A broken time in our life...

Have you ever had a time when it seems that all kinds of stuff is just broken? Our house was built 10 years ago and it seems that little things are starting to break all at the same time. As long as we own things, they are going to break. The only things that will last forever is people. But, knowing this, we still need to fix these "broken" things. Here is the short list:

*Leaking drain in upstairs bathroom (saving money to call plumber - my wonderful husband has tried to fix it, but it still leaks)

*The dimmer switch in the downstairs bathroom is going bad - flickering.

*The 15 year old truck is making an unidentified squealing noise. Cost unknown, but it is still better than a new car payment!

*The computer is going through some growing pains. We wanted to update the operating system on our Mac to 10.4. Turns out that it only comes on DVD - which our computer doesn't have. So, a superdrive was needed. Maybe it was nervous going in for updates and through a power supply. So, we now have a great working computer, but for much more than anticipated.

* I noticed last week that the gas stove was fluttering. The gas level would like pulse. Gas line problem. It hasn't been consistent enough to panic. We are thinking (hoping) it might be from outside our house with the high gas use this week with below zero temps already. We are hoping that January will be warmer...

In spite of this, we are grateful for all the things that do work and that our family is healthy. We just need to work through this broken time in our life... which led me to thinking about our spiritual brokenness.

We live in a broken world where sin has invaded our lives and causes us pain - either because of something we have done, or has been done to us. Our church has been having a series titled "It Would Take a Miracle", and the first Sunday was about It would take a miracle to heal this family. It seems that all of us have had struggles with someone in our family - parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, etc. Most of the message was about forgiveness and this whole idea of letting go of the pain and forgiving. Our pastor stressed that this does not mean that you need to be in relationship with the person - put to let go of the wanting revenge so that our own hearts can heal. The Lord will deal with each person's sin accordingly - it is not our place to seek revenge.

Thank you Jesus for your birth and saving grace!

Blessings