Breaking the silence...

What a crazy months it's been for the Porter's...

We started raising support to go to Botswana and were blessed by how quickly it poured in. Then we found out Er is with child. Which was quite exciting and joyful and yet at the same time quite a confusing thing. After counsel and prayer felt that God changed the timing of us leaving for Botwana to an undisclosed time in the future (hopefully not too distant) even though my heart and dreams still are there, not here. Spent several weeks falling in love with and becoming excited about this new life growing in my wife's womb. I've been running the Bluestem by myself as my boss has been gone the better part of the last 3 weeks as his father in law was very ill and subsequently passed. It's way too much work for one person. Then Er quite nearly miscarried. Apparently the placenta tore. After a long week of not knowing if our child would live or die we were both relieved and blessed to see that our babies heart beat is stronger than ever and that the placenta completely healed itself. Erine does have quite a large cist that causes her a lot of pain and will have to be removed (for the babies sake) if it grows much more, but the doctor is hopeful that it will shrink itself of the next few weeks. But praise God that both wife and baby are fine. Erine just has to take it easy for the next while (i.e. 9 months) and God willing everything will be just fine.

Needless to say, we could use a vacation.

It's a strange thing to go through so much as once. I pretty quickly figured out that I had two choices. I could be angry at God, frustrated with Him seemingly being unjust to me. And that's kinda where I was for a good while. He was after all in control of what was going on. It wasn't beyond Him to have let us discover the blessing of our pregnancy before we sent out support letters to everyone we know. Or to have prevented all the hardships of this pregnancy that had already shaken my world and my plans around so much. But he didn't. This is what He wanted for us to endure. And frankly, it just didn't seem fair to me. In a lot of ways, it still doesn't. I certianly have no understanding of it. But, that was a pretty stupid place to be. In all of my feeling sorry for myself, I began to doubt who God was. More than that, I kind of fell into this pit of unintentional self worship. After all, in my deepest parts I genuinely felt that my well being was more important than how God was moving. Eventually, I moved past that a bit. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and kinda moved into this apathy. I knew who God was and what He was doing was going to somehow be glory to Himself. But I really just didn't care. I was tired and hurting and just didn't give a care about any of this stuff outside of myself. Which was an equally terrible place to be.

Fortunately, God is faithful to His promises even when I'm not faithful to Him. Since then, I'm in the process of trying to move to choice number two: I could put trust in the fact that God is who He says He is. I've kinda come to a the conclusion that if the goodness of God is dependent on the well being of Kevin then this world is destined to miserable place. I thought about Jacob having to wait so long for his promised son and then being asked to sacrifice him. Clearly his faith was in who God was not in what God was asking/allowing to happen - because Jacob was going to go through with it. I'm sure he was none to excited about it. But because He knew the value and joy of following after God because of who He is, he was willing to endure it. Or Joseph who had a whole lifetime of hardship (compared with my 3 or 4 weeks) who still considered God worth following because of who He was... not because of what was going on around Him. And the list goes on. Not that I have half of the faith of these sorts of men and women... but I am learning how to be more like that. Because despite what God is doing/allowing in my life. He is good. He's faithful. He's gracious. He's slow to anger and quick to love. His mercy is so abundant that my mind could never wrap it's self around it, even if I spend my whole life trying. He is just. I know these things are true. And even when things in my life don't seem (emphasis on seem) to reflect that to be true I have to remember esentially the whole history of this fallen planet where He has continually shown that be to true. Over and over and over. His nature is good and loving, even when what He gives me to endure hurts so very much. So I can trust that His plans are as well. For some purpose, seen or unseen God has given us the joy of enduring this all. And it's okay, because we'll be better off for it. Already God has taught me so much about Himself and about faith. And even though my dream is a little farther down the road now, I have a wonderful blessing on the way that I wouldn't trade away for even my wildest dream. God really is good to us. Praise Him for it.

KP