Community!

December 6th: How do you want get involved in your community this year?

Well, this is a question I honestly haven't put a TON of thought into, but  I'll give it a shot.  I mean, this is the first year in a very long time that we don't have any HUGE (like uh, new baby in the house type) plans for the year.  Which means, theoretically if the 3 children in my care give me a bit of free time I guess this would be a possibility.

Truly, I think community involvement is important.  If all goes well, I would love to get more consistent at going to church, but the only reason this is inconsistent is because the odds of all children being 100% healthy on any given Sunday is pretty much a miracle in itself this winter.  Our church does some pretty cool things for our community and getting more involved with that, would be good.  One very easy opportunity I would like to see myself get involved in is filling yellow bags full of groceries.  It is a pretty simple task.  The yellow bags hang by the front door of the church.  You grab one when you leave, you take it home and fill it with food, bring it back and set it by the front door.  Members of the church take these bags of food, go into different parts of the community and knock on doors, asking families if they could use some groceries and hand them out.  This would be a pretty simple way to help out just a little bit.  Ideally, I would love to fill one bag every month in the coming year.

I look at community as a very broad term.  I really hope this coming year see's one of us off to Ethiopia on a mission trip.  This is something on both of our hearts, but it is a lot harder for me to take that leap. Ideally, it would be wonderful for Peter to get a chance to serve in this way this year, just because trying to coordinate the schedule of our 3 children while I am gone for 2 weeks sounds very difficult.  However, you just never know and it may be me facing my fears and hopping back on that plane by year end :)  Serving on mission trips is something that is very important to us and we especially feel strongly that we need to serve the people of Ethiopia.  In the years to come, I think it would be awesome if we rotated years and one of us was in Ethiopia each year!  

Another area of community involvement on our minds and hearts is foster care.  Now, before I jump any guns here I will say this is an area that we have been praying about and have not felt the Lord saying "yes, move!" but we keep listening and you just never know.  Foster care is so important but in the research I have done it also sounds like it would be a heart wrenching calling.  Of course my heart is already feeling very led towards another adoption, but I doubt we will be in a position to move forward on that in 2013, so helping children in need through foster care could be a great opportunity to make a difference even if it is just short term care.  My heart and passion is definitely with babies and children, and I want to continue to use that passion to the absolute most that God will allow!