happy birthday rosie muffin!

today marks the 7th year we have been blessed to have our rad little daughter...aka rosie :)

i can't describe the joy (for the most part!!) she brings me..she's always ready to give hugs..she's always got something to tell you...and she has the most contagious laugh.. she, indeed, is god's gift to us!

tonight we're gonna have her fave for dinner - perogies SMOTHERED with butter and sour cream (there goes all of this weeks's calories in one sitting!)- with us and her uncle josh, then the 5 of us will make our way down to silvercity theatres and watch KUNG FU PANDA! woot woot! a birthday party with friends is scheduled for july, post crazy end of school season!

i will leave you with this video made by a friend in the philippines to honor our dear muffy.. we love you babe!!

rosie's birthday video

Good Bye and Thank- You

Hi my Mission Burnaby Friends,
I LOVE YOU!
Thank-you for being here for me during this last 6 months.
Thank-you for being present
Thank-you Rosie and Caleb for being awesome
Thank-you Hayley for making my day by saying " Hi TANYA" every time I walk in the room
Thank-you for loving me as I am
Thank-you for having faith in me
Thank-you for opening your hearts and homes
Thank-you for showing my your tangible love
Thank-you for feeding me :)
Thank-you for giving me a warm place to sleep
Thank-you for being fun
Thank-you for making me laugh
Thank-you for giving me good books to read
Thank-you for teaching talking with me
Thank-you for praying with me
Thank-you for being you
And thank-you for being an open door
just like the heart of God..
I LOVE YOU! Did I mention that??
Until we meet again. MO Peace MO Joy (FUN)!!! MO faith MO courage and love in this grand adventure we call LIFE!!! See ya soon.
Tanya Dawn little t, tanin, tanenbaum Gillespie

the art of rain...

I made my way to Saskatchewan on Tuesday night. After being mistaken for a flight attendant three times, running into a guy from Estevan while waiting for the bathroom and seeing a guy I worked with in Regina over six years ago, I landed in Regina. Marcy and Dwight met me at the airport and we caught up during the trip to Moose Jaw and when we got to their house. We slept for a couple hours and then we were off to the farm in Consul.

If I didn’t know better I would have thought I was still in Burnaby; it was cold, rainy and windy. When I got to the farm, I had lunch with grandma and grandpa, salmon, while looking out the window at the rain falling… Again, I was a bit confused about where I was.

The rain continued Wednesday and most of Thursday off and on, always gray, sometimes windy and sometimes calm, mostly wet. The farmers are thankful but I can’t help but hope the sun will come out soon.

The rain got me thinking though. The difference between rain in Burnaby and rain at the farm is cement. In Burnaby, when it rains you get a little wet. Walking to work or waiting at the bus I get a little wet. The bottom of my pants get heavy and sometimes pretty soaked but that’s easy enough take care of with the heater under my desk.

Here, rain means mud. The mud was so thick and the puddles so deep I almost lost my grandma’s mud shoes on my jaunt over to see Heather and Geoff’s new house. Heather calls the puddles her moat. Evan lost his boots in it today. He got stuck and Heather had to pull him out and leave the boots behind. (She got them out later with a shovel ☺)

I can’t help but think about what a difference the ground makes when we talk about the results of rain. Some surfaces are completely unaffected. Some can be completely reformed with a little bit of moisture. Some are so parched and dry that the water can hardly even penetrate the surface.

I have to wonder what the state of my heart is. How receptive am I to the rain? In whatever form it may come… pouring and painfully harsh, tender and misty, or constantly unpredictable in fits and spurts.

what have we lost?

"So do you go to church? I mean that is what you are supposed to do right?" was the question posed to me. And the thought that began to form in my mind looked like this: what does it really mean for the people of God to 'come'? Especially 'come together'? and why? Is it a gathering where we sit and listen? is that it?
Could it be that how we do this 'coming' thing is actually a read out, if you will, of the condition of our hearts?

What does it look like for you/my heart to 'come'? Who do people see when you 'arrive'?

If we come together right, we come fully and nakedly ourselves...we come with more of our humanness showing than we are apt to come to most places.

We come like Moses with the evidence of being a shepherd on our shoes, with muck on our shoes - tired, sore feet, travel stained with the dust of our lives upon us: our failures, our deceits, our hypocrisies...because if, unlike Moses, we have never killed anyone, we have again and again withheld the gift of humanity from other people. Including with-holding from those who are 'nearest' to us, the love that might have made their lives worth living...not to mention our own.

Like Moses, shouldn't we come as we are? Maybe even as strangers and exiles...because wherever it is that we truly belong, whatever is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and/or gotten lost. Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name - something we know best from the empty place inside of us all where it belongs. Some times we just know it as the ache.

And too many of us spend our time avoiding that terrible feeling of emptiness/darkness and we spend our time searching for something that reminds us of what it felt like...and in the end life becomes about us...which is a very sad and twisted reality. Just living for ourselves...

Could 'running from something' or 'searching for something' be synonyms?

Is love not the transformation of a life...from being all about me, to being all about you?

I think we come together to find what we have lost. We come together to acknowledge that even if we are the best we can be...we are lost and helpless to save ourselves. That we need the reality of Jesus...not just in a supernatural personal/private experience...but His reality manifesting in others.

We need the gift of being able to confess our sins to someone with muck on their shoes too.

Could it be that what we search for is a place of love and no fear...where we can rest and allow the journey to be what it is? The pathway of being found...

so back to the beginning...Could it be that how we do this 'coming' thing is actually a read out, if you will, of the condition of our hearts?

Is my ability to invite others into my very personal journey a barometer of my selfishness? of my love? What if in the coming we discovered what it meant to return to that which we truly long for...a place called home.

just thoughts
j