As Shane said, it has been a while since our last posts. Things have been rather busy since our return from Alberta. I have had to juggle midwife appointments, OB appointments and ultrasound appointments. I am very thankful for the families at church who have been volunteering to watch my boys during these appointments. I don’t know what I would do without them. They have been a real blessing!

The ultrasounds I have to have every two weeks because the twins are identicals. The risk with identicals is that they share the same placenta and therefore might suddenly decide not to share nutrients. If that is the case, one twin will thrive while the other struggles to grow. Because of this risk, they watch them close to make sure they are growing appropriately. So far so good! They are measuring right on track and are currently only 3 oz apart, although the OB feels they were closer but couldn’t get very good measurements because of how active they are. At 22 weeks, they “weigh in” at 14oz and 1lb 2oz.

While I have been working on all these appointments, we had to prepare for Shane’s family coming to town for his graduation and his sermon. It was a big weekend and it took its toll on me with all the late nights out with family.

I’ve also been working on getting the house ready to put up for sale. We won’t be listing until much later but given that in another month I most likely will not be able to do many home repairs, now is the time. I’ve been painting various rooms around the house and some outdoor painting as well. There is so much to do and so little time. Knowing that by June I won’t be able to do anything and then most likely will not be able to get back to working on it until September/October when the twins finally settle in, I have lost a lot of nice weather opportunity to get things done.

I am still homeschooling the older two boys. Dylan is working on his grade 3 material while I have Lyndan doing grade 1 work when this would be his Kindergarten year. It has been a challenge to keep them motivated and focused this year but I think we have reached an understanding and they are doing well and accomplishing a lot. Aydan is doing some pre-K/K material when he wants to be like his older brothers and Dannan has learned how to walk.

And that, is our family update.

Wow, it has been far too long since I updated this blog!  I am embarrassed, because it is meant to be an almost daily journal of our journey to the unthinkable: to plant a church for Jesus in Medicine Hat.  It is hard for people to read along when we aren’t writing!

So here is an update: I plead excuses because (if you have been keeping up on Twitter or Facebook) you know that last weekend I had a bit of a double-whammy: I graduated from ACTS Seminaries with a Master of Arts in Christian Studies, and the following Sunday I preached my third sermon ever at Community of Hope.

The graduation ceremony went very smoothly.  Having 6 Seminaries working together is great while you are going there because the interplay between denominations and the collegial environment despite distinctive approaches to theology, life and practice makes for a very rich experience.    However, graduation ceremonies are a bit of a bear because legally, conferment of your degree only happens when the representative of said body says the “magic words” so we had to listen to the legalese from each Seminary AND from Trinity Western Univeristy who simultaneously grants the degrees to all graduands.

I was surprisingly calm all things considered.  If this had been the only thing I had to worry about that weekend, then I might have been more nervous.  But as it was with Sunday looming in my mind this seemed to be a cakewalk.

Thursday night my parents rolled into town (one day early), and we had dinner at the restaurant attached to their hotel.  I had Friday off, and Grandma and Grandpa Edwards pulled up around noon, so we had them over that afternoon, and had a big Chinese Food feast that night with them and my aunt and uncle: my Dad’s twin brother at our place.  That was a good party.

Saturday I had to head to the venue for the graduation by 10am, and we were out there until 3pm.  It was good to be finally finished, and I did get to touch base with the two professors that I wanted to speak to the most: Bruce Guenther, the History professor who I was Teacher Assistant for on my first go-round, and also Kent Anderson, professor of Homiletics, who was my faculty advisor at Northwest Baptist College in 1997, and advised me because I had taken a lot of college (at different colleges) that I would actually be eligible for Seminary.  If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have graduated today.  Of course, he did not recall that at all.. but then again at that time I was just another college student 23 year old, and strangely, I have never gotten around to taking any of his classes.

Saturday night we had a bigger family dinner at the restaurant again, with all the kids there and with my Uncle Paul, Aunt Sonya and two of their three teenage girls, as well as Dad’s bother and his wife, and Grandma and Grandpa.  It was a lot of fun, and I received some gifts for graduating which were a surprise , and very welcome.

Sunday I was to preach.  Pastor Philip had taken half the church to Goldendale, WA for the Northwest District Grace Brethren Conference, but the other half – some 50 people, were still coming.  I spoke about the “Calling of God” (go ahead and listen here), and actually came in fairly short – only 25 minutes was my message.  I feel like I started off a little scattered but settled down ad feel like I did pretty well – especially since this was my first time preaching in front of family – my parents and my grandparents stayed to watch me.

So obviously, such a weekend took some time to come down from.  That’s my excuse for not writing anything in this space for a couple of weeks.  What are we up to now?  Well, I am going to start picking away at either a rewrite of the “Attitude of Hope” membership class, or an entirely new version that will become the beginnings of a vision and mission framework for our church in Alberta.  I am going to be teaching our Discovery class for 7 weeks starting in May, to introduce some people to the truth about Jesus in preparation for membership.  We also have our “Great Canadian Adventure” coming up in mid-June, and Philip says he wants me to take a hand in organizing that, then begin to prepare and plan for the 2010 version which will take place in Medicine Hat.   We don’t have anythign big planned for this summer because the Twins could be arriving anywhere between the beginning of July and mid-August.  The Dr. told Cheryl he would be making sure that things wrap up by the 38th week, with the earliest we could deliver (unless something is amiss) being the 32nd week.  That pretty much devours the summer.

Stay tuned!

It occurred to me yesterday that we have not formally announced the results of the tour that we got back from only 7 days ago.

To go back a couple of steps, let’s talk about Thursday night, March 26.

At this stage, we had just finished a visit to Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, and having talked to my sister and my mother in Edmonton by phone, discovered that our planned overnight at Dawn’s place was not going to happen.  It wasn’t a big deal – only 90 minutes south we knew we had a bed at Cheryl’s parent’s place in Red Deer.  We jumped on the highway south through Devon and that led us straight to… Leduc, and a White Spot for supper.  Kind of funny, when you realize that White Spot is a unique restaurant chain that is a household name in BC, but almost unknown in the rest of Canada.  The fact that we drove right to one of the very few that are not in BC… well it was comfortable.  I made one concession – I didn’t have their “Legendary Burger”.   When in Alberta, you have an Alberta steak.

We meant to stop for dinner, to digest in private the cities we had seen and ask God where our hearts were.  We only brought in two packets – Spruce Grove and Medicine Hat.  Looking back, these were the two we preferred from the start, but having reviewed all the options, we were more certain than ever it was between these two cities.

After sitting down, we both found our hands gravitating to the Medicine Hat material.  We tried to be fair and set up pros and cons for the two cities, but it was clear to us that barring an act of God, Medicine Hat was where we were being led.  There are many reasons, from the superficial to the miraculous.  I’ll start there. (more…)

I received a newsletter from Forge Canada today, and it had an interview with Karen Wilk, the leader of the River Community Church in Edmonton.  She talks about how they started as a church plant, and how they moved into a neighbourhood as 5 families with the intent of serving the community and seeing a church rise out of the people they grew in relationship with.  Take a read.