He is Risen!

Happy Easter!

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow

Because He lives, all fear is gone
Because I know He holds the future
And life is worth the living,
Just because He lives!
-William J. Gaither

*edited to add this great verse from our daily bible verse email!*

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you!"
1 Peter 1:3-4

I am a Soul

C.S. Lewis once said, “I do not have a soul. I am a soul, I have a body.”

I read this quote the other day while browsing through a long list of quotes by Lewis who is arguably the greatest apologist of the Twentieth century. I loved it. I soaked it in. What's more, the simple truth behind this statement came as quite a shock to me and changed the way I thought about a few things. As is often the case, one thing can affect many others.

The very idea that we are not a body with a soul, but a soul with a body changes so much. If I could focus on that, I would care so much less about my outer appearance and focus much more on so many of the things that Christ tells us about our souls. It is His dwelling place. It is the Temple. It is who we are which encompasses our reasoning minds, emotions, memories, personality traits, character and all the other things that make up all of the incredibly unique things that make us individual creations of God. What makes it better is that we take the very best of us to Heaven. In that day that we get called from this earthly shell, we get to go home and literally be made perfect. Perfect in that we get a new body and perfect in that the bad things about us, those little idiosyncrasies that keep us from being the child of God we really want to be will be wiped away. While our earthly shell is discarded, our soul (which is who we really are anyway) is just made better. We get to be clothed in our heavenly body and receive instead "a building from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven." It's more than exciting to know that I am more than a body that withers and fades with time and disease. I am a soul waiting to return to my heavenly home where I will receive a perfect body. Woo Hoo! No more weight watchers, chemotherapy, or botox!

2 Corinthians 5:5-8 "Now the one who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a first installment. So we are always courageous, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yet we are courageous, and we would rather leave the body and go home to the Lord."

There's so many nuggets of truth in the Bible and it seems each time I read I am reminded of some lyrics from a band named Disciple:

"Cause Lord if You showed me a thousand things
Brand new about You everyday
I still would never see the fullness of Your glory
Lord if You gave me a thousand years
To try and count up all the ways
That You have shown to me
That You are just not enough
You are too much" A Thousand Things

Evan turns One year Old!

We had a blast tonight at our nephew Evan's first birthday party! It's hard to believe our little buddy has already been around for a whole year! I feel like he has grown up more quickly than any baby I've ever been around. It feels like just a few weeks ago we were going to the hospital to see him just minutes after he was born:
And it didn't take long for us all to fall right in love with him, of course! We prayed with him when Jason and Alisa dedicated him, and watched as he said his first word!
We have been so blessed to be around these past few months to see him grow up and his personality develop. Soon he will be walking and talking and we'll get to know him even more!

Matt took a bunch of fabulous pictures, as usual, and we had fun meeting some of the people whose blogs we (and by we I mean me) have been reading fairly regularly from among Jason and Alisa's friends. Mostly we just enjoyed the time with family and friends, celebrating the first year of the life of our happy little buddy!
Happy First Birthday buddy! We love you!

Spring Cleaning

I've been doing a little bit of spring cleaning in the house this week. The sunshine has been out more and more and it's really putting me in the mood to have a sweet clean house with all the windows open and the grill fired up on the back porch! We did grill out some turkey burgers tonight for dinner and they turned out really well. Matt is the grill master!

I started by vacuuming the whole upstairs, and next I'll have to start getting the guest room inhabitable again by this weekend... my Dad is coming back from his trip to London and I think he'll be staying with us for a few days again! We love having Dad around. Matt has a live-in guy-movie-watcher, and I have a houseguest who very thoughtfully washes his own dishes!

I've also been hard at work getting new handmade things photographed and listed in my etsy shop. There is some new jewelry and notecards, for starters. I'm really excited about getting some fun baby things up, as soon as I can book another sitting with my little male model! The last attempt ended tragically in a dark cloudy day and a power outage. Here's a little preview of some of the new lovelies, feel free to stop by!

Happy Birthday Matt!

I am so blessed to have called myself the wife of this amazing guy for the past 3 and a half years so far... and honored to know that God was preparing us for each other well before we knew it:

I'm thankful for his lighthearted and cheerful personality... the way he can light up my day with the slightest funny gesture and I can't not laugh when he's around!

He finds ways to stop and celebrate the little things that most people would glide right over, and creatively finds joy in the ordinary.

He's been my shoulder to cry on, my sounding board for never-ending ideas, the heater of my chilly toes in winter, my "fixer" when things break or go wrong, my navigator, and my bestest friend.

He's strong, brave, and a little crazy (yes, this is him hanging upside down off a mountain), and I'm proud of him in ways I'm not even sure I could describe.

We've been together such a short time, but now I can't imagine it any other way. He's the one I dreamed of, and I get to spend the rest of my life loving him!

HAPPY 27TH BIRTHDAY MATT! Love you, babe.

The Calling

When I got back from lunch today, a work associate of mine approached me and said, "You're SO lucky God has called you to ministry. Now you can sit back and only have to work one day a week. Good luck and enjoy working at Club Med!"...I thanked him for his congratulatory remarks and began explaining to him that a pastor's life is blessed because they are paid to do what Christians all over the world are not paid to do: study and teach the Word of God through words and deeds so that God may have ALL the glory. While the pastor's life is tremendously blessed with this...it is also a remarkably dangerous position (spiritually dangerous, more often than physically-Luke 17:2) and while you may "work" one day a week, you are on call every second you are on this earth. If you're a Christian, you know what I mean. The needs of the world and the service they require don't have a time clock you just punch in and out of at the end of a long day. Your service "time clock" is the entirety of your life.

I came back to my office and prayed that God would help me to understand just how to convey these thoughts best and also to minister to my own soul as to answer some of my own questions. I have physically seen the toll ministry can take on a family and I am willingly and wantonly pursuing that life for my family despite some internal conflict.

I opened up my email box and an automatic email that I have subscribed to sent me this article:
"God's Call Waiting" by John Ortberg.

Amongst other things, he states:

"A calling, though we glamorize it, is not glamorous. It is a response to a summons. It is a kind of surrender. It is a willingness to die to the past and move to the future. C.S. Lewis wrote, "To follow the vocation does not mean happiness, but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do not follow." Aeneas does not want to leave his home to follow his calling; it means leaving old dreams and old loves. But there is a larger and better destiny to which he is called to submit. So Jupiter says of him, "That man should sail." And he does. Sailing means embracing the pain of leaving behind what he thought was his comfort and fulfillment. It means trusting that somehow he is not just moving into the future; he is being led. It is Abraham leaving Ur for he knows not what. It is Moses leaving Egypt for a land he will never enter. It is Jesus walking the Via Dolorosa toward a hill he does not want to climb. "That man should sail." It meant—a little like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show—it's better to have the faith to embrace reality with all its pain than to cling to the false comfort of a painless fantasy. That life and growth and meaning can come only in the risk of obedience. The future—even if it's hard—is better than nostalgia. It meant that in leaving port there was something to sail to. It meant hope." [my emphasis added]

I wanted to share that with you all, because as we continue to wait on the Lord for the place He would have us serve, we are ecstatic to be leading others as they pursue worshipping Him, but we are also very aware of the changes on the horizon. Turning the page to the next glorious chapter requires that we leave the old chapter behind. I clung to the last line that I emphasized above, because that's what I have, hope. I have nothing but hope that while we are leaving behind a few dreams, possibly the closeness of family (proximity wise of course), and other things which I am sure I am forgetting, we get to do what we were meant to be doing. That is an amazing thought, and we are truly thankful to God for the opportunity to serve Him in this way.

If it all seems overly dramatic, you have no idea how dramatically God has had to move in our hearts to get us to here and we wouldn't want to be anywhere else (even if it made it easier).

Making Family Traditions

This weekend, we went on another long walk around Falls Lake, which is quickly becoming one our favorite new family traditions for Sunday afternoons. The weather was especially awesome, and we like it so much because it is such a blast to take Pontouf with us. We start out at the Dam where there are usually lots of families and folks walking around too, then walk down and around by the edge of the lake. There's much fewer people there, so we let her off her leash and she runs around... chasing birds, drinking out of the lake, exploring, jumping over and under fallen trees, and running back and forth as fast as her little legs can carry her (which is surprisingly fast!) She'll run off a little ways and then come right back when we call her. Well, you can imagine this is a lot of activity for a little pup, and quite a bit more than she gets on a regular daily basis... and it completely wears her out! She crashed out when we got home and slept all afternoon, and then this is what we found when we got in bed to do our bible study: