My First Blog

Hello everyone. I found out about this site from a coworker, and I am hoping that it is a good way for you to keep in contact with our family. I saw this post off of a coworkers blogger, and with us having a baby in three months, I feel compelled to share it with everyone that I know:

My coworker got this in the mail from Family Life Today and it just made me cry.

Laying Bricks or Building Cathedrals?

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.

Psalm 127:4,5

Parents today need God's perspective of children. I think many of us can relate to the story of a man who went door to door asking for donations for a new children's home. At one house he met a tired, beleaguered mother who responded, "I'll tell you what I'll do. I will give you two children." That is how many people feel about children some days. On one hand we say, "We sure love kids." And then we turn around and complain, "They sure cost a lot, and man, you have to deny yourself to raise kids." It's as if we don't really believe ththat we are "blessed" when our quivers are full of children.
Children are divinely placed gifts, not accidents. They are a privilege. I may sometimes feel that kids get in the way of life, but in reality they are part of the life that God is bringing to us everyday. They are on loan with a divine purpose. A man saw three men working with mortar and bricks. He went to the first man and said, "What are you doing?" The man replied, "I am laying bricks." He went to the second man and asked him the same question and the worker said, "I am building a wall." But the final bricklayer had a different answer: "I am building a cathedral."
In the process of raising kids, it is very easy to feel like you are just laying bricks. In reality you are building a cathedral, a child whom God has given you to train up to carry on in the next generation. There is no greater privilege in life.
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As Sidney gets older, I realize that I am the luckiest woman in the world to be her mother. She started off as nothing more than cells. A diamond in the rough. Now she is becoming this beautiful diamond. I see statistics all the time about the costs, the time, and the labor of raising children, but I have learned that I can't think of raising kids in monetary values. I can't take my money, or my time, or my labor with me. Raising kids is going to be my biggest accomplishment in my life. My career pales in comparison to this monumental task.