Children

What Shall I tell you about today, then?

First I have to say how good church was yesterday. The Holy Spirit was undeniably present - not in terms of charismatic phenomena (that was last week) but in terms of people meeting God and moving on. Not least the Vicar, who preached a very relevant sermon from Acts ch2 - again not about the supernatural apects but about how the disciples were 'all together' - spot on for our church which has not been entirely harmonious for the last 24 months. But his sermon showed his deep passion for the church to be God's church, doing God s will. His closing words were "are you an institutional christian, or a New Testament Christian?". Not long ago he would have been burned at the stake for speaking those words from an Anglican pulpit. It is very exciting to see God at work.

Now all that fits into the theme of this blog - God making an adventure out of ordinary things - but I'm getting ahead of myself becasue I wanted to catch up on what God has done for me in the past before making it more of a contemporary record as I go along.

Today I want to talk about children.

As a young man I was never really enamoured with the idea of children. Ii suppose it comes from a day when as a 17 year-old my lunch breaks in the prefects' common room were disturbed by small boys screaming shrilly and jostling for places in the refectory queue just outside. At this stage too I was cringeingly embarrassed to be seen pushing my new neice in her pram in the street - that was 'woman's work'. Anything to do with babies was for girls.

But we have a God who likes to change people, don't we?

As I got to know my future fiance, I learned very quickly that her gifting lies in children. She was a qualified teacher working at a local primary school. She was keen on the children's work in the church. But more importantly, she was desperate to be a motehr in her own right, not just of one or two, but of a large family.

I was not one to argue with God about this - I was sure that she was the one for me. If she wanted children, it was down to me to change. We agreed that we would go for either 4 or 6 children. We knew that we could not afford any children, let alone a big faily. But we took the view that if we waited till we could afford it we would nver do it. Anyway, we felt that this was what the Lord wanted for us. Not necessarily for everyone, but certainly for us.

We got on with it as soon as we were married, and our first boy was born the next year. 22 moths later boy number 2, and after another 16 months boy number 3. All along we had been wanting a girl - not that we didn't want boys but we definately wanted a girl. The doctors advised that we would probably continue having boys. So we prayed desperately that the next would be female. In fact my wife made a vow - that she would actually manage a quiet time everyday until the scan, to reinforce her prayers. So she locked herself in the toilet - the only quiet place with three young boys in the house - and diligently studied the Bible and prayed every day.

Then came the day of the scan. We had never asked the gender before, but this time we did, and although the health service will never say anything too definite in case they get it wrong, we had done our homework and could see clearly in the image that this was indeed the girl we had prayed for.

Afterwards we embraced and cried with joy - God had heard our prayers. The adventure continued.

I'll carry on with this tomorrow - but must go now to my workplace Christian Fellowship.

Tara for now.