And he's gone.

We just received word that Will has gone home to be with Jesus. He has, as my mother put it, "joined the ultimate praise team." It's not hard to believe that Will is better off. He'll never have to battle leukemia again. He'll never have to feel his health slipping away from him or feel the frustration of illness. Jesus was his comfort in life and in death. He is in the presence of the God he loves and served all his life, and there is no greater happiness than that.

Please continue to pray for his family as they cope with losing a father and husband.

Prayer update

The good news, the bad news.

After a week of promising reports and tiny gains, my friend Will suffered a major setback. Inspite of the fact that his transplant had grafted and was beginning to produce white blood cells, Will has had two major brain bleeds, one in the right frontal lobe, and one in back. He is still alive, but he is not breathing on his own, his kidneys are deteriorating, and those in the know are talking about arrangements for afterward and family coming in. Oh Lord, we don't want to lose Will. We are still hoping for a miracle. Please pray.

Baby Fix

This video is for my mother, who unabashedly resorts to my blog everyday in order to get her grandbaby fix. What better baby fix than laughter and giggles? (notice that she is looking at me, not at the camera. If she had seen the camera, we wouldn't have gotten this video.)

baby pictures

I've been receiving complaints that there haven't been any recent pictures of Niki on my blog (and to tell you the truth, I've been kind of frustrated myself). The simple reason for that is that I can't get the pictures I want out of her. Niki is adorable, but she's not one of those babies that lights up when they see a camera. In fact, she usually looks unbearably concerned or just hides.

This is her usual expression when I'm trying to get a picture:

If not this:And sometimes this:

I don't know if she finds the camera so fascinating that she focuses on it instead of on whatever made her smile, or if she finds it so intimidating that it wipes the smile off her face, or if she's just so bashful that she prefers not to be seen in all her gorgeous cuteness smiling at the camera. What I do know is that she'll be cooing, gurgling, and giggling until I pull out the camera, and then I get Baby Big Eyes. Adorable yes, but I'd like to show off a bit more of her more personable personality.

I took these pictures of Seth and Niki on Fathers' Day. It was Seth's first Fathers' Day. He said that when he saw me come into the living room with his present, he wondered who it was for. "I think that's the moment that I actually realized I was a father," he said. (Took him long enough ;). ) As you can see, Niki loves her daddy. He can even get her to smile for the camera,

a little bit.

Happy Fathers' Day!

p.s. Update on Will -- his medications are working, and he is in stable condition. He is still sedated, but the doctors are no longer alarmed. Please keep praying.

Please Pray.

My friend Will DJ is nine days past a stem cell transplant, and he's experiencing complications. His Hickman catheter (I think it goes into the heart or the aorta) which they use to do all his bloodwork, has clotted. This is not one of the complications that the doctors were anticipating, and they're not sure what to do.

Will has a wife and two teenaged sons. He sings with our praise team. We were anticipating that he would be gone for the summer. We'd like a little more time with him before eternity.

A meditation

Are parents teacher or students? My biggest concern when I learned I was going to become a parent was how to teach my coming child about God. I mean, how does the finite (and fallable and tired) communicate the nature of God to the mind of a child. Now that Niki is here, I find her teaching me about God in tiny finite moments.

Often in the Bible God presents Himself to us as our Father. We take this to mean that He is in authority over us, that He is our origin, that He provides for us, but think about everything else that a parent is, all the things that are difficult to put in words.

For instance, this morning, as I was changing Niki's diaper, I budged her head on the changing table in a way that was uncomfortable, and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and her mouth all smunched up, but when she saw my face and noticed that I was smiling and comforting, she decided to smile instead. She looked at me and decided that what she had thought was a bad thing was not so bad because I was smiling.

Think of the effect that a parent has on a child. More than teaching right and wrong, we teach them how to respond to the smallest things: scraped knees, bugs in the backyard, dirt, lace and ribbons, their own desires, habits, and traits. They take their mindsets from us. They look to us to learn how to respond to all the little stimuli in the world around them. So too we should look to God, letting His perspective or the look on His face determine how we respond to the stimuli in our world, especially the hard ones. If we look up and see God smiling, then we can be confident that whatever discomfort we are experiencing is part of a healthy process or done with a good purpose.