God gives good hugs

Over the last couple of years I’ve been learning that God delights when we come to him with expectation and anticipation.  I think our tendency is to come to God with a shallow hope, like a peasant coming to a king hoping the king will grant his request.  But the reality is God is our abba (daddy), who loves to bless his children in ways that works out for our best interests.  When we pray from a position of faith and expectation, when we pray from a position of joy in what God is going to do, it is his very nature to respond with love and joy.  And when you come face to face with the living God, we should expect amazing things to happen.

I went to Prayer and Praise tonight with high expectation; I was looking for joy and peace.  There is currently a potential for big changes to occur within our family (related to foster care), and although I feel I clearly know what God would have us do in this situation, I wasn’t feeling any joy in it and that was messing with my peace.

God met me exactly where I was.  There have only been a few times in my life when I can say I felt the manifest presence of God to the point of physical stimulation.  I count myself blessed for those moments.  The first one occurred when I was struggling with my faith.  At a time when I was ready to turn my back on God completely, God simply put his hand on my back.  In that simple touch I received tremendous peace, and although I had already been confirmed, this was the day I received Christ.  My life turned at that moment.

Tonight I was seeking God.  The circumstances are entirely different, but I was seeking that touch of peace that I had felt before.  If you seek, you will find.

Tonight it felt like God wrapped his arms around me and gave me a big hug, the same kind of hug that I love to give to my children when you squeeze them to the point of contorting their bodies just a little bit.  I felt God’s touch.  It’s not quite the same as a physical touch, though I have heard some people give testimony that they felt a physical touch when nobody was there.  But it was a spiritual touch that crosses over into the physical ever so slightly.  I could feel the position of his arms, and the nuzzling of his head against my mine, and goose bumps all over.  It was what I was looking for.

Then God told me this: “What you’re feeling right now, this is what I want you to do for my children.  Embrace them, hold them.  Show them how much I love them.  Don’t worry about anything, I’ll take care of the rest.”

There you go.  Confirmation.  Peace, but not a passive kind of peace that allows you to sit on your fanny.  Joy that I can take rest in the fact that God promises me that he’d worry about the details and provide everything we need.

Okay God, I’m in.  Your will be done.  I love you too,
Nate

Super Spartan Race – been there, done that, got the t-shirt

Becca and my parents are relieved that I survived the Super Spartan Race this Saturday. It was 8.5 miles including 30 obstacles of climbing, crawling, jumping, pulling, lifting, and lots of mud. Any obstacles that were not successfully completed on the first attempt required penalty drills. I was pleased that I only failed on 2 obstacles, though one of them was the rope climb and I was pretty upset with myself on that. My excuse on this was that it came after two other obstacles that required a lot of hand strength, and my grip on the rope wasn’t confident at 20 feet up.

My final time was 2 hrs 9 mins. This being my first time through, and also considering I’ve never run further than 5 miles before, I ran kind of conservatively. If I could do it again I think I could have gotten under 2 hrs. It definitely helps to have a good partner that can push you and make the time go faster with conversation, thanks Doug.

In my age group (30-34), I was in the 60th percentile. In my gender, I was in the 62nd percentile. Overall, I was in the 68th percentile. (I don’t think these stats include the 300 competitive racers in the first heat.) I was hoping for a little better, but considering this was my first obstacle race and my first kind of physical endurance competition of any kind, I’m pretty happy. I showed up, met the challenge, and did better than 68% of the people there, not bad. I beat the average time by 15 minutes.

Part of the reason I wanted to do this event was to compare my new found fitness with other people’s fitness; am I really an athlete again or do I just think I am? Kind of hard to tell when you always work out alone (usually in front of the TV) and do very little athletic activity with other people. I’m pleased with my result and now I know I can push even harder. At the end of the race I felt good, maybe too good. Maybe that was just the adrenaline talking, or the elation to be done, but I felt like I could have kept going or pushed harder.

Unfortunately the Spartan Beast (the next level up) is not offered in very many locations, the nearest is Utah. Next year we may try a different local obstacle race like the Tough Mudder, might as well start a new t-shirt collection.

When I finished the race I was completely caked in mud except my face. When you cross the finish line they gave me a medal and the black t-shirt that you see in the pictures. I did not race in the black t-shirt. The mud that you see on the black t-shirt was only the mud that transferred from me to the t-shirt through incidental contact until I was able to get cleaned up, that’s how muddy I was. I thought it looked pretty darn cool, I wish the shirt was designed with that mud splatter effect.

Something to remember about Arizona, however, is that our dirt is very rocky. The mud is not smooth and silky, it’s like sand paper with tiny rough rocks in it. Next year I will definitely run with gloves to protect my hands on the obstacles. This alone probably would have saved me a couple of minutes. The most uncomfortable thing about the mud, however, is getting rocks in your shoes. By the end of the race it was starting to hurt to walk because my shoes were full of rocks and mud, fortunately most of it was conforming around my toes. But I was glad to be free of them at the end.

This has been an excellent experience and motivator for my daily work outs. I will be looking for more challenges in the future. Care to join me?

These are all the pictures I have right now, there aren’t very many cameras out on the trail. I may or may not be getting more. I’ll post again if I get any new good ones.

http://www.themoehrings.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=90184

Thanks to those who expressed concern and celebration with me,
Nate

Yearly Pics

Once again, Jessica Drew (jessicadrewphotography.com) has captured some great shots of our family. This one is my favorite, but there are lots of good ones for you to peruse.

Family pics

Hannah’s 4 Year

Benjamin’s 2 Year

First 6 weeks

I’m learning that the school around here goes in quarters. Our foster daughter missed the first quarter of this year, but got a report card for the second quarter. When I was in school we had “6 weeks”. There were 3 six weeks in the fall and 3 in the spring (with respective reporting for each one). The only reason I was reminded of that is because Hannah is on week 6 of her 36 week schedule for P4/5. :) So I guess its time for an update.

So far things have been going great. . .

Base P4/5:
- One bible verse a week and a nightly bible story reading time with daddy. We finally finished the P3/4 bible (we did Jesus Storybook bible twice before we even started this one) and have jumped into the P4/5 one.
- We have at least two Mother Goose rhymes each week. I usually find coloring pages to go with those as extra work if she needs something to do.
- She also gets at least one story from a book called “Uncle Wiggily” which is about a rabbit who can understand children and tries to help them with their problems. It is a chapter book without any pictures, so we weren’t sure how well she would do with it. She seems to like it and retain the information as I’ll ask her about the story later on and she can usually recall it. There is a board game based on this book that I might have to get her eventually. :)
- A new part of the curriculum for us is a set of workbooks called Developing the Early Learner (DEL). They are focused on four areas; auditory, visual, motor skills, and comprehension. She has gotten acceptable results in all skills so far. Every now and then we have difficulty distinguishing sounds (auditory) but not enough missed to be considered a bad result. We are almost done with the first of four books. They get progressively harder so we’ll see how it goes.
- There are also cultural stories from various other books in our reading list
- A song a week
- Reviewing the date (we look at the day of the week, month, and then date on our wall calendar and then mark it off)
- Social studies – currently consists of a story
- Science – currently consists of a story and sometimes an experiment

LAK:
- As an add on to P4/5, we’re also doing the kindergarden Language Arts. Since we started last year, we are on week 24 of 36. She already knows all of her letter sounds, but the focus of the curriculum is to do roughly one letter a week with activities surrounding that letter throughout. It also introduces her to some grammar rules and such – think punctuation, rhyming, capitalization. She ends up getting to work on her handwriting quite a bit over the week, so I’ve backed off on our Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) for now. There is an element of reading that is part of the curriculum that started in week 10, but she wasn’t quite ready for that at the time. Lately, she has been doing a much better job blending her letter sounds so that she ‘hears’ the word. I think she may be ready to add in the reading part (or we could go back and do that part later after we’ve finished the schedule).

Math:
- We got a book by Kumon that is labeled as early math for 4,5,6 yo. It’s counting and dot to dots at first and then moves into addition skills. I don’t push the math, but if she asks for it, we’ll do one or two worksheets. She is still in the counting part up to 30. This also helps us with calendar time.
- We also continue to do the 20 free questions on IXL.com if she asks to do math. She’s gotten a lot better with her coins and has mastered what they call the Pre-K skill set. I’m moving her up to the K skills and am interested to see how she does. Every now and then she pipes up when I’m working with our foster daughter on her math homework so I think she understands some of the basic concepts.

PE
- H and B are taking a movement class through Gilbert Parks and Rec. They seem to really like it so far. They get to do balance beam and tumbling and lots of jumping and running. This may be the last semester for awhile where they can be in the same class since H is turning 4.

Second Language
- I want to add in a second language element. I don’t want it to take a lot of time and might not push it very hard. I personally want to learn some more sign language and am considering ordering a set of DVDs geared toward teaching kids ASL. We have a couple girls at church that have hearing disabilities whose parents sign a lot. And Hannah seemed to pick it up very well as a baby before she started talking. I can do it with her and we can take it as slow or fast as we want. I just need to figure out where to put it in the schedule.

Wow, it sounds like a lot when I put it all down on paper, but we’re only spending about 30 to 60 min in the morning for the readings, 1 hr in the afternoon for any ‘teaching’, and then a 30 min homework time with all the kids before dinner. Give or take a little bit each day and its only 2 hrs/day. I don’t stress about it, if we miss something on a day, we just do it the next day or bleed over into the weekend if we need to.

2011 Scrapbooking

I have caught up through April 2011 (Images 01-08) on my scrapbook. We got a foster son in April last year, so that is going to bog me down as I’ll make special pages for things related to him (since I can’t post his pictures). If you wanna see our foster albums, you’ll just have to come visit!

Its Time For Some Peace Finding

You would think by the third time around that I’d be better at expecting how things are going to go and dealing with all the emotions and issues that arise when you bring a foster child/children into your home. Obviously small things change, the children are different, have different abilities, likes, dislikes, and behaviors, this time around we have two instead of one. But we spend a lot of effort on trying to DO things the same way. We make a pretty good team. We can usually tell how each of us are going to respond in most situations and can sometimes head off issues. We have habits and plans and have a fairly consistent schedule that helps the children feel safe when they get used to it. We have a standard way of disciplining and the levels we escalate through as certain things work or don’t work.

With our last placement, I found myself writing about losing my peace. The post is here. The point of the post was that I really struggle when I feel like we are in limbo, when I can’t plan my ‘more than 6 months out’ goals and activities because I don’t know if we’re going to be a family of 4 or 6, whether we’re going to be having visits with bio-mom or some adoptive family. And if you know me even a little, you know that I’ve pretty much had my whole life planned out since I was about 5. ;) I realized last time around that I had found my peace again once a decision had been made about the plans for our foster son and I then had a handle on when I could start my type-A planning tendencies again.

So . . . we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes right? Well, I’m a slow learner. I’ve been having a really difficult week with the kids and life in general and feel like I’m spiraling in situations when I’m typically fairly calm. Granted, we have been having some behavior that isn’t very fun, but its really not anything we can’t handle. I’ve been tense and not sleeping very well and overall what I will call “peaceless”. After being grumpy about being grumpy for a little while, I got tired of that and did some soul searching. I discovered that my “peacelessness” started around the time of our most recent hearing for the girls. The result of the hearing was basically a delay in the decision making process for various reasons of which some have merit. Of course, this messes with the way Becca wants things to go. Becca was hoping that we would be able to transition the girls over the summer, but before next school year. With the delay in the process, that is still a possibility, but unlikely. While we were looking for a longer placement, we weren’t really thinking that long. Hehe. Isn’t God faithful? Now, stubborn, type-A, planner extraordinaire has to let go of some things that she wanted to do this year AND we still don’t really have a timeline. AAAAHHHH!

I had been sitting on this post for a couple days, I think waiting for some confirmation from God. This morning’s sermon was good for me. I needed to be reminded of God’s love and provision for us and how we should use our resources for his glory. So, in order to survive until the next hearing (where hopefully some decision making will occur) I need to find my peace again.
- I need to grieve the plans that I had laid out for 2012 that will not be realized. (Sometimes that selfishness really rears its ugly head.) The foster kids were a goal for this year, but now I have to move them up in priority to be a larger part of my plan – which I probably should have done to begin with. I believe that we are doing what God wants us to be doing and have to trust him to realize some of my wants next year or show me why those wants weren’t the best for me.
- I need to switch from a sprint to a long distance run. I don’t think that this will actually change the way we are doing anything specifically. I think its just something I needed to say. It will be interesting to see more of the process and be in it for a little longer than we have been. We continue to pray for reunification for mom and if I really believe that is what I want to happen, I need to accept that it may take awhile to get her life turned around. If we get to be a part of that redemption, it will be worth putting some of my selfish plans on hold.

At least this time, I realized it after about a week instead of a couple months. :) Maybe I’m making progress after all.

100% German

Well, its official, I’ve sullied the blood of my children. . . :)

I finished researching Nate’s ancestry to the immigrant ancestor to America. Most of his tree is really shallow, a lot of his ancestors immigrated about 3 or 4 generations ago. There was one line that was giving me trouble, but I found some information recently and believe I’ve got back to the immigrant ancestors on that line too. That part of his tree is the farthest back in time and he has two great grandfathers on that line that served in the Revolutionary war. So now I can say without much hesitation that Nate is 100% German. (I’m a mutt!)

I had created a photo album of all my research for the members of his family back in 2007 (before Hannah was born). Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of new info from Nate’s aunt (and another distant relative) and got the rest of the info on Ancestry.com. So, I updated our copy of the album except for the last little bit I just found out. After I get that part updated, his book will be officially ‘finished’ and I’ll be in a maintenance mode with regards to his tree. Which basically means, I’ll monitor my tree on Ancestry and see if anyone links to any of the records or photos I use and then I’ll check if they have any new data that I didn’t have and update accordingly.

Woohoo! It feels good to accomplish something. Since his tree is a lot shallower than mine, I’ve still got a lot of work to do. But I have a lot more research help on my side from some other genealogists who did my maternal grandpa and grandma’s lines. My dad’s side is a little harder, but Ancestry is helping out.

humbled by your support

We are so lucky to have a wonderful foster care support network.  So far in 2012 I feel like we have been showered with gifts from friends and family near and far, who want to support us in our ministry.   Everything from toys, clothes, food, money, babysitting, interacting with our kids, love, and prayers, we covet your prayers.

On my way home from church today I was humbled to tears that 3 different people stopped me and really wanted to know how we were doing and if there was anything they could do.  Their sincere expression of warmth and concern means so much to me, even if I am unable to find a direct way to plug them into our ministry.  Knowing that they are praying for our family is huge.

To God be the glory,

Nate

Lamby has been Retired

After more than 4 years of guarding Hannah’s dreams and soothing her owies . . . he has been replaced. :( I think he found a pretty good place to hang out though.

Yep, we’re related

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  • The Moehrings

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Blog

God gives good hugs

     February 17, 2012
   By: Nate

Super Spartan Race – been there, done that, got the t-shirt

     February 12, 2012
   By: Nate

Yearly Pics

     February 7, 2012
   By: Rebecca