tonyandkirsten.org

When you get home at close to 10pm from a long meeting, what you don’t want to get home to is a house with a strange odor and a slight haze in the living room. Nothing was obviously burning, and the smoke alarm was not going off (and we know it works…boiling water on the stove and hot shower steam have set it off in the past). Still somewhat worried, Tony called the non-emergency number for the fire department.

Meanwhile, Lindsay and Madeline and I headed for Wendy Rehm’s house. Though it was somewhat irrational, I was worried our house might explode or spontaneously combust. The fire truck pulled up on our street a few mintues later. Luckily, they didn’t wake up the neighborhood by turning on their lights and sirens!

After a very long 10 minutes or so, Tony called with the “all clear.” The culprit was a very hot old-school halogen light…the kind they banned from the dorms a few years back. We have a pair of white floor lamps of that variety given to us by, I think it was, the parents of Tony’s brother in law. I guess they may have to go, since they cause the paint on the wall to heat up and fill the house with fumes.

I feel a little silly that it turned out to just be a lamp, but it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry. That was our little adventure this evening.

I read an an article this week in the Ames Tribune that reminded me about how much I should take joy in the challenges and circumstances of each day. Whether it’s looking forward to graduation, getting married, having kids, buying a house, the kids starting school, the kids leaving the house, or any of life’s other milestones it seems to be human nature to always be looking forward to the next thing.

In some ways, I think that’s just fine. I’m really excited for Madeline to learn to walk and talk and eat solid food…because those are all signs of growing up, and I’m excited for what’s in store for her future as she (God willing) someday becomes an influencer of others for Christ. At the same time, I don’t want to let my excitement for the future turn into discontent of my life circumstances today. I want to live by verses like Colossians 5:16-18: “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (Is anyone else singing along to that verse?)

So far I think I’m doing okay in this area. I know I am biased, but I think Madeline is darn cute and a pretty agreeable baby She’s learning new things everyday; she’s sleeping through the night; she’s getting to be a little more predictable in her schedule. Things are a lot easier than when she was just a few days or weeks old. While she still has times of fussiness and screaming, usually it’s now for a reason and we can do something about it (feeding, diaper change, nap, etc). I can put her down in her swing, infant seat or exersaucer for a few mintues and she can amuse herself while I cook or get other things done.

But I need to remind myself to enjoy each day for all it’s worth. Madeline has already grown tremendously. She has outgrown newborn clothes she will never wear again, and no longer likes to be curled up quite so tightly in my arms as she did in her first few weeks of life. Soon today’s cute clothes will also be outgrown and she will no longer need me to help her balance to stand on my lap or sit against the couch. She‘ll no longer smile in delight when simply batting at toys that hang above a chair. I don’t want to get so caught up in housework or ministry or reading blogs or looking eagerly to the future that I don’t appreciate each unique day in my daughter’s life.

I am trusting God that He will help me to find contentment each day as Madeline grows older and moves through various life stages, as we have (God willing) more children, and as we experience all of lifes ups and downs and other milestones.

That’s right. We’ve been taking more pictures of our daughter. Now, they’re posted on our gallery.

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So, go look at them!

I never expected things to work out perfectly with all the insurance issues and medical bills associated with Madeline’s birth, but I didn’t expect as many problems and mistakes as we’ve had. Madeline and I had different insurance for the birth (yes, the baby gets a bill too!) and so we’re dealing with two different insurance companies.

We got hit with a tripple-whammy in about late June or early July. First, the insurance company processed my hospital stay incorrectly, leaving us with a bill about $1500 higher than it should have been. That is definitely an error as far as we can tell. It was supposed to get resolved in 10-15 business days, but it is well past that and no news yet.

We’ve also had issues with Madeline’s insurance. Somewhere between us turning in the paperwork for her insurance (to start with the day of her birth) and the paperwork being processed at the insurance office, the start date got changed from May 21st to June 1st…meaning, right now the insurance company doesn’t think they need to cover any bills associate with her hospital stay or her followup visits to the doctor before June 1st. The ISU insurance office assures us they will get this problem taken care of. But again, no official resolution to this error.

Sandwiched inbetween finding out about these two issues, we got a bill from McFarland Clinic for the Anesthesiologist that did my epidural during the birth. This caused quite a crisis due to a quirk in my insurance that basically means we have to pay a lot more for services from the clinic. It seemed really unfair to me that a service provided to me at the hospital would have to be billed from the clinic. There wasn’t much we could do about it at that point, and so it got submitted to the insurance. We were expecting the worst — that we would have to pay an additional $500 or so on top of what we had been counting on paying for all the medical bills for Madeline’s birth.

We finally got the insurance statement in the mail for that claim. Amazinly enough, even though we got a bill from McFarland, the insurance company paid the Anesthesiologist who performed the work directly, and aparently she herself is a preferred provider because we had no extra charges for her services. Praise God!!!! With the difficult-to-balance budget I blogged about yesterday, this makes a big difference. Things in our budget will look a little brighter.

I’m so thankful for this gift from God — and insurance problem that finally worked out in our favor! I’m still very hopeful that the other two problems will get themselves worked out, because they are so clearly errors that were not of our doing. But please keep praying for us that this will be the case!

I have never been a person good at dealing with financial issues. I tend to be more of a “saver” than a “spender” and this has kept me out of trouble for the most part. However, I would much rather practice the “out of sight, out of mind” method of doing my finances than use any detailed accounting system. I did well by that when I was single, and only once bounced a check…and that was only due to laziness in not getting to the bank to deposit a large check a roommate had written to pay me back for a month of rent.

Unfortunatley, that system does not work well in marriage. With two incomes and a lot more expenses to juggle, keeping track of the budget is much more of a necessity. Earlier this week, we discovered that our current budget doesn’t balance as well as we might like. Between medical and dental bills that have exceeded our expectations, not making as much progress as we hoped in support raising for GCM, and a variety of other minor circumstances we find ourselves needing to pinch more than a few pennies over the next couple months until we get these things worked out.

Me, being the “out of sight, out of mind” person would much rather find ways to make money (and go back to ignoring my financial situation as often as possible) rather than cut expenses (which requires careful thought and attention put toward regular expenditures). I don’t really have time to get another job or start a business, but I had fun daydreaming about ways to make money yesterday.

I like to ask myself the question, “If I could make money doing anything, what would I do?” Some of you might think I already have it made because I can get paid to do ministry. I am thankful I have this opportunity, but it has its down-sides too. I mean, in ministry you have to do what the pastors and other leaders want to do…and what God wants to do. All crazy ideas have to be wise, and the best use of time and resources…blah, blah, blah. Wouldn’t it be more fun to just do what I want to do?

The best ideas I came up with for fun ways to make money would be to be a wedding/party coordinator or to somehow get paid to do research (internet or library research or something like that). Of course, even with those business ideas you still have to do what your clients want, so it’s not complete free-to-pursue-my-own-ideas bliss. At least there are fewer levels of management.

Feel free to share your favorite money making ideas in the comment space here…

Quick note before I get started: If you are reading this and the page looks strange, it might be because you are browsing with IE and Tony hasn’t quite gotten our site update (we’ve switched from moveable type to wordpress) finished. You might, as Matt Heerema often sugests try an alternative browser like Mozilla Firefox. Or you can wait until Tony gets things adjusted. If you are using IE and it looks great, it means the fixes have already been made.

Reading Kathy Hanson’s blog earlier this week about how the various Star Trek movies should be ranked from best to worst brought back a lot of memories of my younger days when my mind was often dreaming of strange planets in a far away galaxies. It’s a little-known fact about me that I spent at least a year or two reading sci-fi books pretty much exclusively, and continued to read them on occaison through most of high school. While I don’t read much fiction these days, I still often pick a sci-fi flick when Tony and I go to the video store to grab a movie.

My interest in science fiction started at a young age, when I apparently sat with my mom watching Dr. Who back in the early 80s. I only have vaugue memories of this. As soon as Star Trek the Next Generation started on TV, I was hooked and my true interest in science fiction began. I not only watched TNG on TV, but I started reading the novels based on the original series when I was in about sixth grade. By seventh grade, that led me to look into other type of science fiction.

Our library in the town I lived in at the time had a separate section for science fiction, and being the logical, ordered person I am I simply started with the “A”s and planned to work my way down the alphabet. However, since there are a lot of science fiction writers with names that start with “A” through “C,” (Or at least several very prolific writers) I don’t remember ever making it much past “C.” Two of the greastest masters in sci-fi writing are Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and I spent many months just reading their works.

Science fiction often has grand, sweeping sagas and deals with themes that cut to the core of who we are as people – things like life, death, human origins, higher powers and the meaning of life. Many science fiction books give the reader a sense of being a part of something greater than one’s self. I often wonder if my enjoyment of these types of science fiction books was an early indicator of some kind of spiritual interest bubbling up inside of me before I could even recognize it as such.

After reading sci-fi novels almost exclusively in Junior High, I got a little burnt out and moved on to reading more in the realms of historical fiction, mysteries and “the classics.” I would still pick up a good sci-fi novel every now and then. After I became a Christian (in the spring of my Junior year in high school) I had a hard time looking at some of my favorite sci-fi novels the same way though. Most stories in this genre are pretty godless, and something rubbed me the wrong way about their explanations of life’s greatest mysteries and struggles. As a young Christian, it was almost a stumbling block to read these stories that placed ultimate meaning in technology or superior alien races or in “Fate” or something like that.

As a little bit older Christian, I think I could now read a lot of those same works and not be stumbled quite the same way. It does make me wonder though if there are science fiction works that treat these ultimate questions differently. I generally don’t like “Christian fiction” as one finds it from specifically “Christian” publishers…it seems cheesy and trite most of the time. But I’m curious if very many mainstream authors have chosen different ways of treating these deep issues. Even if the explanations are godless, I am pretty confident that science fiction can be used by God to point people toward Him…even if it is just in causing people to think about something deeper than the latest entertainment craze.