Five Minute Story

As promised, here is the five minute story I wrote for Herman Haan's classes this past week. I hope you enjoy!

Three Spiritual Lessons I Learned While Expecting Dezmond

Pregnancy is a tough thing to go through and for me it brought me closer to God. It was hard mentally, physically and spiritually and I had to rely wholy on God to get me through. In everything I journeyed through there were three main lessons that I learned.

Number 1: Total Surrender to God

Around the time that I was due, I had heard of a lot of babies that had died either during delivery, after they were born or they were stillborn. It made me realize that this baby wasn't my own, it was a gift for as long as God desired. You can do all the testing in the world (of which we chose to do none) but ultimately, this baby is God's creation and His child. Also, I did nothing. I ate, I drank, I exercised. I was completely surrendered to the process of growing a human being inside my body.

Number 2: My Body is Not My Own

I made a choice during pregnancy to give up certain things that I ate or did for the health and safety of our baby. I did all these things with JOY because I knew that it was the right thing to do and I knew that the end results were worth it. I made this correlation: Why would anyone go and live in a mud hut in Africa or move to India for the sake of Christ? Because we make a choice. A choice to give up comforts, electricity and safety among other things for the benefit of Christ and it is a JOY to do these things because of the hope we have in Christ. We know the blessings that doing these things will bring to our lives - giving up my body for the sake of my child, or giving up our bodies for the sake of Christ.

Number 3: Christ on the Cross

God gave up his ONE and ONLY son. I have only one son and the ferocity with which I would protect him is frightening. Being a parent lets you see deep into the Father-heart of God, to imagine His pain as he gave up His son BUT He did so, so that many more of His children could have life and freedom in Him.  

From this I take with me every day these three lessons. I remain surrendered to God - whether it's for one minute, nine months or 89 years, the safest place to be is in the middle of God's will. I am still learning that my body is not my own by every day choosing to say yes to God and choosing to give up things that entangle and ensnare me. Looking at Dezmond every day reminds me that Christ not only died for me but for him as well, and that he has a brilliantly bright future relationship with his Father just waiting for him!

We have to apologize for the lack of consistent blogging. It's something we're working on and will hopefully correct soon!

This week our speaker is Herman Haan. The topic is homiletics and media...whatever that means. No seriously though, homiletics is the study of the composition and delivery of a sermon or other religious discourse. And as boring as that sounds, this week has been our personal favourite week up until now. And I'm pretty sure he didn't teach us anything about homiletics!

Herman has an amazing story. He is from the Netherlands and was a hippy and a junky back in the day, living on the streets and searching for God until one day, he heard a group singing and playing music. He wandered up and asked what they were all about and a woman lead him to Christ. Six months later they were married! He has since been a pastor, started a Bible school and now he works at a Dutch Christian television station, producing shows, starring in shows and going around the world to make award-winning Christian documentaries. He is also in a band that has several award-winning albums out (in the Netherlands).

What Herman has been teaching this week is on how to bring out our creativity in whatever form that comes out. He had us write five minute short stories (mine I'll share in a post very shortly) with a frame (intro, what, why, how and conclusion) and he had us write creative life stories (which I think we might share also in another post) which we will be reading in class tomorrow.

Every afternoon Herman showed us one of his documentaries. Now, these are extremely crazy, hard-edged documentaries but they were amazing! The first one was titled "Playmate Becomes Mother Theresa" - which was about a playboy playmate who turned her life to Christ and has since been working in Haiti opening orphanages, schools and health facilities for children who are abandoned by their parents. The love she showed these abandoned, sometimes handi-capped, left-to-die children was incredible. The second documentary was titled "The Pimp and the Prostitute" - about a pimp and a prostitute who fell in love, came to Christ and then were married and are now reaching out to other pimps and prostitutes. One line the former prostitute says is that she is so grateful to God for putting her through that so that she can now go and help others who were like her. She said it was the best job ever to help those who are caught in that life. Amazing!! The documentary we watched today was "Murdered on their Wedding Night" about a man and woman who were married for ten hours before robbers broke into their honeymoon suite and murdered him! The documentary was filmed only three months after this happened and already the widow and her husband's family were full of forgiveness. The man's father stated that he would never let a tragic situation like this ruin his relationship with his heavenly Father and that God is good. The widow also spoke only of forgiveness for the men who did that to her husband. INCREDIBLE!! These rough, tough, UGLY stories of faith were so inspiring and gut-wrenching but so full of God's love and so full of God's grace.

Only one more day with Herman and I'm sad this week is done! I feel so impacted by what he's taught us and he didn't even really "teach" - he was so relaxed and so open during classes - playing us songs that he's written, having fun fake interviews to teach us interviewing skills, sharing our stories. This is the reason we're here - to be impacted, to provoke change in our lives, to learn that it's good to be us the way God made us, and to rejoice in our good, good God.

Prayer/Praise

Praise:
*We have another person living in our house!!!! Thanks to Steve's sister who got a friend to come live with her! This takes some of the worry of her being there alone as well as a little more of the financial side of things off of us for the coming months!
*Steve had a stomach flu this past week and neither Dez or I got it! He is feeling much better and only missed one day of classes ( the stomach flu wasn't the praise, me and Dez avoiding it was!!).
*Classes have been going well for me (Jo) whether I'm listening in on the baby monitor or actually able to sit in class. I'm excited to be learning and participating even though there are still tough spots along the way.

Prayer:
*Never-ending sickness. I am suffering from my third cold since arriving (in one month) and Dez is coughing more again as well. Steve has also had his third sickness already and isn't ready to fight a fourth. It's getting very frustrating to be sick over and over again so pray for healing for GOOD and ridiculously built-up immune systems!

Thanks to everyone who reads our blog and prays for us continually!