Last month my mom and sister gave me another baby shower in Virginia. It was such a thrill to be with family I hadn’t seen in a long time. My aunt and uncle with two of their girls came and oh how they have grown. There were some people I hadn’t seen in a while and it was good to hear some stories of their labor/deliveries. I will leave some pictures up, but all of the time and effort that both my mom, sister and grandmother put in was very much appreciated (thanks for the chocolate covered strawberries ;0)). All of the pictures you can see at picasa. :0)

I was hoping grandma didn’t stick me with the needle. :0)

Adrienne diligently helping and how excited I was about this wonderful gift!

Mom and grandma setting up. Check out the cool diaper cake mom made (Adrienne says it was her idea) :0).

Zack took me on a great birthday weekend to Wrightsville beach! It was a good chance for us to get away as husband and wife before our little bundle comes. It both reminded us of our anniversary being at the beach. He took me to a nice restaurant close to the beach called Boca Bay (thanks to a recommendation from a friend of ours) and we had some good seafood. Before we had left our house our water heater had broken so we were thankful for some hot showers when we were at the hotel. When we got back to our house the water heater was still broken. Today it was fixed with just switching out a broken circuit breaker (we’re so glad it wasn’t worse). During the time we didn’t have hot water my husband was gracious enough to boil some hot water on the stove so we could at least take a bath while we waited for hot water.

I had my doctor’s appointment yesterday and our son is head down (great position), my blood pressure was normal and his heart beat was good (146 which is normal). They also checked to see if I was dialated at all and the doctor said that my cervix is still closed but from now until my due date I have a doctor’s appointment every week. So we’ll keep y’all in the loop, but we’re thrilled to meet our son. Thank you Lord for all of your gifts that you give us. :0)

If you found this post, you found the new “TheRieslands.com”.

As you can see, there are lots of changes under way, but there is also a good bit of cleanup left to do. So please check back soon as I take some time to get this looking good!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Ja2mrdadE

Did you hear about the new Olympic sport? It’s called ‘Slap Face’. Check it out…

On Saturday Aug. 2 we arrived at our house and were greeted by all of our hosts and I walked into a mountain of presents and I was thinking our lil “peanut” is already spoiled. It was incredible to see the amount of outpouring from friends and family. Zack and I were truly blessed to be apart of such a family of love and generosity. The guests poured in and we ended up just talking and fellowshipping for the first hour and then proceeded to pray and then eat. There was an array of fruit and veggies and some quiche and other goodies to go along with it. After eating we played some fun games. The first was a word scramble that had to do with babies/baby items/things for mom. I did absolutely horrible at it because I was running on little sleep. The other games we had was put the diaper on the baby and then the candy bar game (which I enjoyed the best). In 8 separate diapers the girls put a type of candy bar and melted it in the microwave. Our job…to figure out by smelling what the type of candy bar it was. It looked worse than anything else.

It was fun memories for me because I got to see some friends I hadn’t seen since we got married and others it had been almost a year. So now our nursery has some furniture a ton of clothes and the floor is covered with gifts. Praise the Lord for all of His blessings.

This is what this blog is all about, as of 8/5/08…

The author basically says what everyone else has been saying.

I really want to see this movie, but it sounds downright troubling.

Anybody got some feedback for me?

He was really excited because this is the first wekk in at least four years when he feels comfortable leaving his wife and kids at home while he goes out to do something.

Hmmm…

Kind of puts my day in perspective…

For the first time in a while, I’m making some time to write something somewhat meaningful here.

It’s strange. Although these past couple of weeks have had me busier than ever (lots of driving back and forth between Greensboro and Creedmoor and working really hard to get up to speed at work, plus focussing a little bit more on church stuff), I seem to be experiencing more clarity than I have in a while.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just ’cause of the John Mayer song. Actually, I hope not. (Isn’t the point of that song that as soon as you realize that you’re having a moment of clarity it’s too late, because that realization will take away the clarity?)

But I digress…

To be honest, it’s not nearly that complicated. I think the bottom line is that I’ve had at least 2 1/2 hours a day to sit in a car and think and listen to some fantastic teaching from guys like Mark Driscoll and Francis Chan. And at least equally importantly, God has been doing some amazing things in Stephanie’s life too. She might not even realize it, but she’s more beautiful than ever — in every way. I feel more encouraged and supported than ever, and that makes more difference than any woman will ever understand.

So, all that rambling because I want to ask for some feedback. I had a rare moment this week when a Bible story became completely new to me — the meaning and value for my life right now came through in a way it never has before.

In our ‘Spiritual Gifts’ Bible study that our men’s group is studying through at work, the author makes a point using the life of Moses, and he focusses specifically on the story from early in Moses’ life where he kills the Egyptian. The author challenged me to consider the question: “Why did Moses kill the Egyptian?”

It seems like a simple enough question, but the answer is powerful for me: I think Moses killed him because he was beginning to get a grip on God’s calling for his life. God put in Moses’ heart a burden for His people. Moses felt God’s compassion and righteous anger towards the conditions of the Israelites.

And before he probably realized that God had put this in his heart, and certainly before he consulted God about it, he did something rash and chalked it up to passion.

The result: a man died, and Moses spent 40 years hiding out in the wilderness.

And I got to thinking: Did it really have to be that way? If Moses had realized that his passion came from God, and asked God for direction on how to act, and then waited, could it have played out better? What if God was ready and willing to lead the people out in 1 year? What if those 40 extra years of toil and death that God’s people experienced weren’t necessary?

But then again, God is sovereign. Someone in our discussion put it this way: What if God planned for everything to happen just the way it did? What if He wanted Moses to go out to the wilderness so that He could mold him into the redeemer of His people that He wanted him to be?

This definitely seems reasonable. Think about all the people who spent time in the wilderness before God really fulfilled His calling in their lives. There’s Moses, David, Paul, John the Baptist… even Jesus it seems to some extent.

So all that leaves me in a funny place because I have such an overwhelming passion for God’s church. I seriously feel the Gospel like fire in my bones and everything in me screams to give my whole life to see the world changed by the Gospel. I want to spend my life being poured out for the Bride of Christ in America until She is a true reflection of Him, and truly cares about His bride around the world. And I try to wrap my head around the story about Moses, and how God seems to send His servants into long seasons of waiting where He prepares them, and I try to think about how that applies to me, and I just don’t know what to take away.

In the sermon I listened to this morning from Francis Chan, he said that in Uganda alone (I think — that part wasn’t clear), 43,000 children are orphaned every day, and 29,000 orphans die every day.

Every day.

Part of me fights God about that.

“What can You teach me in 5 or 10 years that is worth so many wasted lives?”

I know. It’s an audacious question to ask the Creator. I ask it respectfully. I know that I have so much to learn that I don’t even know how much I have to learn.

But what’s the balance in the meantime? How do I stir up the passions God has put in me and take full advantage of what’s available for me to do in THIS season, while simultaneously resting in God’s sovereignty and just waiting for His leadership?

I guess I already know what I would tell someone if they asked me those questions… but all the same, what do you think?

I have to tell this cute story though before I sign off. I was hanging out with some friends of mine and their kids and all of the girls and I were sitting on the couch (they are all around the age of 8 or 9). Well this one girl was grilling me with the usual questions: when are you due, have you picked out any names? I told her I had lots of time because the baby wasn’t coming until November, to which she replied really? You don’t look it. I thought you were going to have the baby a lot sooner because your tummy looks really big. She continued with “my mom’s friends stomach is a lot smaller”. If I was having one of my pregnant emotional days I would have burst into tears and been really upset, but I got a kick out of it and it made me giggle. Out of the mouths of babes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX8YY1ESlW4

Here’s a video I made to show at church this past week.

You can read more about what’s happening in it here.

The kind where, out of five stars, it gets one finger up.

The kind where, on a scale of one to ten, it’s like a punch in the face.

So I got in the car today, and I had a text message from one of my best friends, “Call me as soon as you can.”

So I called him.

“Hey man, what can I do for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“God has really put you on my heart today, so I was wondering if I could do something for you.”

So I whined about how much my day sucked.

And he prayed for me.

And that’s how the Kingdom works…

I was working like a dog at the time, and fully expecting to get a raise that I was up for in December. At our company, raises will often come a couple of months late, but they’re usually retroactive to whenever you were eligible. So when I sat down in my manager’s office in March, I was expecting to get a good raise that would be retroactive to mid-December. Or in other words, I thought for sure that God would use this to help us pay our tax debt by the looming deadline.
But that’s not what happened.

I got the raise I expected, but my manager told me that it wouldn’t be retroactive. I was kind of puzzled, and I asked if I was being punished for something. He said that I wasn’t. That I was doing a great job, and something along the lines of “this is just how we’re doing it.”
That left me pretty discouraged.
So we put our tax debt on a credit card. So much for paying that thing down…

And then my brakes went out. So I put those on the credit card.
And then our home owner’s association dues came. Can’t pay those on a credit card, so I paid some other bills on a credit card so we could write a check for that.

And I started to carry some serious anxiety, and thought that surely if I trusted the Lord through this and was obedient He would come through in some supernatural way.

That’s about the time we got a bill for our baby. No, you’re right — the baby hasn’t been born yet. It was actually only 10 weeks in the womb when we got our bill. The doctor’s office informed us that they had negotiated with our insurance, and our portion of the cost would be about $2,000. We could feel free to bring it to our next appointment in 2 weeks.

At this point, I was pretty discouraged.

I was more than discouraged.

I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders.

1/3 of the year down, and we have spent more than we’ve made just about every week. Way to go, Zack. Don’t you deserve the ‘Provider of the Year’ award…

Then May rolled around. I got an extra paycheck in May, because I get payed every two weeks, which means that I get two paychecks a year that don’t fall into the ‘twice a month’ pattern.

Then, a week later, we got our tax rebate check.

Just like that, $3,000 that our budget wasn’t counting on. And God gave us some room to breathe.

But that’s not all that happened.

I got a call from a recruiter who asked me if I was interested in a job. This is important because I didn’t apply for anything (except a couple spots at SAS, but that’s another story). I didn’t put my resume on anything but this blog right here. Not on Monster or JobFinder or anything else.

He couldn’t explain where he got my resume except that it turned up in his database.

As it turned out, the position he described was a somewhat unstable, contractor position that seemed like a bad idea with a baby coming.

So I turned it down.

And asked God to stop teasing me.

But then he called back and asked if I would be interested in taking the same position as a full-time salary position. Good pay, but I’d have to commute to Greensboro.

Gas is $4 a gallon. And I have a baby coming.

“No thanks.” Hang up. “God, please stop teasing me!”

A week goes by and he calls back again. “What if you could have the same job, but work from Raleigh?”

So I drove all the way to Greensboro to interview… for 4 hours.

Came home, and waited for the call.

For three weeks.

“God, this really isn’t funny. I’ll gladly keep the situation I’m in, but please stop teasing me.”

But He wasn’t. The call came last week.

To be continued…

Got this in my inbox today.

I heard this on the radio a couple of days ago and I was like, “That sounds like Chris Tomlin… but I don’t know this song.”

It made me happy :0)

You can download the song on iTunes or Amazon.com.

Did you hear it yet? What did you think?