Felix's First Thanksgiving

Mom and Dad said it was time for Thanksgiving, but I was a little confused because I’ve been hearing Christmas music all month. The mall has Christmas trees, and snowflakes, and reindeer decorations – Mom and Dad said that’s because they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Romania.

Grandma came to visit us, and everyone I know who lives here from America was really excited about the feast coming up. Mom bought a green pumpkin that’s bigger than me; when she scooped it out it was orange on the inside and she put it in a pie. All day, I smelled chicken cooking (because Mom and Dad couldn’t find turkey anywhere), and Dad kept mashing up apples to make cider. I don’t know what those things taste like, but they sure smelled good. 


Our Baby's Birth

During our 38 week appointment the doctor asked us to come back either the following Tuesday or the one after in order to have a series of tests done before our baby was born. He was pretty casual about the test and seemed to think the second Tuesday was a better option for us but left it to our preference. So we prayed about whether or not we should go and we felt directed to go in on the first Tuesday. Although, I’d been having Braxton Hicks contractions for weeks, there had been no indications of labor, as confirmed by the doctor at our 38 weeks appointment.

So we went in on Tuesday morning (Sept 5th), which was 38 weeks, 6 days gestation. At the doctor’s visit, my blood pressure was elevated (140s/110s), the baby’s heartbeats were a bit lower than desired (110-120), and his movement and breathing on the ultrasound was very low as well. The doctor said that these symptoms could have multiple indications, but one was that the baby could be in distress. He did not see signs of true concern yet, but it showed that it could become concerning if we waited too much longer. So he recommended that we do an immediate C-section; we agreed, and felt peaceful about that decision even though it wasn’t our ideal preference. 

20-Somethings - Part 1

This blog post is about the current situation of 20-somethings leaving the church in America. It is not meant to criticize the church, nor to target anyone. It is based on our experience in churches before we were in full-time ministry and on the experiences of other Christian individuals we’ve talked to that are our age. Many posts have been written on reasons for individuals our age leaving the church, most of them focus on hypocrisy and are clearly written out of bitterness. That is not the intention of this post. (For more on hypocrisy see below.**)

We have talked with many leaders of churches who strongly desire to have younger members active in their church, but don’t know where to start. Our hope is to share our personal experience in order to share some patterns we’ve seen in American churches. What we’ve found as the largest struggles, as have many others we know, is finding a church that is both spiritually mature (e.i. preaches the Word, and lives it out), and is focused on building relationships. In the churches we visited, there were no major problems regarding spiritual maturity that jumped out to us, but consistently we found a lack of effort for people of the church to reach out relationally. This seems to be a common theme in many churches we’ve visited.

Always A Need For Flexibility

When it comes to being flexible, often you hear quotes like:

But often when it gets to be the time that you actually need to be flexible, it’s a lot more complicated. It’s very easy to want to resist sudden change. It’s always difficult when you have a plan in mind and then suddenly that plan needs to get put by the wayside. However, most often if you try to resist the change, you end up having a greater struggle than if you’re willing to adjust to the new situation.

Dan had to learn early on in his EMS career that he needed to be flexible on every call. Often when people make a call to 911, they are not very clear and articulate because they are in a panic.  Often the information that’s provided to the dispatcher is not clear, and sometimes even wrong.