Paul and Moses Let Us In On a Secret

The Bible Quizzing is now officially over.  The Provincials were this weekend and my oldest son decided he wanted to be a part of it as it was optional.  Normally during the year the teams are somewhat randomly made so a strong player can be put with a newbie just to give the new ones experience and to develop character in the more experienced players.  Otherwise it can quickly turn into a very competitive situation and become all about winning and not about learning Scripture.  This weekend was a different matter.  Because it was only one more quiz meet and it was purely optional to be in it, the teams were intentionally stacked!  My son ended up being on the team with the strongest kids from one particular area and he was thrilled! 

He had had a tough year where he had won "Top Quizzer" at one of the quiz meets, but he hadn't gotten any recognition for it as they had tallied up the points incorrectly.  We figured this was just another way God was trying to keep him humble and that if was to be recognized at another time we would just leave that up to God.  He was fine with that and finished up the year in 2nd place at the quiz meet before the Provincials. 

This quiz meet was quite different.  Right from the very beginning of the meet, it looked like their team was going to clean up.  But then, on the second day some other very strong teams started to get them some stiff competition.  My son was like the Paul Henderson of quizzing and came in at the last minute in several very important quizzes scoring some last minute "goals" which saved his team from getting eliminated and got them some very important points.  In the end they ended up winning the whole meet and are the top team in the province!  They were so excited!  They were tested on 20 chapters of Acts!  It's amazing to hear all those kids rattle off verse after verse and being given only the first word of the verses as their clue. 

It was a great way to finish off the year and a real blessing after being overlooked at that other meet.  He could have made a big stink about that, but instead he just rolled with the punches.  This win definitely made up for it!

People wonder sometimes how we manage to spend time with each child when we have so many.  Quiz meets like this help a lot!  RM took the older 5 and I had the younger 3.  It is so special to be with the younger ones sometimes as I forget what is was like when the older ones were so little.  Days like that bring it all back and it is so fun.  They did play a lot on their own, but I tried to get involved as much as I could.  We went on a long walk/bike ride - 3 km!  Not bad for little guys!    They played the funniest game of hide and seek while I cheered them on.  It was funny because it was basically out in the open using the same spots over and over, very cute.  Then we baked a pie that my 6 year old pretty much did on her own.  I figured why not?  Of course the toddler wanted to "make a pie, too", so I gave him an empty bowl and another bowl full of flour and he played with that the whole time.  What a mess!  But again, so cute!  The 4 year old's job was to make the pastry shapes by rolling out the pastry - just like playdough, so he loved that.  It was a great day and I feel those days are gifts when it's just me and a couple of the kids.

Yesterday was a great sermon on contentment.  I like to think I am pretty content as I know how awful it is to feel discontent.  It just gets me in a terrible rut of discouragement, but then the pastor did the anatomy of a discontent heart and I realized, no, I still can be very prone to discontentment.  In fact, I did a bit of an experiment and tried to track how often I longed for something better, say, on our farm or how often I wished I had this or that.  It happened almost as soon as we left the church's parking lot!  Many times during the day I realized a thought would enter my head either about the farm or something I wished I had, even wishing the debt were gone.  It was awful!  But I realized that perhaps the thoughts will never stop as I'm sure Satan sends them as an attack on me, but the question is, will I allow myself to take the discontentment to the next step and wallow in it or stop the pattern.  So my next step in the experiment was to do just that.  As soon as a thought would enter, I acknowledged it basically as sin, as the pastor said it was, and that was that.  The next thing I tried to do was to find something I loved or felt blessed by and there were so many things that it was easy to get rid of the feeling of discontentment. 

Paul calls is the "secret to being content" in Philippians.  It is a secret!  You literally have to figure it out otherwise the enemy comes in and turns you into a very unhappy person.  But a secret also seems to imply it is something we should want to know as it could be our ticket to something great!  And it is!  I felt like the sickness of discontentment left me yesterday as I had learned the secret of contentment!  The trick will be practising the secret now....

The secret also goes hand in hand with something I read last week - God is working even when we don't see it.  The devotional I read came from Exodus where the Israelites were fleeing from the Egyptians.  When they got to the Red Sea, it seemed like they were goners, but "all through the night" God sent a strong wind and the next morning they were able to cross through the Red Sea on dry land.  Evidence of God came in the morning even though He'd been working all night.  The idea is that God uses dark times, darkness, when there is seemingly no evidence of Him.  That is when He is working.  Yes, evidence comes "in the morning", but I usually want evidence all along the way!  It was such an encouragement to consider darkness, or no evidence, as almost evidence itself!  To know God is working in the night makes me view the quietness so differently.

At the beginning of this debt journey, I was so sure we would see God bless our attitude toward debt and get us out super fast!  We have made good progress and for sure we've seen evidence of God all along the way, but then there have been times of complete silence from God, times where it doesn't appear that there will ever be an end in sight.  That verse was a game changer, yet again, for me, to realize God is working "all through the night".  Coupled with the sermon on contentment, I can only be left in a good place.