hospitality

Here's a link to a short post I saw on the Girltalk blog (which I LOVE). It has a great view on hospitality, helping me to see that it is a responsibility for all believers. I believe that hospitality can be one of the primary ways to bring others to Christ, by inviting people into your home and showing them first-hand what it is to be a Christian. They can watch you with your kids and with your husband (hopefully, it's a good example you are setting - ha!) and wonder how they can get a home like yours. What they will see is not YOU, but the Spirit of God IN you, and it will be desirous. Hope this makes you think, like it did me, about a way you can be hospitable. Why not start with a neighbor with whom you don't feel that you have much in common besides both of you being mothers? You never know! =) I loved the section that emphasizes that we don't all have the same way of showing hospitality. It will be varied based on "God's varied grace." That takes a lot of the pressure away, knowing that MY way of showing hospitality doesn't have to look like the way others show it. It can be original to me.

Summertime 2009

I have been very lacking in my updating, so I thought I could make up for it in one post. We continue to travel just about every weekend, raising support for our future ministry in Romania. We are so blessed to have family living nearby and love to celebrate all the birthdays and other holidays with them. Here's just a few pictures showing how the summer is going and how the kids are growing...

We took about a week and dug up new flower beds and planted flowers here at the house where we live with Mom and Dad. It was a lot of work, but it looks SO pretty!

At the end of May we celebrated Kara's birthday....TWO YEARS OLD!! We had a party here in Bellefonte...

You can't see it too well, but I found this cute cake online (just jelly beans for the rainbow and white mini marshmallows for the clouds) =)

...and then one in Mechanicsburg a few days later (with Trav's family).

We found these hats in a missionary closet on our travels! Cute! =)