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...continued from last time.... ....well, there we were....homeless (without insurance)...... i'm not sure how to continue... we stayed at my in-laws' house (james' dad and step-mom) for a couple of days until we could find someplace to stay longer-term. my memories are kind of broken from this point. i can't really remember what happened in which order, but i do remember that my aunt and uncle in conroe offered for us to stay in their spare bedroom for a couple of months, and we moved in on January 1, 2001. i also remember going back to the site of our house and digging through the ashes. we found bits of things that we recognized. we found our wedding picture completely undamaged (that was God.) we found my childhood stuffed animals and pictures that had been protected under a fire-retardant feather bed james' mother had given us. we found enough bits and pieces and some dishes i thought i could salvage to halfway fill our trunk. we didn't find the cats. w

It's a good life... For anyone who's interested, here's a snippet...life in Beth's world...and an abbreviated (or not so abbreviated) autobiography of the last decade. I've now been married for seven years....to well, my perfect match from God. It took a long time, but we're finally, wonderfully moving as a team and following God together. It's a truly wonderful thing! We moved back to Texas on oct 31 1999. We had barely been married a year; we were about to get evicted from an expensive apartment that we couldn't afford anymore (a few bad choices), and we stuffed everything that would fit in our buick lesabre and drove....less than $300.00 in our pockets home to Texas. On the way, at a gas station in Texarkana, i lost our only set of car keys by flushing them down the toilet...on accident of course...so that was a small set back. Finally we arrived in Evergreen Texas on i think november 2...we stayed in a trailer on my in-laws' property for a fe

Bedstejoy said that she doesn't know how i burn the candle at both ends. 8) This is it. When you wait upon the Lord, He will renew your strength. I just rest in Him; it's His candles that are burning; my resources are not what's being used up; His resources provide everything needed. In the picture, it looks like the candles are about to be all gone, but what you don't see is that when you rest in the Lord, the candles grow; they are never used up. i told my friend yesterday, who was about to go in for the sixth day at work this week to complete about 80 hours and was very tired--that i love the moment when we think we can't go on, but we go on anyway...because that's the moment in which God provides strength and shows us Him Self in supernatural ways and allows us to complete the task at hand. Praise the Lord. That's why i'm a happy clam. 8)

Yesterday, in court, my heart wept as i listened to the honest testimony of an almost 17-year old girl who defended herself before the judge in tears, saying, "no one has ever talked to me about that!"--meaning purity and sexual relationships. She testified instead that she was born to a relationship outside of marriage, she became sexually active when she was 12, and her mother got her on birth control when she was 13. What appeared a hard girl at first, wept bitterly when confronted with the morality of her actions. Often, you don't know who to believe in court. People lie so very often. But as i listened, i knew she was telling the truth...not that it was a good excuse, but... her mother talked to her---about not getting pregnant. And the reason it didn't cross her mother's mind to talk to her about purity or abstinence is that her mother has never understood those things either. So pray for a family i cannot name--that God will intervene... My heart weeps

...A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity