end of March life update

The weather has been milder, and we are seeing the sun earlier and earlier. :D I have been outside making dirt behave several times a week. Some of my onions are debuting their green stems. I have popped one of two blisters from my spade work breaking up the soil.

I am beginning to enforce mandatory outside time, although it is not as difficult as it used to be, because both little people want to play outside, and do not fight putting on coats and shoes. It used to be fifteen minutes getting ready and fifteen minutes outside and that was not quite worth it for me. But now we are getting better, and sometimes coats are optional.

My neighbor and I are sharing the three chickens that she owns, who live at the back of the garden. So every other week, I feed, water, and scrape poop off the floor of their house in the morning, and around lunch time there are about three eggs waiting for me. We have decided to make T-tshirts that say, "My pet made my breakfast."

I am in the middle of the T-tapp 60 day challenge. I decided to force  motivate myself to do three long workouts a week, and then anything extra would be exceeding my goal. I am also doing the various extra challenges as they pop up on Facebook--this week's was Awesome Legs (a leg movement that tones inner, outer thighs, and hips), and two weeks ago it was a movement for the abdomen. Since I am not expecting either inch loss or weight loss to be super dramatic (because I lose slowly or in spurts, but it all equals out over time), I am getting a little lazy about weighing and measuring myself.  Mainly because I wear fitting clothes enough to know if there are any changes (and I have noticed some, but again, not dramatic), so I know I am not in need of changing anything. Also, I decided that I needed to take a break from "counting" calories. It was just tedious and I've been maintaining for a little while. I started using sort of a macro portion control method used by Beachbody.... but I have corrupted it a little to include more fat because I believe in fat!! If you want to know how I figured that out, let me know, lol!

At the mom's group I attend weekly, we are going through Daniel with Beth Moore. I am enjoying it because it has a very interesting perspective. Beth always does. And it requires me to get into the word every day, and I appreciate that. I also have been working hard to get together with some of the moms from moms group because I need friends! :D This is good for me and for them. We all live within twenty minutes of each other so it's not hard, we just have to make room in our schedules for it!

I started reading a Biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Now this is INTERESTING!! מענין. (that's hebrew for interesting. pronouced MenYen). rabbit trail!! This book is a perfect faith builder--we get glimpses for Bonhoeffer's theology and sermons, but not enough to bore me, and it has historical aspects that keep me captivated--he lived in Germany during the first world war and the died during the second world war. And (so far), he was a gifted teacher and presenter of the Gospel, really waking people up to Christ. It ignites the fire in me to remember to keep on delivering grace to people, but also showing them the Gospel is vital for them.

Interestingly enough, it also points out how higher education in present day is a weakling limp noodle in comparison to what it was eighty years ago! Like my degree, for example... people wouldn't even think to go to school for something like that in the 20s and 30s. It is important, but the pastor really was the social worker in this period of time in Europe.

Ben's parent's washer broke and so they gave us their dryer, and so now we have a dryer! This is a major improvement on our home! this past winter was a stretch for me, but between our neighbor letting us use her dryer occasionally (we trade things), and having several milder days (if you have sun, even if it's freezing, things will dry, but they will freeze first, and the part of clothing around the clothespin will probably not dry, but it's better than having too much moisture in the apartment). And everything else we dried inside our apartment (which wasn't the majority).

And we also survived the winter with Dyson hot +cool fans instead of using baseboard heating all the time. We used the heater int he kitchen only on particularly cold mornings and the kids baseboard heater at night because it functions efficiently in the side of room that they have.

Ben and I continue to study Hebrew. We have approximately four lessons each week, about 3.5 hours. We do homework and practice speaking together some of the time. We are definitely getting better, and making improvements. I still want to speak more and need names for most things in the house still, but we are getting better. Still learning tenses and different verb structures and rules. But I like it!

We enjoy seeing family occasionally--we saw Ben's family for Easter, and my parents are coming to see us soon. We saw Marie in February when she came back to get her visa stuff figured out.

I joined the worship team at church and play piano and do harmonies (and one song I did lead, on Palm Sunday) once a month. This is a great thing for me--not only for my soul and to stretch my fingers, but to finally have a method to intentionally get to know people in the congregation besides in the nursery.

i'm working through my old fiery trials still

I decided to write this blog because I've been in a weird rut in my mind. Lately, it's taken to remembering things in a slanted view point, in attempts to make me feel inadequate, then guilty, for having such memories. But there is a God who loves me and wants to rewrite the memories of my past. I refuse to look at the things that have hurt me and let them continue to hurt me. I'm done with that. I need to forgive, I need to forget. I need to let go. I need to feel freedom for the emotional baggage of things I could not control and cannot change.

About five and a half years ago, my life changed. I was hurt, broken, confused. What did God do?

God surrounded me.  My group of friends surrounded me, prayed over me, let me live in their room (until the school made me move out...), encouraged me, resurrected my inner beauty confidence, rejoiced with me, healed me. God took this time to give me a support group. My soul was bare and bruised, and my friends picked it up, put it back, and tended to it.

God enriched me. I found ways to write out my hurt, move on with my heart. I am better. I can see the world from better eyes, and I have been taught to not settle for the present options if they are mediocre.

God affirmed me.  Despite heartbreak in the beginning of a semester of college, I put my heart into the degree I desired. I worked at it, I learned I grew, and when that broke too, God still affirmed me in my education.

God showed me forgiveness and redemption. I was broken from the brokenness of it all. I was broken from the sin that was there and the heavy duty commitments I had made that were broken.

And God took my heart in His hands, and took my hand and pulled me out of my darkness into an incredible raw real beauty that only He could create. He put the breath back in and tended the fire of passion in my soul and started the engine again. And I picked up speed and I opened my eyes to the world around me as I passed by. And I learned, and I loved and I felt every step again. 

My heart was full again. 

A year and a half later I took a test and I passed. And a treasure began to accumulate inside.

And suddenly I was viewing the world fly by
out of my control,
and I didn't care,
and I didn't want to be doing what I was doing with school
and I just wanted to be married so that the shame and words behind my back wouldn't hurt so badly.

And suddenly my lack of passion and energy caught up to me and dissolved in thousands of tears and feelings of bitterness and betrayal and shame

Everything was blended together and I could see no support from the people I'd looked up to all this time. My friends, my love--they were there for me, but not the people who brought me to that point.

Two professors of mine, at a later time, expressed to me that they opposed the removal of my BSW to a liberal arts with a concentration in Social Work. One, who was on sabbatical at the time felt things would have been different if she'd been there.

But I couldn't--I can't keep dipping into the "what if's" and the "how it could have gone" because that's not how it did go and I can't change it, I couldn't change it.

And I need to let go and let God.

God is still working on me. This was a hard time. These feelings still create a complicated web that I get stuck in, though not as often as I did a few years ago when it happened.

God shows me how to forgive. Although I am stubborn and frustrated (still) by everything that occurred, I begin to look at each person's actions objectively, and begin to understand how each thing happened.

The person that I need to forgive is myself. Even though I did not make the ultimate decisions that removed my intended degree from my possession, and I did not fire myself from my internship, I made decisions that let that happen. I didn't speak up (and I can always give my reasons why, but that still won't change my situation) that my internship wasn't going well. I didn't tell my male professor leading the internship coordination that I was pregnant. I worked hard and things still fell apart because the few places where I didn't work hard were the places that the people who mattered noticed the most and felt were the most important.

God is unfailing. I think the hardest thing to say about this whole situation despite it's outcome is that I didn't fail. I didn't. I did my job, I worked hard. I did my homework, I contributed to class, and I was exhausted and nauseous everyday and I was over-blamed for things that happened, and I was uncomfortable with confiding in my male professor that I was pregnant, and I thought that I had made better connections with the leadership at my internship than I did, and before I knew it, everything had flip-flopped and I was sitting in my car, with tears continually running down my face trying to pick up the pieces and figure out how I was going to tell my professor, and friends, and family that I had been fired, because it was as much of a surprise for me.

It is easy to say now that everything was over-reacted. It's like my internship supervisor and my professor and all the people who looked at the evidence provided were on the pregnancy hormones running through my veins at the time. And the decisions that they made, several times through voting, broke my heart.

So my grief in this time was not just for the loss of an arrangement of words on my official transcript, but the loss of trust and support from a professor I thought was on my side.

And even in this time, God was seeking me and working to heal me. I was feeling it. I sought the word of God, but it was hard to pray because I was holding so much of this inside, every time I set myself to open my soul to God the grief would spill out.

And I do care that people see that I am alright, and I wanted to be alright and to be done with it and through it, but when I was by myself in our home with our baby with no one to talk to, I would relive these events again, and feel it like it was just a few days ago.

And God. So I still ask myself if I see the conclusion of this event in my mind. Other old, hard memories have been settled. I can't decide if time or remediation or prayer or counseling or something else would give me peace and strength--so I would see the growth and gains I have made from this time.

and of course I can see them--two beautiful children. A strong marriage. a different city, a different state (this helps, of course). Success in other areas, no longer desiring to work in social work (this is a growth, I think, recognizing in myself that I take others stories and apply them to my own family much too easily). Embracing motherhood and the true joys of not having to leave my children to work. Understanding my great desires to work the soil in my garden and grow things.

and I move on. I have worked hard to let Scripture come alive for me and fill my soul so that I gain strength from it. I have written songs that have been better prayers for me. I am a different woman than I was four years ago. Consistently coming back to Scripture until I let the words enter through the cracks in the callus I built up from not wanting to be hurt anymore.

God humbled me. God prepared me. God heals me. God was there in the car when I saw the storm crash around me. He was in the office with me when my degree changed. He was walking beside me every time someone from school took note of my growing belly. He prepared me to overcome my strong emotions and challenges to have a healthy labor.

God is healing me. God is guiding me. 

and I can choose to look at it this way.