Entertaining

This weekend we've done our first proper entertaining in our new house. Yesterday Joanne had the girls from our bible study group round for lunch and then today Tim and Christine and Lizzy (an English lady who's been here about five years, lives less than five minutes from us and goes to St John's too) came round after church for lunch. Next weekend's the house is going to be full of people too. We've got Mark and Renee and their kids over for tea on Friday and on Saturday Sarah and Anne and Simon and Rebekah are coming round for dinner.

It's so great to be able to have people round and have plenty of space. The open living room - dining room - kitchen space worked exactly as we had hoped it would. I always felt that when we had people round at our flat in London I missed half the conversation as I'd be in the kitchen cooking. Now I can be in the kitchen, Joanne can be helping and neither of us are ignoring our guests.

I never realised before today how satisfying it can be to wash a dirty car and have it gleaming when you're finished. I'm not sure washing house windows will give me the same sense of satisfaction but I think perhaps I ought to give it a go as they're looking a tad grubby.

I spent a decent amount of time yesterday going through our photos on my laptop. We have three or four groups of four photos in the same frames (there's the four seasons of the same bridge in Central Park in New York, the four iconic New York structures, four San Francisco shots, ...) that we like the idea of and wanted to replicate with our own memories. I think we've come up with some striking combinations but you can tell us when you see them maybe. Now we just need to get them printed and framed. But the main thing that struck me when going through all these shots is just how fortunate we are to have been able to travel and see so much of the world. Why even only this year I have been to Ghana, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Romania. It all made me realise I am so fortunate to have been born in western society and to have the priviledges and opportunities that's afforded me. I pray I would never take that for granted and would always thank God for how he has blessed me and use what He has given me to serve Him better. In our bible study group at the moment we're looking at 1 Timothy and last week we studied chapter 6 verses 3-11. As part of that we spent some time thinking about how godliness should bring contentment and love of money leads to "ruin and destruction." We need to remember that money is a gift from God given as a blessing, true, but also (and mainly) given to us to allow us to serve Him. It's something I forget sometimes. Why is it that the more God blesses us the more we take His blessings for granted?