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Well, I downloaded the app so that I could blog from my iPhone, and I really thought it would help make me a more regular blogger. No such luck so far. Oh well. I thought I should at least give it a try so that I can convince myself to do this more often.

Here's hoping...


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

2010, we hardly knew ye

When I look back at this year, I am completely amazed. Amazed that we survived it, amazed that our whole lives have changed, amazed at God’s faithfulness. Mostly that last one. I’ve been terrible at keeping up on here this year because of everything that’s been going on… so here is my condensed look at our year:

January:
-We had just turned down a job offer that would have moved us to Midland. We finally had some peace in our lives and looked forward to a peaceful year ahead of us…
-We bought our plane tickets to Europe, thus making the trip official. There’s no backing out when you have non-refundable plane tickets.
-We were contacted by PR regarding the youth ministry position. So much for our peaceful year.

February:
-We began the interview process with PR.

March:
-PR offered Lance the job… and we accepted. Peaceful year? What peaceful year?
-We told God that we were following where he called us… and that because of that, we were trusting him to handle the details (like, oh, say… where we’ll live!).

April:
-We began the painful process of telling Legacy folk that we were leaving. We cried a lot.
-Lance led singing for his last few times at Legacy.
-We began packing up our house to get it ready to put on the market.

May:
-Since we had already purchased the aforementioned non-refundable plane tickets, we went to Europe… despite the fact that we had JUST started at PR and our lives were so crazy. We become trans-Atlantic travelers for the first time ever. We had a wonderful trip and totally enjoyed ourselves.
-As soon as we got back, summer stuff began at PR.

June:
-We celebrated 4 years of marriage.
-We put our house on the market.
-My little sister got married.
-Lance was gone an awful lot.

July:
-Our house was still on the market.
-Lance was still gone an awful lot.
-We began looking at houses in Arlington.

August:
-Our house was still on the market, and we began seriously looking at houses in Arlington. We spent every Sunday afternoon touring homes.

September:
-I got an email in the middle of church one Sunday morning that we’d gotten an offer on our house. After reading through that offer, we realized it was someone we knew from Legacy… and that his agent was someone from Legacy… and we cried and thanked the Lord.
-We began packing… like REALLY packing.
-We were still looking at houses and struggling to find something we loved.
-We began starting down the barrel of selling our house without having somewhere to go and making arrangements to stay with Lance’s mom short-term.

October:
-We made an offer on a house that we liked but didn’t love.
-We found another house like a week later that we LOVED and made an offer.
-I worked my tail off and gathered every bit of financial documentation about us in 24 hours (and let me tell you – they required a LOT of financial documentation!).
-We packed up our entire lives.
-We closed on the house 3 weeks later. We got an amazing interest rate and a great price… and we bought our house from another CoC minster. Coincidence? Doubtful.
-We moved into our lovely new house on Halloween weekend. Still can’t believe we ever thought it would be a peaceful year!

November:
-We had two youth retreats in November – one being the weekend immediately following moving into our house. Yeesh. That was stressful.
-We hired a painter to paint all of our common rooms during Thanksgiving week. What a difference that made! It started feeling like OUR house.
-We unpacked.
-We began shopping for Christmas.

December:
-We took our trip to NYC.
-We unpacked.
-We put up all of our Christmas stuff which made it look so much more like a home, and we finished up our Christmas shopping about two weeks before Christmas and got everything wrapped and under the tree.
-We celebrated our first Christmas in our new home, and we enjoyed time with both of our families.

We’re still not done unpacking, and there’s wall painting and floor tiling to be done still… but it’s starting to really feel like home. We have singlehandedly kept fast food businesses in the black this year with how much we’ve eaten there. We can barely button our pants (but we do intend to change that)… but we survived it. At times this year, our marriage felt like a business arrangement as we did our dead-level best just to keep up with everything… but looking back, I feel like we’re stronger because of it. We followed where the Lord called us, and He blessed us.

God is so faithful to His children. In fact, one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2011 is to begin a journal of stories of God’s faithfulness in my life. I believe in and worship a God who continues to move and act in my life. He’s not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He’s also MY God. I stand in awe of the things He does, and I want to continue to remember those… and I want to pass those down so that my children and grandchildren will know that they are part of a legacy of faith.

I think my verse for 2011 is going to be Psalm 116:7 – “Be at rest once more, O my soul, for the Lord has been good to you.” Here's hoping for a more peaceful year in 2011!

magical pictures

Here are some of my favorite pictures from our magical trip!

Seriously... this trip was such a dream come true. I've always wanted to see NYC at Christmas, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Magical!

yeesh.

I have been a giant failure at blogging lately. Things are still so crazy. Super speedy update: We had our common rooms painted a couple weeks ago, and they look so good! They are a beautiful, neutral beige… SO much better than yellow! And it was totally worth hiring someone – they look AMAZING, and it took him 3 days to do 4 gigantic rooms. That would have taken us 4 months, 97 cans of paint, 15 sessions of marriage counseling, and we STILL wouldn’t be done. Let’s see… then we enjoyed Thanksgiving, and I went black Friday shopping and got a new TV for our bedroom. We left on December 1st and took a short trip up to New York City . I have always wanted to go at Christmastime, and right now one of our college friends is playing Pumbaa in the Lion King on Broadway (and he has a one-year contract), so we wanted to go up there even though we just took our trip to Europe this year. It was a wonderful, magical Christmas trip! (We saw the tree, watched the Rockettes, ice skated in Rockefeller Plaza , window shopped, bought me a Tiffany & Co. necklace… MAGIC, I tell you. MAGIC.) I did get kind of sick on the day we flew back, and I still have kind of a man-ish voice, but it’s getting better now. Lance and I hung curtains in our dining room last night, and I am SO excited about that. Our house is finally starting to look like we live there. We have some paint color samples on the wall in our bedroom and bathroom, but I am having a much harder time picking those colors than I had picking the common room colors. Sometime soon, I need to post pictures of the house with its new and improved décor and pictures of the NYC Christmas magic. I absolutely cannot believe that Christmas is in 18 days! So exciting… and yet, so much to do still!

chaos chaos chaos... new house.

It has clearly been a long time since I’ve blogged… but with good reason. This past month has been total chaos. When I last blogged, we had made an offer on a house that we liked… but we didn’t really love it. We didn’t have that… feeling when we first walked in the door. We were negotiating on the price with the homeowner, and we were kind of struggling because we didn’t love it. We just wanted to make it work.

Well… so then we went to see another house… and we did have that feeling. We loved it. It was everything we’d been looking for.

And now we live there.

Amazingly, it’s only been 3 weeks and a few days since we went to see the house. We made an offer, negotiated quickly, found a mortgage company that could help us close in 2 weeks instead of a month, closed, and moved in.

The floor plan is awesome, and it feels gigantic to us… even though it’s really only about 300 square feet bigger than our NRH house. It has a formal living and dining, a giant master closet, an island kitchen with tons of storage, a long driveway, an almost-quarter-acre lot, a big backyard… and yellow walls. For some reason, the old homeowners painted every wall in the house yellow before moving. So… we’ll be painting. Even with the yellow walls, though, this house is an answer to our prayers. We just love it.

Of course, right now, we are mostly living out of boxes. I’ve unpacked some dishes and most clothes, and everything else is still in a box or a force-flex bag. I’m not the tidiest person in the world, but I definitely like organization. This, my friend, is NOT organization. It brings back fun near-panic-attack feelings like I always have when I’m out of control.

Anyway, I have a lot of pictures of the house, but I haven’t had time to upload them or do anything fun like that. I hope to have a picture post soon… because our new house is just lovely.

Thank you, Lord!

confessions and blessings

I’ve been a terrible flake about writing on here lately. Honestly, it’s because I’m just overwhelmed.

My life is a constant flurry of activity these days. Our closing on our house in NRH is in 22 days. Today we are making an offer on a possible new house in Arlington . Our home office is pretty much packed up (yay), but then I remember that I haven’t even really touched the kitchen… and there is a TON to pack in there. I’m just exhausted… and we have a family retreat this weekend, a fifth quarter next weekend, a family festival, a junior high retreat, and a high school retreat… all before Thanksgiving. Yeesh. My back is full of knots, and I keep getting stress headaches. Well, stress/sinus. I always struggle with allergies when the seasons change. To summarize – I’m busy, sleepy, and don’t feel too hot.

Every time I sit down to write something, it ends up being more of a to-do list… and it sounds so negative… so then I give up and quit. Instead, I am going to try to focus on the good things happening in my life:

1. We found a house we like enough to make an offer on… and it’s even cheaper than most of the houses we’d looked at, so we’ll be able to put quite a bit down (at least 20%, maybe 25%) and have a nice low mortgage.
2. Our house sold in this terrible market (totally all God).
3. We are going to NYC the first week of December regardless of what else happens… so I KNOW I will have a little break and be able to get away for awhile. And I’ve always dreamed of going to New York at Christmastime, so I am just SO excited.
4. Even though I sometimes get sad and miss my Legacy friends, we are finally getting to a point that we’ll be able to start attending some PR grow groups and hopefully make some friends there.
5. I’m still in a non-Bunko/supper club group with some of my Legacy friends, so I get to see them and catch up at least once a month. I never realized what a blessing that could be for me.
6. I decided that I really want Ugg boots to wear in NYC while we’re there since it will be so cold, so I went and tried some on this weekend and liked them enough that I’m ordering a Discover cash back bonus card to go buy them… hopefully in the next week or so. They were delightfully comfy and warm… which is good because that is MUCH more than I normally spend on shoes. (And someone come hunt me down and kick me in my face if I ever wear the Uggs with Soffe cheerleading shorts. I still don’t get that look. If it’s cold enough for your feet to need Uggs, don’t your legs need pants???)
7. I’ve been reading through my Bible, and I got really bogged down in Isaiah and Ezekiel, but I’m now to the other side of those (just finished Daniel, actually), so hopefully I will pick up the pace and perhaps be able to finish reading through the Bible this year.
8. Christmas is getting close! Yesterday I numbered off the days until Christmas so that I could do a countdown. Today makes 81 days until Christmas! I am so excited about that. I love Christmas. I mean, really. It’s ridiculous. I love Christmas. Did I mention I love Christmas? Well, I do.
9. We are (sort of) beginning to get into a groove at PR. I am starting to know names and be able to talk to people… and find my way around the building without getting lost (hallelujah!).
10. I have a really wonderful husband. He takes such good care of me and is so patient with me when I go through phases like the one I’m in now (borderline panic attack at least once a day). We’re SO different, so I know he doesn’t necessarily understand how I’m feeling, but he loves me and cares for me through it. It’s also been a big blessing to see him really thrive in his new job. Sometimes he gets overwhelmed, yes, but he just has all these new ideas and gets so excited when kids really get it. He has a precious heart.

Finally, I am so thankful for the Lord’s faithfulness. Throughout this changing churches/selling a house/buying a house/moving process, one of the stories that the Lord brought back to me over and over was that of Abraham. God called him out of where he was without showing him exactly where he was going. God was incredibly faithful to Abraham, and the only times things didn’t go well for Abraham were the times that he tried to manipulate his own situation instead of following where he was led. God just kept reminding me that I need to trust and not try to shape my own situation into what I think it should be. Amazingly, of all things, that is precisely what this past week’s sermon was about – about God calling Abraham to an unknown place and the faith it takes to move there. What a confirmation! Oh, He’s so good to me.

So… I’m still a little overwhelmed by the number of boxes that need to be packed and the arrangements that need to be made… and my allergies are still less than fabulous… but I know I am protected and loved and cherished by the King of kings… and that He will provide for my every need. After all, I’m worth more than sparrows and lilies.

immeasurably more

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Our lives have been an adventure of blessings lately. Over the course of the past few weeks, we have gone from fearful, worried, hand-wringing, terrified about selling our house… to a house that is under contract and an option period that ends tomorrow. And the blessings don’t stop there.

So basically – here’s the story. Saturday, August 28^th someone came to view our house (obviously always a good thing). The only comment they left was that buyer preferred a different color scheme… which made me cranky since I figure most people just assume they will repaint whatever house they buy. Anyway, no harm, no foul. We went to bed Saturday night and got up and went to church Sunday morning (as is our custom). During church, Lance got up to sit with a boy from the youth group who was getting baptized, and an elder stood up to make a veeerrrry long announcement (no joke – like 7 or 8 minutes) about budget stuff. Needless to say, I got bored, so I checked my phone to see what time it was. Well, now that I have this fancy iPhone, I also happened to see that I had gotten 3 emails while I was at church… and lo and behold – we got an offer on our house! So I (obvi) immediately begin crying and want to tell Lance but he’s sitting on the front row. When church ended, I ran over and told him, and we were so excited. We went out to lunch with Lance’s mom, and I was reading through the offer (a 22-page PDF… on my iPhone screen) and realized it was a contingency and said, “Oh, we need to not get our hopes up too high then,” and I asked Lance to print the entire PDF out for me when we got back to the church since reading the tiny print was making me batty.

When he printed it out, we realized that God had orchestrated this entire situation – we know the buyer’s agent, the buyer, and the people involved in the buyer’s contingency. They all go to Legacy, and we know, trust, and love them all very much. This has been an incredibly peaceful, easy process. AND thanks to the aforementioned contingency, our closing isn’t set until the last week of October, so we still have 6 or 7 weeks to try to find a house in Arlington!

Oh my goodness, the Lord is taking care of us! Honestly, if I had tried to come up with my perfect situation, it would not have been anywhere near this great. God is absolutely watching over us and guiding our every step. And how this is increasing my faith! When He calls, He leads. He provides. He blesses. And then He smiles when I am somehow amazed (yet again) at His faithfulness.

Okay, I know this is already long… but I also have to share that the Lord had just really been putting particular verses and Bible stories on my heart throughout this process. One of the main ones has been, “Not to us, O Lord, not to us – but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness.” (Psalm 115:1) And God gave us this situation in the midst of chaos – in the midst of a 27% housing market decrease in July – and took care of every detail… and I didn’t do a darn thing. Couldn’t if I wanted to. I had NO control. And all I can do is marvel, stand amazed, and give the glory to Him… the One to whom honor is due.

To end, the verse that has been soothing my soul for the last week as we work out all the details of our housing contracts – “Be at rest once more, O my soul, for the Lord has been good to you.” (Psalm 116:7)

Praise the Lord. Amen.