Long time no....

Hey

I am sorry for the delay in getting an update on here. Things have been very busy over the last couple of....months!!!

Margaret continues to work hard and pay our bills and Eva continues to grow and learn and develop everyday. She is now reaching the stage where she knows exactly what she wants and when she does not get it she thinks she will get it if she stamps her feet on the ground and slaps her hand of something. It is quite amusing to watch in one way and distressing in another. For the first 17 months of her life she has been so flexible and easy going. Now she seems only to want things exactly as she wants them. I suppose you could argue that she is just growing up because we are all like that aren't we - like to have things done out way and throw a bit of a fit in some way when things don't work out like that.

Anywho, along with this little hard side of her development has come many much cooler things that are completely worth a mention. We stgarted sending Eva to a child minder three mornings a week in order to clear some space for me to study and it has been going well. As you might expect, Eva was slightly anxious at the thought of daddy leaving her with a strange new person and I had to spend the first couple of months waiting until her back was turned so I could sneak out while she was not looking. there were a couple of mornings when she did not even want to go in because she knew I was going to leave her. but now she seems to be over that. now she smiles as her child minder comes to the door to open it for us and has a big smile for her as we enter the house. And I sit down to make sure she is okay before I leave. After a couple of minutes I stand up and say 'bye bye', at which she turns and smiles and does the same. Its very cute!

Her words are also coming along really well. She now picks up the phone - whether someone has called or not - and puts it to her ear saying "Hiyaaaaaaa". Again its very cool. When Margaret or I are in our bare feet she comes over and points and says "Toe".

She has also become more accident prone than ever. Last Saturday night she was trying to climb onto her new favourite perch ( a low window ledge in our front room) and she got her footing a bit wrong. She fell and clunked her cheek off the radiator that hangs just under the wondow legde. She screamed very loud and we knew that she had hurt herself a lot. The next morning she had a real black eye and it is only now (a week later) starting to go away. We are so expecting a call from Social Services in the coming weeks!!! Basically, like any child her age she has an explorers heart and this is matched by the ability to never sit in one place for more than 5 seconds. I suppose when you are 16 months old there is so much to take in around you that you just don't want to stop.

She can also now open the back door and be out there in a flash so we have to keep it locked at all times now. A couple of weeks ago you could have secured Eva in a room just by closing the door and now this is not possible as she is able to reach all the handles and knows exactly what to do with them. Clever little monkey!!!!

My studies are going well. I am continuing to love class and learn a lot from it. we are working on two modules at the minute. one is church history - it's okay but really a bit boring for me. the second is the Old Testament Prophets and I am loving it big style. I have never been a huge fan of the OT because I was never great at understanding it and putting it all in the over all picture. Now that I have someone to teach me about it and show me things about it, I am lapping it up and having my eyes opened to some cool things. I have been spending a lot of time and thought in Amos and with Elijah's story in Kings. Both have made me think hard about stuff.

Church has been good when we have been there. I have had a number of preaching engagements over the weeks and so have not always been able to be around. It's a good church to be around - a really wide ranging mixture of people with all sorts of backgrounds, stories, pain, testimonies, styles, etc. and a continuous flow of new people into the church. It is an exciting place to be. They got a new youth worker recently and I got to meet with her a couple of weeks ago. She is good and has a searching heart and I think this is going to be good for her and for the youth she works with. Keep the EBM youth ministry and Beth (Youth Worker) in your prayers as she works her way through things and starts making her mark on that ministry.

As I said I have been speaking at various churches and services and things. i got to be a speaker for a local school's Scripture Union (Campus Life) weekend retreat. I had 70 11-14 yr olds for the weekend and we spenmt some time learning some lessons from monsters Inc. it was a great time and they were a great group. Schools over here (Northern Ireland) are very different from USA schools in that there is no worries over seperation of church and state. Therefore, we have pretty much got free run in schools in terms of sharing the gospel. Pray for this work and all those involved in it. There were 140 kids in total at that weekend and it is not unique to find this number of kids attending this type of thing.

Last Sunday I got to preach at a service in a local Presbyterian church which was pretty amazing for me. On the morning of last Sunday I had been in my own church and really only found myself going through the motions of it all. I did not sense any real meaning or place in it all and really was asking myself, "What the hell am I doing here?" It really all felt dead to me - though there was nothing wrong with the worship, the prayers or the preaching. I think I was just feeling that inside and nomatter where I would have been last Sunday morning, I would have been asking the same question. You can imagine that I was then wondering that if this was the spiritual place I was in, how on earth was I going to preach that night. Regardless though, I had to go anyway and I did. i went early to meet a friend there and have a coffee and then the youth pastor and his wife came in and asked if they could pray for me and for the service. I said yes and we got to praying. I don't know what exactly happened after that, but as they were praying for me, I felt a real sense of the Holy presence of God and felt humbled by it. Everything that had gone on earlier in the day now pailed into insignificance as I became aware of God's presence and as I became more and more aware of it I sensed that even though I wondered how I was going to preach that night, I was in the right place and God would be at God's work. Then during worship, they sang a very significant song from my life and again I felt that God was placing his hand on me and saying "You are going to be fine - I am at work here". The sermon went well and the people responded well. God was at his work. Sometimes we get so smart that we think that God's work is dependant on us being in the right place but that is bullshit. God's work is God's work and we are used as part of whether we think we are in the right place or not. After last week, that is comforting and reassuring for me. Maybe it is for you too.

I am sure there is more for me to write about, but this entry has grown long enough/

Big shout out to all of you in PSL. We miss you. Big shout out to those on the mainland too - you are missed in our lives too.

Blessings