Ah, the start of another school year!

Well, here we go again. I'm off to the races for my 9th year of teaching starting tomorrow, August 11th. It's hard to believe that I will be starting my 7th year at Liberty Common School. Before that I was at Falcon Elementary, near Colorado Springs, for two years. As we are in the continuous wait for our adoption I find myself wondering how I plan for this school year in which I don't know when I will get that phone call to say that our certified adoption invitation letter is arriving soon and we need to round up $3000 "on the fly" to fly! I've really struggled this Summer with worry about whom I will find to sub for me for almost four weeks. This has been an interesting Summer for me. We have owned our new home for almost six months now and it still doesn't seem real. I've had more than my share of thoughts over the past few months as to if we made the right choice to move. My private lessons total has been significantly down this Summer, making things very tight. Buying new things for our home has also made our bills a bit higher than I wanted them to be. I've spent much of this Summer landscaping and mowing around our new home, trying to do as much myself, so as to save some money. However, it has taken its toll on me physically, at times this Summer. About four years ago I contracted ParvoVirus B-19, more commonly known as Fifth's Disease, from someone at my school. It is a very contagious disease at first, and more commonly affects children. When an adult gets it, the pain is excruciating and very arthritic, along with a very hot, sunburn-like rash. (...and no, it's not the same as Puppy Parvo, as I often get asked. :-) ). Unfortunately, the symptoms have a tendency to flare up when I get overworked or overheated, as I did last Friday. I spent 7 and 1/2 half hours digging out a portion of dirt near our house and putting in 37 cubic feet of new topsoil by myself. This area had created a negative drainage against the house and needed to be fixed. Also, it was choked with bindweed and thatch. In addition to this I spent over an hour mowing. Even though I thought I was drinking enough water, I became very overheated and had a flare-up of the symptoms over the weekend. I was miserable and had trouble walking for a while. Thankfully, I'm doing better this evening. On the positive side, I have been able to ride my bike more this Summer and I'm losing significant weight; a life-long battle for me.

In the midst of all of this, I'm counting my blessings even more this evening and reminiscing about how God has brought so many wonderful people into my life over the years. After a very painful Saturday, I discovered when I checked my Facebook page in the evening that the 23-year-old son of very dear friends in Tucson, Arizona died in a motorcycle accident on August 3rd. It was incredibly shocking, as I knew him very well and he was one of the students in the church children's choir that I helped direct. The last time I saw him he was about 12-years-old and I never would have imagined that he wouldn't live a longer life. I've been on the edge of tears several times today and I'm actually having a slight crisis of faith. I don't know how to pray anymore for our adoption wait and our finances. I've never been a very patient person and it's a struggle for me to keep persisting in prayer. Strangely enough, the message at our church today was about the parable of the persistent widow and the judge. The parable encourages us to persevere in prayer, because God will bring about justice in His time. I wish it was easy for me, but God knows me better than I know myself. I'm thankful He loves me even though I don't have the strong spiritual gift of faith. I'm glad that I'm saved by faith alone in Christ's death on the cross for me, and not for ongoing works to prove myself, or by mustard-seed faith. I wish I could visit my friends in Tucson and grieve with them and encourage them. However, I know that my prayers and tears here are lifting them up to God's grace. The picture attached to this entry is from when I performed the role of Psalty the Singing Songbook at First Evangelical Free Church in Tucson. It was a Mother's Day performance from 1995. I believe that the boy, Josh, that died this week is partially blocked behind me. I remember all of the kids in the picture like it was yesterday. However, almost every one of them in this picture are now in their early twenties. Some are even married!

Thank you for your support of us during this time of waiting. As you can tell from Chandra's entry before this, sometimes people ask questions about our adoption that are hard to answer, and sometimes rub the wrong way. In our consumeristic American society it is very hard to understand waiting long for anything, especially for anything that approaches two years. It's an important reminder that our society isn't the norm for most of the rest of the world. We continually covet your prayers for each new day!

Jay :-)