A Jem for His Crown

If you had in your possession something very precious, would you loan it to someone who had repeatedly shown him or herself to be untrustworthy?  Likely not.  I wouldn’t, either.  Yet that’s what the Lord has done to B.J. and me.  Seven times over He’s entrusted us with His children.  How we are humbled when we consider our weaknesses and failures with regard to our ability and our commitment to raise them in the fear of His name!  But how we are comforted to know that He forgives our sins and equips us through His Holy Spirit and by His Word for this high calling!

Introducing…

Time to cut the cord.

First photo with Dad and Mom - too bad Dad has his eyes shut!  :-)

Lots of help with his first bath!

Happy siblings.

Second photo with Dad and Mom - too bad Mom has her eyes shut!  ;-)

Ready to go home.

We intend to call this little man “James” or “Jem” (J.E.M. also being his initials).  (Scout Finch had a Jem, and so did Anne Shirley.  I decided I’d like one, too.  ;-)

Photo shoot on the kitchen table.

Meanwhile...

Several people have asked us if we named James in honor of Jim Elliot, husband of the late Elisabeth Elliot.  No, not really, though it doesn’t bother us a bit that their names are the same.  You see, for the first three years of our marriage, I pretty much ceased reading anything that wasn’t a cookbook or a homemaking or pregnancy manual.  Just before Willem was born, we moved to the little Kramer acreage right around the corner from Dad and Mom, and I checked out Elisabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor.  Then came The Journals of Jim Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman, Passion and Purity, The Shaping of a Christian Family, Discipline: The Glad Surrender… 

I credit Elisabeth with ending my literary hiatus, necessary though it may have  been, with turning my focus from methods to principles.  Her and Jim Elliot’s devotion to the Lord was a much-needed wake-up call for me.  In the throes of midnight feedings and countless diaper changes I needed their encouragement to find my contentment in Him and to be thankful and fully present in the season of life in which I found myself: “Wherever you are, be all there.”  I told her so in a letter.  She responded via the pen of her third husband, Lars Gren, the one of whom she, having already buried two husbands, often said, “May he outlive me.”  The Almighty answered that prayer in the affirmative when Elisabeth passed through the gates of splendor last June, and again Lars responded to the sympathy card I sent him.  His note lies in the “treasure box” on my closet shelf along with his letter from several years before.

There’s not a book of Elisabeth’s from which I’ve not profited: she’s always pointed, always profound.   And with regard to our little James Elliot, when we look to the future, we can’t help but tremble.  It’s our prayer that he will grow up to be a man who is ready to give his very life for the sake of Christ’s kingdom.  After all, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

When he's not taking advantage of his distracted mama by unwrapping every bar of soap in the bathroom or throwing thousands of Perler beads around the basement, Sean's pretty smitten with "Baby James."

Nathan is my big helper at home!  Here he is "reading" to James.

And when the day comes that the Lord makes up His jewels, it’s our earnest desire and our greatest ambition that this little Jem and his six siblings will be among them.