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!

A reflection of 2011!

Trevor and I have been reminicing over 2011 and excitedly chatting about 2012...mainly because we will be REUNITED! We were so very blessed in 2011 though and I feel like a huge part of going into a new year is thanking God for another year that we were given!

We started off January 2011 with news that I got a job! My first big girl job after graduating with my Master's and it was exactly where I wanted to work...the VA hospital! We were both ecstatic! It was sad to leave all of my great coworkers at NPSP on Fort Hood, but it was a very exciting adventure ahead! We also had Marty and Marilyn in town visiting for New Years but Trevor and I both got the stomach virus and our trip was cut short :( They visited again later in the year though! The last week before I started at the VA, Trevor and I took a road trip to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS! It was a blast...we visited Bourbon Street in New Orleans and Trevor gave me a tour of Keelser AFB, hopefully where we will be stationed next (more on that later :P)!

In March 2011, Trevor and I were anxiously preparing for him to deploy in June and decided to make a surprise visit to his parents in Cali! We book flights and flew into San Diego, California and surprised his ENTIRE family at his uncle's wedding! I thought his mom was going to have a heart attack as she began screaming "my son is home and he's in the military" and dragging us through the restaurant! It was an amazing trip! We were able to spend a ton of time with family and celebrate his birthday in Cali. We also spent 3 days alone in San Diego and we were on the beach where he proposed, exactly one year after the date he proposed on March 11, 2010! Obviously, Trevor found out that he was not deploying until September but we LOVED this "pre-deployment" trip!

Coronado Island, San Diego California!

In April 2011, our AMAZING small group multiplied and Trevor and I along with two other couples started a Grace Bible Church small group for young married military couples! These couples have become our family here and we are so thankful for each of them!!

Our small group couples on Easter Sunday at our house! :) 

In May 2011, Trevor and I decided to take a trip to Galveston for Memorial Day and had a blast! Trevor was a bit disappointed in the Texas beaches, but he would be as a CALI guy! ;)

By the bay!

Our resort in Galveston! 

August 2011 was a whirwind of a month! It was the month before Trevor deployed and the month Dale and Quinn welcomed their precious baby girl, Lilianna Rose Walker, into the world on the 12th! I posted a blog about Lily in September so you can find it to read more about her precious story and God's goodness to the Walker family or you can read her mama's blog at http://liliannarose.blogspot.com. We are so very blessed by Dale and Quinn and their family and their friendship is one of our greatest blessings of 2012! Trevor and I spent most of the month getting ready for him to deploy...it was an emotional month to say the least but we had been preparing for him to deploy for over a year at that point!

Lily's birthday! :)

At the end of August 2011, Trevor and I took our one year anniversary trip to Guanacaste Costa Rica and it was perfect! When we got married we agreed to go on a trip once a year just the two of us and this was our second annual trip! We loved CR, it was beautiful and sooo much fun! We visited the arenal Volcano, went ziplining through the rainforest, toured the country side and relaxed at our resort! It was the perfect trip to take right before he deployed and I am so thankful for that time and the memories we made together!

Costa Rica with my love! :) 

So many babies were born this year and I wish that I could post about ALL of them, but this would be a super long blog if I did because our friends were blessed with so many this year...whether they were blessed with the opportunity to solely carry them, meet them, or blessed with a fully healthy baby. Hudson Ray Timmons was born to my best friend and Tanner on September 20, 2011 happy and healthy! Praise the Lord! This was such an emotional day too,Trevor and I drove down to Austin to see Hudson right after he was born and I just remember crying my eyes out before we left the hospital to head home.... My best friend just had a BABY and I knew that was going to be the last time they saw Trevor and Trevor saw Hudson for the next 7 months. Hudson would be 7 months old when Trevor saw him again,  I couldn't even fathom that in the moment! I have loved getting to see my best friend become a mommy though :) Love you both Chels & Tanner!

Here's a couple of pics of my first visit to see Hudson since he had been born:



Sweet mama moment :)

                                                      

Sweet Gracen Faith Saltzgaber was born on September 29, 2011 to our dear friends Ryan and Dayna and went to be with Jesus that day. Trevor and I had the priviledge of walking alongside Ryan and Dayna while they prepared to welcome Gracen into this world and prepared to also say goodbye to her on this side of Eternity. She was born and was absolutely beautiful and we are forever grateful for her story and the glory that it gives to God. Gracen girl's story has touched so many people and each time it points back to our Lord's goodness. To hear more about Gracen's story, follow her mama's blog at:  www.rydaysalt.blogspot.com.

This picture was from Gracen girl's DAY! Her and her story have been SUCH a blessing in our lives this year!

Trevor deployed on September 28, 2011 and it was one of the hardest days of my life. Saying "see you later" to your husband as you send him off to war is heartwrenching and the first month was for sure the hardest.

In November 2011, Trevor had been gone for about a month and I was finally getting into a routine with him being gone. I had 3 of my closest friends over for Thanksgiving and cooked my first turkey and full meal! It was DEF intimidating but so much fun, it almost felt like I was in college again, just as a wife :) I loved it! Here are a few pics:

My first ever Turkey!! :)

A toast with some amazing friends on Thanksgiving! 

December 2011 was an emotional month! The holidays have been very emotional for me for the past 3 years since my mom passed away already and with having my hubby gone as well, I was pretty much a mess for a month!  Among the mess, it was a great month! We had a ladies night at the Melting Pot for all of the girls in our small group who's hubby's are deployed and it was such a fun night! 

Here are a couple pics from the melting pot: 

Hubby also became NCOIC (non-commissioned officer in charge) at his base in Afghanistan! This was so exciting and I am so proud of him! He is so good at his job and this is a wonderful opportunity! 

Here's a pic of my handsome man in Afghanistan: 

Trevor on Thanksgiving :) 

As hard as it was to be away from Trevor on Christmas and still be missing my mama over the holidays, I was blessed to spend Christmas was both of our families in the mountains in Cali! It was so relaxing to spend 5 days up in the mountains and not have to worry about anything at home and I know hubby was relieved to have me there too, he was just as sad as I was to come back!

Hiking with my wonderful in laws!

Marty and I!

Christmas with the kiddos before I went to Cali :) 

Trevor and I aren't big on New Years resolutions but we do have some things that we are are committing to! We are committing to continue to love the Lord and keep him at the center of our marriage as well as strive to have a biblical marriage that glorifies Him! We will continue to do our best to serve those in our military community as He has called us to and continue to make life long friends here at Fort Hood.  Here comes the typical resolution though...we've made a deal that we each want to lose 5 lbs per month between now in April when he gets home, wohooo! Of course we wanna look GREAT for each other, but one of the main reasons we want to focus on eating well and working out is for my immune system because I was sick so much this fall/winter... thankfully I can say I have been sickness free for the last month! :)

We are sooo thankful for everything that happened in 2011 and are excited for the new year!! AND...we are officially 1/2 way done with this deployment! Thank you Jesus for keeping my husband safe! We have so many weddings and trips we are looking forward to in 2012 but most of all we are just thrilled to be doing life together again soon :)