Where’s your heart?

I’ve been of the mindset that my husband is the leader of my home and I express that openly to my children and friends with a happy heart.  After reading the next chapter in my book, I wonder if that was truly the case.  By definition, the leader (Trent) makes all final decisions.  Now, I’m not saying he does so without communication between us and really knowing my heart in any and every situation.  I mean, come on, you know Trent.  And by my role as a help meet, it is my responsibility to have buy-in to these decisions, knowing and trusting God will provide for us wherever our pilot might head.  These are always the moments where I feel I’m being tested.  I want to be able to stand in front of God on that day and ask, did I make You proud?  It made me stop and think… if Trent said, baby (cuz that’s what he calls me), I want to move out to a house in Shawnee to be closer to the other 4 kids (resulting in Noah going to school else where than I prefer) how would my heart be?  If it was right, and I was truly in line with God and my husband, my teeth would see the light of day and I’d simply ask when?  I know.  That’s a whole lotta trust.  But I have complete belief that my husband wouldn’t make that decision without full consideration of my feelings and a boat load of prayer (an Arc, if you will).  The book says to find your life in his.  This is a bit more easy for me to swallow than others because my dream is to be my husbands amazing wife.  Nothing else.  I don’t want to be a top executive at my company, I don’t want to be an accomplished anything but woman of God.  I want to be a stay at home mom, keep an amazing house for my husband, cook him insane meals straight from the food channel, and support him in his career either with creativity or just love.  That’s my dream.  I’ve seen it too many times in my short 33 years.  You take nothing with you.  Your only legacy is your friends and loved ones.  The only thing that matters in this life is who you are in Christ and what representation you presented and lived while on this tiny little planet for a short span.  So finding my life in Trent’s would simply be a dream come true rather than an insult that I think most women in today’s society would be offended by.  I like this line God is not looking for happy women to make them into help meets for good men.  He is looking for women willing to be true help meets to the men whom they married, so He can fill them full of joy.  This year what I’ve learned most about my God, is that he’s not looking for me to be perfect… just for me to have the right heart and trust Him… and in every instance that I have obeyed, He has abundantly blessed me, just as He said He would.  She closes with this… Pray that God will give you the wisdom to help you know and appreciate your man.  Pray that God will give you the wisdom and grace to share your man’s dreams so it will always be you that he dreams about. 

The next chapter is going to bite me in the butt.  All up in my face.  It’s called Reactions Define You. :-0  So I’m going to reflect a bit in the chapter I just read!  J  You may call it chicken… I call it… well… okay… I call it chicken too!     Would you expect anything more of me?

“…it’s all crack-a-ly and dry…”

The last several times I had thought about blogging I thought, I want to somehow explain how I feel like step-parenting is equivalent to God’s relationship with us.  So I’d think about it, and drift off in my adult ADD world and it would fall wayside.  Then something else would remind me about it again, and I’d ponder on it a bit and drift off in my adult ADD world, again lost in the many thoughts a day that roam my head.

SIDE BAR:  It’s funny, I read something a while back that is so true in a mother’s world, and you moms will relate here, because I found myself doing it this week… I went into my bedroom to grab a recycled gift bag from my closet (that I always keep to reuse, but never do because I forget that I have them) so not only do I have adult ADD but a horrible memory as well… yeah, poor Trent, I know.  So, I excitedly go to get this gift bag that I’m so happy and proud I remembered I have from my closet and see my plant on my TV and hear my son’s voice, ‘mom, you need to water your plants, they’re all crackely and dry’ so I turn around to go get the pitcher and water my plants and while I’m in there, I start cleaning my kitchen while I’m waiting for the pitcher to fill, then I open the cleaning closet to throw away something and realize I need to take out the trash, so I bag that up and set it on the front porch to take down later, go back in and see Noah and realize he needs to take his morning pills, so I go get him his pills and water to see my pitcher is full so I go water the plants, including the one close to the bathroom when I spot that I need to take out the bathroom trash as well, so I set that on the porch as well and on my way back in see my sons pills on the table, so I go get him some water and hand him his pills and water and it dawns on me, I was doing something??? What was it??? I look over and see Tres’ gift and so I head back into my closet to get the bag and realize, I REALLY need to clean out my closet, and so it began… all from needing to get a gift bag out of my closet, I got my plants watered, my kitchen cleaned, the trash taken out, my son’s medication delivered amongst other things I’m sure I’m forgetting.  That’s why I’m a project manager, it’s a talent… I like to see how many balls I can juggle at one time.  :0)

Okay, back to my original thought, see adult ADD in action, even on my blog… I know I have to blog this because last night my husband was talking to me and actually said the same thing I had thought several times, he related step-parenting to our relationship with Christ.   That’s it!  I’m doing it!  I’m writing it!  See, I have these amazing kids.  5 in all.  Addisun is 17, Kailee-bird is a couple of  months shy of 16, Chandler is a month shy of 14, Tess (goodness) is a month shy of 10, and Noah-bear is 8.  They are all beautiful, inside and out and each special in they’re own accord.  They are unique and gifted and pretty dang remarkable in my eyes.  This is the way Christ see us, right?  I love each of them, individually for who they are.  I relate to each of them in some way, and they teach me to love, be patient, and bring me joy everyday.  Again, how I would imagine we are in Christ’s eyes.  Yet, four of them have a mother.  A mother that they have complete trust and security in, it’s natural… it’s ‘Mother’ nature.  I’m their step mother.  When they have struggles or they are experiencing life, I want to pour into them.  I want to guide them.  I want them to be the best they can be in Christ.  I have wisdom, I have love and I have a way of life that I want to share with them if they’re willing.  But that’s just it.  The only way I can pour into their lives is if THEY allow it.  They have to open their hearts to me.  Do you see it?  Do you see where I’m going with this?  We have worldly parents that we love and trust because it’s our comfort zone.  And we take their advice to heart.  But we all have this Father who has the ultimate wisdom, the ultimate love and the ultimate way of life that He wants to share with us but the only way He can is if we open our hearts to Him.  And yet in most of our daily lives, we don’t go to our Father for advice on the small things.  Sure he wants to help with what house to buy, or what school our children attend, but I know my God also wants me to seek him in what blog to write, what book to read, or what friend to reach out to, and even some days what shoes to wear J.  I relate in this way, I want to guide them so badly sometimes it hurts, even with the small stuff.  I imagine Christ feels the same way about us.  I’m reminded every time I see my children, how Christ must feel when I try to handle a situation without His Guidance.  

I’m sorry

I haven’t been writing and have been recently reminded that I need to be (thank you Cori!)  I had a long weekend with my family, and it was eye opening (in a great way) and relaxing all in one. 

Here’s where I’m lacking as my husbands wife and my children’s mother.  I’ve fallen too far away from the Word.  I could blame the fact that we can’t get on the internet anymore at work (since I lived in biblegateway.com) but I simply need to bring my bible with me to work.  I wrote in an earlier blog how I always wanted to guard my marriage by keeping it new, remembering how I felt when I was dating my husband and keep those feelings fresh.  Through Craig’s message series, wonderful people praying for us, friends, and my husband I just now came to the realization that I haven’t kept my relationship with Christ new and fresh.  My husband is leading our family in ways most women would DREAM of and in stead of encouraging him I sit quietly and listen and don’t say a word and even some things I get angry about.  Why?  Because I’ve lost sight of what I found 2 years ago.  A happiness and freedom in Christ that aligned the rest of my world in such a way I could never imagine.  I am dishonoring Christ by not encouraging my husband.  I am the very woman that I am reading about in Created To Be His Help Meet.  I am human and I will always fall short, it’s when I see it and I know it and my own emotions try and build this wall between me and my husband, and therefore, me and God that really scares me.  So pray with me, pray for me and hold me accountable that I am able to lay my emotions aside and stand behind my wonderful husband who is leading my family.  On the way to work this morning it was by no coincidence that I heard ‘heart of worship’ on KLOVE.  ”I’m coming back to the heart of worship, and it’s all about you…. all about you Jesus.”  I was at the laundry mat last night and to kill time while in the drying process, I read… the one line that stuck out at me was God gives imperfect women to imperfect men so they can be heirs together of the grace of life and become something more together than either one of them would ever be alone.  It’s all about you, all about you Jesus.

My heart

There is one tag line about marriage that will remain with me until the end of my days… did God design marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy.  A very special couple introduced a book to us in our first small group called Sacred Marriage.  It is a great book to dive into and cuss an discuss even if it’s just with your spouse.  It didn’t seem to hit home with newly weds in their first marraige in our group, but for those of us who had been married before, had children, both, or had been married for some time it brought about some great discussion.  It really made me stop and reevaluate how I can better my marraige instead of seeking out what my husband is doing wrong.  The tag line alone reminds you that marriage takes effort.  As my girlfriends and I discussed this weekend, one of the most gut wrenching things to hear these days is ‘well, I just fell out of love with him/her’ and yet those words are uttered everyday.  I’m so not a reader by nature, it takes effort for me to read, but when I do, and I read books like Sacred Marriage, For Women Only, or Created To Be His Help Meet… I find that I’m a better wife while I’m reading.  Knowing that makes me want to always be in a book or be rereading to keep these tools fresh on my mind so that I act upon them.   

My husband and I are going on two years of marriage and we get comments all the time, like “it’s so cute how you guys are always holding hands” or ” you two are still so smitten with each other” or “you two are still on your honeymoon phase” and it makes the corners of my mouth chase my ears when I get those comments.  I’ll be the first to tell you that Trent and I’s marriage is not perfect.  We have our battles, but the most important lesson I took away from Sacred Marriage is to ‘fall forward’ from these battles.  I don’t ever want to become complacent in my marriage and that takes effort.  My father-in-law told his wife after many many years of dating, I want to marry you, but if we ever stop dating, this certificate doesn’t mean anything.  My husband has taught me to guard our marriage.  I take steps every day to stay in love with him.  Some things that are important to me are…

• Never ‘venting’ to my friends or co workers about Trent’s insecurities or things he does that irritate me.  When faced with those situations, I try to give advice to those girls about how they may change the situation by their actions or words from things I’ve learned in these books 
• I never hang up or email without saying “I love you”… not “love you”… but “I love you baby”… and meaning it.
• I never go to lunch or dinner with a guy friend alone or have conversations that I wouldn’t have if my huband were right there.
• I don’t speak to or have any sort of connection to any previous boyfriends
• In everything I do, I think, how does this effect my husband
• I daydream about my husband, intimately
• I send him emails and texts telling him how proud of him I am and how attracted to him I am daily
• I don’t do anything differently with my son outside of my husbands presence as I do when he’s there (this lets Noah know that we are totally in agreement with the way that we are raising him)
• I smile at him every opportunity… I don’t ever want him to seek acception or happiness from another face.

When I feel things starting to become complacent, I take my thoughts back to my actions and feelings to the first three months of our relationship and say and do the things the same way I did then.  It does take effort because inevitably I have lived much more life with Trent than I had then and there are wounds and circumstances that make you not want to do that, but that’s when I know I need to the most… I’m going to fight everyday for my marriage and that simply takes sacrifice.  It never fails, that when I put my selfish feelings aside and lift him up I draw closer to God.