FOW

As we all had more kids in the Care Group, the moms wanted to get them all together. They started a play group, rotating to each other’s homes. It was as much for the ladies to get together as well, as they often felt stuck at home with little children. As the kids got older, Laura started an informal preschool with them.

The Care Group had grown quite large by this point so they decided to split it. Our good friend, Rich Dalmas was going to be the leader of one of the groups and we stayed with him. He and I had become particularly close as we had been baring our souls to each other in the men’s accountability group these past several years. 

The accountability group met once a week and there were usually three or four of us. But oftentimes it was just Rich and I and we made it count. He was a true friend, especially if I needed correction. In training our children, we were being taught about the importance of making sure our children heard and understood our instructions but I could get overzealous at this. 

Alexis was a sweet girl but (as with every child) she did some things that she shouldn’t. When Alexis did something wrong, I would hold her face to make her look at me and talk very sternly, making sure she responded that she understood. After Rich had seen me doing that a few times, he gently suggested that I was being harsh. I realized he was right. I’m so glad he cared enough to confront me about something that helped me stop being unkind to my sweet little girl.

After Laura’s experience at Celebration, she didn’t want to (as she saw it) waste money to go sit in a hall again. But Celebration was a significant event in the life of our church and it was important for members to attend if they could. Elsewhere, I’ve written about the Fear of Man as opposed to the Fear of God. Well I also had FOW - the Fear Of Woman. That’s when you don’t want to make a decision that will upset your wife, even though it might be good for her. By default, we didn’t go to Celebrations. 

Once again, my good friend Rich gently questioned my non-decision and FOW. Again, he was right. I, in turn, gently persuaded Laura that it was the right thing to do. So Laura decided that she would just not struggle with it. She would just get whatever she could from the weekend. She and her other mom friends called it the other Celebration - not the one where you got to go to all meetings and have leisurely meals but the one where meals were work and where you might hear a message or two, but probably only on a monitor in the fussy kids room.

She would get to some meetings, especially if she let me watch the kids. But she and the other moms from the Care Group grew closer with their sit-in-the-hallway-while-the-kids-were-in-the-rooms-asleep bond. As the kids got older, they would start going to their own classes during the meetings but we all also kept having more kids. So the hallway experience stayed alive. Afternoons were open to hanging out together as well, although our younger kids were often taking naps at that time too. So we would all hang out in the hallways, talking and playing games together.

Afternoon hallway Celebration


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more