How He Loves.

This story and this song move me in so many ways. I can't help but cry (surprise) when I hear it. I'm so glad God wasn't afraid to get His hands dirty when He sent His beloved Son to earth so He could hang naked on a cross and take all that is grotesque and embarrassing and shameful and dirty in humanity onto himself...better yet, He BECAME those things for us. I love a good love story. Ours is the most beautiful one of all time.

Laundry Piles and Hope.

As I write this, I am surrounded by piles upon piles of laundry. Some folded, some not. My house is sort-of a wreck actually. I've felt incredibly unmotivated lately, and today was not my day for changing that. It began at 7am with Kaden crying and yelling his head off that he didn't want Zack to leave for work. Zack was trying to console him while trying not to completely wake me up while trying to get out the door for work. I snuggled Kaden and told him just to go back to sleep--Daddy will be home before you know it to take you to soccer practice. It's early, come on...just close your eyes and let's...NO. He was awake and that was that.

So, I did what any good mother would do...I turned on some cartoons for him in the living room, and...went back to bed. Yep, I'm awesome. I usually sleep til 9:30-10:00 unless something goes terribly wrong. The boys barely bother to come to my room anymore in the mornings. They simply turn on the tv and hang out til I wake up, or until they get too hungry and wake me up to make breakfast or they start destroying things, and I get up instinctively. It's a good life, really.

So when Kaden came in around 10 and said "Mom, you make me breakfast? I starving!" I got up and started the steel cut oats on the stove and went for my morning bathroom routine. Then I got my laptop and looked up every early pregnancy symptom I could read about online like I had done the night before. Today is day 35 of my cycle. I have been speaking scripture over my body and my situation. It's been a long road so far. Next month will be 3 years since we started trying to have a baby. In the meantime, we've gotten two of the most wonderful children in the world through adoption. I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world, but over the last 6 months or so, I've been struggling. Trying to figure out why and reason things out that I don't understand. My faith has been wavering to say the least. And I forgot about the oatmeal and burned it AGAIN.

Sunday morning, I cried through the entire church service. Mother's Day is more special to me than I ever thought it would be, and the Lord spoke to me through the message in more poignant a way than He has in a long while. And I sort-of got a revelation about this whole fertility battle. After so many months and years of disappointment after disappointment, you begin to develop this defense. Don't get your hopes up, you'll get hurt. Expect the worst. Protect yourself. And then I thought about these verses I memorized a long time ago: "Without faith, it is impossible to please God. For those who come to Him must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him." Wait, that goes against everything I've been feeling and doing. Expect the worst or hope for the best? Protect myself or step out in faith? Those verses always surprise me, because it shows us so much about the character of God. He doesn't want people praying to Him who don't believe in His goodness. The only 2 requirements He has are to believe that He exists and believe that He's a rewarder. Man, I've been struggling with that lately. Questioning God's character. Is He really good? Is He really faithful? Does He really care about me and my situation? Will He really come through for me? Yes. And I can't please God unless I come to Him believing that He is, and He does and He will.

So, last night I started getting excited. I told Zack that I was really going to get my hopes up this time, no holding back. I went to the store this morning and bought a pregnancy test (actually, 2) and came home and took them both. And even though my attitude had been so positive, the tests were not. And I could feel myself slipping back into this funk I've been in for months. And I didn't want to do anything today but go back to bed and wait for tomorrow to come. I know the truth. I know what I should feel and say and believe. But when you're in the middle of the trial, sometimes you just don't have any strength left to stand.

So, my laundry is piled high, and I didn't finish making dinner until 8:30 tonight. And I didn't go to soccer practice with Zack and the boys. And I didn't exercise, and I didn't feel like doing anything today. And I didn't. And now I'm feeling guilty for this funk I'm in again, but here I am. I remember a scripture that says, "And, having done all to stand, stand firm." Why does that sound so easy and feel so hard? All I want to do is give up this fight. Tired and weak from trying. I still haven't gotten my period yet, so I guess there's still hope that both those Dollar Tree pregnancy tests were wrong. But still, I know my hope should be in Him and not in whether or not I'm pregnant. 

Still, I struggle almost every day. Man, I used to feel like I didn't have much of a testimony, but after the last 10 years, I think I might be working on a good one. And perhaps soon I'll read over this post as I did today with my old posts about the boys and worrying about the adoption process, and wonder at God's goodness and perfect plans. They certainly aren't my plans, or anything close to what I'd planned for my life, but I have to believe that they are good plans. Plans not to harm me, but to prosper me and give me a hope. Hmmm...give me a HOPE. I like that.     

So Much for Reinvention.

Writing ones thoughts and feelings feels like somewhat of a personal thing...at least for me. I've been thinking of starting a new blog where I could post anonymously. That is, people I know wouldn't necessarily be following me. Well, after a couple of hours of trying to come up with a name for my new blog...one that isn't already being used...I've come to one conclusion: there are an insane number of people who start blogs and don't continue them! Seriously. Every single blog I went to (yes, I went to see what these brilliant people who came up with the same blog name as me were writing about) was...sad. One or two posts. Abandoned blogs. Blogs people had started with the greatest of hopes and then left...alone. Desolate. Blank.

That's not who I want to be. Writing is a huge part of my life. It's part of who I am. When I abandon it, I feel like something's missing. Sure, I'm embarrassed by some of my previous posts. Sure, I'd like to start from scratch, reinvent myself, try to be not such a dork. But I won't. I'll press forward with my blog. It doesn't matter that there are some things I don't normally share with people that I'd love to be able to write about. I'm tired of this self-preservation mentality. I am who I am. This is me...the girl who burns the oatmeal every morning, and doesn't paint my toenails and...can't seem to get pregnant. Life is complicated. I follow a few blogs that try to make me think otherwise; try to make me think there are women out there who have all the answers, the time, the beauty, the money, the creativity. Maybe they do have it all, but I don't. I'm going to be real. If nothing else, I'm going to be myself...and that person may evolve and change (I hope), but I want to be true to that person, whoever she is.

Changes

Wow. I haven't blogged in oh so long. Thanks, Ruthy, for commenting and reminding me I still HAVE a blog :). I've been thinking of revamping the layout and format (attempting to), so...more to come soon! :D

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful...beautiful boys.

My sweet babies are getting so big. Today Kaden brought me a blanket and said we had to hide from the bad guys so they don't shoot us. Maybe no more video games with Daddy for a while. I want them to stay innocent and sweet and fearless forever. Allen's been doing this fun thing where he listens to our conversations and brings them up to other people. Yesterday in speech (I watch from behind the glass) when Mrs. Kay showed Allen a picture of a car, he said "Daddy should have put gas in momma's car...she be late!" They moved onto another subject, and I decided I shouldn't yell at Zack on the phone on the way to speech anymore.

Reinventor

I'm thinking of reinventing myself. Does that sound pretentious? It is...well, not entirely. I stumbled across a blog today that caught me off-guard, and has started me thinking about who I am and who I want to be.

Younger Whitney didn't picture 28-year-old Whitney where I am now. That's because I never thought about who I'd be at 28 years old. At best guess, I would have said I'd be married, have children, and...well, that's all. I didn't give much thought to the kind of person I would be.

Today, as I read the blog about a woman's life that was devasted by a plane crash, I found myself wondering, as I often do about these kinds of circumstances, what would be my response to such a tragedy? Would I be able to put one foot in front of the other after having seen loved ones die? Would I be able to serve a God who allowed me to live, even if I now lived with the memory of loss, and was reminded of that loss every time I looked at the scars on my own face in the mirror? The blog was filled with gratitude and humor and vulnerability and honesty and love.

Who am I? The girl who's first response when her car breaks down is "It figures! Of course this would happen to me! Why can't I catch a break?" That's not who I want to be anymore. I find myself complaining and whining about the silliest things, and it even sounds gross to me. I hear myself making excuses for why I don't pour myself into the things I love, and why I'm not good enough to be who I want to be, and I've grown tired of what I hear.

Today I'll reinvent myself. I'm going to start being a friend, and a good one. No more "I don't have time for people," because people are all that matter. I'm going to stop letting fear of imperfection stop me from doing the things I love. I may not be the best, and that's going to be okay. I'm going to...and here's a biggy for me...be CONTENT. No more thinking in/planning for the future and wishing for all those good things to come my way, b/c in the meantime, I'm missing what's happening now. I want to be happy and grateful for what I have now, even if it's not the best I'll ever have. Appreciate what's happening at this very moment...because I'll never get it back again. I'm going to let things go. Life's too short to be that guy who can't let it go anymore, and I don't wanna be.

So...Don't be surprised if you don't recognize me anymore. I'm changing. :)

Textured Control

What I wouldn't give for sharper pencils, no eraser
And for the little pieces to fall magically in place
So I don't cut off edges with what's broken from my heart
And press them in and work them out at a shaky-handed pace.

What I wouldn't give for all my questions to be swallowed
By a fuzzy, knotty sweatshirt with a mustard stain on front
And I'd never reason out of all it's warmth and objectivity
And never wonder why it doesn't smell like what I thought.

If dull is what you're after,
You can have this pencil when I'm done
But if you'd like to place a tag on unrequited dreams
I'll take mine in small/petite,
Just keep your answers short and sweet
And give me endless seas of crispy pages, no frayed edges, please.

Forget-Me-Not

Remember Dory from Finding Nemo? She had short-term memory loss, which affected everything she did. If you're like me, watching that movie, you really started to feel for Dory...especially because you understood her pain to a certain degree. I've had a bad memory for as long as I can remember...=) Well, I guess it's not terrible...just sort-of selective. Like, I will literally tune people out when they start to talk to me about dates or times of things, birthdays, appointments--really, anything specific I will completely ignore unless I have my calendar in front of me or have a pen and paper in my hand. I will literally stop people if they try to tell me specific things I know they'll expect me to know later if I can't get it in writing right then. And it's not that I'm being rude or stubborn or anything...I just know myself by now, and I know that if I can't visually see something, I will not remember it.

Now, I know you would normally equate a bad memory with not being smart, but I've always done really well in school considering this memory deficiency. That's because, almost without fail, if I see something written down, I will remember it. I always consider myself a good test-taker for this reason. I can remember answers on tests, and it's almost always by visualizing where on the page I read it, or where the answer was in relationship to a picture on the page or how it looked jotted in my notebook. This might be a pretty common thing, but it's seemed to cause me quite a bit of trouble in my life, especially when dealing with people who don't understand my braindicap (I also have a love of combining words, but that's another issue altogether), but also in my spiritual life.

I've had a recent epiphany that being a Christian is both really hard and really simple. See, once you learn the truth about who God is...not who people SAY He is, but who He REALLY is...it's really pretty simple. God created you so He could love you, and so you could love Him. And once the depths of what He went through to prove His love to you really starts to sink in, it's inevitable...you can't HELP but love Him. You trust Him because you know He wouldn't do anything that isn't good for you. You believe in Him, because He starts to speak to you quietly when you listen, and then you start to love Him even more as you learn about who He is...and that's what being a follower of Christ is all about. Simple, right? But here's where things get hard...Remember what I said earlier about my memory? It's bad. If I can't see it, it's really easy for me to forget...in fact, it's inevitable...I'm going to forget.

I recently had a time in my life of just, almost...despair. I wondered to a friend how it was all going to work out. My friend gently reminded me of a post I'd written that talked all about how I knew things would work out because God was in control. Oh. Right! It was a little embarrassing to have to be reminded of something I knew enough to post on my blog. But the truth is that...I forget. I forget that God's in control of my life. I forget that He loves me and wants what's best for me...that the sole purpose in His allowing me to take another breath is so that He can love me and so that I can love Him. I forget that He knows me...He's taking care of me...I can trust Him. It's hard because I can't see it...I can't visualize it...I can't see HIM. But I know it's true.

I used to struggle with the thought that there are so many other religions out there...so many other people claiming they know the truth. I always used to wonder how people would be able to tell the difference between what's true and what's a lie. I know the Bible is true, but the guy sitting next to me on the bus was taught that it's just a book of fairy tales...how will he ever know the truth? I posed this question once to my husband, and I'll never forget what he said. The reason people can tell the truth from the lies is that all of us--whether we believe it or not--were created by God. And God made us in His image. And inside every one of us is some part of God. (I know this is true, because we can't even love God or come to Him without His help.) Similarly, we can't decipher the truth unless we have some truth, some piece of God (the Holy Spirit) in us (all humans) that, when we allow it, helps us see the truth. How is it that there is something in every person that recognizes beauty? We see a beautiful mountain, and we say "beautiful"--and not only that, but a million other people, from any nation, in any language would look at that same mountain and say "beautiful." How are we born with the recognition of beauty? It's built in. How do we know the truth about God being real? It's built in. People know it, whether they want to admit it or not. There is something inside us all, when we allow ourselves to hear the truth, and we are very honest with ourselves, that bears witness with our spirit. We know in our "knower" what the truth is. Now, we can harden our hearts...we can ignore the truth enough times that we no longer see or hear the truth as truth...but it's there nonetheless...

So, I guess the point of this post is to remind myself that God is in control of my life and my circumstances. I just have to remember it...

Great is Thy Faithfulness

Zack and I led worship at church last week. We decided to sing the old hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." And I could not even get the words out. I just stood there on stage, bawling like a baby. The words hit me so hard, and all I could do was think of my 2 little boys, and what a miracle they are to us.

"Great is Thy faithfulness, oh God, my Father.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not.
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see.
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me."

So much truth. Morning after morning, I look into the faces of my little angels and marvel at God's faithfulness to me. Even when I am so unfaithful to Him, morning after morning, His mercies are new. All I have ever needed, His hand has provided. What a beautiful, faithful God.

Summer of Change...and Uncertainty

I've found myself saying it a lot over the past several months: "Once summer's here..."

Like, "Once summer's here, the adoption will be final," or "Once the summer's here, daddy will be home all day," or "We're moving this summer," "We'll go see Mickey Mouse this summer," "We'll find out if we can get the house this summer," and lately, "Hopefully I'll get my job back this summer."

There are so many things happening, changing this summer, that they'd be hard to list over just a few short months on a calendar. Or maybe it's the fact that they're just big in scale--monumental milestones in my life--maybe that's what makes them feel like so much. Like, by the end of this summer, the adoption of our 2 little boys should be final. By then it will have been almost 1 year since we started this journey. 1 year of worrying, praying, wondering, believing....waiting. By the end of the summer (I hope), Zack and I can take an enormous exhale, and worship our God for His faithfulness to us.

I recently got laid off from my job. And at any other job I've ever had, I can't imagine myself even caring. But this one's been sort-of like a dream job for me. I get to write creatively, work mostly from home so I can be home with my boys, and I'm friends with the people I work with. I found out about the lay-off the day after we made an offer on our dream house, so...the timing seemed really bad. I've been told there's a good possibility I'll get hired back this summer, and, since we made an offer on a house that's a short sale, it'll take the bank a while before we find out if our offer's accepted, and by then, I may have my job back. So, the timing has to be exact. I have to have been working again for 30 days (so I can have 30 days worth of pay stubs) before closing. It's all a little crazy, but we feel like if this is what God wants, it'll work out perfectly. If not, we may be homeless at the end of the summer when our lease is up at our apartment =/

Last weekend I turned 28...yup, 28 years old. Sounds so old. Closer to 30 than to 25. Ive been trying not to think about it too much, and it helped that we spent my birthday taking the boys on their first trip to Disney World. They had such a blast...and it was the most fun trip to the Magic Kingdom I've had since I was a kid. Since they'd never been before, they didn't really know what to expect, which I think is why they hardly said a word for the first hour or 2. They just sat quietly in the rides with their mouths hanging open. It was so cute. It was one of those trips I don't really have anymore as an adult...one where I'm sad to go home at the end. The Disney trip was something we'd planned to do later in the summer, but since Kaden's only free for a couple more weeks (when he'll turn 3!), and I got in free for my birthday, we decided to go early. We had a great time. No crowds. No rain. It was the perfect summer trip. Now I can cross that one off my "Once the summer comes" list of things to do.

Among other things happening this summer, Zack and Kaden have birthdays (so, 2 parties that need planning), Zack is changing to another school, he'll be home all summer (which I'm very excited about), he's hiking the Grand Canyon again with his dad, we're running a fireworks tent in a new location, I'm writing a screen play with my boss, my in-laws are coming down for a reunion/vacation, we're going to my Aunt's house for a long weekend involving water slides, our church is throwing us a sort-of shower, we're going to attempt to open a new county in our DUI business, Zack will become the head coach of either track or cross-country at his new school, and we're starting and heading up a new young adult ministry at our church, as well as taking over children's church once a month. Did I leave anything out? Buying our first house, adopting 2 children, changing jobs...no, those are the high points. =)

This is certainly going to be an interesting, if not insane summer. My boss said he has a feeling good things are going to happen this summer, and, don't tell him I said so, but he tends to be right about things, so... Yeah, it's a summer of uncertainty, a summer of change. But I think good change is coming. Good things are on the horizon.

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