Snow, Snow, Snow!

This week we got 6 inches of snow and school was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. We made good use of the time! We got a lot of sledding in and enjoyed a lot of time together as a family. Kate and Rose have gotten to be good sledders. Kate likes steep hills and a lot of speed. Fortunately, she is good at steering as well because there are several trees and lamp posts to avoid! She figured out that if she lays down on her back she can go faster. She looks like a little luge runner! However, she still steers. Rose on the other hand learned from Kate how to do this as well only she doesn't steer. She just lays down on her back and doesn't look up again! I think her attitude is "I'm yours Lord! Do Your will!" She sure goes fast though! She has had a few close calls though, narrowly missing trees and poles. She sure thinks it is fun!

Yesterday we went out to Bernheim Forest again to do some hiking. It was beautiful with all the snow out there. The nice thing about going out there this time of year is there are not many people out there! It was a beautiful day with a lot of snow. We also saw a lot of deer which was fun. The girls had a good time throwing snowballs as we hiked and playing in the snow.

Tonight we have a winter storm warning in effect. We are supposed to get several more inches of snow! Woo hoo! I love snow! It has been fun living where it snows!

Snow on the seminary campus.

Kate and Rose climbing the hill for another sled down the hill. They climbed that hill a lot this week!

Kate and I built a snowman after a morning of sledding.


Family photo while hiking out at Bernheim Forest.







Sledding on the hill next to our apartment. Action shot of Rose on her way down the hill.

They are off! Rose demonstrating her Luge form.

The girls pose on the hill before heading down hill.

Rose climbing the hill for another run.

Tess enjoying some time in the snow.


May God bless you all and continue to work in your lives for His glory and your good!

Shane

The VonSander Family Pukers

**The following contains content that is for mature viewers only. Contains references to vomit and other questionable content. Viewers should be advised the following may cause slight laughter, nausea, and abdominal discomfort. The author reserves the right to not be held responsible to the following due to a state of partial delirious due to lack of sleep, food, and liquid.

Kate had stomach problems beginning Tuesday night. It never really amounted to much though so we didn't think much of it. Last night, Rose and I went to church, leaving Kate, Tess, and Jess at home just in case Kate had the flu. Upon arriving at the church, I started not feeling very well. Church is 25 minutes from home, so about halfway through, I decided to leave because I wasn't feeling any better. The closer we got to home the worse I felt. By the time we were a couple of miles away from home I began to feel I wasn't going to make it. You know the feeling! Extreme dizziness, the rising feeling, and the cold sweat! Right before home, I was stopped by a red light. Choice: Get out of the car and have an embarrassing situation in front of all the traffic or pray and try to last. Due to my extreme aversion to embarrassing situations, I chose the latter. Praise the Lord I made it home. Thus began the debut of the VonSander Family Pukers.

As soon as I got home, I was down for the count. The whole works. Miserable. It was 7:00. By 8:30, Rose was throwing up. By
11:00, Tess was throwing up, joined soon by Kate. Finally, at midnight, Jess got into the action as well. It was a symphony of throats at work that was....well....gut wrenching. We were all miserable and it continued throughout the night. There were several times when two of us were throwing up (or pooking according to Rose) at the same time. Jess and I were taking care of the little ones in between our own bouts of getting sick. It continued until 6 in the morning. We just spread the kids around our bed on the floor. Throughout the night, I kept thinking of the verse in I Thessalonians 5, "Rejoice in the Lord and in everything give thanks for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." So, I gave thanks and praised the Lord for a night of puking together as a family! It was a night in which we had to rely upon the Lord and His strength.

On the positive side, I lost five pounds and Jess lost six.

In between my own getting ill and getting out of bed to help my family throw up as effectively and efficiently as possible, I kept thinking of songs from The VonSander Family Pukers. Naturally, these are set to songs from the Sound of Music. Our CD though is called the Sound of Vomit.

1. (Tune: The Hills are Alive) The rooms are alive with the sound of puking. With sounds we all dread, but we've heard before! Our guts will be empty, with the sound of puking and we'll wash every blanket we own.

2. (Tune: A Few of My Favorite Things) Broccoli and meatloaf and bread and potatoes. Cookies and ice cream and chips and lasagna. All of the food that was down in my stomach. It is all coming up now just for me! When the guts churn, when the throat tightens. When I'm feeling bad. I simply throw up and see all of my food and then I just feel soooooooo bad!

3. (Tune: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria) How do you solve a problem like dry heaving? How do you take the bile and make it stop? How do you make it on time to the bathroom? How do you stop the vomiting and get some rest?

4. (Tune: Do, Re, Mi) Puke, its brown and it smells real bad! Darn, it just got on the rug! Oi, I feel so terrible. Uuuuh, oh here I go again! Arrrgh, the kids are puking too! Will, this night ever end? I, am dehydrated! That will bring us back puke.....

5. (Tune: Climb Every Mountain) Vomit all your food! Clean out your gut! Running to the bathroom! Till you find reeeeliiieeeeffff!

6. (Tune: Sixteen Going on Seventeen) I am gagging, going on vomiting, baby, it's time to heave!

This is the result of laying awake at night in a ball in between episodes and trying to keep a joyful attitude! May it bless you and make you smile! If it bothered you, please remember the disclaimer at the beginning!

Blessings,
Shane

Playing in the Snow

We woke up on Saturday morning to a beautiful layer of snow. The weather then cleared and the sun came out. What a beautiful weekend! The moon was also full at night. It is hard to beat the beauty of moonlight on snow! We were blessed to be able to spend some time playing and sledding. Here are some pictures from the weekend!

The first thing we did after breakfast was to bundle up and go for a walk around campus!






Once again the hill next to our apartment offered some great sledding! We had a great time sledding and playing in the snow. Kate and Rose especially enjoyed the sledding! It was a joy to watch Kate and Rose laugh uncontrollably down the hill. Later on, the girls began racing Aimee and her friends down the hill. Naturally Kate taunted them all the way down!

The Great Commission? Maybe Later....

Go into the entire world and preach the Gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. You see, it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. You will be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

How do we view those words? Are they advice for Christian living? Are they merely suggestions of something to do if we get bored in life? Are they only for those who struggle to fit into society? Are they a last resort for those who can’t seem to do anything else? Should those words be accepted and believed at all?

Unfortunately, many Christians really don’t believe those words. Think about your own life? Do you really believe those words? Do they motivate you? Are they the driving force for how you live your life? Do we in the American church as some of the wealthiest Christians in the world really believe those words? Those are the words of Christ and they are found in Mark 16:14-18, Luke 24:44-49, Matthew 28:16-20, and Acts 1:4-8.

The main verb in the Great Commission is “Make Disciples”. Everything else flows from that command. Christians are to make disciples of Jesus Christ. What does that mean? It means we seek to see people, not only come to believe in Christ, but seek to see people continue to grow and mature in Christ. It means we focus less on programs and activities and more on discipleship. This is how Jesus ministered. He took twelve men and had them walk with Him for over three years. He both formally and informally taught them. Perhaps Paul best summed up making disciples when he said in I Corinthians 11:1, “Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ.”

We need to focus on making disciples because it is a command of Christ and therefore should be one of the driving purposes of our lives. Unfortunately, we often settle for less. We take the Great Commission and reinterpret it to mean “Go into all the world and get conversions. Then turn them into church members.” We in the American church want results. Therefore, we want conversions. Making disciples is too slow and time consuming. We’d rather have big evangelical events and be able to claim 300 people came to Christ, regardless of whether or not they really did. It has been said that there have been more recorded “conversions” recently in one island nation than there are people that live there! Perhaps we need to celebrate disciples instead of conversions.

We need to make disciples. Yet, once we get conversions, our focus then becomes making them church members. We want to get them plugged in. We want them to be in the Adult Sunday school class, serve as an usher, a parking attendant, etc. We fill their schedules full of church programs. But, we fail to disciple them. We fail to say, “Come walk with me and imitate me as I also imitate Christ.” Is it hard, time consuming, and slow? Absolutely. Is it biblical and effective? Absolutely.

Go into the entire world and preach the Gospel. We usually take the command of Jesus for missions and separate it into two categories: Going and Sending. There are some who are called to go and some who are called to stay. Praise the Lord for those who truly go and those who truly send. But, I would submit that more of us should go then do and if we aren’t going, we must be sending. John Piper has stated that if one isn’t going or sending, they are disobedient. I believe he is correct. More of us must take the command of Christ and go. Those of us who stay must take sending seriously.

I would submit that this is severely lacking in the American church. As I reflect back on my own life, it has been severely lacking in my own life. Sure, we’ll send a missionary a hundred dollars if they come to our church and give a presentation. We’ll tithe a small portion of our money to the church and hope it goes to missions. But most of us do not truly sacrifice to send. Think about the sacrifice one makes to leave all that is comfortable here in America and go to another culture to make disciples! They make drastic sacrifices to do so. It should follow by necessity that we would make drastic sacrifices to send them. But no, we focus on improving our standard of living, our material wealth, and our happiness. We have lost the perspective the early church had as they labored and sacrificed, even to the point of death, not just for making disciples in their own community, but in making disciples around the world.

The question we must ask is this: Do we really long for the Kingdom of God? This is the driving force behind the Great Commission command. Jesus taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” We partly experience God’s Kingdom in the here and now, but when Jesus Christ returns and Satan is defeated, we will fully experience God’s Kingdom. We read in Revelation (5:9-10; 7:9-17; 13:7; 14:6; 21:12) that God’s Kingdom will be full of people from tribes and nations from all over the world. God’s Kingdom will not fully come until all of these people hear the Gospel. Matthew 24:14 states, “And this Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” (See also II Peter 3.) If we long for the Kingdom of God, we will be active in missions. We must pray for God’s Kingdom to come and we must labor for the Kingdom of God. Seeing the Kingdom of God come must be what drives us to be actively involved in the Great Commission.

May we be obedient in fulfilling the Great Commission and honestly examine our own lives to accurately determine if we are being faithful in making disciples, both here and abroad!

“When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever” –John Piper

A Weekend of Mourning

The bridge that connects Kentucky to Madison Indiana.

Here are a few pictures from the last snow we had.




This grave site is in Bernheim Forest and contains the graves of a family from the mid-1800s. The earliest grave we saw was from 1840. The parents were born in 1804.

Another hike out at Bernheim Forest



This weekend was a weekend of mourning for us for two reasons. First, the girls and I took down our Christmas tree yesterday. It was finally starting to curl a little bit. Secondly, there are only 2 1/2 football games left in the season. As I am watching the Jets-Colts game right now, I look ahead with sadness, knowing there is but one more game today and one more game in two weeks. Maybe I'll start watching the Weather Channel for my Saturday afternoon down time!

The last two weeks have gone quickly, but they have been good ones. I have gotten a lot of reading done and have been able to get three of my books read before the start of the semester this week. This semester will have significantly more reading the last one. I am looking forward to my classes though. They should be good.

We have also had some good family time. We spent last Tuesday out at Bernheim Forest and then went for a nice drive in the country. The Tuesday before, Jess and I had a date day and went up to Madison Indiana and explored that area. Very pretty up there. The movie Madison was filmed there. Very unique little town with a lot of history. It is really neat living in an area where a lot of towns were established in the very early 1800s.

Last night we had a big thunderstorm. That was fun. A lot of lightning, big thunder, and heavy rain. The weather has dramatically changed, going from the mid twenties to the high fifties with rain. I'm praying for more snow!

Kate and Rose have been building a lot of puzzles. That is the new thing they are really enjoying. It is a good rainy day activity! They have also been building with their new Duplo blocks a lot. (Wooo hoo! The Colts just scored!) Kate has started reading this week. That has been fun. She is really eager to learn.

Yesterday was a very busy day cleaning and getting the house ready for the semester to start. So, today we are relaxing, watching football, playing Nintendo, and playing with the girls. It is a rainy day and very gray outside!

Well, my dinner is ready, so I better go! May the Lord bless you and keep you!

Blessings!

Shane

Haiti

Dr. Mohler wrote an excellent response to the crisis in Haiti. You can read it at:

http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/01/14/does-god-hate-haiti/

Snow!

Snowing hard at noon!








Well it snowed all day today! It was beautiful. We have a great hill on campus next to our apartment for sledding so we had a great community sled tonight when the snow let up! Kia thoroughly enjoyed running up and down the hill chasing the girls! Tess got to sled a lot and giggled all the way down the hill! The girls had a blast playing and sledding. Now, it is clearing off and is 13 degrees. A little chilly! It is wonderful to live in the snow again!

Enjoy the pics!
Shane