Anna M. Aquino

Yesterday while in prayer I felt the Lord impress upon me to do a family activity. I thought I’d share the experience in light of Thanksgiving being Thursday. I cut five stripes of construction paper for each person and we all had to write on it five things we were thankful for and then share it with the family. As we went around the circle and shared the things we were thankful for, I took each strip of paper and added another link to a paper chain. Each thing we shared created awesome dialogue in the family of things we were grateful for, and our chain continued to grow. What I had felt the Lord saying to me is that this was a reminder that every time we are thankful about something it extends our reach out from just ourselves and into the world. When we start listing the things we are thankful for we stop focusing on the things that are frustrating us, and we can begin to focus outside of our own little bubbles. Jeremiah 30:19 (NIV) From them will come songs of thanksgiving ...

My family and I have taken to going on bicycling rides around our neighborhood when we can. It’s good family exercise and we’ve been enjoying it. However it can be a challenge to do this with my youngest. She’ll be 6 soon, and sometimes she still has problems riding up on the sidewalk or watching for cars. What usually happens is I usually lead and my husband usually rides at the end so that he can watch out for her. Often, I don’t even realize they’ve stopped until I’ve turned around. She’s stuck in the grass, her wheels have turned, and she wasn’t going fast enough over the bump in the sidewalk. Dan’s already there helping her, and I’ll stop and we’ll all wait until we can get moving again. Sometimes it turns into a cheering season where we all start chanting “GO! Go! Go! You can do it!“ Stopping like this can get a little frustrating, but our youngest needs the help. I was thinking about this as we were out riding the other day, and how it relates to the church. Ideally ...