished by silly stuff like this to the point where her beauty won’t be visible anymore. So when I saw Abigail’s grandmothers lying on the floor insisting they couldn’t get up, I sat down a few feet away and said, “Come on, Abigail. Get up and come to me if you want me to pick you up.” Abigail has been saying more things by the day, some of them fairly sophisticated for someone so young. But yesterday she said a whole new one. With tears rolling down her face, she looked up at me from her spread-eagled position on the floor and said, “I can’t!” I didn’t know she could say that. I was so surprised that I laughed. I probably shouldn’t have done that. But here was this little tiny girl fibbing right to my face and thinking I wouldn’t know. “Yes you can!” I said back to her. “Get up, Abigail.” “Waaaaaah…I can’t!” she said again. Then she picked up her leg like it weighed a million pounds and made a big show of crossing it over her body like she was going to roll over. She even made grunting noises like she was working really hard to get up before flopping back and crying up at me pitifully. “I can’t!” “Do you want me to pick you up?” I said. “Waaaaaaah…yeah,” she said. That’s another new word over the past few days. Ben says we really need to start saying “yes” instead of “yeah”. But anyway. “Then get up,” I said again. “I can’t!” she insisted. This took about twenty minutes. For twenty minutes she told me she couldn’t get up and I told her she was going to if she wanted me to hold her. And then she just did. She stopped crying, picked herself up, and crawled into my lap where she sat peacefully and sucked her thumb. “That’s my beautiful girl,” I told her. “Now let me tell you a story about your Grandma…” I notice that for the first time since beginning this blog, there's a month that doesn't have a single blog post in it. So much for my continuing wish to find time to write. I have greater and greater respect for moms of multiple children who maintain any kind of regular blog, let alone a thought-provoking one. It seems like I should have more time with only one child, but perhaps I just haven't learned to manage it properly!
I'm probably busier right now than I've ever been. It often feels to me like I have ADD or what people describe ADD being like, because I often can't spend more than a few minutes on a project at a time, so I have to keep switching my concentration from thing to thing to thing. If laundry needs to be done, I do it in ridiculously small steps. One minute I have a chance to take the laundry downstairs, but it might be a few hours before I have another few minutes to sort it. I keep sort of a running list in my head of the things that I'm trying finish each day and how many steps still need to be done for each task. This is quite a workout for my brain and the rest of me too - I'm finally down to my pre-Abigail weight. In the process of this busy-ness, I have had quite a few thoughts that I'd like to put down, but I wonder if many of them might just wait until a time when I have more time. I'm sure there is going to be such a day, simply because I notice older moms I know do eventually have time to do things like knit or write or quilt again. It's an amazing thing how becoming a wife and then a mother really does change many things about who I am. It's not just a status change. It's a big change in how I function, what I think about, even what I find enjoyable or what bothers me. For instance, this week Abigail has had a cold. She's only had three viruses in her life and really sailed through them with flying colors: even the six weeks she spent recovering from RSV when she was two months old didn't include any trips to the ER for bad croup, antibiotics for an ear infection (we took her in but her ears were fine), or much medicinal help beyond saline drops in her nose. Those are pretty invaluable for keeping a kid from getting bronchitis or ear infections, by the way. At any rate, this week we ran out of her saline drops, so Ben and I took her for a short ride in the car to the drugstore to buy some drops. It didn't take us longer than five minutes to find the drops, but we found ourselves wandering around the entire store, looking at everything from shampoo to discount candy. When we were standing in front of the rack with all the travel-size products, we looked at each other and said, "What are we doing here again?" and Ben grinned and said, "This is just what we do when we go out." And it was fun looking at the stuff in the drugstore. I found it very enjoyable. Something that bothers me that didn't used to is how to raise Abigail in such a way that she loves good. I suppose growing up I became very confident I knew what it took to raise a child so that when they were an adult they would believe in what is good and do what is good. The older I'm getting, though, the more I'm seeing catastrophic failures in people I grew up with, things happening with them I never thought would and would never, ever want to see happen with my beautiful baby girl. I'm not sure these things would be seen as catastrophic by everyone, but to me they are frightening. What I'm seeing is that there is a huge difference between really loving good and looking good and unless you know what to look for, they can look the same for a long, long time. And I have discovered much to my concern - my fear, really - that I don't see people all that clearly. Ben sees much more clearly than I do, thankfully, but that doesn't change the uneasiness of beginning to realize how much I don't see and how much I don't know or understand. And if a person doesn't see clearly, they'll end up somewhere they don't want to be. Actually, raising Abigail to love good IS simple: Ben and I have to love it. Because children follow after their parents unless their parents send them away. So maybe what is fearful about recognizing I don't see clearly is that if I don't see clearly, I don't love good as I ought to. There are a lot of other thoughts going on, some serious and some simply curious (is it really possible that the Titanic isn't the ship at the bottom of the ocean? What do you get someone for their birthday if they don't think they're going to be around much longer? What if we translated every verse in the Bible that said "the Law" as "God's Ways"?) but if I'm going to write anything in the blessing book tonight, I should wrap this up. If you've missed the past few months of Abigail's pictures since I haven't posted the link on this site, September's pictures are here and October's pictures are here. Good night! I keep having ideas of blog posts I want to write, but these days it seems like the time I have in which to write usually falls somewhere around midnight and I'm not sure it's the wisest use of my time. For all I know, however, this may be normal for many years to come and I should probably just take advantage of the fact that I actually have time.
I think it might be finally sinking in to Ben and I that we have our own family and we only get one shot at forming a good marriage that produces good children. Sometimes I'm not sure my mind can even properly grasp what a huge undertaking this is and as solemnly as we took it on, it doesn't seem like we could've possibly been solemn enough for how gigantic a thing it is. I can say it's a matter of life and death without being melodramatic at all. Both physically and spiritually, we are in the process of making decisions that will either bring us life or kill us. And it only takes very small errors of thought to end up with a complete family catastrophe. As someone I know once said, this is not the time for sloppy Godliness. And it has been sloppy of us to think that we could pick and choose which of God's commands we should keep. As Abigail has begun testing us to find out if she should really listen when we tell her not to touch something or come when we call, a passage I've heard in Deuteronomy since I was only a little older than she is keeps coming to mind: Moses, addressing his people on the day of his death, said, "I set before you today blessings and curses. Choose life, so you may live!" When I see Abigail making a beeline to stick her little fingers in an electrical socket, I find myself saying to her, "Choose life so you may live, Abby!" And then I find myself wondering if that's exactly what God thinks. When he set out all his "commands, judgements and precepts" before his beloved children, he wasn't doing it to cause them grief or harm. He was laying out for them how he intended for them to live, warning them of dangers and placing his understanding and view of the universe before them so they could keep their fingers out of electrical sockets and live. That's why failure to obey brought curses, just as Abigail runs a serious risk of bringing serious consequences on her head if she doesn't listen even if those consequences are not things I'm actively bringing upon her. Choose life. It's such a simple, enigmatic statement. At first glance, it's like a facepalm-simple phrase. Who doesn't want to choose life? Well, aside from the troubled individual here or there...but for the most part it seems like we all fight pretty hard to live. Babies are blessed right from the beginning with loud obnoxious voices and the tenacity to make sure their parents can't sleep or ignore their cries to be fed so they can get the food they need to live. But I don't think God was just talking about the physical. He included it, of course - God's very practical commandments are not set on some weird mystic spiritual plane in which our bodies are something to be ignored as worthless - but when he was saying to "choose life", he was talking about REAL life, something Jesus called "life abundant", life that was more than just eating and breathing. In God's eyes, I think most of us are overall like people in a vegetative state: alive, but not vitally. Existing in a coma while machines breathe for you is not really much like the life we're used to living. Life outside of God's ways is pretty much the same. God's version of "Life" does not include sickness, hunger, miscarriage, defeat, famine or anxiety. For some reason, I had always thought that a lack of those things could only exist in Heaven. I was overlooking the fact that God's promised blessings on his people included freedom from these curses. Those people were all still living! God's version of Real Life - the life he said his people could choose - takes us out of a vegetative state and gives us an existence in Paradise right now. This is not for after we die because after we die we're dead, not alive. God's commands - the ones he gave to people who were still living and promised the above blessings if his people strove to follow them with all their hearts and minds and souls and strengths (Jesus quoted Moses in that famous verse). God's version of Life, the life he wanted his people to choose, was to love him so much that they would keep his commandments. When Jesus described to his disciples what it meant to love him, he said, "If you love me, keep my commandments." Life is in God's commandments because his commandments are so much of him that we draw closer to him by obeying him. If we want to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength and if God is unchanging and if Jesus is God's Word and was with God in the beginning...then choosing life means choosing to live the way God laid out for us to live. I want Abigail to choose life by obeying our commandments. God wants the same for us. I don't tell Abigail anything that's too hard for her. It isn't hard for her not to stick her fingers in the electrical socket or to come to me when I call her. It isn't hard for us either. What's strange is that even after keeping the Sabbath and coming to the conclusion to not eat things God said not to eat, I still somehow in the back of my mind held to the understanding that God's commands were not really for me and I was somehow being particularly careful by picking of few of them to pay attention to. I had forgotten so many things that I've heard all my life, things that were completely clear. When Jesus said he didn't come to abolish the Law, he said he didn't come to abolish the Law. When he chastised the Pharisees, he told them that if they had only listened to what Moses had written they would've known him because Moses was writing about him. That means God's true commands - not ones with extra additions, but God's actual commands - give us the gift of recognizing God himself. God said the reward for calling his Sabbath a delight was to find our joy in him. When John called Jesus a light shining in the darkness, he was calling God's Word a light in the darkness. Lately we have become aware of darkness around us to a degree we never even imagined possible. It's as if the more we look, the darker the darkness becomes. So if anyone really wants to know why we'll be sleeping out in a shelter next week instead of our house...it's because we want to love God with all our hearts and minds and souls and strength and he said if we love him, we'll listen to what he told us to do. And next week, he said he wanted us staying in shelters instead of our houses so that's what we're going to do. Because we want to choose life so we and our children may live. Abigail is seven months old! It's been another month of big changes, mostly getting her first teeth and learning to crawl. I thought she was going to walk late judging by the fact she was built like the Turner babies, but I think she's going to fool me and walk early after all. She's pulling herself up on furniture and walking around in her co-sleeper and even standing by herself for brief stretches. Yikes. How did she get big so fast? (Slideshow here) I've been expecting this moment for a few days now - Abigail began picking up her hands one by one while getting up on her hands and knees and rocking, so I knew it wouldn't be long. I was telling Mom Turner this afternoon that I could tell Abigail had everything it takes to crawl: the strength, the coordination and the desire; but there was just something in her brain that hadn't yet clicked to say "I could go somewhere if I do this." I wished there was some way to just transmit what was in my brain to hers, but I knew the only thing that would make sense to her was for her own mind to recognize that she could make this crawling thing work. All day today I kept seeing her almost take a crawling "step", but then she would hesitate and not follow through. Then this evening after dinner I set her down one more time while Mom Turner was here just to show her what I'd been talking about. Mom got out her camera just in case...and this time Abigail didn't even hesitate at all but crawled over to the bead necklace Grandma Lila gave her a few days ago. Not often you manage to get real first steps on video, crawling or walking! Now I'd better go unpack the baby gate and put it on the stairway, because once Abby's got the idea I think she's going to be moving pretty fast by the end of the week... Also known as "the month Abigail suddenly becomes a happy girl". I've posted her Six Month Slideshow here. We've been waiting for this since she was born and turned out to be such a busy-busy person, but pretty much the minute Abigail could sit up on her own she suddenly got much, much happier. It's almost as if she's a different person. She'll sit in her co-sleeper while I make the bed and clean up our room (which means our room is clean again!). She'll sit on the counter while I make dinner (dinners are much more back to their usual standard). She'll sit on the bed while I fold clothes (it only takes me one day to do the laundry). And she'll sit with us and watch things on the computer even before it's time for bed (although she likes to turn around and put her nose on mine and say "ooooooh!" at frequent intervals). All in all...she's becoming more enjoyable by the day and we can actually go places now without having to be walking her constantly so she won't fuss. Hm. Maybe someday soon we can even redeem that PF Changs giftcard we've been hanging onto because we weren't ready to take Abigail to a restaurant with us... After the recent news of Detroit declaring bankruptcy, there's been a fair amount of discussion at our house. We say things like, "How did this happen? How did such a big thriving city turn into what it is?" Ben and I spent some time a few evenings ago looking at pictures of some of the iconic buildings downtown, contrasting what they must've looked like even as recently as the 1960s and what they look like now. The place looks like a ghost-town, as if some plague came along and stole away the people right in the middle of their daily lives. There are dentist offices in one of the big empty skyscrapers that still have all the equipment sitting in the fully-furnished rooms, hotel rooms with their furniture still neatly arranged and moldering away like a time capsule of the 50s, giant office buildings with graffiti covering the stairwells and all the wooden handrails lying in a heap on the first floor after the wrought-iron spindles have been stolen away as valuable scrap. There are prairies growing where there used to be neighborhoods and big grand old mansions are falling into heaps with trees growing through the roof. Old apartment complexes sit abandoned with their windows broken out; Ben pointed out one beautiful complex full of interesting architecture and complicated brickwork and said, "I saw these same apartments in Chicago - they were expensive and they were completely occupied. It's so weird to see the same ones sitting empty like this."
There are a lot of reasons why it got this way, of course. The decline of the American car manufacturers, the rise of thoughtless unions, the terrible rift between different ethnicities, the pervasive idea in our culture that government should provide all, the meddling of the "social justice" movement that decided to mix up the neighborhoods instead of allowing people to live where they wanted their children to go to school, the uniquely Detroit concept of forcing people to pay an extra tax for the privilege of working there, the insidious corruption that gradually made it nearly impossible to do work without bribing someone...all this and more. It all adds up. But there's been one factor that hasn't been discussed much and it's kind of hard to even put into words exactly what it is. It has to do with prosperity and how when people become prosperous, they have a tendency to forget God - to forget what is good. When things are easy, it becomes easy to reject what is good and right. It doesn't mean prosperity is evil, because prosperity is a blessing. But as Moses said to the Hebrew people before they went into the Promised Land, "When you're sitting in homes you didn't build and harvesting from fields you didn't plant, be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God!" Detroit became a very prosperous place. At one time, I believe it was the fifth most prosperous city in the United States. And if the penalty for forgetting God is that your land becomes cursed...anyone looking at the state the city's in now would be hard-pressed not to think much of it looks pretty cursed. As a nation, the whole way we tend to think about things and approach them has taken a hugely different path from what characterized our nation even just fifty years ago. It's not too ridiculous to say that these days, what used to be bad is now good and what used to be good is now bad. If a woman promises in her wedding vows to obey her husband, that's bad; but if she wants to marry another woman, that's good (or at least more acceptable). This is exactly opposite from how such things used to be viewed. How does such a huge change happen? It happened because what people used to call "good" just didn't look very good to their children. The problem today is not that women want to marry each other. It's that those who said they believed in God and the marriage he created between man and woman made that marriage look so terrible that people started looking for alternatives. Everything began changing in the 60s. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what happened, but it came down to children rejecting the "old-fashioned" ways of their parents. The 50s were marked by prosperity and a seemingly upright moral culture that is pretty widely mocked today, a culture preserved in TV shows like "Leave It To Beaver". Everything looks so stable in those shows, with pleasant stay-at-home Mom in her apron cooking dinner and clean-cut dependable Dad coming home every night from work to his nice suburban home to spend time with his orderly family. Everyone pretty much went to church, children went to nice schools (without fear of being shot and not much fear of being bullied) and everyone had peaceful homes and pleasant childhoods. But did they? The truth is - and it's been pointed out many times - that much of the 50s culture was a facade. People did what they thought they were supposed to do to look good but had no peace in their homes. There was alcoholism and broken marriages that just weren't visible because the parents couldn't divorce easily, and a host of other problems. We were prosperous and had forgotten God, even though we were putting up a front of still believing him. And the children of this generation looked at their parents and said, "If this is what 'good' looks like, I don't want to have anything to do with it." So they began rejecting everything their parents said they believed in, even things it really was good to believe in. In Detroit, that meant there was less and less regard for caring for things or even for people. Everyone was "looking out for Number One". There was less regard for authority - as proved by the riots. And there was great encouragement to rebel against standards and old ways of doing things and do it all a new way. The problem is that good is still good. If it was good once - if it was ever good - it is still good. "Good" is not subjective. There isn't one good for me and one good for you. Good is good. There is a true definitive standard of good, just as there is definite truth. We may not always know what it is, but it exists. And that is what our society has totally lost sight off. We're swimming around in a sea of relativism, lost in the idea that, "well, that's good for you but not for me and what's good for me is whatever I think is good for me." If that sounds bad, see my above comment that good is now bad and bad is now good. As a society, we've abandoned "old fashioned morals". (That's code for abandoning God.) We abandoned them (and him) because the people who claimed to believe in them proved to be fakes. As someone I know said last night, "Children would be better off if their parents were honest about what they believe in, even if they were honest about not believing in moral standards. At least the children would have a chance to adopt those standards themselves instead of looking at their parents' hypocrisy and deciding to have none of it." This is something that's affecting all of us. Good has been abandoned to the point that many don't even know what it even is. It's affecting all our cities, even those more prosperous than Detroit. And more personally, if Ben and I want Abigail to follow God, then we'd better really be searching for him and not just say we want what is good. Because if our life doesn't bear any desirable fruit, Abigail will abandon it for something better. And if we've had the gall to say we believe something that we don't, we will damage her ability to ever see those beliefs truthfully so she can at least succeed where we've failed. After long delay, I've gotten Abigail's 4 and 5 month slideshows online. I hardly got any pictures of her during her fourth month since everything was so busy and I missed getting my formal 4-month photo of her altogether. Benjamin took a beautiful one of Abigail and new baby John together a few days after John was born and that'll be a nice four-month portrait. I was much more careful during the fifth month, though, so I have much better photos and even a formal 5-month one. Whew! 4 Month Slideshow Here 5 Month Slideshow Here
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Author: LaurenWife of Benjamin and mother to two wonderful little girls who are getting bigger every day. Enjoys writing down thoughts and discussions we are having within the family and sharing them with whoever is interested in reading. CommentPlease don't be shy! If you're reading the blog updates, we'd like to hear what you think. Click on the "comments" link to send us a note.
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