CHANGE OF SEASONS

My youngest son, David, is graduating from High School next month. 

He’s enrolled at Biola University and has been accepted into their Torrie Honors Program. He hopes to study music production. 

We couldn’t be more proud of him.

Since Kindergarten, Wendy has been home-schooling him and now - once he graduates in a few short weeks - all of that ends.

It's been especially hard on Wendy to watch both her boys grow up so fast. Now our little boys have beards and drive cars and talk with deep voices.

Wendy has been David's teacher his whole life, and now that phase of her life is done. At least academically.

Along with this huge life change comes the departure of our dear sister in Christ, Marlys, who has been with our house church family from day one. We've known her longer than that, of course, so saying goodbye to her is going to be very difficult for us when she moves to Florida.

Another sister in our house church is also moving away - along with her whole family - to Georgia.

Wendy doesn't handle good-byes very well. Not that any of us enjoys them, but these are especially difficult for her.

Saying goodbye to this season of her life with David, and saying goodbye to her dear friend Marlys, and saying goodbye to this sister and her family...it's all coming down on us at once.

My struggle isn't so much with the good-bye portion - although it does hurt to let go of these wonderful people who have been so much apart of our personal family and our church family. No, my struggle is mostly with the unknown factors like, "How will we pay for David's tuition which is more than triple what Dylan pays for school?" and "Should we buy a new car and go deeper in debt so that David can have a way to get to class?" and now that Wendy has to find a job to help cover these additional expenses, "Where will Wendy work and how will she get there every morning?"

And a half-dozen other questions like this that I have no answers for right now.

You can probably relate, I'm guessing. I'm sure many of you are going through - or have already gone through - similar situations in your life.

Here's all I know: God loves me. He loves my family. He knows what we need before we ask. He has a plan. He is in control. I am not.

So, I do what I can, which is simply to let go of my fears and trust Him.

If I can count on Him to walk with me through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I can certainly trust Him to be with me through the Valley of the Shadow of Uncertainty and Change.

Not only will He walk beside us, He has already gone ahead of us to prepare the way.

If you think of it, please hold us up in your prayers as we keep our eyes on Him.

Change is never easy, but it's how we learn to trust in our Abba.

Blessings,

Keith

GIVE UP by David Giles

Note: Today's blog is written by my youngest son, David Giles.

God gave me the word “Give up” recently. It was my word of the year, but I didn’t understand it at first.  I asked God what it meant and I told him I would wait a few days to make sure it was really from Him.

 

Two days later, I had a dream. I was running away from something, and I knew I couldn’t make it, so I gave up. I awoke and I felt like God told me, “You need to know when to give up, and when to continue.”

 

I thought about that, and about what else the phrase, “Give up” could mean. Some quotes came to my mind “Better to do right than to be right” and “If you love something enough, let it go. And if it comes back, it was meant to be.”

 

I had my dream on a Saturday night, so when I woke up, it was a Sunday and our house church family was meeting in our home. The first thing that someone shared tied into my word from God: “He who seeks his life will lose it” (Luke 17:33)

I had already planned to share this with the church, but after hearing this I had no doubt that this was from God.

After sharing this, a few other people had words for me:

 

“What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ” - (Philippians 3:8)

 

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” - (Luke 12:32)

 

I think that this new word ("Give up") ties in with last year’s word which was “It’s not about you.”

 

I know that God will continue adding to these words, and make me into who he wants me to be.

 

-David Giles

February, 2014

HIT START

My youngest son, David (15) has been working on creating his first X-box game. He’s already created over 100 PC games using a simple program called Game Maker Pro over the last few years, but recently he was inspired to move over to actual coding to create a game for X-box Live. With the help of Brent, one of the brothers in our house church family, David has been hard at work the last few months trying to build his game from the ground up. It’s not been easy. In fact, it’s been downright frustrating at times. He’ll make progress one day and then get bogged down on a coding bug and not be able to move forward until he, or his mentor, can identify it and fix it.

A few weeks ago, David hit such a bug. He poured over the code and found nothing. Then he sat down with Brent, who’s already created and published two original X-box Live games of his own so far, and they still couldn’t identify the source of the problem. So, for weeks now he’s been dead in the water.

The problem David was having with the code was that when the player pressed the “fire” button, the bullets weren’t originating in front of the player’s icon. They were appearing at random places instead of where they were supposed to. Eventually, David stopped looking for the solution.

But then, just a few nights ago, David had a dream. He was with our family at an 80’s themed restaurant and I asked him, in the dream, to go back into the kitchen to speak to the head chef. When he got back there he found Paulie behind the stove. Paulie is a regular member of our motel church family. In the dream, Paulie handed David an X-box controller and said, “Don’t give up.”

In the morning, David woke up and remembered the dream. Especially the part about being handed the X-box controller and the words, “Don’t give up.” So, he sat down at the computer and started looking through the code again. That was when he realized something – he had programmed the enemies on the screen to fire tracking bullets at the player. In order for those bullets to track the user’s location it would have to calculate the position of the player on the screen first. Quickly he went to the code for tracking bullets and found what he needed. Then he copied that code and went to place it into the section for where the players bullets would spawn. What he realized was that his code wasn’t actually bad, it was simply missing one capital letter. See, the code is case-sensitive. So, his original code was only off by one letter.

If he had given up he never would have discovered this, and if he hadn’t had that dream he wouldn’t have given it one more try.

What’s even more awesome is knowing that David realizes that God was the one who gave him this dream and spoke to him about not giving up.

So, whatever it is that you have given up on – a relationship, a project, a dream – let me encourage you not to give up. Try one more time. Give it one more shot. Reach out and take that X-box controller from God’s hand and hit “Start” again. You might be surprised what happens next.

-kg

 

HE DID IT!

So proud of my son, David. I gave him a puzzle on his 13th birthday (December 31st) called "One Tough Puzzle". It has only 9 pieces and it says on the outside of the box, "10,000 wrong answers, but only one right answer". (Kind of like our lives, right?)

Our whole family took turns trying to figure this one out but one day I came home from work and David had figured it out - mathematically! (I can't explain to you how he did it, but when I asked him how he found the answer he proceeded to explain a complicated calculation that boggled my brain, but I know it all makes sense, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to make it work).

That's my boy.