Janey's News
October 4th, 2006

Countdown to my beautiful daughter’s wedding – Oct.14th. Obviously this is why I’m not blogging very often (after the wedding, I’ll invent a new excuse). Actually, there are a lot of things I’m not doing often enough – except eating. I always eat more when I’m nervous, and believe me there’re still lots of details. Thank God though that my baby girl is so organized and has taken care of so much already. Amazing how those babies grow up and get so organized (it makes up for the messy room all those years). Does this mean there’s hope for my son? There is because God is faithful.

I recently considered 1 Cor.11:31 and the beautiful opportunity God gives us to examine ourselves. By so doing, we can prevent pitfalls whereby we bring judgment upon ourselves. In other words, if we examine our own hearts -- “sonder le coeur” in French – then we give God’s Spirit an opportunity to show us areas in our lives that oppose the ways of God. These may be areas of selfishness or just blind spots. They might be caused by willfulness or just DNA “pass-ons”. Either way, we have the privilege of bringing them before the Maker, recognizing that these areas don’t please God and then asking Him to root them out. He then does. Not by waving a magic wand but by a process which is sometimes painful. But what freedom when the root is removed. And all because we began examining ourselves asking God to shine His light into our dark spots.

I suppose it’s like doing a breast exam each month. If you catch something wrong early enough, you can likely root out a whole ton of misery & perhaps prevent eventually losing a breast. I guess this is what it means to pluck out your eye, or cut of your hand, if it offends you. Just deal with it. And the earlier the better because the sooner it’s dealt with, the happier we’ll be. And so will those who might be victims of our blind spots or whatever it is we have that wounds people because we haven’t died to self. Letting God root stuff hurts at first, but we feel better after. Most of all, it helps others in multiple ways. It helps them because we become more Christlike and that helps the whole world because more of Christ in a dark planet is good. I like that.

I love Mercy Me’s song Goodbye Self. Wow. Awesome. Says it all in a fun way and with a great melody.

I have a couple of chapters on this subject in my book, Heaven Help Me Raise These Children! -- Biblical Answers for Practical Parenting Issues! Thanks for recommending it. The book now has an accompanying CD I recorded to go with the book and can be ordered here: www.carepointministry.com/heavenhelp.html.
For those who want to pray for the suffering children, please check out the recent prayer requests on my website: www.orphansfirst.org

A bientôt, (later)…