Snow Day....

So today leaves me wondering how smart it was to plan a wedding in the winter in Indiana... When people start using the word blizzard a mere 8 weeks before your wedding you can't help, but ask yourself what you were thinking! Needless to say the weather prevented my day after Christmas shopping that I hoped to accomplish, but tomorrow is another day and that day will hopefully result in a dress for the flower girl. Now the plus side to the snow day is that I ended up getting the ring bearers bible together and the flower girls basket. So the day might not have resulted in the exact to do list being accomplished I had hoped for, but it was productive in its own way!

Finally....

Finally!!!!  I've made it past the 2 month mark. I've even made it past the 60 day mark.  Invitations are out and RSVP's have started to trickle in (or race in the instance of a few people trying to make theirs the first to be returned lol).  Rather than broad goals we're down to details such as order of service, do we have readings or do we forgo them?  After what seems like forever things are down to the last weeks.    I'm left with dress fittings rather than dress shopping.  When I look over the months since July I find I've changed so much!  I feel like I've grown from the experience.  Wedding planning the way Dustin and I chose to do it has brought us closer together.  We've learned a lot about each other and have grown individually and together as a couple.  I do have to say its a nice thing to be at a place where I actually get to enjoy the holidays.  No wedding stuff for me until next week and it's a wonderful feeling!  Well, I might have to look into that reading bit in my spare time to see if there is anything that catches my fancy, but no hard core planning until after Christmas!

And Still More Lessons in Faith....

I'm pretty sure God's trying to use the period around my wedding to test my faith and patience in every possible way...  It's been a while since I've posted and quite honestly it has been because I've been struggling with and making some of the hardest decisions I could possibly make.  I thought dating, having a relationship and getting engaged were big enough, but God seems to be determined to do things in big style for me right now since in addition to all of that I've had other changes going on as well.  I've officially joined the ranks of the unemployed.  Now interestingly enough it was by my own choice, but it was a choice I did not make easily.  I've mentioned in various posts about different parts of my life that have lead me to the moment of meeting Dustin and the events that followed, but tonight I find myself thinking about a request I made of God not long after my first visit to Mooresville Church of God.  I asked him to use me however he wanted.,  In the hours I spent sitting on my bed one night crying and struggling with what I was sure was the hardest decision I would ever make to leave a church and a church family I loved dearly to go to a church where I knew the grand total of one person and wasn't sure exactly where or how I would ever fit in or be accepted.  As I struggled with that thought I came to the point of realizing if this were what God was asking me to do I really had no choice.  I had to go.  The consequences of saying no and staying where I was when God wanted me elsewhere was a domino effect that I loved that church family too much to risk, but even more so I didn't want to live life in the Wilderness of No.  I'd been there before and it took me a while to recover from the last trip.  I look back on that four hour crying jag nearly 2 years ago as a turning point for me on a personal spiritual level.  It was a moment I can look back on and say with certainty my life changed in the moment I said yes.  The journey over the next year and a half was amazing, but I can't say that I expected the turn my life took in November.  You see I have this little habit of liking security and answers.  I like to see where I'm suppose to go and if I'm going to open a door to walk through it I want to know what's on the other side of it.  If I'm going to leave a job I want to know what I'm leaving it for.  I prefer a back up plan to the back up plan.  It makes me feel better.  I'm learning right now though that God doesn't exactly work that way.  He works in ways we can't even begin to comprehend.  So while Dustin and I had both been talking about what my career would look like after the wedding, I don't think either one of us was exactly expecting any job change to happen before the wedding took place, but happen it has.  Sometimes there comes a moment when you realize that the world around you has changed to a point it's not exactly what it was when you walked into it.  That's what happened to my job.  As much as I loved parts of it there were a lot of things changing and I wasn't the person that could do the job the way it needed to be done.  You know I've always thought it was awesome the way when God called Abraham packed up his house and left to go to a country the location of which he had no clue.  It was inspiring when the disciples left their nets and up and followed some stranger who walked past their place of business.  Personally, I'm thinking it looks a lot more glamorous in the Bible when I can read the end of the story whenever I want that says, Abraham did find his country, became father of a great nation and things turned out just fine in the end.  As for the disciples, well, it still somehow seems a little different being able to look at their story and see how the dots connect to make the bigger picture.  For me in the here and now it's been a little bit of a struggle.  I mean I know I'm doing what I'm suppose to.  I know God has lead me to the exact place I am right now, but that doesn't mean I don't question.  There is a part of me that is tempted on occasion to think.... I'm a nurse with ten years experience, I can get a job that pays well numerous places.  But IF I take matters in to my hands and find a job that suits my purposes of security and stability that I can see in the immediate future what blessings do I miss that God's trying to bring into this season of my life?  So I'm sure by now you're wondering how my current job situation pertains to my bride status....  Well, it pertains in the lessons God is sending my way through the freak out moments I have.  You see by making me plan a wedding at this time in my life He is giving my faith a tremendous work out!  It's teaching Dustin and I things about one another that we might not have had the opportunity to learn otherwise.  I find myself thinking a LOT about Romans 8:28:

 

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

 

Even in this season of my life that feels a little uncertain in the change taking place I do know that God has something awesome in store.  All I have to do is look at the stories I mentioned earlier to be reminded of that.  Somehow there's a part of me that is much more empathetic to Abraham's decision to pass Sarah off as his sister rather acknowledging her as his wife in a moment of human uncertainty at the outcome of a particular situation.  There is a part of me that understands in a very unique way now exactly how the disciples came to be out in their boats fishing in John 21.  The interesting thing I find in that particular story is that Jesus never rebukes them for "caving" to the need for some certainty.  Instead he takes the catch (which he made possible) and feeds them.  If you look at the book of Acts though you never see mention of those nets and boats again...  I'm understanding exactly what some of those very real people, who I always tended to look at as characters in a story before, were feeling in what we like to consider their moment of weakness.  Yes, Peter denied Jesus, Abraham fathered Ishmael and Jacob stole Esau's birthright, but I'm finding as I travel this path I'm on it's easy to doubt and question when you don't see exactly what is around the next bend in the road.  So I find myself in the middle of uncertainty holding to the verse I've claimed as my own.... 

 

"For I know the plans I have for you, delcares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."   -Jeremiah 29:11.

 

  The part of his plans I can see right now involve a wedding and Dustin.  The rest will fall into place in His time!

It's the Not So Little Things...

I find myself very thankful tonight.  I sometimes wonder exactly what it was that made God decide to send Dustin.  This week has been one of those weeks that I kind of feel like he ended up carrying me through the last part of it.  I'm not completely for sure why this week feels so emotional, but it does.  Sometimes I feel like I'm at some sort of turning point in my life and that always makes me just a bit nervous when events start to line up and I don't get the entire picture, but the thing I find now is that no matter how uncertain I might be about how something is going to work out Dustin makes a great cheerleader.  I never really thought I'd come home to a clean house after a bad day at work even after I was married let alone before, but today that was exactly what happened!  I came home to be greeted by three happy little puppies and a clean kitchen, living room and dining room.  Now those were all things that in my mind I had decided that I would push to the back burner when Dustin mentioned going out.  In my list of things to do tonight I walk through the door to find the things I was dreading were done.  Now I will give Dustin a hard time on occasion about the fact that his "filing" habits for my things aren't quite the same as mine and there are times when I'm hard pressed to find where he put something, but the reality.... I don't really care.  It's such a minor inconvenience in the big picture of I the love I feel when I walk into the house and realize that he knew...  without stepping foot in my apartment in 3 days he knew that with the week I'd had experienced I was not keeping up on the housekeeping piece and he stepped in and surprised me by taking care of it.  The moments like that I find myself kind of thinking I've spent so many years focusing on that magic moment called a wedding and now that I'm suppose to be excited about it, I'm much more excited that Dustin knows and loves me so much he gets me without my having to tell him the extra things that are stressing me out.  That stepping in and doing those things that hang over my head at times means more than flowers or chocolates.  Of course don't get me wrong the flowers came Wednesday and I was quite thrilled by those as well!!   

And we return to our regularly scheduled broadcast....

So the wedding preparations are underway once more.  There is something about me that kind of hates it.  I was enjoying the break!  I find that once again I'm ready for this to be over!!!!  Ok, so I'm in a better place, but I have decided that at 32 planning a wedding I'm not anything like I would have been in my 20's.  In fact I'm pretty sure I don't make a very good bride in a lot of ways.  I'm discovering I'm definitely not traditional!  I am glad in a lot of ways we did go the route of wedding planning as there have been so many growing experiences along the way.  In fact we find ourselves wading through so many issues now as we plan the wedding together that otherwise we would have been addressing the first year of marriage and very likely been ready to kill each other over...lol.  Most recently has been the infamous money topic.  Dustin has a very practical approach to money while I admit it is definitely a more emotional topic for me to deal with.  We're quickly learning that I deal with money in pieces.  I can handle talking about it for chunks of time and then I need a break.  Not that I have hugely unhealthy spending habits at this point, but I need the breaks to regroup rather than discussing through to the end.  The nice thing is that we're developing habits that will make our transition into shared finances much easier after the wedding.  In fact the awesome thing about paying for and planning your wedding together is that we have a trial run to figure out the things we need to watch for and work on.  So it strikes me as rather humorous the other day when it occurs to me that most girls see their wedding as that fairy tale moment when their world is perfect and everything exactly as they want it.  Yeah, well, my world might be perfect if you are a bride who is a number obsessed accounting major, but that I'm not.  My world ends up being perfect because at 32 I've figured out that fairy tales in their truest form are rough.  They aren't the happy animal singing version we've been sold by Disney.  They are dark and filled with human emotion.  Ok, so my wedding isn't this depressing moment in time, but the truth.... Sometimes that planning piece is really tough.  There are times when since we're paying for things rather than waiting on my fairy godmother to make a moment perfect, I wonder if things are really going to work out.   I admit that for all the times I think to myself it's a matter of trusting God that there are moments I find that my prayer ends up being "I believe, LORD.  Help my unbelief."  There's this part of me that even at this time though I find myself with the thought that we're going to have an awesome story to tell our kids one day though about how God gave us an awesome wedding and prepared us for marriage at the same time.  Of course at the same time I really am ready to get this wedding over and get on with the future ahead of us, because as God's giving us little glimpses of it....  It looks incredible!!!

Love....

Early on in my relationship with Dustin I read a book titled Sacred Marriage.  The premise of the book is the idea of what if God designed marriage to make us more holy than happy.  I found it an interesting concept and after reading it decided to try to implement it in my approach to my relationship with Dustin.  It was a totally foreign concept when compared to the way I had at one time devoured fairy tales and romance novels in an attempt to find the "meaning of true love".  I will say that I believe reading that book was one of the best things I could have done for our relationship.  It made me take a more balanced approach to dating with the goal of marriage.  It made me plan more long term and not focus so much on the instant gratification of the moment or on what I felt at the moment.  I find in many ways it has made a huge difference in me.  It's easy to fall into the trap sometimes of thinking I've waited 32 years for this. I deserve ____ (insert what I'm wanting from Dustin at the moment).  However when you start to focus on marriage or the relationship being about what God is using this other person that you have joined or are getting ready to join your life with to teach you it somehow changes things.  There's part of me at times that wonders exactly what it looks like after marriage because it already feels like I'm learning so many things about myself, but then God throws in the twister of letting me understand more about him through some things that happen with Dustin.  This weekend was a case in point.  I've developed a tendency over my life of holding things inside, through counseling I've learned to process through them, but I find that there are times when I still pull into myself to do that processing.  I'm not completely for sure why I've developed that rather interesting coping mechanism, but Dustin and I both are learning about that particular quirk of mine and how best to deal with it.  I learned something very interesting through it this weekend though.  I have to say that Dustin is good about letting me work through whatever it is I'm dealing with and supporting me as I do it even if it means I'm not quite ready to talk it out yet.  This weekend as I waded through the mess of emotions surrounding me the pulling into myself had a different effect than it's had in the past.  I found myself feeling incredibly lonely.  Here I was even with Dustin present during parts of it, but feeling isolated.  In the middle of it all I did find myself asking God exactly what it was I was suppose be learning in this.  It's taken me a couple of days, but I find myself looking back over the experience feeling that with the combined experience of Dustin and myself I have a visual of how it really should feel to us when we are experiencing distance and separation from God.  Now I by no means am implying that Dustin and I are some super spiritual couple, but this weekend was an amazing experience even in the middle of the sadness and loneliness that I was experiencing.  I mean the reality is that I knew all along that Dustin was there wanting to help me, wanting to offer his support and love, but for a period for whatever reason that I really don't understand even now I couldn't let him.  I'm not sure if I thought I had to get the answer myself or maybe it was I felt I couldn't bother him with something so trivial, but the truth...  He wanted me to bother him.  He wanted to be there for me even if he couldn't fix it he wanted to experience it with me.  It makes me see a little differently the idea of how it looks when we act like God doesn't need to be bothered with things from us.  It's like having a comparison of what it's like when we pull away from God to try to deal with things on our own.  He's sitting there waiting patiently, asking us occasionally are you ready to let me help yet (yes, Dustin asked multiple times if I was ready to tell him what the problem was).  There was something this time in seeing the look on Dustin's face each time I couldn't bring myself to share what it was that was bothering me when he asked that has me right now as I write this crying for a couple of reasons.  I realize in a relationship perspective that it hurt Dustin in a way each time I couldn't bring myself to share, but even more is the thought that the look I could see on Dustin's face is nothing compared to the agony it causes God when I try to push through every day life without him.  The moments when I push him away like a 4 year old saying "No!  I can do it myself!"  The interesting thing I found out after I finally was able to open up and start to process with Dustin rather than internalizing everything was the view that Dustin's perspective adds to complete the pictures.  His very simple response that made me pause was that he didn't like the feeling of separation and distance.  It sounds so simple, but it's so profound!  That's exactly how God feels when we push him away and don't allow him to be a part of our every day existence!  I know that the love that Dustin and I share is nothing compared to the love that God has for each and every one of us individually so if this is how Dustin and I experience this one moment in time how much more does God experience that distance and separation on such a large scale?  And He still doesn't leave us on our own!  It's pretty incredible!  I still feel like I've only scratched the surface on the magnitude of the realization from this weekend, but even that little tiny piece that has me understanding God just a little differently makes me so grateful that He has given me Dustin to learn these lessons a little better!  

Fun moments...

 

 

 

Just so no one thinks I never get to have any fun in the middle of wedding planning I thought I'd share my favorite picture from the bridal shower some of my family threw for me last weekend.  I have to say it was a fun and festive shower (with some really cool presents).  In keeping with the 50's vibe we are trying to capture with pieces of our wedding the decorations were really fun and cool with a very retro feel.  It was a really fun day which ended in a fun if impromptu pizzia party with some of my dad's family at a local pizzeria.  I think my favorite part of the day though had to be when at my mom's suggestion the game where it was required to make a wedding dress out of toilet paper the models became the 4 little girls at the shower.  It was cool in several ways.  The different pieces of my life were represented in the picture you see above. 

Chloe, the little girl on the far left is the daughter of one of my childhood friends (ok, I'll even confess one of my crushes in  grade school) next to her is Dustin's niece, Shae.  On the other side of me, my families are represented as Breanna, the little girl right next to me is my cousin's daughter on my mom's side (I'm never good with the first and second cousin thing, so feel free to figure that out yourself) and last, but not least is Mary, one of my younger cousins on my dad's side.  It was kind of neat when I realized that I'm kind of in the middle of these little brides that represent the pieces of my life coming together which happened at my shower.  Friends and family came together representing so many pieces of time and relationships that have led to this moment I'm preparing for.  Kind of a cool way to sum up an entire bridal shower in one picture isn't it?