Moving stuff...

One of the groups we partner with in a big way is Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program.  One of their many tasks is providing housing for incoming refugees... over 300 Nepalis alone will be arriving in 2012!

Serve Burlington partners by providing volunteers to help schlep donated furniture out of storage and into the apartments before the new residents arrive.  We rarely get to meet the new residents... Tuesday last week was an exception! We were moving some furniture into a unit when people from an apartment we previously furnished came down to help... it turns out that they are related to the incoming family and invited us upstairs for tea.  Have you ever had Nepali tea?  Yum!... black tea, milk, sugar, and black pepper are an incredible combination.  When we left, they invited us to stop back anytime... which Caryn, Hudson, and I did yesterday.

We brought by some donated clothes, as well as some things Hudson picked out from his toybox for their 2 year old boy, and then they proceeded to get very busy cooking rice, goat, chicken, and a traditional bean dish.  What a meal!  The VT Bazemores thoroughly enjoyed themselves and our new friends.  Proof that relationships matter was made clear when our host said that we were the first people to stop by and talk with them since they moved here a few months ago...you could see the longing in her face for relationship.  One of the women speaks very good English because she was an English teacher in Nepal... she will be a bridge to many in the Nepali community as the refugees seek to assimilate.  Please pray for them, and the other refugees, as they begin new lives in a strange place.

One cultural quirk that really stands out to our new friend is the fact that people in Vermont do not say "Hello" when passing each other on the sidewalk... sad... I fail to do that sometimes too.

Two pics:

Hudson sings a few of his favorite songs...

Learning old things in a new way...

I(Mike) have been reading The Holy Wild by Mark Buchanan...and wow. I highly recommend it. It could just be my stage of life or an awakening in my own life to the person of God, or just the book, but it has been hitting home with me. Today I was reading chapter 5, A Burned Patch of Ground, talking about God's Wrath...yikes. I will let you make the connections (Romans 1:18-21 ), but Thankfulness came up and I wanted to share a snippet from the chapter with you...

Mark Buchanan shares:

I was in Uganda, Africa, about a dozen years ago, in a little township called Wairaka. Every Sunday evening, about one hundred Christians from the neighboring area would gather to worship. They met at the edge of a cornfield, under a lean-to with a rusty tin roof that cracked like gunfire when it rained. They sat – when they did sit – on rough wood benches. The floor was dirt. The band’s instruments were old or handmade – bruised, scratched guitars with corroded strings and necks that had warped in the humidity; a plinky electric piano plugged into a crackling speaker; shakers made of tin cans and stones. All of it kept straying out of tune.

One Sunday evening, I was too sour to join in. The music sounded squawky. I was miffed at someone on our missions team. I found the food bland, tasteless. I was feeling deprived and misunderstood. I found the joy of others hollow, mustered-up. I was miserable, and I wanted to wallow in it.

The pastor asked if anyone had anything to share. Many people wanted to, but a tall, willowy woman in the back row danced and shouted loudest, so he called her forward. She came twirling her long limbs, trilling out praise.

“Oh, brothers and sisters, I love Jesus so much,” she said.

“Tell us, sister! Tell us!” the Ugandans shouted back.

“Oh, I love Him so much, I don’t know where to begin. He is so good to me. Where do I begin to tell you how good He is to me?”

“Begin there, sister! Begin right there!”

“Oh,” she said, “He is so good. I praise Him all the time for how good He is. For three months, I prayed to Him for shoes. And look!” And with that the woman cocked up her leg so that we could see one foot. One very ordinary shoe covered it. “He gave me shoes.”

The Ugandans went wild. They clapped, they cheered, they whistled, they yelled.

But not me. I was devastated. I sat there broken and grieving. In an instant, God snapped me out of my self-pity and plunged me into repentance. In all my life, I had not once prayed for shoes. It never even crossed my mind. And in all my life, I had not even once thanked God for the many, many shoes I had.

What have you NOT thanked God for today that He has provided? How about your shoes?

The training wheels come off!

It has been a big couple of weeks. Hudson began asking for us to take the training wheels off his bike again. See what happened after about 30 minutes in the backyard!

I love this one!

Hudson figures out wheelies!

Mike has always loved John Deere tractors...so Hudson got one from his grandparents. Last year we "enabled" second gear letting him pick up some speed. Last week he figured out how to rock his body back while pushing on the pedal resulting in the front wheels coming off the ground! He was getting pretty good till he managed to flip it completely over and onto himself...Mike was there to laugh with him. He is a bit more timid but did one for the camera.