Update on Heather at Just Laugh... and other stuff : )

I know that many of you that read my blog also read Heather's blog, and since she hasn't posted for close to a month, I thought you might like to know how she's doing, and how to pray for her.
First of all, an electrical outage a couple of weeks ago messed up her computer, and she's unable to get online at all. So if she hasn't responded to your e-mails or comments-- don't take it personally! The good news is that her husband Brian made it home safely last week!! The bad news is that he came home to a house full of sickies :( Heather, Lily, Ayden, & Anjolie all have the flu! I'm so glad that Brian made it home in time to care for all of them. Please keep them all in your prayers as they recover.

Now, on to my family! Today there was a scheduled alarm testing that sounded throughout the city. We were told about it, so I wasn't worried when I heard the loud sirens begin to wail. Unfortunately, I forgot to warn my children! My daughter happened to be in her room getting her Bible for school when it went off. She told me that she immediately turned in her Bible to Psalm 56:3 "What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee." I am always thrilled to see these little glimpses into my children's hearts. To know that in a time of her perceived trouble, she immediately sought comfort in God's word....AND knew where to look to find it! It did my heart good to hear her tell me what she had done. My daughter is also the type to be afraid of many things; so this was good preparation for her to know that God WILL BE THERE when she needs him most.

I mentioned on my last post about the guilt I had over our large grocery bill. I've been doing some praying and thinking about what I could do lower the amount we spend. I used to be very good about making up a "menu" of planned meals for about 2 weeks time, buying everything I needed for those meals, and then only needing to return for certain perishables (i.e. milk, fruit). Somehow when we moved I had gotten out of this practice; probably because of the huge change I went through with the way I cook. I decided that it was time to go back to planning our meals, so that is what I have done. This always saves us money because I'm not buying a bunch extra of things I didn't really need. We went shopping today, and the Lord is already blessing my efforts to save money.... there were sales on almost all of the fresh produce (which is where a lot of our money goes). I'm not sure what the reason was; maybe in celebration of the upcoming Passover holiday this weekend. It doesn't really matter though; I was happy to take advantage of the savings! If our trips to the store follow a pattern like they did today, I'm hoping to save around 2-3 hundred dollars this month! I'll let you know how it all turns out.

I had another answer to prayer just today. This is the first year that we have had to do our income tax return on our own. In the past, my husband's employer always took care of this for free. But now that we're out here "on our own" we also had to take care of our own taxes. We ordered Turbo Tax and it was pretty easy to get our returns completed. We didn't want to spend the extra money they charge to do an e-file, so we printed everything out and mailed it off. That was February 2nd. We waited, and waited to see the returns hit our bank account. We checked the websites to find out the status; but the website would always tell us that they had no record of our return. I finally called and waited the 20 minutes to be able to speak to a real live IRS agent. The lady was very friendly and checked in all departments for our information; but it just wasn't there. By this time it had been almost 8 weeks since we mailed it off, and mail usually only takes 1 week or less to reach the US from where we are; so we had to conclude that it had gotten lost.... we would have to resubmit :( The strange thing though was that our state tax return also had not been received. I was beginning to worry that our important, personal information had fallen into the wrong hands; which sparked me to get our annual free credit report! I will admit that I have a tendency to dwell on the "what ifs" and get all stressed out about situations such as these. This time I determined to rely on the Lord instead. I knew that there was nothing I could do; so I had to leave it in the Lord's hands. I prayed for the Lord to straighten everything out, and to protect our identity and finances. I can honestly say that I didn't let it worry me any more. Praise GOD! Last week we finally coughed up the money it took to e-file our returns. My husband went ahead and told the man at our mail room about our missing envelopes and asked him to check around and make sure they hadn't fallen behind some furniture or something. They weren't there, but he did give my husband the phone number of the mail room in Tel Aviv, where our mail goes before it gets sent out. He called there today and was told that at the time we mailed them, there was a problem in the mail room, and everything got delayed for several weeks. It turns out that they were just recently mailed about a week ago and should be at the IRS any time. I'm so thankful to know that our info did NOT fall into the wrong hands. I'm so thankful to KNOW at all.... most things like this, you just never know what happened. I think God wanted to reassure me that he did in fact take care of it for me; just like I asked.