Twice in the past 6 months I’ve been the recipient of what I would consider “excessive gifts.” The first was a brand new iPad 2 as a “thank you” for letting someone stay at our house for a couple weeks. The other was an “excessive gift” from a completely anonymous source. The details really aren’t important, but I’ve learned a lot from my knee-jerk reaction to receiving these gifts.

Here’s a list of the thoughts and feelings I experienced when I received these “excessive gifts”:

• (with the ipad) “That was way too much. Great. Now we need to buy them a car or something next time we stay at their house for a week.”
•  Guilt: this is way beyond what seems “appropriate” for service we performed (to be honest, we would have gladly paid to have them stay at our house).
• I must find a way to pay it back.
• Is it even okay to just accept the gift?
• Frustration: “What are they thinking? We don’t need or deserve this.”
• (with the anonymous gift) My mind raced to figure out who gave it to us so I could know what they were thinking and how to make it right.
• “Since I can’t pay it back, I need to  make sure to act in a way worthy of this gift.”

Just over 4 years ago, the Colin and Grace Jones family consisted of 2. In just a few short months, we will have grown to a family of 6! Here’s a brief timeline of the past 6 years:

2004: We start trying to get pregnant

2006: We are seeing a fertility doctor, using meds, and eventually artificial insemination, and find out we’re pregnant by the end of the year. Super excited!

2007: We have our first kid!

2008: 3 months after Elias is born, apparently those fertility issues resolved themselves, and we find out Grace is unexpectedly expecting! Kinda scared, but hey, we wanted kids anyway, so what the heck.

2009: 6 months after Gabriella is born, and despite the use of contraceptives, we find out we are pregnant again. 3 kids in less than 2.5. It was almost like someone told us we were being sent to a Siberian prison for the next 20 years. We were pretty depressed about it for a long, long time.

2010: We have Lieve (you can read about how I unexpectedly had to got to deliver her myself). We prepare for a tough year of 3 kids in diapers, but we thought we’d probably survive it. Then we would take 3 to ∞ years off from having kids.

2011: We learn that the effective use of contraceptives is one of the many things that we are not good at… we’re pregnant with #4. But something weird happened this time. You might expect that we would be the most devastated yet, but we weren’t. Ever since we found out we were pregnant with Lieve (in an effort to ward off violent depression), Grace and I meditated on this passage from Psalm 127:

³ Children are a heritage from the LORD,
offspring a reward from him.
⁴ Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
⁵ Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court.

If 3 kids in 2.5 years felt like self-inflicted torture, then 4 kids in 4.5 years should have felt worse. However, even we were hoping to take a sabbatical from pregnancy, childbirth, and diapers, something funny started to happen: we started to BELIEVE this passage. So when we found out we were pregnant, both Grace and I thought, “wow. God is really blessing us.”

2 questions I’ve had to ask myself over the past 2 years:

1. How does God view family, and am I aligned with His view?

2. How does God view children, and am I aligned with His view?

I don’t know if this means we’ll have 30 kids and become like the Duggars. Maybe God’s teaching me that I should get a vasectomy. Maybe He’s showing us that we should have more kids. At this moment, I don’t know. But I do know that I embrace God’s decision to bless us with 4 kids. Because if He says, “blessed is the man whose quiver is full of children born in one’s youth”, maybe I should view children the same way.

*Oh yeah. And it helps when all the kids are totally awesome, hilarious, fun, and entertaining.

“And this is the way to have eternal life—to know the only true God.” – Jesus

“I thought the way to have eternal life was to say the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’… no one said anything about ‘knowing God.’ I don’t like the sound of that. Just tell me what to do, not Who to start having a relationship with.” – Me 4 years ago

“I am starting to experience a small sliver of eternal life as I get to know God.” – Me today

I look forward to an eternity of knowing “the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one he sent to earth.”

No: this doesn’t involve some questionable game of chance in a place of ill-repute. Though, I wouldn’t say it is a risk-free proposition, or that it is for everyone. However, it’s worked out really well for us!

We are entering into our 3rd summer of renting out our house as a Vacation Rental on VRBO.com. Yep. Other people pay us to stay at our house, while we vacation (typically at Grace’s parents’ place on Hood Canal, though we’ve vacationed to Los Angeles, Whidbey Island, Las Vegas, and Cincinnati courtesy of this gig).

With the struggling economy, people are looking for more economical ways of travelling. So a 4 bedroom house for $300/night, where you can cook your own meals and fit 4-10 people, sure beats staying in multiple hotel rooms. Plus, we have a 60″ TV with cable and DVD player, a kids’ playground in the backyard, and fully stocked kitchen. So it’s a lot more comfortable and enjoyable to hang out in than a hotel room. And it’s perfect for us, because I can work remotely, and it’s covered 50-100% of our mortgage the last 2 years.

Here’s how it works:

• We rent it to people coming to the area for weddings, vacations, family reunions, etc. They pay ~$2,000/week for the house + refundable security deposit
• We clean up our house and leave it comfortable for the rentors. This has basically become Grace’s job, and she does an amazing job of leaving the house clean and inviting. She’ll leave fresh flowers and sparkling cider or things like that as a finishing touch, and people seem to love that stuff.
• We go somewhere else during their stay. (Note, if you stay with friends or family you can keep costs low, but make sure to do something nice for them to let them know how much you appreciate their hospitality… take them out to a nice meal or buy them a nice bottle of wine)

Reasons to not do this:

• You don’t own a home
• Your house is your castle, and you want to keep it that way. Or you can’t stomach the idea of other people sleeping in your bed
• You work a 9-5 with little or no vacation time, so there is little to no flexibility
• You are so tied into your community that leaving for a week or 2 at a time would be counterproductive
• You rent out part of your house to someone who wouldn’t be able to be flexibly (I actually think about this a lot, because we’d like to have someone move in with us, but we make enough from VRBO, that we would need a roommate who can be flexible in the summers)
• You’re afraid someone might break your stuff (Solution: Don’t keep nice stuff out in the open… we lock the garage off, and keep valuables in a safe deposit box at the bank. But to be honest, we have had very little trouble with broken stuff. People want their deposit back, so they tend to take care of your home)

Reasons to do this:

• Work towards your home becoming less of a Liability and more of an Asset
• If you just did this 2 weeks a summer, and planned your family vacation around it, you could easily pay for your entire vacation and still put away a couple thousand dollars. And even if you don’t go somewhere fancy, when you know that you’re making money on the proposition, you can feel free to eat out a little more or enjoy something fun to reward yourself for the hard work of getting your house ready for VRBO guests.
• Challenge your own faith that THIS is not your home (it’s God’s home, and Heaven is your true home)

Why I’m telling you this:

We heard about this from a friend about 4 or 5 years ago. They vacation the entire summer, renting their small house out on VRBO, and cover their entire year’s worth of mortgage payments! At first I thought, that’s cool, but I could never do that. But then Grace and I decided to give it a try, and now we’re hooked. And I’m not the only one… I have preached the gospel of VRBO to several dozen people and now I know at least 8 people who have tried this in 5 different cities, all with success stories. Some people stay with family, others rent out just 1 floor of their house, others travel around the country in their RV, and others use it a way to pay for glamorous vacations they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. So I thought I’d throw it out there to other people who might be looking for creative ways to get some extra income out of their house.

And if moving out several times in the summer does not sound like you, I will be writing a blogpost in the near future about why I want someone to move in with us in the near future.

A couple thoughts I wanted to write down about something God has been teaching me…

John 7:24: Look Beneath the Surface so You Can Judge Correctly

The problem:

We look at the surface and made incorrect judgments:

• I’ve been written off and written others off as unable to speak into one’s life for being too traditional,  not traditional enough, too charismatic, not charismatic enough, too successful, not successful enough, too risk-taking, not risky enough…

I was reading Psalm 142 the other day and it really struck me. Here’s the flow I seem to get from it:

1. David cries out to the Lord for help from circumstances:

¹ I cry out to the Lord;
I plead for the Lord’s mercy.
² I pour out my complaints before him
and tell him all my troubles.

Paths of Return by Jeremy Pryor – Seeking to return to Jesus’ intended life, mission, and community.

Coupon Connections by Amber Bustanoby – She’s a friend of ours who maximizes EV at retail stores!

BenCRAWFORDlife by Ben Crawford- Ben is one of my best friends. He is brutally honest about his thoughts, struggles, ideas, and cooking recipes.