Ck out the new blog…

diaryofapastorswifeandstayathomemom.blogspot.com

I don’t even know where to begin. So much has happened, changed, and is changing. We have begun getting clarity on Ryan’s future in ministry and what that looks like. It’s nice to be able to see an end goal. Although we have no idea on the final outcome, it’s refreshing not to be just floating along per say. We also know that God can change our direction at any moment and we’re excited for that too. Honestly, when He’s done that in the past…amazing things happened. We don’t fear change, we actually embrace it quite well. We know that it gives God a platform to do what He does best.

So much is on the table right now for us. So much is being changed in us and through us. I just had to stop for a moment typing as tears came to my eyes. I am extremely humble for the platform that God has given to us and continues to give us. I am amazed that He’s chosen me…me…to play the role that I have played and continue to play. He took a girl that thought she needed no one, wanted no one, and didn’t need anyone to a woman who knows she needs a Savior, who’s thankful for Ryan and can acknowledge my need for his direction and leadership in my life. God has used Ryan to change my view on God. The way that Ryan loves gave me a glimpse into God’s love. Ive said it a 100 times, but Ryan truly does not have a selfish bone in his body. He just doesn’t. He chooses to obey the scripture and he dies to himself to serve me, serve our kids, and serve Jesus every single day. I thank God every day that I have Ryan. He’s a remarkable man and I wouldn’t be who I am in Christ if it weren’t for him. Marriage has truly taught me about santification and I am so grateful for that process.

In that, I have become extremely passionate about marriage, our roles in society, and about mentoring and accountability. The world feeds us a load of junk. It tells us lies that are not true. And I have seen some very Godly people being caught up in those lies. This is why community and more importantly accountability is so essential for the believer. Without it, we are so vulnerable to the lies that the world sells and the lies that the enemy sells. I could write a whole book on that topic, but I won’t bore you for now.

I will end with this, the prayer that our 18month old prays every night…God is good, God is great. Amen.

5 years ago Ryan and I had our own plans, our own dreams. For as much as we thought God was in the center of them, we quickly learned after our I do’s that God had other things in store for us and that we couldn’t honestly say that He was in the center of our lives. The truth was, we were prostituting God. We wanted His blessings and His rewards, but didn’t want the hard stuff. We didn’t want the obedience, we didn’t want the daily prayer life or the daily bible reading. We had our own agenda. Almost immediately He would rip the rug out from under us…sending us on a wild goose chase and we are still chasing after Him.

We always said that we’d have two kids, maybe three. But that was way down the road. We had dreams of travel and adventure before we settled down and added a kid into the mix. A kid would just steal our fun and we didn’t want that. Ha, now five years later…we have Morgan, Levi, Matthew, and Luci. What joys they have been to us. It has been work and it is challenging at times, but my children have eached drawn me that much closer to the heart of God and with each child has placed me closer and closer to His will.

I never thought that we’d be on this road to pastor. I knew God had bigger visions for Ryan than what we had intially thought, but I think we both thought that it would be something on the side…maybe worship ministry full time…but that was a big maybe. You see, there was no money in ministry. Ryan was already blowing and going in the banking world. We knew that big things were happening there. Money was more important…or so we thought. God however, ripped that out from under us and now five years later, Ryan is on the verge of running his own church.

These past five years have been everything that I would have said I didn’t want…and yet, I have learned that being in the center of God’s will is exactly where I want to be. I couldn’t ask for a better husband. He loves me deeply, passionately. I never have to question where I am in relation to his priorties. He will stop everything on a dime for me. For a girl who was abandoned all her life…. Ryan has taught me what God’s love is suppose to look like. He dies to himself each day to make sure that I am taken care of. I always thought the idea of this beautful love story wasn’t real, that it wasn’t possible…but I assure you it is…I am living it.

And it continues on in the lives of Morgan, Levi, Matthew, and Luci. A love so deep, so passionate and so real is evident in the beating hearts of each of my children. What love.

I still look at her often, thinking about how she was being knitted at the very moment that my father was leaving this earth.  I have thought about it much lately as we just had his birthday and now the holidays are approaching.  My grandmother has wanted to talk about him a lot lately too (I go over there every day).  When my dad was alive and the mere mention of him abusing drugs was brought up, she’d gawk at the notion.  Even though she knew deep down that he wasn’t this stellar guy, she couldn’t acknowledge that our family had any problems.  They are all like this…so after he died when it was stated that he was abusing drugs by dr’s…my grandparents still remained in denial.  It was frustrtating.  So finally I tried to get my grandma one day to admit it…and she was refusing so I finally said, “well, if he wasn’t abusing drugs then he was just an asshole and I don’t care that he died” and she just stood there looking at me…shocked…and she said why would you say that…so I just sat and recanted all the horrible things he had done in the year before his life…including a couple of weeks before he died..and she she stood there for a moment…and then she said “you’re right”.  So now, esp this past week, she’s been talking to me about his drug abuse.  How he “fooled” everyone.  He didn’t fool anyone…they just didn’t want to believe it.  He was an addict.  His death was senseless.  And we have to live with the consequences of his drug abuse for the rest of our lives.  I will always feel cheated.  Not only should I have had my dad for years to come, but even the years I had him were taken from me b/c of his addictions. 

Regardless, I still miss him.  I still think of standing outside his hospital room after he died…looking at him through the window.  I didn’t want to leave him, but I couldn’t stand there with him anymore.  I think of how I felt walking back into his room once care was removed.  Watching him cough, and struggle….I will forever be tormented by what I saw.  Sometimes I wish that they never would have revived him…that he would have just died.  I hate knowing that I had to decide to remove care.  I always wonder…had we waited…would he have woken up.  

But in all of that..I have a beautiful daughter that God gave to us right in the middle of that.  That was a very stressful time for me.  I didn’t sleep, eat…I worried…I was honestly thinking I could lose the baby bc I was so stressed.  So knowing Luci now…she’s just so laid back…I remember telling my Dr numerous times…that if she could stick w/ me thru that, I knew that she was good for the long haul.  And Luci did…she gave me hope.  And she continues to provide that for me. 

Luci came out and she is the first child that I teared up right away upon seeing. I am a thinker…I have to analyze everything. I always cry at the birth of my kids, but it comes later as I reflect on thier pregnancy and delivery. But with Luci, it was different. She came out and I finally got to see the gift that the Lord provided to us during such grief. The Sunday after my dad died, I stood in church and as I sang the song “Never Let Go” by Crowder, their is a part of the song that says “in joy and pain, you never let go” and I thought then that is what I was going through. Pain, losing my father…joy in being given another child. As I said then, such conflicting emotions and emotions that I felt again as I delievered her. Joy, seeing her, having her here, alive and healthy…pain…I can’t call my dad and tell him she’s here. I am a straight shooter…I have never pretended that my father was a great dad..he wasn’t. But I always had hope that he’d change. That he would get clean, sober up…and be the man that God desired him to be. That dream ended last Christmas eve…and even though my father never became that man, I still miss him.

This week has been hard for me. His birthday is Friday…and it’s brought back so many feelings and emotions. I just keep remembering coming out from deciding that we would withdraw care…I went to the waiting room to tell his friends so they could go see him before we went back in there and signed the pw and had life support removed. I walked out…I told his friends and as I told them I lost it and his friend Alex just held me…for whatever reason…that is what I keep remembering.

I just wish that I could talk to him…there is so much I want to say…

Why is that when it comes to the bible, we are so quick to claim the promises He gives us but ignore the commands? And that’s kind of where we were. We knew deep in us that God was asking something of us and we fought and resisted. Thankfully God had enough mercy on us and gave us time to work through our motives and lay down our dreams and our hopes and our desires and say yes Lord, our hopes and our dreams are yours.

And we have four little lives that remind us of this every day. I am reminded every day as we pray with our kids. I am reminded everyday as they pray alone. Or tell us that “God has the power in their room” or listening to them say that “the enemy is not welcome here” and Morgan talking about the enemy as if he were a she. It makes me giggle everytime – we are building an army for Him. And I am humbled.

I will say that when we found out about Luci Grace, due here in a few weeks that I was a little angry. My dad had his heart attack on Dec 18th, I found out I was pregnant with her on the 20th and he died on the 24th. Those conflicting emotions – death, now life swirled inside of me. And in many ways continue to. As I watched my father take his final breath, I knew that my daughter was being formed by God’s very hands inside of me. God took my father at the very time He was giving me our daughter. I feel in many ways robbed of this pregnancy. I have had little time to really “enjoy” it. I have mourned most of my pregnancy – and as her birth is nearing the sadness is getting even deeper. Knowing that I will not be able to call my father when she is born. Knowing that I won’t get to see him hold her. That hurts. I tear up just typing this. But in all of those emotions – I am reminded that God chose her. He dictated her life. Not me, not Ryan. And in that, I rejoice. I rejoice knowing that years ago – He was readying us for this very moment.

If you had asked us early on in our marriage how many kids we would have, we would have said two…maybe three. and that’s a big maybe. Shortly after we were married I was heavily convicted to go off the pill. We were just in the beginning stages of being groomed, shaped and molded for the Lord for ministry. I would get up each day, take my pill and I would hear Him ask me if I trusted Him so much, why was I taking the pill. I would hear Him ask me how I could encouage others to trust Him but here was an aspect of my very own life that I was not. That penetrated me deeply. I began to pray and seek out the motivations of my own heart for taking the pill. I talked to Ryan about going off and naturally he’s a man – a young man who just got married and he really didn’t want anything to do with it. However, I will say that instead of his response being no…he was mature enough to say Hey, that’s not my conviction but that doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong. Let’s pray about it. Let’s seek the Lord and see what happens. He did not ask me to remain on the pill. He said that the Lord speaks not to just him but to me as well and that by denying my conviction he realized that he would be asking me to choose between him and the Lord. He would be asking me to go against what God was doing in me and he did not want to be apart of that. That decision right then and there changed us, it changed our marriage and it changed our walk with the Lord in ways that I would never have imagined. For the first time, I can honestly say that I trusted him. Like really trusted him in the way that submission called me to. It wasn’t hard – it was easy because I knew from that moment on that he truly had my best in mind. Not his, not his desires, but me. So we went off the pill and shortly after I had to have some cancerous cells removed off of my cervix. After that procedure the dr’s told me, two different ones that I had to go back on birth control and that we couldn’t go off for 6 months. So we were at an impasse. Do we trust the dr’s or do we trust the Lord? See, even when we went off the birth control we never really looked at it as trying to have a baby. We really looked at it as an act of obdience and if a baby came from that then ok. So, we decided to trust the Lord. And what would you know – we got pregnant the very month the dr’s said that my body would be ready. That trial of ours was a huge stepping stone for us. It changed everything. We had Morgan and then I went back on the pill – for just a few days. The conviction was right back. We had been hoping the conviction was initially placed on us for Morgan – but we soon learned that wasn’t the case. Then we had Levi and we did not go back on the pill after him. We were however still working through our feelings on having children. It was a long process – we spent years praying for release of the conviction and until finally during Matthew we embraced it. We have come to realize that God truly does know what is best. And by giving that up – it’s made all the other steps of faith for us really easy. I mean, we have to be 110% unselfish to have children the way that we do. Ryan calls it our sacrifice. But it’s such a rewarding sacrifice. We have grown in leaps and bounds. We know that when God asks us to do crazy things like Ryan quitting his Bank of America job and me quitting my job at the same time, losing 75% of our salary that God’s ways are higher than ours. The crazy thing is that we have truly gotten to watch the Lord provide for us. I can tell you today that we are sitting better almost 4 kids later and me not working than we were a year ago let alone 4 years ago. Not only has the Lord given us back my salary but Ryan actually makes more than we both did together working at B of A and me working. God gave us a bigger home that a year ago we could not have afforded and we got it at a great deal and up until the closing the Lord was moving -saving us thousands of dollars. But its not about money you see – we say that as excuses right, we can’t afford a baby. Or we’re not “ready”. That’s what we said. I cannot speak for everyone, I can only speak for myself and Ryan but for us, we had to really look at our hearts. We had to see why it was we were on the pill and we had to ask ourselves some really hard questions – like, I would say if the Lord really wanted me to have a baby pill or not, He would. And I still believe that to be true, but then I had to ask myself if I really believed that God created life or did Ryan and I? I had to ask myself if I truly trusted God’s ways and that if we ended up with 10 kids was I truly ok with His will. Because that’s what I realized – I pray “Lord your will be done” but deep down here was an area that I didn’t mean it. So I was a liar. I really wanted my will to be done but I hid under the guise of seeking the Lord. I wasn’t seeking Him, I was seeking Him to do my will. I was seeking Him to give His stamp of approval on what I had determined was best.

I now sit, 9 years later after my conversion a changed woman. My life looks nothing as it did before Him and it looks nothing of what I had hoped for after I met Him. I now have no plans for this life. My only hope is that when the Lord calls, I will go. My only plan is that His will truly be done in my life. Whatever that looks like. While it is annoying for me that people ask me about how many kids we are going to have, it’s also a humble reminder that His ways look foolish to the world.

***disclaimer, I just want to add that we do not think bad or anything of people on birth control. We truly don’t. we are all on a journey here with the Lord. We can only testify to what He has done in our lives and in our hearts. If what I wrote offended you, then the only thing I can tell you is to really search and pray what was so offensive. Remember – the bible is offensive.

We just got back last week from taking my dad’s ashes to Port Aransas and spreading them in the ocean as he asked.  I must admit, that at this point – I am a little numb.  I feel like it’s been the longest funeral.  It still doesn’t seem real, that’s he’s really gone.  I have had a lot of time to heal emotionally from his loss.  I will always mourn the what could of been, what should of been…I will always mourn all the “never agains”.  Often times I think I wish I had just one more conversation with him, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t think that could resolve all the hurt and emotional damage inflicted by him over the years.  And I still get angry because we still have so much to contend with now with his wife..with his estate etc.  My sister and I are the only ones who are handling everything.  And even in that, it’s more like I decide, she agrees and just backs me up.  So I feel like, even in his death, I am still cleaning up his messes.  I told my sister heather the other day that he couldn’t even get death right.  He died just as he lived…leaving chaos, confusion, and destruction in his path. 

Besides my father, I don’t even know where to begin.  Ryan and I moved.  We bought a bigger house for our family.  This is it I swear.  Even if we end up with 10 kids, we’ll just have to figure something out and get creative.  I can’t make another move.  Ryan is super happy.  He’s in the area he wanted, he got his pool and he’s provided us with a beautiful home.  I am thankful for him.  Not because of what he provides for us, but just his sacrificial love for us.  He truly does not have a selfish bone in his body.  He sacrifices daily for me and for each of my kids.  He has a servants heart.  And we are better because of it.  His love for me has truly taught me about santification.  I have grown so much in our marriage with the Lord simply because of Ryan’s actions towards me.  Ryan has been so faithful in honoring the Word in our marriage and it shows.  I love him more than words can say.  Every day I wake up and I think, wow, I get to do this life with this man. 

Other than that, we are just chugging a long at home and at church.  Ryan is really growing deeper and it’s so amazing to think back to the kid who was a tight wad and afraid of anything that wasn’t traditional southern baptist.  The Lord has taken him on such a journey the last 7 years and it’s amazing to see what He has done in Ryan. 

Kids are good.  Getting big.  It makes me sad.  Morgan turned 3 in may and Levi turned 2.  Matt will be one in a couple of weeks.  Our newest will make her debut in roughly 9 weeks.  I am so excited to meet her.  I can still remember all the emotions surrounding finding out about her and losing my father.  What a circle I will have witnessed over 9 months.  I watched my father take his last breath and I will in a few weeks, get to see my daughter take her first breath.  I can’t imagine not calling my dad when she is born.  I can’t imagine Ryan not giving him updates through the day…I can’t imagine him not coming and holding her.  I fear the emotions that will come with this delivery.  But I am so looking forward to locking eyes with my precious daughter.

And yet with such an act of love and mercy and grace…I have watched many others treat this weekend, Good Friday and even this morning, as if it were any other day.  People who claim to love Jesus…who serve Him…who say that He is Lord of their life push Him to the side because something else came up.  Sometimes I wonder if those that sit inside our walls fail to acknowledge the brilliance of what He did…of He is…is because we don’t want the responsbility inherent in that knowledge.  I mean think about it for a minute.  There is a difference between knowing something and believing something to be true.  Our pastor talks about this all the time.  He always says that if you say something isn’t good for you but you continue to do it, then you don’t really believe that to be true for you.  Jesus is no exception here.  Many say they believe in Him, but I wonder how many know that truth.  Many say that He is Lord yet He’s not a priority.  I am not claiming perfection here…there are many times Ryan and I begin to pursue things that are enticing and sometimes things that we think are “good things” but those things push Christ to the side.  It’s a struggle for sure.  But for many…I have had too many people tell me that grace essentially means that this life is for them and becuase of it, they are free to pursue whatever they wish and that God needs them more than they need Him.  Seriously…I have heard these things. 

Ryan and I do not buy our kids Easter presents.  I don’t think that you are wrong if you do…we have just chosen not to turn this into a holiday for them.  We do not want them to grow up thinking that Easter means presents for them.  We want them to understand the fullness of the Cross.  We want them to know that the Cross is their present.  That eternal life is their gift.  That HE is their prize. 

And may Ryan and I never forget this truth.  That HE is our prize.  He is our JOY.

I facilitate a class at church for surivivors of sexual abuse.  Not just childhood, but all kinds.  It’s amazing to me how many women I have sat and talked to that have been victimized inside their marriages.  The numbers are astounding.  The last four women I met with privately all have that story.  I can’t wrap my mind around it.  Out of that God has birthed this drive to help our youth.  There are a lot of issues with doing this.  It’s not easy.  We (Ryan and some other church leaders) met with a detective of child sex crimes this past week and now I understand why the church has remained silent.  However, it’s not a deterent for me.  I will not allow these girls or boys to continue to be victimized or sit in silence suffering from past abuse.  We will work out the details, the kinks and it will happen.  it’s just going to take some time which i hate bc I fear that there is a kid who needs help right now.  But it’s so difficult so we will do what we need to and we will help free some of these kids from current abuse and past abuse.  I can’t sleep it’s all I think about. 

This has made me think a lot ab my dad.  He wasn’t sexually abused that I know of, but he was still wounded.  Wounded early on as I was from his parents and other things.  I am mad at myself bc we help people everyday like my dad recover from their past hurts.  we offer grace to these people for their irrational behavior.  Why was I able to extend that grace to a stranger and love on them but deny that to my father?  I wonder how much he could have changed had we helped him…really helped him.  I don’t know that he would ahve accepted it, but I also don’t know that he wouldn’t have.  That’s where my culpability is.  That is where I failed him.  I think that knowledge is where this drive for these kids come in.  I will use that guilt to change lives…I got big visions too and I can’t wait to see what the Lord has in store.  Please pray for us as we embark on this journey and pray for protection.  The enemy would love to ruin this and hold these kids in bondage longer.

Until next time….

PS Ryan finished up his MDIV!!  I am so proud of him!  Two masters under his belt now.