Ethan's Baptism

Well, I could not be more proud of our son for more than one reason! First of all, I stand in awe of the fact that at 3 years old Ethan understood that he was a sinner in need of a Savior! He accepted that there was no way to heaven accept through Jesus' perfect shed blood, and he asked Jesus to be his own PERSONAL Savior. We wanted to wait a while to "test" if you will his understanding of salvation before he was baptized. So for about a year, we have been watching and waiting for the "proof of salvation". There has not been one time that I have doubted Ethan's salvation. Ethan knows without a doubt who his Savior is, and I rejoice greatly in this. Not only can he tell us clearly that Jesus is his Savior but there is evidence in his fruit! The Bible tells us that those who are a child of God, "saved" if you will, will bare fruit. Let me just tell you, our little Ethan bares much fruit. He constantly has a song in his heart for Jesus, He has already preached several of his first messages, and is a little soul winner wherever he goes handing out tracts and such! I submit to you that this is fruit! He is already trying to win his little brother over to the Lord. He has amazing spiritual discernment for one so young, and has an unbelievable way of memorizing Scripture that puts his mommy to shame. He has learned many verses and almost knows every book of the Bible in order, all 66 of them! I say this not for our honor and glory but to the Glory of God who makes all things possible! So needless to say, this last month we were confident that Ethan was ready to be baptized! We spoke to him about it and he was really excited and wanted to do it. He did end up getting a little scared when the time came but I am so proud of how brave he was! I think what scared him was that Pastor told him that the water was hot. Below I have posted a video of his baptism. Please rejoice with us in this step of faith our son has taken. He was so proud of himself afterwards that he actually did it! Mommy and Daddy told him how brave he was! Remember, bravery does not mean you are never afraid. It means that even though you are afraid, you do what you know you need to do! What a brave little boy we have! We pray our boys will be leaders and as a friend of mine says, "world changers"! That's what we need today! The sound is pretty good so you will hear his response to Pastor's questions as well as his tears at the end!

Pictures!

Well! I know you thought I have fallen off the face of the earth, but have no fear, I'm still here!! I confess I have a hard time keeping this blog up like I had hoped, but I'm still trying. I know you are really here to see pictures so I will be brief with my update. We are all doing well and enjoying the warm weather here in Alabama. Ethan's T-ball season is over but Zach is still in the midst of his softball season. I am now working with the bus ministry on Wednesday nights at our church. I teach the 4th-6th grade girls class and I love it! I praise God for this opportunity to share HIM with these wonderful girls. This Wednesday I taught a lesson, and afterwards there was at least one girl saved and four more receiving assurance of their salvation. I praise the Lord for this, for it is only through Him that such a work can be done! Having the responsibility of teaching these young ladies from God's Word has given my an new appreciation for the Bible. It has given me a new yearning to search out the Scriptures, and I am so excited about this! I stand amazed that God's Word has stood the tests of time and remains true today! God knew thousands of years ago the things we would have to deal with today! Some people say that the Bible is an "old book"! May I suggest that the Bible contains EVERY bit of information we need today and we can thrive in this life because of the things God teaches us in His Word. Thank you Lord for giving me this opportunity. If you can't tell, I am excited about this young class. Please pray for us. These girls have such potential! Here are some new pics!

My Mommy thinks I'm cute!

This is when Ayden had a mysterious full body rash.

Running and playing in the mud!


She's actually letting me do this?!

Don't worry, they got a bath as soon as they got inside!

Ethan helping mommy peal potatoes! What a helper!

Here, There and Everywhere!

The title of my post pretty much explains our life right now! Zach is playing softball for our church and Ethan is playing T-ball. Between ball games and church and serving the Lord however He sees fit, we have been gone almost every night for the last few weeks! We definitely lead a Full life! Sometimes I find myself asking the question, "Is it worth it?" My answer to that would be yes, if what we are doing brings honor and glory to God. Zach and I try to lead a life that brings honor and glory to God at all times so that others see a difference in us. We want people to see in us that God has something to offer that the world does not. I pray that we can do this with a humble spirit so that we do not come across as being "Holier that Thou" because we certainly do not think of ourselves as being "better" than anyone else! I pray that the people we come into contact with at the ball parks and Walmart, and anywhere else we go, will say to themselves, "There is just something different about them, and I want whatever they have too!" God offers us something so priceless that the world cannot even try to equal. He offers peace, hope, security, and eternal life through His Son, Jesus! Anything short of that is pretty much worthless to me! I just pray that we can share this priceless gift with others!

I'm so proud of Ethan! He has already understood that he is a sinner and has asked Jesus Christ to take his sins away. I cannot even begin to explain what joy this brings to me to know that Ethan and I will spend eternity in heaven together with our Savior! I guess what saddens me the most is that we all have loved ones that we will be separated from for eternity unless they accept what Jesus did for them on the cross. But this is not so with our beloved son, Ethan. And, because of his decision for Christ, he is going to be baptized this Sunday night! We did not want to push him in this decision, but he was the one to actually bring this up. He was very adamant that he wanted to be baptized. Believe it or not, even a four year old can understand that baptism is a step of obedience to God, and Ethan very much wants to be obedient! We will try to video tape it and post it next week. Our prayer is now that God will use Ethan mightily for Him. We are also praying fervently that God will save Ayden at an early age! Please pray about this with us!

Well, we are all well for the moment and I do hope we stay that way. Ayden just got over a double ear infection and Ethan had a cold. We are enjoying 80 degree weather here in sunny Alabama, and spending most of it outside! My birthday is tomorrow. My family and I celebrated last weekend with a dinner out to Olive Garden. It was wonderful! My husband bought me a sowing machine (I'm picking up a new hobby), and my mom got me a new dress! For those of you wondering how old I am, I'm not going to come right out and tell you but I will tell you I was born in 1981. I know you can figure it out! I'll post some picks of the boys now since I know that is what you really want to see! Thanks again for stopping by to check on us!

My three "men" chilling out on the couch!

I just woke up an I want my mommy!

Ethan's T-Ball Schedule

For those of you who are interested and would like to try to make it to one of Ethan's T-Ball games, here is a link to his Season Schedule.

http://www.moodypark.com/Baseball/5yrTBall/Thunder/Thunder%20Schedule.pdf

Life's Struggles and Blessings

Well, you may be wondering if the Lang family has fallen off the face of the earth! I am happy to say that we are still here and thriving! We have been so busy that I can hardly keep up with my house let alone a blog, but I will try to update you as best I can. I have more pictures to post but those will have to wait until I have more time. I have title my post the way I have because it seems that we have had some struggles these last few months but also so many amazing blessings! My children have not been well, in fact, two weeks ago, all three of my precious men were sick with the stomach bug. Zach bounced back pretty quick from it, but two young ones took about a week to get over it completely. But in this trial, I found a great blessing! I never got sick! Not once when my family was sick did I feel the least bit ill. Praise the Lord because only such protection could come from Him! I'll spare you all the details about how much cleaning up I had to do. but God truly knew that mama must be spared to get through the week we went through. I praise you Lord! The week after everyone was sick, we made a trip to Ohio to see family and friends. We had a wonderful time, and I'm so thankful that everyone was well for the trip. The boys did great on the airplane, another huge blessing! Well, we got back from our trip this past Tuesday, and that evening Ayden started to break out in a rash. When he woke up Wednesday morning, his face was swollen and the rash covered his whole body. The doctor says it is some sort of allergic reaction. Your guess is as good as mine as to what he is reacting to! Please pray for this to clear up. It does not seem to be bothering him too much, but it does look awful! And to top all that off, Ethan now has a fever and a cough. The blessing in this is my children seem to be handling all of this just fine! Thank you Lord! It could be so much worse couldn't it? One more struggle, I would like to share with you (and ask you to pray for too) is for my husbands job. I know many are concerned about there jobs these days and we are no different. I praise the Lord that we still have a job, but Zach has had to take a pay cut. I want to thank Pinnacle Engineering for how upfront they have been with us and for the sacrifices they have made to ensure that everyone has a job. This pay cut was to avoid laying anyone off so for now we still have a job. Please just pray that things will turn around soon. I have found several blessings in all of this So I will just number them off for you. Number one: The company has been so upfront about everything and my husband didn't just get laid off one day without a hint of anything going down. Number two: I'm thankful that the Lord has revealed to us His principles in handling finances so that this news is not devastating to us. Number three: We had pledged a certain amount of money to our church building fund and we paid that off the week before we found out about the pay cut. I can't praise the Lord enough about that! He is so Good! The bottom line is that God is so Good through the good times and the bad. I know that even if Zach did lose his job, God would provide for us. He always has and I do not expect Him to stop now. I hope to post pictures soon! We are busy with T-ball, softball, and many other activities. Oh, and Ethan has finished learning the Roman's Road Bible verses and I will post a video soon of him saying his verses!

We woke up to a wonderful surprise yesterday! Imagine, if you will, waking up one wonderful Sunday morning all nice and cozy warm in your bed. Nothing particularly different at first about this Sunday. Nothing different until we ventured from our bed to find everything outside covered in a beautiful blanket of snow! Now those of you from the North who are reading this blog are probably thinking, "Snow in March? What is so exciting about that? We are still waiting the Big Storm of '09!" OH, but this is not the North. This is ALABAMA! To most of the children who live here, snow is but a description to them, never to be experienced! Snow is something they have only seen in pictures let alone in person. I spoke to a teenage girl at church yesterday who had never seen snow until just last year when she went on a missions trip to Germany. Being Northerners ourselves, Zach and I probably took the snow a little for granted, but we were still very excited! We've missed it. And it was wonderful to play with our children in it! We made some great memories yesterday!Praise the Lord, we made it to church safely yesterday. We had a wonderful service and it seemed so fitting that our small yet never the less present choir sang "Holy is He". We made it safely home. In fact, the snow was already starting to melt by our drive home Sunday morning. We decided to eat lunch before we got out to play in the snow. We should have played first because much of the snow had melted by the time we made it outside. Nevertheless, we had a major snow ball fight, built a snow man and Ethan even made a snow angel! Here are some pictures we took of our fun filled snow day!




This is what it looked like when we first woke up.

Beautiful!

Getting ready for our snowball fight!

On the way to church!

The battle is on!

My Snow Angel!

My men and their snowman!

Thanks for sharing in our winter wonderland adventure!

Faith

I don't usually post my personal devotions and Scripture Study in this blog, but today, I really felt led to do so. Maybe the Lord can use this in some way! Our Pastor has so graciously given his congregations devotional books each month and this month is about FAITH. Hebrews chapter 11 is what he calls the "Hall of Faith" chapter. It is amazing to study! If we really, stop and think about ourselves, we have to admit that we all have "faith" in something! We may have faith in our money, and we have seen recently, that is not something very stable to have faith in. We may have faith in ourselves, family members, talents, promises (which can easily be broken). I say all that to say, where does your faith lie? Hebrews 11:7 says, "But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." Our faith must lie in God! So many argue the existence of God because they cannot see him, touch him or hear him. May I ask you a question? Do you believe in the wind? You can't see it but you can feel it. You can watch it rustle your child hair as he walks across the grass. You can feel its coolness on your face on a warm day. You can watch it cause leaves to fall from a tree on a crisp fall day. I've never heard anyone deny the existence of the wind, but so many deny God. If you've never accepted him as your personal Savior, that empty, hollow feeling you have is proof that He is there. He's just waiting to fill that void. Look around you! Everything around you declares that a marvelous Creator created everything and put his own personal touches into this world. When I look at my children, I can't help but see the miracle of the Creator perfectly designing my children! Hebrews 11:7 says that we cannot come to God unless we first believe that he is (that he exists)! Do you believe? FAITH! Our pastor defines faith as taking God at his Word in spite of my feelings, circumstances or consequences. Let me just make it clear that I choose to put my faith in God! Our verse goes on to say the God rewards those who diligently seek HIM! I feel so rewarded. I've much to be thankful for. I want to seek Him, and He will reward me for doing so. I claim this promise. Do you feel rewarded today, or do you always feel "tough out of luck". Trust me, luck has nothing to do with it! The Bible says, that God rewards those that seek Him! Are you seeking Him? The Bible also promises that if you seek HIM, you shall find HIM. Trust me, God wants all to come to Him! I hope I've made you think some, but this was just too important to keep to myself!

Loving all of you!
Cathy