The last year or so has meant a lot of new things for us.
Back in November 2012, I lost my job as a Saturday flower delivery driver thanks to new management at the shop I worked at. I decided it was a good time to pursue floral design at other shops. In January 2013, I offered myself as extra holiday help at a shop down the road from our apartment and let them know I was interested in a part-time job in design in general. They hired me for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, and after that hired me on part-time as a designer and driver. The first 6 months were hard as I tried to learn everything and become a better designer, and Christmas was utterly exhausting--my first 46 hour work week! But by 2014 I was feeling really comfortable there and incredibly overwhelmed with gratitude for a good job and good coworkers and good hours. It has been such a blessing and answer to prayer in so many ways.
Come June, though, I will be leaving, at least temporarily, to start a new phase of life: motherhood.
Stephen and I took a giant leap of faith and went off birth control back in September. We were still in a dingy, dirty two-bedroom apartment that was, for all intents and purposes, a 1-bedroom apartment with a storage room that could absolutely not be a baby room unless something major changed.
But the Lord had His say, and we got pregnant in October, with a baby boy. So we began another crazy journey: house-hunting for the first time in our lives. Our budget was ridiculously small, but we were bound and determined to find a new home for this baby to live. We searched the furthest ends of the suburbs around here for an affordable house that was also functional and safe. There were some possibilities, and we even made an offer on one house, but the owners countered our offer and in the short time we had to decide what to do, we came to the agreement that it just was not right.
Completely discouraged by the hunt, we stopped house hunting for a while and pursued other, better apartments. In the meantime, trying to be prepared for the worst, we bought a storage unit to move in all of our stuff from the second bedroom. It was amazing the freedom that afforded--our apartment would have been finally livable!
But the Lord had better plans. In March, Stephen's grandma came to us and offered up a suggestion for consideration. She had a large house with a large master bedroom in it that could be turned into an apartment suitable to her with the installation of a kitchenette. She would live there and we could have the rest of the house.
She left it open for us to decide, but the decision seemed pretty clear. This felt right. So after some talking about how it might work, we gave Grandma the go-ahead to begin constructing her back bedroom into an apartment.
Well, our lease at the apartment ended before everything could be perfected and ready, but we scooped out a place for our bed and Grandma's bed and started working together on readying the house. It is still rather chaotic, but we all make slow progress on getting settled every day. The baby at this point still does not have a room, but he does have a cradle in our room to stay in for the first few months, which would have been the plan anyway.
I absolutely love Grandma's neighborhood that we live in. It is exactly the kind of neighborhood a family can feel comfortable in. We have way, way more than we were ever hoping for while we were exploring other options. God is truly amazing and we are truly blessed, and our little boy will be, too.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
Two Important Things Learned From Marriage
A long, LONG time ago, my sister-in-law Kaile wrote a blog about 6 things she had learned in her first 6 months of marriage: http://aspects-of-me.blogspot.com/2014/02/6-things-learned-from-6-months-of.html
I enjoyed reading it and was inspired to write a similar blog
reflecting on my 5 years of marriage and hoped to draw an equivalent 5
things out.
Well, I came up with two. Very hard ones. And had to stop there because it made me realize that there is a lot more hard learning that I still have to do. I'm not saying that marriage is only hard lessons, but in marriage there is an awful lot of self-sacrifice, which for Christians is simultaneously the most difficult and most necessary lesson we will have to learn.
The tough lesson of self-sacrifice comes even more into play when two become three, and marriage becomes not just marriage but parenting--which is the milestone Steve and I will be hitting in the next 5-6 weeks when our little guy enters the world.
So I figured I better post what I've got before Baby Boy arrives and I have a whole new phase of self-sacrifice to learn and it's even harder to finish things I've started. :)
So here are two of the most important lessons I've learned in my 5 years of marriage.
1. Communicate, even when it's hard. This was a hard one for me to learn. I grew up believing with all my heart that negative emotions should not be shared with others. And that conflicts were best handled by not handling them at all. To say that my husband did not grow up believing these things would be an understatement. Our worst, longest, most brutal nights in our first years consisted of a horrible cycle: I got upset, I shut my mouth, Stephen tried to pry everything out of me, and the harder he pried, the deeper I dove into anger, pain, silence, and resentment at him for prying.
To this day, when through a conversation my deepest negative emotions are brought to the surface for all to see, I'm still reminded of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan takes his claws to Eustace's scaly exterior and removes his layers upon layers of dragon skin. It is an extremely painful experience for Eustace. And so extremely necessary.
While it's hard to face my own ugliness, God has given Stephen an amazing capacity to forgive, fully and without any consequences. That forgiveness, I have learned, is SO much healthier in a relationship than simple conflict avoidance.
2. The difference between heat and thorns. This is one I first learned from a counselor (Steve Green from Impact Biblical Counseling), and marriage became my platform for putting it into practice. It is tied to Jesus' teaching from Mark 7:20-23, where he says, "What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” To paraphrase Steve Green in his article "The Gospel Makes a Difference": You aren't angry at your spouse because they "made" you angry. You are angry at them because deep down inside you have anger. In metaphorical terms, your spouse's words or action are the heat that was applied to you--but the thorns that came to the surface in you were already there. The heat just brought them out. And the solution is to turn to the Cross in repentance for your thorns, and let Christ do His work to heal you from them.
This is not to say that your spouse has no thorns of his or her own. For every fallen human being, thorns are a given! But what we've learned is that it is not your job to make your spouse repent of his or her thorns. That is the Holy Spirit's job. Our job is to continually turn back to Christ to heal us from our own thorns, and to pray and trust the Holy Spirit to work on each other's thorns.
Well, I came up with two. Very hard ones. And had to stop there because it made me realize that there is a lot more hard learning that I still have to do. I'm not saying that marriage is only hard lessons, but in marriage there is an awful lot of self-sacrifice, which for Christians is simultaneously the most difficult and most necessary lesson we will have to learn.
The tough lesson of self-sacrifice comes even more into play when two become three, and marriage becomes not just marriage but parenting--which is the milestone Steve and I will be hitting in the next 5-6 weeks when our little guy enters the world.
So I figured I better post what I've got before Baby Boy arrives and I have a whole new phase of self-sacrifice to learn and it's even harder to finish things I've started. :)
So here are two of the most important lessons I've learned in my 5 years of marriage.
1. Communicate, even when it's hard. This was a hard one for me to learn. I grew up believing with all my heart that negative emotions should not be shared with others. And that conflicts were best handled by not handling them at all. To say that my husband did not grow up believing these things would be an understatement. Our worst, longest, most brutal nights in our first years consisted of a horrible cycle: I got upset, I shut my mouth, Stephen tried to pry everything out of me, and the harder he pried, the deeper I dove into anger, pain, silence, and resentment at him for prying.
To this day, when through a conversation my deepest negative emotions are brought to the surface for all to see, I'm still reminded of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan takes his claws to Eustace's scaly exterior and removes his layers upon layers of dragon skin. It is an extremely painful experience for Eustace. And so extremely necessary.
While it's hard to face my own ugliness, God has given Stephen an amazing capacity to forgive, fully and without any consequences. That forgiveness, I have learned, is SO much healthier in a relationship than simple conflict avoidance.
2. The difference between heat and thorns. This is one I first learned from a counselor (Steve Green from Impact Biblical Counseling), and marriage became my platform for putting it into practice. It is tied to Jesus' teaching from Mark 7:20-23, where he says, "What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” To paraphrase Steve Green in his article "The Gospel Makes a Difference": You aren't angry at your spouse because they "made" you angry. You are angry at them because deep down inside you have anger. In metaphorical terms, your spouse's words or action are the heat that was applied to you--but the thorns that came to the surface in you were already there. The heat just brought them out. And the solution is to turn to the Cross in repentance for your thorns, and let Christ do His work to heal you from them.
This is not to say that your spouse has no thorns of his or her own. For every fallen human being, thorns are a given! But what we've learned is that it is not your job to make your spouse repent of his or her thorns. That is the Holy Spirit's job. Our job is to continually turn back to Christ to heal us from our own thorns, and to pray and trust the Holy Spirit to work on each other's thorns.
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