Yes, I am angry.  And hurt.  No, I do not think I’m not being a good Christian by feeling this way.  Even Jesus got angry.  So far, I don’t see that I’ve sinned in this situation, so I feel that right now I’m in good standing.  Please don’t preach at me right now.  I know all the same verses you do.  For likely about as long as you have.  I need to process, and pray, and let the Holy Spirit work His peace in me.  It won’t help if you start throwing Scripture verses or Christianese at me right now. 

Also, am I the only one who thinks that Social Services needs to revamp their obligation/anonymity policy?  I mean, if there is truly a very obvious case of abuse or neglect, and you’ve tried to talk to the parents, I can see wanting to be able to quietly report it.  But even the social worker who handled our case two years ago said that most of the time, the reports/accusations are unfounded.  So I think that number one, if a person feels obligated to report a situation they need to first be asked if they’ve spoken with the persons involved.  If they have, they proceed with the guarantee of anonymity, unless the accusations are found to be false, and then the identity is allowed to be given to the accusee.  I bet that would stop a lot of the “axe to grind” reporting that goes on.  In fact, our own social worker asked me if I knew of anyone who had/has any issues with me.  Yeah, I can think of a couple of people.  Not that I’ve really done anything.  They just can’t stand me.  Poor them. 

And, we really did see that house several years ago, and it was truly love at first site.  There has been lots of doubt over the past few days as we’ve investigated our options about the level of regret I might feel if we gave up our waterfrontage.  At this point, I feel like it would be nothing but blissful, sweet relief.  We still own our mobile/lot, and it’s the next best thing to waterfront, and we know and like the neighbours there.  So we could still have a “cottage”. 

We need wisdom.  And grace to walk this out in a way that only glorifies God.  Without doing or saying anything we’ll regret.

And without eating too much chocolate.