Basque Update

We've had quite the summer of fundraising.  Well, mostly Jeff. I show up and talk a little bit but he has done some hard and faithful work.  Speaking at churches and bible studies, meeting with people one on one in between a day of meeting with local HS kids and planning camp trips.  Then came the camps and trips out west to potential partners.  And the biggest event and blessing in many ways, a banquet.  The banquet was a chance to share our hearts and God's love for the Basque people with a larger group of people.  We were hoping for forty and just over a hundred came.  Amazing friends locally helped us pull it off.  High school friends served without payment and an incredible caterer, Aruna of Kababs N More, created an amazing meal.  We felt loved and encouraged and can't imagine not having had that chance to share.  We raised 12% more of our budget in one night which is no small feat.  We are still have 38% to go.  The conversations and generosity have encouraged us deeply.  They have humbled us and made us feel ready to fly out tonight!  The numbers nudge us to the ground.  We still have work to do.  Adding to the nudging is that Jeff is officially off Young Life staff September 3rd.  He is putting together (and looking for) building/remodeling projects to get us through late October as we continue to fundraise.  We see the deadline looming and the needs of our family also.  It is a fine line between responsibility and faith.  We feel we are suppose to walk this part out as faithfully as we can with sacrifice, sweat, and sometime tears until we have reached that time.  Our heart is to go.  We believe God's heart is for the Basque people to hear.  If you feel a desire to give to help make that happen here are the links to give towards The Stables Family, Basque, Spain YL International.  It is a secure site and all gifts are tax deductible.  Our biggest need is monthly partners, small gifts given regularly are better for the health of the mission than a bigger one time gift.  Thank you for walking through this with us and we are excited to see what God does in the next two months!

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Shirley

 A knock on the door this morning let us know that our dear sweet friend and neighbor is finally home with the one who created her.  The one who knit her together in her mother's womb and loves her with an everlasting love.  There is a great celebration in heaven today.  Sweet embraces and no more pain.  We are left with beautiful memories.  It is not fun to say good bye.  The boys and I have cried a lot today.  We also have talked about how amazing it is that someone we love so dearly is now getting to see God face to face.  To talk to Jesus and be known completely without fear, shame, or sadness.  A reminder that this life is not a game and the Gospel is not a fairy tale to be told but a truth to be lived out.  She lived a life poured out for others and surrendered to Him.  She was still speaking of His goodness up to the end.  Thank you for all your prayers for her in these last months.  Please pray for her daughter and son and their families.  Shirley was a big woman in a little body and she will be missed tremendously.  

Light

     We have twenty-nine windows and five doors in our home.  I know the exact number because I counted them one night.  The night a raccoon sauntered off into the woods after knocking the cat dish repeatedly into the backdoor at one in the morning.  Jeff was out of town and I counted ready to tell him just how many entries there were for an intruder.  A house with three sleeping boys and one wide awake mom.  By the time he got home days later I was unafraid and grateful again that there is almost as much glass as there is drywall in this house.

Thirty four ways to let the light in.  Light that streams in from the back each morning as I fumble to fix coffee and bowls of cereal.  The light that pierces through the row of tall pine trees out front to signal the end of another day.  The only thing I will miss more than our backyard of clover and woods is the windows that surround me with light.

     We are still in a season of wait.  Our hands have become much busier.  The purging of clutter turning into packing of things to save and store.  Jeff is speaking at churches, sharing the heart and vision of Basque while wiggling boys sit too close to me in unfamiliar pews.  Letters and thank you notes start each morning and Saturdays are filled with catching up with old friends.  But the wait is still hemmed in with the knowledge that the unknowns out number the known.

     I still feel my stomach go into knots when someone at the park or in the grocery store asks when we are going and what will we do for schooling for the boys.  I still feel my mouth twist into a half-hearted smile as I answer that we are still not sure. I am sure in His provision and His timing.  I am completely  unsure of me handling it with grace or without some presence of fear heard in my voice as I reply.   I am asked these same questions and many more by Luke and Levi.  I answer the same but each time recounting all the things we were so unsure of when we moved to Culpeper.  Letting them remind me of how each was answered.  They were too young to ask questions then, to have fears, or see the messy process. But they have lived the answers through the years.  This time we walk through it all together.

Each time we talk I feel it shed light in their tender hearts and my  aching one.  Not a bright spotlight that reveals all.  But a soft one that filters through.  Strong enough to make it through a thick forest of trees and leaves and cast itself onto us.  Strong enough to remind me that spotlights are rarely given when stepping out into the unknown.  Strong enough to remind me that our job as their parents is not just to sit on the front stoop and watch the sun sink safely into the pines but to awake each morning trusting the God that raises it.  Each day that is filled with family and friends who help cast that same light when fears spill out.  That softly point out the lies that confuse and the truth that sets free.  I hope you get to see His light filter through your circumstances this week.  

"Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling."  Psalm 43:3

Not left behind

  As the youngest of three and a true daydreamer, I was given a healthy fear of being left behind.  I was never good at keeping up with two much more focused and braver siblings.  Often, the gap between our strides would widen until I would realize how far behind I was and rush to rejoin them.  Ian is not a daydreamer, he just is a lot younger than Luke and Levi.  He did not come in the nicely spaced
two years of his older brothers. Or even a reasonable three or four year spacing. It was the summer Luke was seven and Levi was five that Ian came into our lives.  And pictures changed from Luke and Levi side by side, to Luke and Levi with Ian far behind.  The gap is slowly closing as I take snap shots
of their adventures. 

I use to worry that Ian would be lonely.  He would feel like an add on child.  Feeling foolish for thinking we looked like parents that didn't have their act together. Not like the other families that planned and provided just the right spacing for siblings to share bus rides and friends.   I didn't know I had the expectation that all my children would be grouped tightly together until it didn't work out that way.  

Funny that is how expectations work, they are silent until met with something different.  Then the loud voice of discontentment, what ifs, and why not echos through my thoughts.  Fear becomes louder than hope.  

I love this picture because it reminds me that our expectations and fears are wrong.  Ian loves to be in the middle ground.  He enjoys watching his big brothers charge ahead, call him forward, and rests in knowing I am safely behind watching it all.  He doesn't look ahead panicked that his stride does not match theirs.  He certainly isn't concerned that I am behind and not beside.  He is enjoying his own pace and making his own set of tracks, his own ripples.

It is so easy to get caught up in our expectations or someone else story that we forget to trust God's timing, spacing, and path set specifically for us.  When we fixate on how God unfolds life for others we begin to think He is withholding from us.  We can miss the blessings of the middle ground, the ripples and steps of them, because we are wishing to be further along or in a past that feels safer.

I am grateful for two older boys who are fearless and charge ahead in adventures.  Thankful for Ian  following the trails they have blazed and often times creating his own.  He is a reminder daily
 that expectations and time frames that disappoint at first, end up strengthening
our trust and faith in the end. A reminder that looking down at the steps taken
now is better than fixating on the future or wishing for the past.
To rest in the knowledge that we are not left behind and we are never alone in the journey.

"You will keep in perfect peace

all who trust in you,

all whose thoughts are fixed on you!"

Isaiah 26:3

Hold on

"When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off.  You sit and trust the engineer."

-Corrie Ten Boon

Shirley is home

"It is important to identify the many ways in which we think, speak, or act with fatalism and, step by step, to convert them into moments of faith.  This movement from fatalism to faith is the movement that will remove the cold darkness from our hearts and transform us into people whose trust in the power of love can, indeed, make mountains move."

-Henri Nouwen

It took me five days to walk across the yard to Shirley's house.  Eight to surrender to the idea that I cannot be the hands to help.  Not the way she needed.  It was eight days ago that her daughter was moving clothes back into her house.  I left the groceries in the van and ran between the yards, Ian bouncing on my hip, to make sure all was ok.  "She is coming home on Monday." The words broke a smile across my face.  A smile that eased into concern as she explained that nothing had changed.  She was not getting better.  She just could not handle one more night away from home.  One more night in the long term care facility with florescent lighting.  The smell of sanitized sickness.  The noises that echo off the hard floors and bare walls.  She wanted to come home to green trees, and soft sheets and surrounded by the full life she lived before all this happened.  

Ian wiggled on my hip and I let him down to pick clovers.  She asked if I could help. Shirley needs twenty four hour care and split between two siblings with full time jobs and families of their own it is hard to know what to do.  I fumbled with words spilling out unorganized.  I couldn't.  I wanted to, would love to, but...my life is too full now.  Too many needs pulling me into too many directions.  I am often feeling overwhelmed with life now.  And I am already dreaming of more cold streams to swim in with boys and adventures in woods.  Adventures far from my own house full of dirty clothes and needs that never end.  She understood.  I felt the lurch in my stomach, the tightening of the chest reminding me I am not enough.  I cannot fix this or even offer the help they need right now.

I saw the ambulance bring her Monday.  Watching through my window.  I stayed home and my chest tightened again.  Each day looking out across the yard as kids asked for help, needs were met, games played.  Evenings smearing into mornings.  There were always cars.  Always people.  I didn't want to intrude.  To let down.  To show up only to say all that I could not.  My mom called twice to see if I had seen her yet.  Excuses tumbled out of me.  Saturday only one truck was in the driveway.  Jeff was home and all was quiet.  With a heavy heart I trudged through the patch of grass carrying clipped flowers and cards.  Small gifts in the face of great need.

I knocked and creaked open the glass storm door.  Her hospital bed set up in the closed-in sun room.  The room she would watch us sled in the winter and watch the boys run through the sprinkler in the summer.  Her bed was facing the road and the stoop where she would sit each evening after the yard work.  Behind her the now green cherry trees, as close to the outdoors as she could get.  I walked in and she smiled.  Her son pulled up a chair and left us alone.  It is still hard for Shirley to talk.  Muscles are weak and saying a few words leaves her breathless.  She still always asks about the boys, the neighbors, which flowers are blooming outside.  She still can only move one hand and her toes.  She still smiles and says this too is God's will and she is trying to trust Him and His plan no matter what it holds.  Most of all she still longs to get up and walk and drive to church and help others.  But there are no tears this time.  And her cheeks hold the pale pink of life.  Her children are doing for her what she has done for others her whole life.  The giving without receiving, the loving as water poured out and not held back and rationed.  

And as we talked I felt foolish for thinking my hands were a part of the answer in this new stage.  I was to sit and listen.  To tell stories of the boys and read words of Life.  To take Ian and make sure he does not try to climb on her bed to talk close.  To remind her that she was made in love with a purpose of love and that lack of movement or speech does not hinder that plan.  And to leave after a visit thanking God for each step taken back to our house.  For each moment given to live and love the ones around me.  Without fear of their needs or my weakness.  But with a full knowledge of His grace and mercy.  

Please continue to pray for Shirley.  Doctors do not know what the recovery will look like. The time frame of recovery or if it is even possible.  She is living each day with grace in bed surrounded by flowers in glass jars.  Nights are the hardest.  Waking up from dreams that are good she said can be harder than waking up from bad ones.  Loss of freedom can be more crushing than the pain.  Pray that the boys and I will not waste the time we have.  Walking across the small side yard to share stories of cold creeks and frogs caught.  Flowers picked  and some love we are so richly given.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are those who morn, for they shall be comforted.  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

Matthew 5:3-5

After I wrote this Luke came over with me to see Shirley for the first time since her stroke in March.  He was convinced it was better to remember the old Shirley.  Terrified to see her in pain and not able to move.  We sat and talked.  We remembered all the visits he made on his own to her house.  His shoulders relaxed and his smile deepened.  By the time we left her house he was filled with deep joy, deep compassion, and most of all hope.  The blessing of loving another.  There is no better gift to give the boys.

Ian is three

     
 He makes us laugh out loud at his antics.  He reminds us that we still don't know what we are doing.  He helps us to live in the now, every sweet and hard moment of it.  He stretches our hearts deeper and our minds wider.  We cannot imagine Team Stables without our #3.  Happy Birthday Ian!