January and the new year (Happy New Year btw) cause one to think back and reflect. I made Marcelyn a couple of scrap books for her birthday of her first year. WOW! It was a full year. Liberty moved into a new building and is still remodeling. That story is blog post in its self. I will say this though Marcelyn was born on the 5th and papers were sign on the 6th for the new building. Major renovations to the main floor started and we moved in Palm Sunday. All renovations should be done in April.
2016 looks like it will be a fun year too. Chris goes to an annual men's conference in Colorado this weekend and that kicks off lots of events I'm currently drawing a blank on. Yes mission trips are being planned and I'll post details when we know them.
I mostly wanted to tell a few stories from "the hood" God has been teaching me a lot lately about my missionary heart. I try and call our neighborhood nice things like "neighborhood" or "community" instead of "trailer park" or "mobile home park" but it seems the last few months things have just gotten bad. Bad enough that I was getting depressed. I know I've gotten to this point once before, but this time it was almost a helpless, hopeless depressed feeling mixed with anger. It took me a week to figure it out, but God finally showed me that I need to be praying more. He also reminded me that He sent me here (to Hays) as a missionary. My mission field is constant and I need to quit getting upset when the world doesn't live up to my standards of the way I was taught to live. They don't know any different. That's probably the biggest shocker I've learned in the last couple of years as I've started to FINALLY gain trust with some families and build some friendships. I've learned that they all want what we want, to have a nice house, yard, car and life. The sad thing though is they don't understand that it takes constant upkeep and maintenance to have these things. Most importantly though is that it takes a solid relationship with God. I said I wanted to tell a story though. Here goes.
It's a of a girl with long blonde hair. She comes from a home that's one of the most dilapidated in the neighborhood with a mom that's rarely home. Yet she is the friendliest most outgoing person in the neighborhood. She knows every single kid that has lived here more than a week. However, her school that she's gone to for the last 4+ years closed. She has been coming to our Wednesday night meetings for about 2 years now and made a good friend through that. This August was her first day in a new school and one of her friends from Wednesday nights was in her class. She had already been going to school there for a while and happily made the long blonde hair girl feel right at home. It's my prayer that this long blonde haired girl falls in love with church and sees that she needs to be there.
The other story I wanted to tell is also of another girl. She's (was at the time) very small, shy and insecure. She started coming on Wednesday nights from just around the corner from where our house is. One day I was doing some follow up visits getting t-shirt orders or handing out flyers for VBS...I don't rememeber exactly, but this little girls mom was at home. We had talked shortly here and there, but I had more time this time and she asked me "Are you Molly Dinkel?" I answered "I used to be" She went on to tell me that she remembered me from when we were kids and we would play out a mutual friends house. Hah wow. As we got to know that family I also went to school with some of them too.
Well I think that's all I have time for in this post. It's my goal to post at least once a month and send out e-mails quarterly. I know I've said this in years past, but I'm going to give it another go and hopefully it becomes more of a routine this year. Also I post most regularly on instagram. @cmlofstrom
Happy 2016 friend
