what is needful?

i have been REALLY into knitting the past few days for some reason. today i have spent lots of time on the computer looking for new patterns. i found some great ones and printed them out, but i probably won't make half of them. i get so inspired and excited, but then rarely get to it all. part of the problem is, yarn is really expensive-if you get the nicer kind. and when you need like 10 balls of it to make something, WOOO! especially when you are still learning and not sure how things will turn out. :) anyway, i'm going to try something new really soon, hopefully! :) i still want to put some pictures on here... one day! :) oh...i got this to work (i think). here are two of my "pidges" aka neck warmers/scarfs.



so...ryan and i sold my toyota yesterday, which is big news! we are really feeling pretty confident in this car-sales thing, thinking maybe we should go into the business. we had lots of calls, but the first person to actually come and look at each of the cars ended up buying them, immediately! my dad said maybe we just asked too little for them. lol. i was kind of bummed today because i've been playing phone tag with a friend of my dad's who was interested in buying the toyota. he left a message for me today that said he was very interested in the car and, though he hadn't seen it, he had kelly-blue-booked it and he placed a GREAT offer on the car. he actually offered us $1000 more than what we ended up selling it for. of course, we wouldn't have taken that much from him, but i thought we could have gotten more for the car than we did. anyway, one word keeps coming to mind and that is "providence." ryan and i talked about this the other day after he backed the aforementioned car into a tree (didn't mess it up too bad, though we did knock the price down because of it). he said maybe God was teaching us that we couldn't depend on our own ways to get us out to CO. we were hoping to sell my cars and use that money to buy a new car for him and still have some left so we could "make it" for a while in CO. (you know, until we get settled, find jobs, etc) but maybe God was saying, "nope, you aren't going to be able to do this on your own..gonna have to depend on ME!" once we realized that, the car wasn't such a big deal. it's nice that we have sold it, but i'm thinking it wasn't so much "us" that did it....maybe more God! :) anyway, it would be a lot easier to go out to CO if we had a lot of money and a great plan...but we don't. and i think that's because we are going to learn, even more than we already know, how to depend on God. after all, we are only going because we feel He is leading us...

i once heard a story about francis schaffer, though i don't know exactly where you could find it to read it yourself. when he and his wife were planning to move to switzerland (i think) to start l'abri (i think), they knew that the Lord was calling them to do it. but, they didn't have any money really to go and do it. they prayed about this and just felt the Lord saying they should go and that He would provide. so, they went...and they didn't send out ONE support letter asking for help, nor did they really tell people that they were low (really low) on funds. they knew that if the Lord really wanted them to do this that He would provide all that they would need to do it...and you know what? He did! and the ministry that they began has affected many many lives for the Kingdom since then... as John Newton once said, "What God gives is always and only what is needful."