Pictures from town yesterday...

Have you ever played the game "Eye-Spy"?  The littles and I play it sometimes when we go down town.

I spy with my little eye...

A kitten watching the egg man load up our eggs...

Two mzungu kids that I know quite well...

And three boys on roller blades very well protected (an very unusual sight!)

What goes up, must come down...

So my boys got themselves in quite the little predicament today.  They might have been yelling for help and I might have told them to hang on, said a silent prayer that the rope wouldn't break, and gone to get my camera.

I probably shouldn't be laughing so hard at this... but what are brothers for, right?

Driving around town these days...

As if it's not enough to rip up and attempt to reconstruct ALL the major roads through down town Mbale at the same time...

...they finally started ripping up the traffic circle around the main clock tower.  They blocked off half of it and 

re-routed that line of traffic around the back of Uchumi...the neighboring supermarket.  The problem being of course, that that road is also ripped up and only intended to be a single lane road.  But does that stop anyone from making it three lanes?  No way, not here!  Until the end of the road where, because it is ripped up too, has a steep drop off into a ditch stretching across the whole road, except one little space on the far left...large enough for cars to slowly ease themselves over the drop one by one...which is always interesting when you have three lanes trying to use it.

But the clock tower/traffic circle was only closed off on one half of it.  The traffic was free to use the other half.  Which should work, except for the huge Lorry that didn't get the message about going behind Uchumi and attempted to go the wrong direction around the open half of the traffic circle.  And who knows where that mutatu in the middle is trying to go!

Driving in Mbale: Never boring. Always entertaining.

John 1:12-13

"But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God."   

As Christian parents we want nothing more than for our children to know God and be known by God.  We labor hard to this end.  We teach them, we pray for them, and we wrestle through spiritual truths with them.  We struggle to know when to discipline them and when to show grace.  We cry, we laugh, we love.  We hope, we trust, we yearn.

And we know that ultimately their eternal state is completely outside of our control.

If our children are to become children of God, it is not by our blood.  It is not by our will.  It is not by the will of any man on earth.  It is only the will of God.

It is a real temptation for me to feel so much fear at the thought that the state of my children's eternal souls is out of my hands.  But it really ought to bring me the greatest comfort.  Their souls are in the hands of a loving God...a God of grace.  He is perfect and his wisdom is perfect.  He is also perfect in how he chooses to display his glory.

On the good days and on the bad, I'm so thankful that they are under his authority.  There is no better place for them to be.