My name is Melanie JEAN Juneau on the web because there happens to be a Melanie Birthing Centre in Juneau, Alaska!! Google finds this similarity much too confusing, so it is Melanie Jean Juneau, which makes me seem like a southern belle. In reality, I am a tiny but hardy Canadian.
2. I have raised 9 children on a hobby farm. My ceiling is my children”s floor which means that hey stand on the work God has done in my husband and I. They have been blessed through us and vice versa
3. God used blogging to set my gift of writing free this year. It was like an invisible barrier slowly melted, allowing my imagination to bubble up in a stream of written words that felt just as exhilarating as my oral tradition. I was excited to start sharing written stories with other people, people who would read them, respond, comment and give me feed back on what I had written. Within weeks, I w
as no longer an island but part of a community of other writers who had the very same insecurities and problems as I did.
4.
When I first became a mother, I tried to do everything around the house that I had done before I became a mother. Even though I was an acrobatic multi tasked woman, becoming a mother forced me to evolve and adapt. I finally capitulated and grudgingly accepted the fact that what was essential was clean clothes, clean little bodies, clean kitchen and bathrooms–period. Most anything else I liked to keep up was to give visitors a good impression. Sometimes I had to give myself a good shake and let go of an impossible standards. I continually reminded myself that a peaceful, centred mum has peaceful and happy kids
Obviously Jesus did not want me to seek approval from society. When God asked something of me He always supplied the grace I needed. He was asking me to adjust my priorities and to put my children‘s needs first.
5.
“Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
Children are like sponges; they absorb values, attitudes, culture and spirituality simply through osmosis. However, it goes deeper than that. Children’s spirituality is not simply taught, it rises from within as they listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit in their own hearts. Often what came out of our children’s mouths surprised and startled us. Yet both my husband and I were often aware of t
he deep spirituality that flowed from our children to us as well as from us as parents to our offspring
6.
Our journey through life can be compared to a desert scene.
We are in the airport
waiting for a jet plane
to fly us to our oasis
but a plane never seems to land for us.
Meanwhile,
there is a camel tied to the fence,
with our name on it,
waiting to take us across the desert.
joy of nine9 