Look who got her level 1 swimming this week. At the beginning of lessons, it was a stretch for Maia just to blow bubbles in the water or to submerge her whole head. The week after lessons ended we camped on Lake Huron and went swimming twice a day. Different kid in the water! Now she'll tell me to back up -- back UP! -- until I'm metres away and then swim underwater the whole way to me. Reminded me of when I was a kid. I would mostly swim underwater. (I think I once swam 3 lengths of the pool without coming up for air. Does anyone in my family remember this?)
Anyways, huge progress for this little fish in such a short time! I'm a proud watermama.
In recent months, we've started memorizing verses at dinnertime as a family. Our hope was really that by repeating the same verse once or twice a night until Maia had learned it with us, that we might learn a verse or two a month (or maybe even one a week?). We didn't really expect Eliana to catch much of all this. Boy were we wrong. Not only has Maia enjoyed this new family goal and absorbed a handful of great 'verses for life', but Eliana has been surprisingly engaged and keen to learn and say them too.
Now if you just say the word "Lord," Eliana will smile and happily recite Habbukuk 3:2 (something I've been praying a lot lately)....
Notice how Maia just lives to play with the neighbours these days? Her enthusiasm makes me laugh.
So as a teenager, I was a 'quizzer'. This means I spent a lot of hours on the bus, in the car and in my bedroom memorizing chapters of scripture. I remember one year we memorized the whole book of Acts. Looking back, it sounds rather odd and extreme, but I'm so thankful for what that season of memory work and competition did for me. (That was the year I missed a spot on the internationals team by one question. I can still tell you what verse it was. I added the word "and" and got it wrong!)
My hope is that when these girls are older and life gets harder, that they'll have a treasury of scripture to draw on. It's amazing how the Spirit reminds us of things we need to remember just when we need them most. But I still think the onus is on us to build up the treasury....
