Holiday Week

Hope your Holiday week was wonderful.  Ours was.

We had our niece Rachel stay with us for awhile.  She is going to school in Madison.  We also had Cale’s 6^th birthday party, Thanksgiving at our house, ringing the Salvation Army bell, chopping down our Christmas tree, and celebrating Garth’s birthday.  (I won’t tell you how old he is.)

It was great fun for us to have Thanksgiving with family.  We had sweet potatoes that weren’t purple.  And real American turkey.  Garth cooked the bird and it was super yummy!  There was my Mom’s famous pear jell-o and my sister’s famous raspberry jell-o, (We didn’t have Jell-o in Indo.  There was this stuff called agar-agar and it was made from seaweed…not the same.)  And real cranberries!  I love cranberries!  But even better than the food, was the family time.  It is always precious!

Speaking of Indo - Please continue to pray for Sentani.  Due to some problems that were going on, the dorm we left has now been shut down, and the  kids have been shuttled off to people’s homes.  The dorm parents are going back to the States, and all of the Indonesian helpers are without work.  There is unrest, and unknowns regarding what will happen in the future.  They are in desperate need for some good, committed people to minister there as dorm parents.  Please pray for that need.  And for us, as it is so sad to see all of this happening to people we care so deeply for.

Here are some pictures of our week:

Bananas

Imagine being the first person to discover bananas.  You pull the fruit down from a tree and take a bite of the peel.  Such a bitter, awful flavor.  What if you didn’t know that there was something wonderful underneath that skin, and you threw that banana onto the ground?  You would be missing out on such a sweet, delicious taste.

I think we do that sometimes with people.  We see the outside and decide what the inside must be like.  Or we give someone one chance, and it doesn’t have great results, so we “throw them away”.  We don’t realize that there is something beautiful underneath, if we just take the time to find it.

The Kite

So the crazy Erickson kids woke up on Saturday and asked if they could go out and wash the cars.  It was a beautiful day and they had a blast doing that.  Later we went to the park to fly Cale’s kite and have a picnic.  It was starting to get cold out at that point so we were pretty much a table full of icicles eating sandwiches.  Haha.  (By the way, did you see the wonderful rainbow in the sky?  Don’t know if I have ever seen one quite like that.)

When we first got to the park we had a hard time getting the kite up.  I couldn’t figure out what Cale and I were doing wrong.  The kite just would not fly right.  It kept twisting around and around and falling to the ground.  For awhile Cale had fun pretending it was his puppy by letting it drag behind him as he ran around. But I knew that he would have so much more fun with the kite if we could get it up in the air.  So I took a look at it, and realized that it was hooked up wrong.  I moved the hook to the other side and told him to try one more time.  It went up right away.  He was amazed.  Then the fun began.  He flew that kite for the longest time laughing with glee and amusement.  It made me think about how God created each of us for a purpose.  Sure we can go through life, doing what we want, trying to make ourselves happy, living for the world.  We will be like a kite being pulled behind a 5 year old.  Or we can use our gifts and talents, seek God’s will in our lives, do things for His glory, and be like a kite soaring through the sky-living out the purpose for our creation.

Unlikely for Cale, our story has a “sad” ending.  The wind blew the kite in a tree and it could not be recovered.  If you happen to drive by the Field House you just may see it in one of the trees.  It will most likely be there until spring.  Bummer!

Love

Rachel

SNOW!

My kids are crazy!  They were so excited to see the snow.  They were out playing in it this morning before school.  Yes, they were absolutely freezing but loving every minute of it.  At one point the snow stopped and Emma raised up her hands in prayer to God for it to start up again.  If any of you are praying against the snow, I just want you to know that you will probably not win.  If the number of prayers have anything to do with the outcome, Emma, Sophie and Cale are offering up non-stop prayers for more snow.  It has been four years since most of them have seen snow.  Cale and I saw 3 weeks of it in 2009, but the rest of them haven’t.

Sophie was five when we went to Indo.  She said today that the snowflakes are not as she thought they would be.  She thought they would be bigger and like you see in the books.  When she woke up and saw the snow, she exclaimed, “Mom, it is like a miracle!”  Cale said, “Snow is like floating water.”  Emma said, “I am loving snow already.”  Not exactly sure what Wyatt thinks.  He is greatly missing Indo, so the snow is an intrusion, and the cold is annoying.

I love it!  Love, love, love it!  I can’t wait to wake up and see everything covered in white!  I agree with Sophie.  It is a miracle!

Love you

Rachel

Yahoo!

I had a really cool God experience today, and I couldn’t wait to tell you about it.  On Saturday I misplaced my wallet.  I wasn’t sure exactly where or when I had lost it so we have been retracing my steps:  the library, the Laundromat…all around the house.  Well, we couldn’t find it.  As a family we just kept praying about it and looking. 

Today, Monday, Garth said he was going to call and cancel my credit card, and we talked about how I would need to get a new license.  But I asked him to wait another day, and he agreed.  Tonight, I was reading a magazine on the couch when the doorbell rang.  It was a police officer.  He said that a lady at the gas station found my wallet and saw inside that it had my name, Rachel Erickson, in it.  The police officer “happened” to be at the gas station as well and she asked him if he knew me since his name was also Erickson.  He said he didn’t know me but would use the address on my card to find me and return the wallet!

How cool is that?  Coincidence?  No way!!  That whole incident was God-driven.  I am so very thankful!  What a fantastic picture of how God cares about the little things as well as the big.  I told the police officer that he was an answer to my prayers.

Yahoo!  God is good!!

Love you

Rachel

Whoever

I was thinking about the verse John 3:16 yesterday.  What if it didn’t say “God so loved the world?”  What if He only loved Africa?  Or just Utah?  And what if it didn’t say “Whoever believes in Him?”  What if instead of “whoever” it had a list?  Those who have no track record of breaking any laws, were respectful to their parents, went to college, no owed debts, and on and on.  My goodness!  The line of people that could get into Heaven would be quite small.  I am so thankful for the “whoever” being in there!

That made me think of something else.  If I really believe that salvation is available to “whoever”, then that means the lady at the checkout of Piggly-Wiggly that is having a bad day.  It means the teacher at school that is sick and could use some soup, or the kid that calls my son “gay” because he is a Christian.

The “whoevers” are all around me.  What am I doing about it?

Rachel