Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I just wanted to wish everyone the very best of the season. It is a beautiful sunny, snowy day here in Regina. A lovely day for playing in the snow! Andrew has been patiently waiting to open his presents and finally the time arrived. Autumn and Andrew and their two little brothers had a great time opening gifts and playing with them. Holly is spending the day with us. We have had our cinnamon rolls and the turkey is in the oven. I think it will be a fun day. Last evening we enjoyed a wonderful Xmas Eve service. It was very well done and thought provoking. It is good to remember the reason why we do celebrate and on that note I will again wish you the blessings of a wonderful holiday season. Ellen

Love Languages

Last evening concluded seven evenings of "The Marriage Course". This is a video series presented by Nicky and Sila Lee and put out by Alpha. Ray and I led the course and we had 7 couples who faithfully showed up most weeks. It is one of the best that we have seen. Even after being married for 43 years, we felt there were some new insights, and new ways of doing things that can be helpful to us.
Last evening was the last one and it was based on a book by Gary Chapman called The Five Love Languages. According to Chapman there are five ways of expressing love. These are: loving words, thoughtful presents, physical affection, quality time, and kind actions. For each of us one of these languages will communicate love more effectively than the others. The deal is to figure out how your spouse communicates love and how you communicate love. Usually they are different. We usually try to communicate love in the way that we would like to receive it. Fortunately for us, we were introduced to this book and this concept a few years ago, but when I first encountered it I was intrigued by it. Ray's top way of expressing love is through kind actions. He loves to do things for the people he loves. My top way of communicating love is quality time. I love to spend time with the ones I love. A close second for Ray is loving words, or affirming encouraging words, and a close second for me is gift-giving. Once we had that figured out we were much better at communicating our love to each other. As we mature these five love languages seem to meld together and we strive to communicate our love well in all of these areas. It is interesting to think about your children and try and figure out what their love language is or even have a discussion with them. Some are easier to figure out than others!
Have you read this book? If so what is your love language?

At Long Last

As we count down the days in Canada I am thinking more and more of the many blogs I will enjoy reading over the next six months. I really cannot expect others to update their blogs with newsy everyday news about family and friends if I am silent on mine!! So here we go!!
We are planning to fly from Regina to Hong Kong on January 9, 2008. Accompanying Ray and I will be Autumn and Andrew and Pamela Stonehouse and Raysha Perry. We are getting excited about visiting Harmony in her 32nd floor apartment in Hong Kong and seeing her school and church and meeting some of her friends there.
We leave there on Monday and fly into Kolkata , spending the night there and then fly to, what will be a new adventure for us, Guwhati, Assam. We will stay at the Baptisit Guest House while we find a home. Ray will begin immediately to teach in a Bible Camp of about 25 young people for a week. It will be held at the Guest House. The rest of us will explore and figure out the bus system of our new city.
We have many feelings and we have many thoughts as to how this is all going to work out. This trip, not necessarily more than others, is giving me lots of time to think about the faithfulness of God in our lives and to put our faith and trust in Him to guide our plans.
One of my goals is to make my posts shorter so more will take time to read them!!
So that is it for this time!
Ellen

Testing the blog

Mom's blog again...