Working at Believing

    We were doing a Bible Study at our church mums' group the other week about how our salvation is a gift from God which He wants us to receive gratefully but without feeling like we have to 'earn it back' or 'do something in return'. The culture in which we live here is a bit like that. At first we just thought people were extremely generous, bringing gifts of food and toys and clothing for the children whenever they came round; and they are very generous people, especially considering how little they have, I don't want to diminish that. However, it didn't take us long to realise that there was an expectation in return that, as part of their wider 'family', we would be there for them when they needed something, like borrowing money, or giving a lift in the car somewhere. God's gift of eternal life, however, has no strings attached, and there's nothing we could ever do to pay Him back for it.

    However, I digress. What struck me as I was reading the Scripture passages which talked about this subject was the implication that 'just believing' is also something you work for. Don't build on sand, build on rock. Don't store up treasures on earth, store up treasures in heaven. Don't work for food that spoils, work for food that lasts. Make every effort to be holy. 'Build', 'work', 'store', 'make' - they're all active verbs, not passive ones. What particularly struck me was in John 6:27-29 where Jesus says 'The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent'. Now maybe He was just drawing a comparison and I'm reading too much into it, but I did get to thinking that perhaps I need to 'work' harder at believing.

    There's a temptation to get a bit lazy about faith, and just have a 'let go and let God' attitude, but with any relationship, of course, our relationship with our Heavenly Father needs constant tending to if it's going to grow. I was challenged that afternoon to make more effort not just to get to know God better in my Quiet Times but to work harder at believing - believing that God is always present with me, in His character, in who Jesus is, in God's promises to me, in what He says about me...

    These past couple of weeks I've seen my early morning alone times with God as an absolute priority. I need to give more of my time and energy and effort if I'm to live a more joyful and abundant life in the Lord Jesus, which, ironically (and I love it that life in Jesus is filled with ironies like this) will mean that my normal daily life will seem less demanding on my time, energy and effort. I need to actively fill my thoughts with heavenly things and not earthly things during the day. I need to be more mindful of God's presence, more spontaneous in prayer and worship. These things are not natural to me, but I trust that as I work at them there will be great rewards. I have already seen rewards. It’s amazing how much more smoothly my day goes, how less irritating the children are, how much more time I seem to have on my hands if I’ve spent some time that morning worshipping and talking to God.

Outdoor Hour Challenge Week 6

This week's challenge is to think about starting a collection. We already have a little cardboard box on our school table where we put all the things we collect on our nature walks - leaves, pine cones, acorns, pebbles, berries etc. The children love collecting things, and it's a habit now to pop things into the pocket at the back of the pushchair if they want to take them home. The other day carting home 4 large sticks (almost tree branches) was a bit of a problem, and I had to convince Hubbie that it was worth keeping them in the garden for the bbq for next summer :-)

I decided, since our focus is on trees, that we would collect photographs. The plan is to choose 10 different trees that we see regularly and to take a photo of them once a month (hopefully from roughly the same angle each time). At the end of 12 months we'll be able to print them all off and make an interesting display of how each tree has changed through the seasons.

We already have an ash tree and a hawthorn tree that we're keeping an eye on, so we've added a fir tree, a sycamore tree, an oak tree, a lime tree, a willow tree and a crab apple tree from the park, and also an apple tree and a plum tree from our garden (hopefully for some pretty blossom next spring!).

Here's the willow tree we chose in the end after lots of deliberation:

Willow Tree

On the way home we noticed a birds nest left in one of the trees that had lost all its leaves. We tried to think of which kinds of animals actually live (not just climb) in trees, and all we could come up with were birds and squirrels. Back at home Sophie found the chapter in 'The Adventures of Pip' by Enid Blyton (which is a fantastic nature book for little children) where Pip the Pixie learns about how birds build their nests.

Bird's nest

Maybe when we're more experienced students of nature we'll be able to identify which bird this nest belongs to :-)

Outdoor Hour Challenge Week 5

It's been a while since we completed an outdoor hour challenge, but we haven't given up! We've had a month or so off homeschooling because of various travel commitments. However, I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to get back on track.

The children and I enjoyed a lovely nature study morning in our local park last Friday. We've been having wonderful weather for the last couple of weeks - around 20 degrees C and it's amazing to be out and about in just a t-shirt in mid-November. However, the trees are losing their leaves fast because winter is supposed to be on its way soon, so I thought this might be our last chance to collect any autumn leaves for craft purposes.

First stop was to check out Sophie and Charis's trees, and they'd both lost all their leaves:

Sophie's Ash tree

Charis's Hawthorn tree

We haven't started started our list of trees in our nature journal yet, but the first entries to go in will be Ash, Hawthorn, Sycamore, Lime, Crab Apple, Willow and Oak, since those are the trees we come across most often in the park. The kids had a lot of fun, and I'm so glad that they seem to be enjoying our nature study walks more than when we first started, although it's not every day they get to jump in huge piles of crunchy leaves! We picked up several leaves that we thought still looked pretty, although many were already dry and brittle. Sophie and Charis also had great fun collecting sticks and spotting a jay and a squirrel in the trees.

Back at home we tried to iron our leaves between sheets of wax paper and stick them on the windows. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but it came out pretty well I think (the large red one is actually from our neighbours grape vine, which we spotted on the ground when we came back home):

Autumn leaves

We also used some of the leaves we'd collected to make greetings cards by covering them on the front of the card with clear laminate.

Sophie, who's a budding artist, has been voluntarily drawing lots of trees in her pictures recently. I don't know if it's got anything to do with our nature focus! She's getting pretty good at seeing how the branches come off the trunk. I asked her today if she'd like to draw one of the apple trees in our garden so that we could put the picture in our nature diary, which she did. As you can see, it's still hanging on to a few of its leaves:

Apple tree in our garden by Sophie aged 5