Blank Slate

Before we left on our trip to Ireland, Gordon and would tell people, "we'll be able to do ___ when we get back from Ireland"... So here I am, staring at our blank slate of months to come, waiting for life to write on it... Sure we have some plans, a couple of weddings, our 1 year anniversary and trying to get together with family and friends to catch up on all of the time we didn't have before our trip and other events preceeding our trip...

Ireland was wonderful. We truly had a great time. There are so many things to write about that I won't go into detail now, but at some point I will. I am still trying to regain my heart. I seemed to have lost it. I found it a little bit while we were in Ireland, but I still struggled to keep it alive even in those moments. I'm not sure what is going on and why I'm still feeling so numb, but I am.

So I look at the upcoming months and I wonder what they will be filled with? Will my heart live again? Will I be able to find passion in life again? Will I be able to sort through what is blocking my heart from coming alive? Will I be able to find the rest and relationships I am longing for? Will I be able to find some of my purpose in life? Will I be able to stop existing and start living?

The questions continue to torment my mind and different hopes surface. Yet those hopes are met with cynicism as their fulfillment as so much of life has had to be put on hold in order to accomplish certain achievements in life (ie: graduation, marriage, etc). Often hope is met with fear which snuffs out the life and longing expectation for something good that hope provides. I hate that fear creeps in like that but unfortunately it is where my heart tends to go in order to protect itself from being let down if that hope is not fulfilled. I don't know how to hope without the guarantee that it is actually going to happen.

So now what do I do with the hopes of the future? Try and keep it alive the best I can but it will be a battle...

Life in the fastlane

It feels as though these last 3 years have been on fast forward... Just I think I am able to catch up, something comes up, a new big decision needs to be made. But we are hopefully in view of a more calm horizon in the very near future.

We made it through the most difficult semester of them all, the last semester of a music composition major's life! His recital was a great success and despite handing in some papers late and thanks to the graciousness of many professor's hearts, Gordon graduated Cum Laude (Cummulative GPA of 3.5) :) I am beyond proud of my amazing husband, at how hard he pushed to finish while juggling a new marriage and all of the crazy 1-2 punches life has been handing us. He reached the finish line with his head held high and with many wonderful memories of his 5 years in college. What a cause to celebrate! :)

In March we were informed that we are needing to move. We live on the 3rd floor to a house and the landlords want to have our apartment for their 18 yr. old daughter. So we are hopefully moving out at the end of the month. At first I took the news really hard because we weren't planning on moving and this year has been tough and full of changes already, but as I was able to calm down, and talked it through with Gordon, I was able to realize that this in fact is a good thing. We've found a place that we like close to church which will allow us to become more involved with the church itself along with our young married's group.

The Lord has been so good to us especially during all of these changes. Gordon was able to secure a job the day before graduation and we are actually going tonight to put in our application on the apartment we are looking at. There is a possibilty of getting piano at a steal of a price (which would be a tremendous blessing for Gordon) and we are also getting a kitten! :) I've been wanting to get a cat for some time and we weren't able to have one in our current apartment. We were also asked to be part of a mission's trip to Ireland, which will help to encourage the missionaries that our church supports in the UK through worship and teaching. This is right up our alley and we are very excited about it. We will be gone from June 11-23rd and once we get back, we'll have landed for awhile. All of this happening one month short of our one year anniversary. Whew, what a first year of marriage!

People told us that our first year of marriage would be great, but also challenging, but we had no idea how challenging it would be. We certainly have had wonderful moments of reveling in the newness of our relationship, but there have been so many outside factors that have kept us busy and away from our hearts. We are hoping that once we return from Ireland and will have moved into our new apartment, life will settle down enough for us to catch our breath and survey all that has taken place this year. We're also hoping to be able to "re-discover" our relationship as we have been running like mad for the last couple of years even before getting married. It is hard to believe that next week we are coming up on 10 months of marriage. It seems like we've always been married, but also like we have just begun... It's a strange mixture of emotions. All of this being said, I am SO thankful that we have been married during all of these dramatic life changes, because I know it would have been extremely difficult having to handle this alone! What a blessing it has been to have been given the gift of marriage!

I think the thing that we have missed the most in these last couple of years is relationships. We formed several great friendships several years ago, and as life has happened, people have moved away or moved on with life. I am praying that as we stop in these next couple of weeks, that we are able to take advantage of the time that we have now that Gordon is done with school to cultivate these relationships and watch them flourish. Life in community can be such a blessing and in such an individualistic culture, it can be very hard to come by.

Well, enough rambling for me. We have a picture of our kitty, but it's blurry. So I'll wait to post it until I get a better picture. We'll be picking it up after our trip at the end of June! Horray! :) I will hopefully be updating more before we leave...:)

My Love

I am so thankful for the amazing husband that God has blessed me with. He is loving, kind, gentle, understanding, patient, gracious, thoughtful, sensitive among so many other things. I just wanted to thank you for being there during these tough times and for not giving up on me when things get hard. You are an amazing example of God's love for me. My best friend, my love, I love you with all my heart!

Trust

There a couple of definitions:

1.reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.
2.confident expectation of something; hope.
(www.dictionary.com)

The main word running through these definitions is confidence. The latter definition reminds me of the verse in Hebrews 11:1 "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. " Faith and trust seem to go hand in hand.

When you've been hurt, deeply hurt, it is difficult to extend that trust again to those who have hurt you. But what do you do when you feel that that hurt was caused by or allowed by God? Do you "forgive" Him, do you try to work through the difficulties and learn how to trust Him again? What do you do with the fear that creeps in when trust is the only thing that you can do is trust? What do you do with those who have endured abuse, childhood abuse, has been part of your life and God did not intervene in those moments of sheer atrocity?

These are all questions that I have been wrestling with for most of my life, but that have recently resurfaced on a more poignant level. There are many areas in my life now in which God is calling me to trust Him (areas of provision and during times of the unknown) and I struggle to trust that He honestly has the best in mind for my life and that He has good plans for me. Of course He has given me many blessings, but those wounds are still there, still oozing, some more than others.

I never realized how much fear controls my life. I worry, I try to do all that I can in every situation to protect myself and those I love in situations of the unknown because I am afraid of loosing them. I struggle the most to relinquish my husband back to the hands of God because I have known a relationship that is "permanent" or one that does not have the potential of leaving or being left behind. Of course anything can happen and He can choose to take Gordon away from me, but I struggle to understand how I can trust God with the one that I love the most in this life and how to allow myself to invest without fear of loosing him. The more I fall in love with my husband, the more I fear loosing him because of the cost that that would involve. I know that it's morbid and depressing to think about these things, but it's hard not to because of the nature of my life.

So how do I trust in the midst of all of this change? How do I let go and trust that God will truly take care of me and the ones that I love? It is really scary to let this go and I know that this question will continue to surface as long as I live. I am doing what I can to address this but it is a long and difficult journey....

Rest

So much is happening around me, that all that I long for right now is rest. A moment to steal away from the craziness of life, and to stop and just be. But lately I don't know how to do that very well. As soon as I get home, I'm going to see how messy the house is, and feel the need to clean so that I can "rest" better (without the clutter) and while I clean, I'll see more things that need to get done, and then I won't have been able to rest at all. Ugh!

The other thing that has been hauting me lately is the guilt factor in regards to resting. Because life has been so crazy busy, and we haven't really stopped for very long over these last couple of years, when I do stop, I feel guilty because there is always some else I could be doing (cleaning, organizing, sorting, packing...) and so to appease the guilt I often give in and try to make myself feel better by doing those things. But I don't end up resting. This is a new phenomenon for me. I've only ever really struggled with the guilt factor in resting before while I was in school, because often I rested too much and didn't do enough homework, but now that I am done with school, I can't seem to shut the guilt off. So I'm not too sure how to make it go away. We'll see what happens tonight. I'd like to find a happy medium in cleaning a little but also finding the time to rest... we'll see if I can do it...

Stop the Merry Go Round- I want to get off!

How do I stop this Merry go Round? It keeps spinning against my will... Just when you think the ride is going to end, it just picks up right where it left off, not leaving me any time to get off and catch my breath! *sigh* This has been the story of my life in the last couple of years but most intensely felt since the beginning of the year.

We hit the ground running, with a new job for Gordon which has him working one night a week, Saturdays and two day shifts at Applebees. This was a tough decision, knowing that he had class 2 other nights during the week, which meant I would be home alone for 3 nights out of the week. At first I was really upset, but later I realized that I was being given "the gift of time" to be able to do the things that I had been wanting to do for awhile and that I had been putting off while I was in school. But my aspirations quickly deflated as I realized that I was incredibly lonely. Being heavily involved in ministry had taken its toll, and left me with few friends I could truly call friends. I was faced with the emptyness inside of me and it terrified me. And I've been running since.

I've been running from God for a couple of years now because of the lack of time to spend with Him but also because I have faced many disappointments and difficulties which caused me to feel as though He couldn't be trusted with my heart. I knew it wasn't the solution to my problems but in some way, by pushing God away from my heart I felt as though I was taking more control over my life and "showing Him" that if He couldn't take care of me, then I most certainly could do a better job. As I am writing this, I am realizing what an arrogant and foolish statement that is, but it was and still is how I have been attempted to protect my heart from present and future pain.

After awhile, a numbness set in and I was able to "avoid" my feelings and emotion which often get the best of me. But there was an ache (and there still is) in my heart telling me that there is more and a better way to live. I long for relationship. Intimate, deep and caring relationship, and I realized that almost all of my friends are far away, and it brought even more pain to my heart. New relationships in our new church have surfaced and "look promising" but it takes time to build those bridges and to allow people back into my heart again. I feel as though I lack the strength to try to build these relationships but I know that I long for them, so I am trying.

But I'm afraid. Afraid of loosing it all again. I can't live in isolation because it is too painful. And I can't risk relationship because the potential for loss is too painful. No matter what there will be pain, so I need to decide which one is "better". Loss is the new topic on my lips as of late. I'm being faced with it yet again and I'm sure will continually facing it as life continues. But I don't know how much more I can take. It hurts too deeply. Those wounds have never had the time to heal. Just as soon as a scab forms over the wound to protect the area while it heals, someone violently rips the scab off, and I'm bleeding again. Sometimes more severely than before. I know that's a grusome description, but it's how I feel.

Well I didn't mean for this post to be depressing but, it's where I am right now. It feels good to write. I haven't done it in a LONG time. Just another way that I have been attempting to avoid my heart. Hopefully writing in this new blog, will help me to find my heart again....