Jack Jack on Valentine's Day!!



Anna had PJ day at school... they ate french toast and pancakes for lunch!


Goal Line Defense

When you become a homeowner, you are immediately thrown into a world of things you have never dealt with. There is a huge learning curve in the areas of terminology, technology and even biology! When I rented an apartment, I was blissfully ignorant of things like lawn maintenance, paint swatches, crown molding and plumbing repair. When something broke or got old, overgrown or worn out, a magical person came in and made everything all better. When I bought a house, I learned about all sorts of things I had never even heard of before like plumbers strap, luan and flux. Before I owned a house, I had never used a reciprocating saw or a calk gun. Before I owned a house I never worried about really heavy rainfall that lasts for days and days on end, and I never even thought about or worried about mold...

When we first walked through new our house with the realtor, we loved it! It was everything we needed in a house and everything we really wanted as well. We prayed and prayed about all of the details and after two weeks, our old house sold for list price and our offer on the new house was accepted! Everything was moving forward like clockwork… and then we had the home inspection. After being down in the crawl space for about thirty minutes, our home inspector said there was some mold on the floor joists… I’ve seen the commercials enough to know that this was a big deal. Our realtor said that dealing with bad, spreading mold is a long, painful and expensive process involving chemists, environmentalists and tons of reports. After reading online, I discovered that being super careful about mold is a relatively new thing for homeownership… as in, the last thirty years or so. Before that, people apparently weren’t too concerned about it… that is, unless you count the Israelites.

Thousands and thousands of years ago (way before anyone knew anything about germs, bacteria and toxic spores) God told His people to be take mold and mildew very seriously. In Leviticus 14 He told them that it is corrosive, insidious and destructive. He told them that mold must not be ignored, but must be quarantined, washed, scraped off or cut out. He told them that if it won’t stop spreading, the only thing left to do is to tear down the whole house and burn the materials, brick by brick and rafter by rafter. Now, I’ve read these verses a bunch of times before, but this week I noticed something strange while reading them again. Leviticus 14:34-35 says, “When you enter the land of Canaan, which I am giving you as your possession, and I put a spreading mildew in a house in that land, the owner of the house must go and tell the priest, “I have seen something that looks like mildew in my house.”

The mold came from Him! God was sending the spreading mildew! He was planting those messed up little replicating destroyers in people’s houses… but why? I thought about it for a long time and came to the conclusion that everything God did with the Israelites was designed to teach them stuff… stuff about Him and stuff about themselves. Like the way thousands of years of animal sacrifices were getting them ready for what Jesus would accomplish on the cross… I think that warning the people about what mildew and mold are like and can do and then telling them how fiercely they had to respond in order to save their houses was a picture of what sin can do to our hearts. I think it was His way of saying that sin is violent and ruthless and when you find it in your life, you have to be decisive and aggressive to get rid of it or it will destroy you. Then He sent them mold as a way to practice responding… like a fire drill in school or like when a football team practices their goal line defense… In the best circumstances, you hope you don’t have to do it, but at some point, you’re going to have to, so you’d better be ready.