August 26th. Remember that.

WE'RE ENGAGED!!!

Joseph hasn't had a lot of room for surprising me, but he's been doing a fantastic job of finding ways to do just so. We've been dating for almost three months now and from the very beginning we've dated with the intention of marriage. We didn't expect it to come up so soon, but the Lord decided to allow us to go at a faster speed than normal people do. Which is totally fine by us.

We struggled for a while on picking a wedding date. The dominant piece of advice we seemed to get from people was "Don't marry for a long time," and that was a hard thing to hear. So we prayed about it, and God told us a wedding date individually. We compared notes, and they were the same! It just becomes more and more exciting to see how God is so wrapped in our relationship.

That was a couple of weeks ago, and the wedding planning has really begun. Joseph was fantastic and bought a HUGE wedding planner that you know is serious about getting down to business (the thing has tabs, for heaven's sake). By the way, he didn't just hand it to me. He drove over to my house, sneaked it onto the porch, and then ran to his car to text me and ask if I could look for his headphones that he thought he dropped outside. I texted back saying "I looked all outside and even inside... I don't see them!" Then I sent another text saying "Just kidding, I found it."

I've already been wedding dress shopping once, and we're narrowing down our decision of where the reception will be. In fact, we have a few details covered. Yeah, there's a lot more details to go, but my point is that we started officially planning and we still weren't even engaged. We had the ring we both loved, and he had to really pray hard to God to give him proposal ideas.

Well, God nailed it. Last night I had my pajamas on, my face was washed, I was wearing glasses, and was sitting in bed listening to music when Joseph called. He asked if I could come up to our church, because he'd had a bad day or whatever downright lie he came up with. I glanced at my clock and at my pajamas and told him I'd be there in a few minutes. A few minutes took a few minutes longer because there was a train in between myself and the church while I drove towards the intersection I usually take, and thank God that there was no train by the time I reached it. Apparently that's God's way of stalling for time, because Joseph was frantically asking God to delay my drive as he ran around getting ready.

So I finally reached the church. He had said he was in the youth room, so I went up to the door and knocked. I ended up banging on the door three different times because he didn't seem to hear me. Finally he emerged from the room and came to open the door for me. I was giving him a hard stare at this point, and he admitted, "I'm hyperventilating right now."

"Why?" I asked, but as we stepped inside the youth room, my question was immediately answered.

Picture being greeted with this:

in a room that means a lot to both of you because it's where you first remember seeing each other, in the dark, with a bunch of balloons all over the place, while your favorite song plays, with a visibly nervous person that you love by your side.

Yeahhhh, I could tell pretty quickly what was going on.

I thought he would drop to one knee right there, but he just kept on surprising me. He said he had a story he had written, and so I read it out loud. There were a few blank places for me to add in my own words, so I kept stopping and thinking about what to write in. The story was about a young hero who fights and defeats an evil rabbit (the rabbit being my idea), and in honor of that, there were balloons that came to someone special every year. And there was something inside each of the balloons.

And Joseph says he's not creative!

So I grabbed a pen and started popping balloons and reading the piece of paper inside each one. I eventually stopped doing the one-by-one thing and just hacked at all of the balloons at once to get it over with. Joseph burst out laughing and picked up the balloons pieces as I read the pieces of paper. They were verses from Song of Songs, one of Ephesians 5 where it talks about how husbands ought to love their wives as Christ loves the church, and a bunch of little inside jokes. Then I had to hunt for one special balloon, which had this inside:

(It says "Will you marry me?" if you can't read it... he knows I like handwritten notes, and dear Lord I'm keeping this paper and carrying it in my pocket to heaven.)

As I read it, he dropped to one knee and produced THE RING that I had picked out and that we both absolutely fell in love with. I don't have a good, close-up picture of it yet, but it'll definitely happen. I don't remember what he said. It was something about how he loved me and stuff, and I don't remember what I said either. We can only assume it was along the lines of "yes" because I pretty much form tackled him in a huge hug right there.

We knelt down at the foot of the cross the best we could amongst the candles and pale roses with flushed, red tips (my favorite roses) and prayed for God to bless us, that He would continue to stay the center of our relationship, and that we would love each other the way He loved us.

And I swear, I could feel Him standing there grinning down at us.

Screw Hollywood.

I don't like sappy romance stories.

There's a lot of reasons behind it, some of which are logical and some of which indicate that I have not been the most secure in my femininity in the past. That's Living Waters stuff right there, and I'm not even going to dive into that. But rest assured, I don't like romance novels and I don't like chick flicks. I do like Titanic, but only for the destruction scenes.

I didn't think too much about it until several months ago, when I was basically told that because I didn't want to watch The Notebook, I wasn't a real woman and that I couldn't appreciate a real man. Ooooooh, that fired me up. I stewed about it for a long time, and I still get a little streamed when I think about it. How in the hell is a woman not a woman just because she chooses to not watch a movie? How does that lessen her appreciation for good men?

The person who told me this also didn't know that instead of watching the movie, I opted instead for holding a long, deep, intense, relational conversation with another woman for a good two hours.

Come on. You can't get more feminine that that!

My point to this memory is, while being told I wasn't a real woman stung, it did also make me question why I choose to not delve into Hollywood romances. And I realized I don't like them because I WOULD like them. I would watch or read them all the time. I would get hooked. I would start thinking all the time about what I wanted my man to look or act like. I would think about how I wanted to look or act like. And I would end up completely distorting myself, my friendships, my marriage, and my perceptions of what romance is like.

I would set unrealistic expectations on my future husband, on myself, and on my life. And I would think that a love life is the most important part of life. Face it... IT'S NOT! It's a wonderful aspect of life that's supposed to make things a little brighter and a little more beautiful to look at. But your love life is NOT your entire life. Romance movies don't show you that. Romance movies are only about romance, and life is not at all like that.

However, I do like romances in books or movies where it happens during an adventure. When it's part of the story, not the actual story in itself.

Well, this is my first blog post in a couple of months so I'll catch you guys up to speed here. For those of you who have read a lot of my previous blog posts or have known me for a while, you know that I've been going through one hell of a time for the past, oh, year and a half. I held nothing back in my writings on here about the pain being felt, but I did hold back many details just because... well, you know. The internet isn't exactly Vegas.

However, I'm feeling the freedom now to be much more honest about things. There's still some things I'll hold back, but that's merely because it's not time to reveal those things yet. But the things I can reveal, I will.

So my whole struggle was over a man named Joseph.

Specifically, my future husband.

It's a long, crazy, painful, rewarding, amazing story of a long, crazy, painful, rewarding, amazing journey. One day I'll have to write out the whole story and have been in a slow process of doing so for the past couple of months. One day it might even be on here. But I didn't come here today to write out all the details, just the nutshell of it all.

It's quite simple. Boy meets girl. Girl thinks boy is too nice and pays no attention to him. Boy continues to be nice. Girl suddenly realizes boy is hot. Girl likes boy. Boy eventually likes girl. Boy and girl ask God if they're supposed to be together. Girl hears an almost immediate "yes". Boy hears "no". Girl furrows her forehead and asks God again. Girl hears "yes". Boy furrows his forehead and asks God again. Boy hears "no". Girl gets furious at God for continuing to tell her "yes" numerous times, without telling boy. Boy attempts to move on from girl numerous times. Girl feels deep pain. Boy feels deep pain.

And this went on and on and on... for about a year.

It is indeed true that sometimes romance doesn't look so romantic, and that sometimes love doesn't look so loving.

Again, it's a long and painful story that I won't delve into now. But the nutshell in that nutshell was that God waited until both of us gave up any prospect of marriage. It took a very long time before we were able to give that up, but God is clever. He waited us out. He waited me out, anyways. I KNEW that I KNEW that I KNEW Joseph was my husband and I stubbornly clung to it for the longest time. After months of frustrations, feeling beaten down, and even feeling a sense of betrayal, I was finally driven to the point of despair and desperation and complete surrender to God. I promised God and myself that if God wasn't going to take Joseph out of my life, then I would. Literally the very next day, God very nonchalantly mentioned to Joseph "By the way, Ashley is your wife." Joseph immediately asked me if we could talk, I went to this talk with the intentions of taking him out of my life, and then God moved and spoke and boy and girl finally ended up with the same "yes" from God.

Even after that, we had to wait another two months to begin dating because I was still in the middle of Living Waters and couldn't start a relationship. That damned class. That damned, glorious class. I needed it so badly. Well, I still do, but if God feels I'm healed enough to be with Joseph then I certainly won't be one to argue His judgment. For once.

Where am I going with this? Honestly, I don't know. I guess I'm just brooding right now.

Today, Joseph and I have been together for two months, and it has honestly been amazing. It's been challenging and often uncomfortable, but it's been so much more amazing than anything I could've ever imagined. I am so looking forward to many more months with him. And I'm not here to brag about finally having a guy or even the fact that I got the guy I'd been wanting for a long time. That's not the point. That implies that I did something or that I even deserve him. I didn't do anything. I don't deserve him. God is the only one who did something (actually, He did everything) and He's the only one I fully trust to give me something/someone, knowing it's for the best possible reasons.

I guess what I'm saying is, God is so generous. He's so loving. He knows exactly how to align a heart with His, and the moment a heart is aligned with His. It's so hard to give parts of your life over to Him, but it's always so worth it that I end up thinking "Why did I doubt Him again?" I think it's the fact that God loves to make people uncomfortable. Or He just really enjoys the expressions on our faces when He does something we don't expect. He just likes to make things work in the weirdest way possible, just to prove that He is out of the ordinary and that we need to constantly be in awe of what He's doing.

Because, good God, we need the reminder.

I'm still not sure why I'm writing and rambling on at this point, guys. I really don't. I'm just such in awe of how God has been moving in my life lately that I just feel the need to share. It's seriously the most incredible feeling in the world when you finally realize just how much God has been moving in your life without you knowing it. Or how He uses the most painful of things to bring you the most bountiful joy. He is indeed much more interested in our holiness than our current happiness. Yeah, He wants us to be happy, but most of all He wants us to have the pure joy that comes from Himself and living the way He asks us to live. And I believe it's never as easy as people like to make them out to be. A lot of people will tell you the wonderful parts of their relationship because they feel it's the most romantic. I refuse to be one of them. As great as the great moments are, Joseph's painful moments are truly romantic to me, and my painful moments are what turned out to be romantic to him... or at least the most meaningful.

I used to think marriage was all romance, that everything was easy and would come naturally, and that people never had hard times before the actual marriage. Yeah right. Now I believe what you do before the marriage is one of the most important elements to your lives together after the wedding day. I believe the most important thing you could ever do is to love someone so gut-wrenchingly much that you give them the freedom to be themselves, and to have the freedom to love someone else if that's who God gives them pure joy with.

That's what gives someone the freedom to come back to you and say, "You're the one God has for me."

I feel like an wide-eyed child. Two months into this thing, and I'm still awestruck just at how well God loves me through Joseph. It's absolutely insane. There's a lot of fragments of myself that I forgot were there until God decided to dig them up, using this man. I forgot that I love written letters until Joseph wrote me one. I forgot that I love white roses with red tips from a poem I read years ago, until Joseph hauled a bouquet of those things up my driveway (he didn't know what flowers I like and decided those looked the best). I forgot that I love telling wonderful stories until I got to tell others about Joseph taking me on a scavenger hunt, or buying childhood games for us to play, or winning a toy for my little brother at the Walmart claw machine. And ironically, I forgot that I love writing until Joseph and I made up half a fiction novel via text message, and until he told me he hoped I would always continue to write.

I swear I'm getting closer to God as I get closer to Joseph, that God is courting me through him, that God is winning my heart through Joseph winning my heart. This is the weirdest, most challenging, and most beautiful thing I think I've been a part of. There's no doubt in my mind that God is in this thing. He keeps confirming His presence in it over and over again. And that's the way it should be.

God's such a romantic. And He's such a good Author. Screw Hollywood. God's plans for us are so much better than our dreams for us.

And I wouldn't trade any romantic stories for the one that He's chosen for me.

It's Natural to Be Afraid

Living Waters is kicking my butt. It's twenty weeks long but it feels like it is dragging on forever. Sometimes I think that a few weeks are secretly added in.

I'm pretty sick of having to study every week about how broken people are, and I'm tired of knowing how much I am NOT capable of doing things right. I'm sick and tired of being reminded of how much I really fall short of the glory of God and the woman He has called me to be.

It's rather exhausting.

I'm ready for Living Waters to be done, for multiple reasons.

At the same time, I'm not. There's still a lot of broken places I haven't discovered yet inside of myself, and there is a lot of healing that has begun to take place, and that has yet to begin. And as much as knowing my broken places sucks, it's also eye-opening and humbling to find places where you can allow God to move in and do what He wants. Words can't quite do it justice.

Yesterday happened to be the most intense lesson, involving everyone standing up and confessing certain past sins out loud. Since the class is private, that's all I'm going to say. Well, besides the fact that basically everyone cried their eyes out and the supply of tissues ran low.

Yeahhhhhh, it was a hard experience. But honestly, it was well worth it. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I don't think it's JUST because it makes you feel better inside, with Jesus having taken some of your burdens and shouldering it. Believe me, it is a powerful thing... but that's not the ONLY thing.

There was a large cross standing in the middle of the room. I sat with my arms wrapped around my legs, feeling like a little girl, and looked up at the cross. I just looked at it. And the image is still engraved in my mind. It was not an extraordinary cross in an extraordinary room. But the cross is a symbol of something and Someone so powerful that I just sat and stared.

And I thought about how lucky I am, to have a God that is so big and yet cares so deeply that He sent His beloved son to come down personally and bear the weight of the world for us. And I thought about how much MORE pain and healing I would willingly go through... not really for personal gain, but for those around me. So I guess this is really to resolve myself.

I will do it for my friends and family, near and far.

I will do it for the youth at the church who look to me for leadership and advice and to hear God for them. 

I will do it for my husband whom I love already, and our family, who I am excited to meet.

It's not an easy thing, healing. It's more scary than anything, and it's natural to be afraid. But what matters is that we are brave enough to face it anyways.

This song to me describes healing. The song is pretty long, but then again, so is the healing process. Healing doesn't happen right away in most cases--most times you have to experience the pain for a good long time before it starts to be soothed. Pain, after all, is an indicator that healing is on its way. It's loud and chaotic at first, but when you stick through it, the volume fades and you can begin to hear God's tenderness better.

Happy listening.

You have so much to offer.

Dear You,

You have so much to offer. You may not feel like it, but you do. God gave you all these gifts, all these dreams, all these desires, all of your personality traits and quirks. He doesn’t make mistakes. Yes, you have weaknesses, but in our weakest places is where He stands the strongest. He is such a gentleman, though. He doesn’t just storm into our souls and mark His territory. He knocks first. Gently. Then—when we are driven to the point of despair and desperation enough to open the door to our soul and, trembling, fall to our knees—He walks in, rolls up His sleeves, and gets to work. He takes our weakest areas and turns it into testimonies to inspire others. He takes the things that once gave us shame and turns them into things we can glorify Him with. He takes abuse, physical and psychological illness, addictions, idols, broken sexuality, self-mutilation, and uses it for an intimate relationship with Him that we would have never had without such desperate circumstances. Not only that, but He takes these things and uses them to show love to others. It’s such an exciting and humbling moment when you look at a friend, a family member, a spouse, a child, a ministry, and honestly say, “Yes, I struggled with this. But God gave me strength to overcome it because He knew you would come into my life. It was a difficult sacrifice because I felt false identity and security in it, or felt acceptable for a moment, or was trying to fill a legitimate need in an illegitimate way. But I loved you so much that I gave this up for you.”

You have so much to offer. But you don’t have to offer me anything because I will just love you anyways.

You don’t have to buy me anything. You don’t have to compliment me. You don’t have to start a conversation with me every chance there is. You don’t have to call me or send me text messages or have my phone number memorized. You don’t have to attend every event I plan, or help me with every event I plan. You don’t have to go to my birthday party or even remember my birthday. You don’t have to like every single thing I like.

You don’t have to have my life story memorized, and I don’t have to have your life story memorized. You don’t have to ask me the hard questions I like to be asked. You don’t have to give me advice. You don’t have to ask me for advice. You don’t have to think I’m the greatest person that has ever existed. You don’t even have to spend one-on-one time with me.

You don’t have to have known Jesus for a certain amount of time. You don’t have to hang out with a certain group of people. You don’t have to be of a certain way, personality, culture, ethnicity, gender, age, height, or weight. You don’t have to have sweet possessions or drive a sweet car. You don’t have to be able to buy sweet possessions or to be able to drive. You don’t have to look nice all of the time. You don’t have to look nice most of the time. You don’t even have to be nice all or most of the time. You don’t have to be someone you’re not.

You don’t have to have been “clean” all of your life. You don’t have to have never consumed a drop of alcohol ever. You don’t have to have never struggled with any kind of addiction. You don’t have to have unscarred wrists. You don’t have to have never lusted. You don’t have to be a virgin.

You don’t have to find me pretty, or mature, or godly, or strong. You don’t always have to be strong either. You don’t have to be the person who hands me a tissue box if I cry, and you don’t have to be the one who gives me a hug. You don’t have to be the one that comes and prays truth over me.

You don’t have to worry about me because I am in the palm of God’s hand.

I release you of all of these expectations I may hold over your head. Yes, there will be times when I will. Please forgive me of that, and the Lord will work those things out in my heart as He wishes. There will be times when I will not particularly like you. Regardless, you don’t have to offer me anything. 

There is nothing, absolutely nothing you have to do. 

I will just love you anyways.

Follow the yellow... flowers.

So Hannah and my friend Maddi have both started blogs. If you want to follow them (which you totally should), you can find their profiles in the Followers list on the side. I've mentioned Hannah numerous times and pretty much every single word out of her mouth is pure gold. Plus she's a lion. And Maddi is just plain hilarious and God has given her a strong calling for missions and to stay in Nicaragua with the Kolbs for a year. I'm looking forward to hearing the stories and how God will use her. Just throwing that out there!

Both of them have blogged stories about the past weekend, and so I gave in and decided to do it as well.

There is a youth conference that occurs one weekend every March called Sold Out. We worship, meet old friends, make new friends, go on outreaches, eat, play games, and basically just go crazy for a couple of days. It's always so much fun.

Permit me the luxury of setting the stage here. In preparing for this conference, we had a choice of outreaches to pick from. I usually sign up for street ministry and had signed up for it once again, but we later heard that there was another outreach for an organization called Living Water International, not to be confused with Living Waters which is much more painful and probably more chaotic. Basically it is an organization that focuses on missions. The outreach was intended for making care packages for missionaries. That sounded interesting, so when our group was asked for volunteers, my hand shot up into the air along with Maddi's. Tammy wrote our names down, and that was it.

Friday afternoon, we got to the conference and us leaders had to confirm which outreach we were attending. I was feeling pretty confident as I walked up to the table where we had to get specific bracelets to show which outreach to go on. I peered upside-down at the list of leaders and the outreaches we had signed up for. A frown creased my forehead.

Next to my name, in the "Outreaches" column, was "Street" instead of "LWI".

Well, now, this was unexpected.

I attempted to fix that, but to no avail. The girl with the list asked me, "You're on 'street', is that okay?" No, it kind of wasn't. Fumblingly, I tried to explain the situation, but there were a bunch of other people wanting to confirm their outreaches and I was getting bewildered and frustrated. Finally I just said, "Yes, it's fine," and walked off.

I was not happy. I was quite verbal about it, too. Look, I love street ministry. I do. It's something the Lord has really placed on my heart. It's one of the boldest, hardest things to do, and I love it and hate it for exactly that. Honestly though, I just simply didn't want to do it and I'm not really sure what was up with that. I think maybe I was just bored with it, or I wanted to do something different, or maybe even I was just too scared. Maybe all of them. But if the Lord wanted me to do it, than whatever. Friggin' fine.

We learned about a method of ministry called Treasure-Hunting. You take time to listen to the Lord and see if He has any words of knowledge or anything specific to look for.... like specific names, places to go, articles of clothing, things to pray for, etc. You write it down, and then you take the list/treasure map with you as you go and hunt for the treasured person God is leading you to. It was so scary to write everything down. I was getting some really intense, weird, dumb stuff, and all I could think of was, "Lord, I don't want to pray for this." I was afraid to go, which doesn't make sense because I've had experience with street ministry, but it makes sense when you think about the fact that Satan likes to try and scare us off from amazing things God has in mind.

What made things worse, though, was that we had to break into groups of three or four and compare papers to see if we had gotten anything similar. I didn't know the two girls with me, Elissa and Yasmeen, and it was just so embarrassing to read my words out loud. One of my words was "yellow flower" and one of theirs was "yellow", and they both got "mannequin". Elissa had "mall", and Yasmeen had "park" and "nail salon". We debated on where to go and just decided to start at a nearby mall, as the mannequins Elissa had pictured looked like the mannequins at this specific place.

It took a while to get there so I was joking around a lot to take the edge off of my nerves. "What are we going to do?" I said. "Find a mall inside of a nail salon? Find a nail salon inside of a park? Find a park inside of a mall?" We were all laughing as we walked inside of the mall. It was big. There was an ice rink, man. We were heading deeper into the mall when my gaze happened to fall on a small photography studio, set up in the middle of the mall.

It was set up to look like a park. There was a bench, and a white gazebo, and a background of a park/garden. And I'll eat my laptop with a fork and spoon if there weren't flowers, the majority of them yellow, arranged all over the place.

"Park," was all I could say, weakly. The other girls didn't hear.

"Park," I said a little more loudly. "Park. Park. Park. Park. PARK!"

"Huh?" Their heads swiveled simultaneously and we all stopped, taking it in. Knowing that this was exactly where God had brought us.

Problem was, there was no one in sight. It was completely empty. We stood there for a few minutes before deciding to come back later. We went from one end of the mall to another. Nothing.

We saw a vase of yellow flowers at the mall's information desk, and that a young lady was working the desk. Ah, what the heck. We went up to her and waited for her to look over at us. When she did, the other girls didn't say anything. I figured I wouldn't immediately alert her to the fact that we were on a mission from God, albeit a weird one. I opened my mouth with the coolest, most casual, most subtle conversation-starter.

"Is there anything we can pray for you about?" was what came out.

Okay, time for Plan B.

It's hard to say who was more stunned--the poor girl, or Elissa and Yasmeen. They hadn't done much street ministry before and were expecting a much less abrasive approach. And the girl's jaw was down to her knees. Her eyes were huge.

Yeah, definitely time for Plan B. If only I knew what Plan B was.

The others intervened and we told her what we were doing. At one point she interrupted us and went to finish a phone call. I kind of wondered if she was faking the call, or if she was calling security (which seemed infinitely more likely), but we stood and waited. She hung up the phone and looked back at us. She then proceeded to say that she had turned from her church a year ago, but that she really missed it and being close to God and wanted to go back and have a community.

Ah, now we were getting somewhere. She didn't really want prayer, so I asked "Well, can I pray a blessing over you?" and got the wide-eyed stare again. Note: If someone doesn't want prayer, ask if you can bless them. Generally people find it hard to turn down a blessing. Plus you still get to share God's heart for them.

She did indeed agree to that. It was good stuff.

We headed back towards the photography set and while no one was working there, there was still plenty of people about. Elissa and I persuaded Yasmeen, who is thirteen, into praying for a woman (wearing a blouse with yellow flowers) by herself. It was so much fun to watch her and to see the woman's reaction do a complete 180. We actually thought the woman would be mad since initially she had had a frown on her face, but she ended up having a pretty smile. Also marital problems that Yasmeen prayed for.

We prayed for a couple more people. There was a woman who sat on a bench behind us, and I turned and casually asked if she wanted prayer without consulting the other two. She wanted prayer for good health. Then there was a little girl who ran by with a yellow flower in her hair. She was adorable. We struck up a conversation with her mom (who was wearing a yellow shirt) and found out that she was divorced. Her husband had an affair with a coworker and got her pregnant, so he left his wife and married the coworker instead.

We talked with her for a while. It was so awesome how open she was, and how much she loved her daughter. She spoke about how afraid she was that her daughter would be affected by not having a father figure, and how she hoped the Lord would somehow provide her with that. We showed her our treasure maps and pointed out the words that had led us to the mall, the photography set, and to her. We prayed over her for quite a while, and then I opened up my treasure map once more and showed her some lyrics I had written down that morning that I felt God reserved for her.

You are the mother
The mother of your baby child
The one to whom you gave life
And you have your choices
And these are what make man great
His ladder to the stars

But you are not alone in this
You are not alone in this
As brothers we will stand 
And we'll hold your hand
Hold your hand

Timshel by Mumford & Sons

I didn't see the look on her face, but the others did. Yasmeen said later that she was on the verge of tears.

At this point, we were still hanging around outside of the photography set. Some people had come and were working on it, but we felt God wanted us to bless the photographer and couldn't tell which one it was. Turned out to be none of them. The photographer showed up later, after a long line had formed for children, including the girl with the yellow flower in her hair, to take pictures of them with a person dressed as the Easter Bunny. She immediately began working.

Well, damn.

I didn't want to just stay there forever. I also didn't want to leave. I thought about leaving a note, but none of us had pens or paper besides our treasure maps. After puzzling over it forEVER (praying for the other people in between puzzlement), I stood up and walked over to one of the girls working in the photography stand.

"Do you have a pen and paper I could borrow?" I asked. She gave me a strange look but humored me by giving me a pen and searching for paper. No paper. She handed me the cardboard back of a notepad. Alrighty then, good enough. I sat back down with the other girls and started praying, thinking, and writing. I explained the situation to the photographer, first apologizing for being weird, and then about the words "mall", "park", and "yellow flower" that had lead us to her. I prayed a general blessing over her, and some specific stuff. I don't remember it all. The other girls read it when I finished and signed their names. They had managed to figure out the photographer's name by sneaking looks at her nametag (her name was Paris), and Yasmeen decorated the cardboard note with Paris's name and some girly, nice-looking stuff.

Now for the delivery. I went and gave the pen back to the same girl. "Can you give this to Paris?" I asked, regarding the note.

"You can just give it to her," she replied.

Well. No. I mean, I could've, but she was busy and I felt a little too chicken to interrupt her. I almost did. But then I just set the note down and asked for it to be given to her when she had time.

The girl handed it to Paris right as I stepped away. Paris looked at me. I gave her a huge, sheepish smile, and fled.

We'll probably never hear from her or any of the other people again. Which is one of the saddest things about street ministry, because I'd like to know the rest of their stories. I'd like to hear what God does for them. I'd like to spend more time with most people we meet and to just simply hear them talk. I'd like to hear their struggles. I'd like to share my struggles with them.

It's hard. But it's okay, because God knows, and that is enough for us.

Postcard from 1952 Pt. 2

Somehow, last night's tired, stumbling blog post ended up getting quite a few views and support, more than I'd thought. While I'm not entirely sure how that happened, there are no complaints. Bring on the pressure of making this sequel a good one!

You'd think that I'd learn from previous experience, but apparently I have to go through a trial several times before I learn that... well... it's a trial. Today I had the same meltdown all over again about God's promises and how much I think I DON'T want them. Inside, I know I do. But, as our wise women's pastor told me, as soon as God gives you a promise, you have to immediately give it back to Him and let Him do what He wants.

That's hard. My reasoning is that God gave me the damn thing in the first place, and so I have a right to it! I have a right to clutch it tightly, I have a right to show it off as much as I want, and I have a right to know every single detail of how it will happen. In fact, I have a right to MAKE it happen myself.

Have you noticed that God's reasoning is a lot different than ours?

His plans to make it happen are a lot different than ours as well. Inserting once more the most recent example of the promises God has made about my marriage, I would have never imagined that marriage would be so hard before the marriage even happens. I always thought God just crashes two people together and bam, that's it. Let the problems commence once everything is official. Who knew problems happened before the dang thing??

With all this trouble of determining who's who and handing God back the dream He gave me in the first place, I have to wonder--is this normal? Do all couples go through the same pain of handing their dreams and each other to God? Why must it be that way?

And it makes me wonder about their stories. Not just the story of the marriage, but the story before the wedding too. God has told me that our (meaning my husband and I) story doesn't begin on a date or a proposal or the wedding day. Our story is happening right now at this very moment. He will use those, yes, but He will also use our frustrations and hurt and ranting blog posts that happen before AND after the wedding day. I believe that the Lord wants to use the ugly and beautiful parts of our story to inspire and restore hope, trust, and childlike faith in His promises and faithfulness.

It's just that... well, I'm in just as much need of all that stuff as the people who will hear our story one day. And it's frustrating not knowing what else the Lord has in mind. I feel I have a good enough testimony--just tell the man my ring size already, Lord.

Apparently, God wants to keep adding more and more stuff, with no end in sight right now. Great.

In Living Waters, there is a certain time where we bunch up into assigned small groups and just talk and pray together. During my time to share, I talked about Hannah's conversation with God and how angry it made me. One of the small group leaders mentioned that she once had a similar meltdown to mine. She didn't understand it until she realized it was because she was afraid to trust God. She was afraid of having her hopes be so high, because it puts so much of you at stake and you could truly, painfully, mercilessly, fall.

And that's exactly it. I'm excited for what God has for me, but the very specific promises I refuse to believe. That, or I twist my fingers in my ears, wondering if I heard right or wrong. I'm so afraid of hearing God wrong, because I don't want to get my hopes high all over again. I don't want to crash and burn once more. I don't want my heart to be at risk. I've asked God for confirmation over and over, and I don't receive it because I've gotten so much confirmation yet I ask for more. Because I'm so afraid it's not God and that a lie has slipped in.

Not only that, but I'm afraid of losing my childlike faith all over again. It's a hard thing to attain, yet so easy to lose hold of. I used to be so good at it. I used to be great at having the innocent trust of, "Okay, God's got this, He'll protect me, He won't let anything hurt me, I completely surrender."

I miss having that mindset. I want it back. And yet it's so immensely difficult, because I realize now that God is more interested in our holiness than our current happiness. He wants us to be happy, but it's not something He just gives out all the time.

And so now an explanation of the title. I've mentioned Explosions in the Sky before, one of my favorite bands. There is a certain song called... you guessed it... Postcard from 1952. And I immediately loved it from the start. I had a hard time relating to it at first, but it eventually became incredibly meaningful.

See, the 50's were the years before the sexual revolution. A simpler and less complicated time before everything started getting so screwed up. And I miss the time in my life when things were easier and not hurtful, before the sexual revolution, before everything got messy and before I started questioning God's goodness.

Postcard from 1952 is what that childlike faith sounds like to me.

Postcard from 1952 Pt. 1

So my friend, Hannah, absolutely turned my world upside-down a couple of weeks ago.

Okay, maybe she shouldn't get all the credit. God used her to absolutely turn my world upside-down a couple of weeks ago. How did this come about, you ask? (Or maybe you didn't--in any case, I'm going to answer.)

Hannah texted me, asking "Have you ever had one of those moments where you're doing your own thing, minding your own business and then God pops in and is all like 'Heeeyy, let me tell you something deep and profound,' and you're all 'Oh, coo--wait, what?'"
Yep. I told her so, and asked what had happened.

It went along the lines of this...

Hannah: Lalala, doodidoodidoo
God: Hey, 'sup.
Hannah: Oh, hey God! What're you doing here?
God: I just came to tell you that every word out of my mouth is a promise.
Hannah: Oh. Wait, what?
God: Yup. So everything I have ever told you, even when you were itty bitty baby? Totally fulfilling that.
Hannah: But. Wait. What about--
God: Yes.
Hannah: And--
God: Yep.
Hannah: How about--
God: Everything.
Hannah *being bratty*: What if I don't know it's you?
God: Am I degrading?
Hannah: No.
God: Do I go against anything I have previously said?
Hannah: No.
God: Am I cruel or mean?
Hannah: No. (God was wise to have Hannah relate this to me instead of asking me Himself, because it would've been too tempting to say something... unfavorable.)
God: If someone or something tells you some word claiming to be me, and they are even just slightly one of those things, it's not me.
Hannah: Oh.
God: I'm going to go and let you process that for awhile.
Hannah: .........Well, shoot.

So she tells me all this over text. I received it during a break at work. And at first I thought it was a funny conversation. I was on the verge of lightly teasing her about it. But after rereading it several times and processing it for a while, I started to get angry. Really angry. Furious, actually. And it was so strange because I couldn't figure out why I was stomping around the workplace in a blind rage, slamming things around and fighting with God under my breath. It even got to the point where, in a moment when I was alone, I said out loud, "Lord, you don't know what I want! You don't know me!" I literally said this to my Maker! How retarded is that?

Once I become angry, it's always tempting to hold on to that anger and let it consume me. Fortunately, I've realized that probably isn't the best thing to do and physically stopped everything I was doing, just to ask the Lord what the heck was going on. Boy, He sure was happy I asked.

I know God has promised me things. He's promised me much, but three certain things have been really laid on my heart lately, and they immediately came into mind: the promise I would be a trailblazer, that I would be a wife, and that I would be a mother.

I've mentioned the trailblazer thing before, and so far have no complaints. I LOVE the fact that God has called that to be one of many facets of my identity in Him.

Being a mother is the most recent thing He's called me to be (this happened maybe a couple of weeks ago, I believe). This is huge and vastly uncomfortable, being someone who only likes kids until they start making loud noises. Babies scare me when they are fresh into the world and have no control over their bodies and can't communicate in ways besides crying. I am an awkwardly maternal woman--I'll have to work at it. Luckily, that's something I don't have to worry about for a while. With great relief, I am granted permission to cross that bridge later.

After all this musing and blogging over the past year about marriage, I think you know that being a wife is the calling I am most concerned with at the moment. There are times when I can't wait, and there are times when I wish I could rip this calling from inside of me and fling it off a cliff. I hate that God gave me that calling so early, because it makes me paranoid. It makes me wonder, "Is this the guy? What about this other guy? Or him? Does what he just said mean anything? This person just did something nice, does that mean something? Am I focusing on the wrong person?" I would not have wished that on myself, or really, anyone. It's exhausting. It's awful. It's terrifying.

And it makes me have to lean on God all the more.

Here's the thing. I have talked with God countless times about my marriage and prayed over it and my husband like you wouldn't believe. And I feel He has specifically told me certain things about my marriage and my husband. I feel He has given me promises and that He wants to fulfill them.

He told me a good portion of these promises last year. I wrote them down. I reread them. I got excited. I tried to help out.

And I crashed and burned. This calling on my life, this promise that stirred my heart, ended up tearing my heart instead. And I was devastated. I questioned God's goodness, and I wondered if I'd heard Him wrong, and if I had heard Him at all. And that was the biggest loss, the loss of childlike faith. The trust. I definitely trusted God--I just didn't trust myself to hear Him right. Honestly, I still don't sometimes. I know I can hear Him well because I hear things for other people often. But when it comes to hearing Him for myself, I get suspicious and doubtful and cynical. Especially if God's promise sounds way too good to be true. Especially if it's the same promise I'd heard before. And ESPECIALLY if it's the same promise I've heard before that sounds way too good to be true.

"Sometimes your calling can interfere with your relationship with the one who called you," one of my Facebook friends observed at the beginning of this year. And it's really true. In the Message version of Galatians 3, it says:

"Only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren't smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you can perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing?

...Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you?"

Ouch.

I will be the first to say that I am SO guilty of trying to perfect what God has for me. Like I said, I just wish He wouldn't tell me so soon... but then, I guess I wouldn't learn to trust and sit tight.

Anyways, God showed me why I was angry, so I got what I asked for. I was still mad for the rest of the day, though.

I think a lot of that had to do with slight disappointment and sheer frustration. There's a nice young man who I'm friends with, one of the few nice guys I know outside of church. Really, he's super nice. He frequently asks how I'm doing, and we've talked a bit about similar interests and our churches and God. And I admit it's been tempting to like him. It's really tempting to get my heart involved. You wouldn't believe how much my interest peaked after he told me he's twenty--less than a year older than me.

This didn't faze me even with Living Waters; we aren't allowed to begin a dating relationship while in it, but I'm not much of a dater anyways so that's not a huge deal.

It's that darn God of mine that's getting in the way. I'll never forget that conversation the Lord and I had about this young man.

"Hey, God... so, that calling about having a husband... what about him?"
"Who, him? Oh, I know him well. Nice young man. Yeah, no."
"Seriously? Come on, man. He's twenty, he's cute, he's nice, he knows you, my parents know him, he has a good job... and he's twenty."
"Duly noted."
"Good. It would make a lot of sense if we got married."
"You're right. It WOULD make sense."
"Alright, thanks God!"
"...which is why he's not the guy for you."

I was not pleased. That conversation happened not too long before Hannah's conversation about promises, so that was kind of like poking a fresh bruise. 

Okay, this is getting pretty long and I'm kind of exhausted. So I'll finish up tomorrow.

To be continued...

First Breath After Coma

I'm not a musician. I adore music, and can sing/make some music, but I have no extraordinary musical talent. It doesn't come naturally to me; I have to work pretty hard to churn out something decent. So I usually just don't.

However, there is a particular band called Explosions in the Sky who really doesn't need to be excited about their music because I've got enough excitement for the entire band and a few audience members combined. (I have heard that they ARE a passionate band and therefore they are well-known for their live music... it's now on my bucket list to see them live.) Mind you, I don't really think of myself as a very passionate person, but many people have told me that they admire the passion they see inside of me, so I'll just take their word for it. I have, however, figured out clues as to when I'm passionate about something--I study it. I annotate it.

Also, I can't shut up about it. My friend Hannah and I have very deep heart conversations, and I mentioned Explosions in the Sky to her several times because they are so deeply embedded into my heart in the background of some of the subjects we talk about. Hannah became curious, so I recommended a few songs. She was converted after that. I burned a couple of CDs for her and handed them over.

I only have two albums out of six by this band because their music is so complex and beautiful to me that it takes me months to absorb and process each album. Every single song has a purpose and a meaning, and I LOVE figuring out how God fits each song into my life. Explosions in the Sky is how I hear God. It's my worship music. You already know I'm a writer and that I love words. I love song lyrics too. But see, Explosions in the Sky is a purely instrumental band. No singer, no leader of the group, just a bunch of guys all contributing equally. And I like that sort of harmony. And I like that there are no words. Your emotions, your dreams, your experiences... those are the lyrics.

Honestly, I have no idea if any of the guys in this band love God or not. And even more honestly, I don't really care. It would be fantastic if they all do, but if God wants to use people who don't even love Him to make His voice clearer to some people who yearn to hear it... hey, can't argue with that. Their music doesn't bring you down like a lot of music does now--it lifts your head. It makes you look up from the ground.

I would love to write about each song and what they mean to me all in one post, but that wouldn't be fair. It would mesh them all together and take the beauty away from the individuality of the songs. So I may scatter some songs throughout my posts. We'll see.

What is the point of this long intro, you ask? Some background, I guess. Some sharing of the passion I have for their music. I don't need to be a musician--I've got a Musician practically DJing for me. And that's pretty okay.

One of the albums is called The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (which is always a good reminder). It's the the closest to love songs they've got and will ever get. There is such a celestial sound to this album... it sounds the way heaven should.

The first song is called First Breath After Coma. It's meant to signify waking up from a deep sleep, and the drums create a heartbeat throughout the song. I think of the heartbeat as God's... and then at the very end, the heartbeat seems to expand and beat faster and it merges with another heartbeat--ours after He wakes us up to His existence.

It's also worth noting that Tammy wrote a bunch of letters consisting of things the Lord asked her to write down for the youth. One of my letters stated that the Lord really wanted me to just lay my head on His chest and listen to His heart beat for me. My thoughts immediately went to this song... and so that's what I hear when I listen to this.

Don't be disappointed if you don't experience what I do with their music. Sometimes when someone talks about their passion, we get intrigued and expect to feel the same. It's okay if you don't... we all hear God differently, and this is how I hear Him.

It's long, but it's worth it.

Don't Quit

Carrie found a poem and posted it on Facebook last year. I thought it was absolutely beautiful and copied it down with a word document on the computer I was using at the time.

Unfortunately, that computer broke. I was somehow able to salvage my word documents via flash drive and plugged them onto my personal laptop. Even more unfortunately, I didn't have Microsoft Word on the laptop, and so was not able to read any of the documents I had saved since there were no compatible programs to open them up. It was pretty disappointing.

Until...

A few months ago, I succeeded in downloading Microsoft 2010 onto my laptop, due to the fact that I needed it for school and a powerpoint for a youth lesson that I was preparing at the time. So I've actually been able to open up the old documents and never even knew it until a few minutes ago when clicking around on my desktop.

What I found were memorable papers from senior year, a half-written youth lesson, wonderful quotes from a particular book called Chasing the Dragon by Jackie Pullinger, a book that I'd begun writing about my time in Nicaragua... it was a treasure trove!

And then I opened up the word document with the poem Carrie had shared, well over a year ago. And after reading it, I decided that I wanted to share it too. Because today, a group of people and I began a 20-week class called Living Waters. It's for those who are sexually and/or relationally broken. It originally began as a class for homosexuals, expanded for the sexually broken, expanded more for the relationally broken, and then it was pretty much decided that ah, what the heck, EVERYONE could use some Living Waters.

Because some of us need healing. Some of us REALLY need healing. Some of us want to know how to relate to others better. Some of us just want to hear the Lord better. And just about all of us aren't satisfied with the way our lives are, and have decided that we want more of what God has for us.

Anyways, we were told that the next four weeks of the course are the most difficult, and to stick with it. I can already tell it's not going to be easy... I've heard quite a few comments on how hard it is to discover just how broken you really are and to muster up the strength to come back to another class and be broken open again. Living Waters is known for being a pretty intense course.

Needless to say, I'm a little morbidly fascinated at how things will go.

So I find it to be excellent timing that I found this poem right at the beginning of the class. It's pretty encouraging to me, and even if you aren't going through something absolutely gut-wrenching at the moment, it's still beautiful. And it will probably be all the more frustrating and beautiful when things do get tough.

I already have the ominous feeling that sometime in the next four weeks, I may come back to this post and promptly attempt to delete this post and pretend it never happened. If you're reading this, you're obligated to not let that happen.

And the poem is this...

Don't Quit 

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, 

When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,

When the funds are low and the debts are high,

 And you want to smile, but you have to sigh, 

When care is pressing you down a bit, 

Rest, if you must, but don't you quit. 

Life is queer with its twists and turns,

 As every one of us sometimes learns, 

And many a failure turns about, 

When he might have won had he stuck it out; 

Don't give up though the pace seems slow—

You may succeed with another blow. 

Often the goal is nearer than, 

It seems to a faint and faltering man, 

Often the struggler has given up, 

When he might have captured the victor's cup, 

And he learned too late when the night slipped down, 

How close he was to the golden crown. 

Success is failure turned inside out—

The silver tint of the clouds of doubt, 

And you never can tell how close you are, 

It may be near when it seems so far, 

So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit—

It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.