Life verse.

Tonight at bible study we talked about our life verses. We've been reading "Calm My Anxious Heart" by Linda Dillow and one of the questions in the bible study was asking if we had a "life verse"....a verse in the bible that has really spoken to us or been a theme in our lives. Immediately I felt like God was reminding me Psalms 68:6 "God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land." 

"God sets the lonely in families"...

This verse is special to me for a lot of reasons. Right after my mama went to be with the Lord, Audrey (who I now consider my sister) prayed this verse over me. After praying this verse over me, John and Audrey invited me to move into their home with them for 8 months. This was such a precious time in my life and it is truly what taught me what this verse meant. Growing up with a single mom, it was always just the two of us and as much as I LOVED our girl time, I always longed to have a large family. What God began to show me in my deepest loneliness after she died is that I did have a family, a family that he was beginning to knit together day by day. As a young child I say it was just my mom and I but it wasn't, it was my mom, Marty, and I. Marty and my mom dated for 9 years throughout my childhood and he became the father I never knew. After my mom got sick, he stepped up and truly became my father and even asked to call me his daughter.  In October 2009, I was contacted by my biological father's side of the family, a family I had never known who desperately wanted to get to know me. Although I was hesitant at first, mostly out of the fear of the unknown, I met an entire side of my family that I never knew existed. So not only did the Lord provide me with a father, sister, but now also a side of the family I never knew who loved me dearly. 

When I met my husband we quickly fell in love... literally met in November 2009 and were married by September 2010, I'm not exxagerating when I say quickly ;) I also fell in love with his family very soon after! Just as God had been sewing my story together and placing me in a family, He did the same for my husband as my in laws adopted him the day he was born. Trevor's parents brought home a new baby boy from the hospital and that day and placed him in the only family he's ever known and it is nothing short of a gift from Him. Trevor has incredible parents who know and love the Lord with everything in them and they have become parents to me as well. I am so thankful for you Scott and Kim, we love you! 

We also have countless friends in our lives who we do consider family. My best friend Chelsea and her husband Tanner are one of those couples. I cannot imagine how a friendship could be closer and I love her deeply.  We have gone through highs and lows...weddings and memorials and the Lord has always been the center of our friendship, whether we realized it at the time or not. At 16 years old, Chelsea and I decided to find a church home on our home and that is when I decided to make Jesus my Lord and Savior and was baptized. She is a huge part of my testimony and has been there at every milestone in my life since that day. 

Dale and Quinn were our very first friends at Fort Hood when we were dating, engaged, and married and they have become our best friends. Dale and Trevor have been stationed together in 3 different states, spent 6 months in Iraq with each other, and in 2011 we walked through the birth of their sweet baby girl Lily and all held one another and prayed together the next day when she went to see our Savior. Quinn and I have a friendship that is deeper than most people have in a lifetime and I am eternally grateful for that. We love them so very much.  

I wish I could talk about ALL the people I think of that God has put in my life that are a picture of this verse but there are too many. We have been blessed beyond belief with a small group of friends here at Fort Hood that we truly live life with every single day. Since Trevor has been deployed, I have gotten so close with a group of 4-5 girls who's husbands are also deployed and it is the most authentic community I could ask for...we laugh, cry, grieve, and celebrate together. It is absolutely beautiful. As soon as a I get the "itch" for change and get excited about the idea of moving somewhere new someday, I very quickly am reminded of how thankful I am for right here and right now. We love our life at Fort Hood and I never want to take that for granted because I know how much we will miss it when we do leave sometime in the near future. We are so very thankful to consider all of these people lifelong friends and family, I truly think we have made lifelong frienships who will be scattered all over the world someday.

So this is my life verse because God HAS set the lonely in families and He continues to do so.  The Lord created our family...Trevor and I together as one. He also created our families that we each came from and brought us all together as one family. He has also blessed us with friendships that we will forever consider family. I can honestly say that most of the people I consider family are not blood relatives and that I am thankful that God has placed each one of them in our lives. We even have a "family" wall in our house with pictures of these people I have written about and other than my mama, not a single person we hung on our wall is blood related but they are all what we call our FAMILY! Thank you Lord for setting the lonely in families! 

Excess

I've recently been reading a book called "Seven" by Jen Hatmaker. Jen's husband pastors a church in Austin called Austin New Church and they have radically changed their lives in the past several years to focus less on THEM and more on OTHERS! Simple concept, right? The problem is that this is foreign in our culture and takes sacrifice, and that is what she writes about in Seven. Over Seven months Jen (and her family for most of the months) take a challenge to consume less and give more...it is so beyond inspiring!

In month one she narrows it down to seven FOODS that she can eat the entire month! She chose chicken, eggs, whole wheat bread, sweet potatoes, spinach, avocados, and apples. Her food choices and mine would be a bit different (haha!) but the point is that a month she experienced what it would be like to only have access to Seven foods and even how simple and yet complicated it made her life. All I could think of is how many people in the world would give anything to have the assurance that they too could eat as many of seven foods as they wanted for a month. Most of us don't ever worry about going hungry, but instead we complain about our options for restaurants in a 10 miles radius of our home.

She also dedicates a month to:

Month 2- only wearing seven items of CLOTHING (other than undergarments :P)
Months 3- getting rid of seven POSSESSIONS per day in their home
Month 4- cutting out seven sources of MEDIA (TV, gaming, Facebook/Twitter, iphone apps, radio, texting, internet)
Month 5- creating seven habits to cut out WASTE... Gardening, composting, recycling, driving only one car, shopping thrift/2nd hand, buying only local.
Month 6- limiting SPENDING money in only seven places! She chose a farmer's market, HEB gas station, online bill pay, Target, Emergency medical, kid's school, and a limited travel fund.
Month 7- Elimintinating STRESS by pausing to observe "Seven Sacred Pauses" to take "breathing spells for the soul" and cut out stress in our lives. She takes Seven pauses in her day to pray and focus on a specific area. They also observed Sabbath from Saturday evening to Sunday evening.
An excerpt from Jen:
"I'm guessing many of you've cried over orphans or refugees or starvation or child prostitutes, heartbroken by the depravity of this world. It's not okay that you're kids get school and birthday parties while Third World children get abandoned and trafficked, but you don't know how to fix that..."

"Perphaps this is why Scripture calls us to the practice or fasting-from food, from greed, from selfishness, from luxuries. It isn't just the experience; its the discipline. It changes us. Fasting helps us develop mastery over the competing voices in our heads that urge us towards more, towards indulgence, toward emotional volatility. Like consistent discipline eventually shapes our children's behavior, so it is with us. Believe it or not, God can still change us. Not just our habits but our hearts. Say "no" for a year and see for yourself."

I have been chatting with Trevor and Quinn about this book a lot over the last month or so and it is so incredibly convicting....I mean seriously, we are so ridiculously blessed. We have soooo much and we somehow forget to be thankful every moment of every day...crazy, I know! We have been talking about ways we as Americans can in some small way feel what it would be like to live without all of this excess, but the truth is that we can't possibly TRULY know what it's like while living in this country... our society is all about excess! However, we can look for ways to implement this into our lives and can train ourselves to focus less on ourselves and the things that our families WANT or DESIRE and focus more on other peoples NEEDS who do not have the luxury of "wants". This is a GREAT read and I highly recommend it!