PIcking Up the Threads

Blondechick16 made it home in one piece from camp, and her initial summary of how her week went was, "I survived." It sounds like she learned a few things from the experience, like how to co-exist with bugs and creepy crawlies; she was one of the few who never saw a tick on their persons, and she claims to be an expert now on finding and identifying them, since they spent so much time doing this for each other! She also discovered that one of her teachers is a great guy after all, and she learned how to work cooperatively with a group of kids that didn't really have much in common--her homeroom class, or "crew," which really hadn't gelled much all year. This experience changed that, as she wrote about in a paper when she got back.

School's out for her now, and Bantam18 is taking two more finals today and then he's done at noon!

Bantam14 had a relatively good experience on the Greyhound bus, and he's been having a blast ever since. He's helped with electrical wiring; he's driven a tractor, a lawn tractor and a car; he's gone miniature golfing with kids from Grandma and Grandpa's church; he shot a groundhog, went running, went for a walk and has seen deer multiple times. He's exercised at the Y with Grandpa, and visited his great-grandma at the nursing home. His great-aunt and uncle from California are there now too, so he's getting to know them and learning electrical tricks and tips from his great-uncle, a pro and a character, if there ever was one!

I've been working on things for the youth theater group that we are starting here in Kenosha, and we've had a setback. At a school board meeting on Tuesday night, six months of conversations with the high school we have been planning to use for our theater productions went down the drain, when we were told that not only was our request for a fee waiver or discount being denied, but our approved permit for use was now cancelled!

I was pretty discouraged on Wednesday, especially since I couldn't get anyone to return phone calls from any other venues I tried to reach. In the afternoon I spoke with someone from a school district office who was designated to hear my appeal, and after she went over their reasons for dismissing our permit, I addressed those concerns as well as I could and requested that we at least be allowed to hold one production there. She reiterated the reasons why their concerns would still apply and talked about pulling the file to check the facts again before she got back to me. When I hung up, it was with very little hope of anything coming from our conversation, and certainly not anytime soon.

You can imagine then, how shocked I was when she called back on Thursday morning to say that they had decided that since we had been led to believe for quite a few months that we had a venue, they would go ahead and allow us to hold our first show there, in November! I was stunned.

I had such a sense of the verse in Exodus where the Egyptians say, "Their God is fighting for them!" I had worked so hard, with human effort, on this problem all day Wednesday, and was so frustrated when no one would return my phone calls. A day of worry and frustration, and nothing to show for it...and I sensed the Holy Spirit nudging me to drop it and leave it up to God. But I was still so discouraged and stressed, until Father Rooster prayed for me, for God to send warrior angels to fight this battle for me, and I knew that was right, though it was difficult to let go. Then I got this phone call a couple hours later--and I knew that God was fighting for us. It seemed so wildly improbable otherwise!

Thank you, School Board. We are deeply appreciative.

Thank you, God! You are so great and so trustworthy!