Homemade With Love

I absolutely love Pinterest. I definitely spend too much of my time looking at things that I love, want to do or make. It never fails Pinterest has something for whatever I'm looking for. Right now I am planning my wedding and it has been very helpful to be able to see what my mind is thinking about in picture form. I am the type of person that if I can see it, then I know it is possible and I can more than likely accomplish it.

A few months ago I was doing some prep work for an event and I needed a craft that a group of mixed ages could do that would take about 30 minutes to accomplish and would be a great door hanger for the people who live at the retirement home here in town. It didn't matter how I typed it in the search menu Pinterest was not giving me what I was looking for. I mean if I was decorating my classroom door there were tons but not what I was wanting. I couldn't find it on Oriental Trading or even Google. Talk about a searching fail. So I sat in my office looking around trying to think of something that would be just right. Under my desk I have a big box of old card fronts. The church members give them to me to use for different things. We make a lot of cards in some of my groups so they are perfect. Well I started cutting crosses out of the cards and was enthralled by how unique each one was. Then I saw some foam crosses on the other side of the room and put together a craft.

I was pretty impressed with what I came up with, if I do say so myself. Then today I was going through the finished products after a group of 2nd-8th graders put them together on Wednesday and I have to say I am in love with this project. They're adorable. There really wasn't a way to mess them up, and each one is as unique as the maker and the person who will receive it.

I do believe I see some future card front crafts in our future here at the church! :)

We Love Because He First Loved Us

I'm so excited for your wedding!  This seems to be a sentence I hear a lot these days. I'm never really sure how to respond to this statement. I mean obviously I'm excited too, but some of these people seem more excited than I am. I mean don't get me wrong I am incredibly excited. I have given some thought to this difference in excitement, you see most people are excited about the dresses, the colors, the food, and the party atmosphere a wedding brings. Here's the deal though, I don't like dresses, colors are colors, food is expensive, and I don't party. I think I see the difference in excitement.  There is honestly a part of me that wants to go to the courthouse and not deal with all of the hoopla wrapped around this one day. There is a part of me that dreads the inevitable dress shopping and the idea of so many pictures of me being taken in said dress...weddings can be so incredibly stressful. It is such a huge day that marks your life and makes a statement about your chosen relationship for life.

But it isn't the wedding I am looking forward to, it is everything that is happening after. I'm excited about marriage. I'm excited about spending my life serving Adam, serving with Adam, learning everything about him, riding the tides of life with him, and together becoming the couple in ministry that God has planned for us. I'm excited to see where God takes this relationship. It has been incredible to be a part of this journey. There are so many moments I find myself overwhelmed by the way God has answered my prayers in an old friendship that has become so much more. I often look over at Adam and am humbled to think that he has chosen me and the only thing I can do is say a prayer of thanks for the incredible man God has brought into my life for me to love. So when I think about marriage and all that comes with it I am overwhelmed with excitement.

You might be thinking, why don't you just get married then, just skip the wedding. There is another side to weddings I haven't mentioned yet, and this is the part I am excited for, the part that is worth all of the planning, and even worth putting on a dress. It is the part where we get to unite our lives in a worship setting. We get to to share what God has done in our lives with our closest friends and family. God created us to be a people of community. We are not meant to go through life alone. Adam and I did not come to this part of our lives alone. We will not go through any other part of our life by ourselves. We are meant to worship in community, serve in community, and overall live lives of community....so why would we start this new phase of our lives without the community we have love and cherish? I cant even imagine going that route. I am also a person that loves tradition, so bring on the dresses, the colors have been selected, we will have cake and eat it too, as for the party....we will do it in full camp and church style!

So as I sit here staring at the piece of jewelry that started all of this excitement I can't help but feel incredibly blessed and excited about the love story that is being written in the lives of two people part of a Christian community in a world created by love itself. "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." - 1 John 4:9-12

If I run off to the courthouse then I am preventing my community from an opportunity to experience love which is to experience God himself. And that goes against everything I believe in and stand for. So bring on the wedding and all it entails, oh and bring on the excitement and bring on the sharing of love!

Arms of Love

There have been a lot of things going on lately that have made me want to write. The most recent being a funeral I worked this morning. I think I am starting to hate them less than I used to. There is just something spiritual about watching friends and family gather in honor and memory of someone.

A year ago in June, I was broken beyond words. Scott's death hit really hard. I view death in a way that means usually I'm not too sad when someone dies, but this one was different. It didn't matter how I looked at it, or what I could tell myself it was not easy to deal with. There were definitely many tears shed, and even months later I would find myself at a loss for words to describe how I felt. I spent a good six months battling being angry with God and then angry at myself for being angry. Thankfully I serve a loving God who is big enough to handle all of my earthly emotions. From Scott's death in June through the rest of the summer, it sure felt like God was testing me. There were issues with my little sister that I mentor, my car died, and then there were three more deaths. Needless to say I started the school year a shell of myself, and just went through the motions with my job and everything around me. My passion and fire was missing and I knew it but I couldn't figure out what I needed to fix it. In January I finally was able to mend my broken spirit and come back to being who I normally am.

Through all of this though I was surrounded by people who loved and cared about me. From my neighbors upstairs to my family and friends miles away. I had a church family here and far that were praying for all of the different situations. I found myself feeling incredibly blessed, loved, and at home. I honestly think it took a time of pain, fear, frustration, and loss in this place to finally feel like I was home. It is easy to love a new place during the hype of being hired and moving into your first place by yourself. But after all of that wears off the loneliness sets in and you start to wonder if you really are where you are supposed to be, especially being single and having no reason to stay home and do things in town it was really hard to connect and feel at home. Then tragedy hits and these people rise up to surround you with love and support, and even though I wanted nothing more than to pack up and go home I had to stay here because I had a job to do. I had people that needed me here. And through sticking it out, I fell in love with this community. And then I fell in love for real, and he moved up here to be with me, and now I have another reason to stay. I have roots starting to grow deeper and I still love going to Ark City to visit, but Hesston has become home.

So now as there is chaos and turmoil brewing in my hometown, there is a part of me that is dying not being there to help where I can. But then I go home or to Adam's and there are arms waiting for me. Understanding arms that are willing to hold me through the fears and tears. Arms that understand that even a year later the grief isn't fully gone, so sometimes I just need someone to hold me. These arms are the only place my heart desires when the reality of the brevity of life hits hard. It is no longer pure and utter torture to be an hour and a half away from my family when something painful happens.

The only thing different this year is that these arms that are holding me, I can feel them on a physical level that I didn't have. But I know and I felt the arms that never let go of me even last year in all of the pain and those arms are still holding me, and have provided me with physical arms as well.

The truth is our life here on earth is going to hurt, its going to be brief, and it is going to be filled with sorrow and suffering. But we have a Creator watching over us and guiding us through the battles of life. And when we trust Him, He provides for us exactly what we need when we need it. I don't think I would appreciate the strong arms that now hold me if I hadn't gone through so much with out them. I learned how to fully rely on God, I fell in love with my community and church family, I learned that all emotions are justified as long as you deal with them in appropriate ways, I learned that my faith was stronger than I knew, and then I experienced/am experiencing God answer my lifelong love prayer.

So my prayer today for you is that no matter what you are facing today you reach out for the arms that have never left you. Reach out for those hands that created you, the hands that are scarred and bled for you, the only hands that can heal, protect, and guide your soul through this life. If you're lonely reach out, also, to the earthly hands that have been provided for you to hold; in your family, friends, and community. You don't have to go through anything alone. You are always surrounded by the arms of love.

Arms of Love - Kutless

Wedding Work Out Challenge

So I have a feeling in the next 6 months there will be a lot of wedding planning posts. Because I pretty much have wedding planning on the brain....For real...6 months.....from tomorrow!!!! That's crazy and completely amazing all at the same time. I'm such a planner and organizer, I'm having way too much fun with this...I have a feeling at some point I might drive Adam nuts, but he picked me so I guess he knew what he was getting himself into...

I thought I would share our wedding work out challenge we decided on yesterday. Adam and I both have been wanting to lose weight but we get bored easily with workouts and with our work schedules it just doesn't happen too much. So we settled on some incentive to get into better shape for our wedding and the rest of our lives....

Wedding Work Out Challenge

Begins: Thursday, May 22, 2014

Ends: Friday, November 21, 2014

The person with the biggest percentage weight loss gets to pick our first dog......

I can't believe I not only agreed to this, but it was my idea.

I better get my butt in gear before I end up the mommy of one of these:

Or these:

Or these:

I'm pretty sure the idea of owning a ginormous dog gives me more anxiety than anything wedding related. If you know me, you know that dogs and I have a really rocky relationship....and the bigger they are the rockier it gets....

Maybe if he wins he will pick one of these gorgeous things:

If I win this is more of what I'm thinking:

Or this:

And just because he hates these as much as I hate big dogs, this: 

I guess we will just have to wait and see what the next 6 months will bring. I have wrapped my head around the inevitability of being a dog owner...of course we will need to find a place to live that will let us have a dog. Coors is going to have a sibling before too long, and each of our motivation and dedication will determine what kind of sibling he will get....whew....pray for us! :)

I Have Found the One Whom my Soul Loves!

Wednesday, May 14, 2014 will definitely go down in the books as one of the best days of my life.

Adam proposed!

It has been such a whirlwind since he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, I still look at my hand and am surprised to see such a gorgeous ring on my finger. I am so incredibly blessed to have this amazing man in my life, and I absolutely love being in love with him.

Our Story:
Adam and I met at Camp Horizon the summer of 2008. I was a counselor and he was there to volunteer. He was still in high school at the time, and I had already completed my first year of college. So yes, I'm older! He ended up spending the whole summer at camp and we became friends. I asked back the next few years to help with Performing Arts Camp. It kind of became OUR camp, until he changed jobs and couldn't come back anymore. Through working at camp together we became really good friends. Then when he didn't make it back the next two summers, we kind of lost touch. Then he moved back to the family farm in Belle Plaine and got a job at the Sedgwick County Detention Center.

We met up with a couple friends for his birthday in September. It was the first time we had seen each other in over two years. He walked in the door and I leaned over to Nicole and said, "Oh I had forgotten how cute he is." I had never thought of him as anything more than a friend, but during that meal it was all I could do to not stare at him. After dinner we started texting and catching up. A week later I decided I wanted to ask him to my brother's wedding. Nicole had a date, and I didn't really want to go alone, so I prayed about it before and just asked that if we weren't supposed to be more than friends then he would just be busy and not able to go. Well it turns out he was free, and he went to Daric's wedding as my date.

I happened to be so incredibly busy that I wasn't a very good date. I felt horrible for ditching him the whole time. Thankfully Nicole was there for him to hang out with so he wasn't by himself with a bunch of people he didn't know. I did manage to push him into the photo booth, and made him dance with me once. Looking back now, I'm thankful for these pictures.

After the wedding he came back to my parents house for dinner and we finally got a chance to hang out. We started talking and seriously catching up. We talked about everything we had missed over the past two years and different things from our lives. We talked for hours. At one point he asked me out, we actually debated whether it was before or after midnight. We settled on before midnight!

Then we just started trying to see each other as much as possible. He started coming up and going to youth group and my kids fell in love with him immediately. We have spent every possible moment with each other since we started dating. He actually moved to Hesston in March to make it even easier to spend time with each other, it also helped with the commute to and from work, and got him off his parents couch. He really likes having his own place.

It has been incredible having a partner in ministry. Someone that my boys can look up to and a good example of Christian guy for the girls. I have a reason to go home from work, I have someone to cook for, and someone to take care of me when I have bad days. He is the first person I think of when I wake, and the last person I think of before I fall asleep. He fills my dreams, and days that I don't get to spend with him are days I don't like.

Sometimes it is hard because he sleeps all day and works all night, and it is often hard for him to wake up and function in the evenings, and it is only fun to hang out with someone sleeping for so long. But we have managed to make it work and create a life together that works for us. We do have the same day off so we get to spend it together.

The Proposal:
Adam planned the proposal for the last youth group of the year. We went out to one of our youth group kids' house. The plan was to grill out and have a bonfire. Adam and the youth council boys went out early to "set up." When the rest of us got there we circled up to pray. After the prayer everyone started to disperse, he walked up to me and started talking to me, then he got down on one knee and proposed. It just so happened that there were three different cameras that caught our special moment, and it was incredibly special having all of my kids there. He stayed up all day to go get the ring in Pratt. He picked it out on his own and then even double checked it with my best friend to make sure I would like it. I do have to say he did a great job, I LOVE it!!!

Save the date! November 22, 2014 is our Wedding Day!!!! :)

Found

Title: Found

Author: Margaret Peterson Haddix

What's it About: Haddix has done it again with another intense series. I am a huge fan of her Among the Hidden series. It was one of my favorites growing up. Found is the first book in the Missing series. These are meant for I would say young middle school students. But I still enjoyed it. Jonah and Chip are 13 year old neighbors. They are both adopted and they start to get creepy letters from an unknown source that says they were found and that someone is coming for them again. This is a story about identity and time travel. 

My Rating out of 5 stars: 4 Stars. This was a super fast read. I could have finished it in a couple days if I had had the time. I have already started book 2 in the series because I really want to know where the story line goes. It is so much fun to fall in love with a series!

I do own the hardback version of this entire series if you would like to borrow. 

As always the picture is a link to Amazon where you can purchase this book.

Church Mother's Day Gifts

So this year I was put in charge of the church mother's day gift. Generally churches give a flower or something to every mother in attendance on Mother's Day. But I don't do flowers. I got on Amazon and was going to order some practical yet cute Mother's Day pens, because who can't use another writing utensil? The item was Prime eligible which means it qualifies for free two day shipping. After I purchased it, it said it wouldn't be shipped until like June or July. Well that isn't going to work. They weren't even going to be here by Father's Day.... Dilema. I cancelled the order, and then proceeded to forget about it until Friday before Mother's Day. Well now it was definitely too late to order anything. So I was cruising around on Pinterest as I often do to find creative ideas. And someone had pinned a bottle of fingernail polish.

From that picture my idea came to life. Mom's like nail polish! Or at least most of them do. And our church budget was right at $1 per item and we needed 60 of them. I knew most Wal-Marts have $0.99 polish and Newton also has a Dollar Tree so this could work. Then our office manager came in needing someone to do Young Disciple's Time. I told her I could do it. I decided that the kids could hand out the nail polish, that would be cute. Oh but I can't do a Young Disciple's Time without some kind of message....

This was the more challenging part. How in the world can fingernail polish become an object lesson. My mother sent me a couple ideas and this is where it went.

• What is Polish? (I got a lot of blank stares back, finally one of the older girls said Fingernail Polish?)
• What kinds of things do you polish? (Silver, Shoes, Fingernails, Handbells...I opened this one up to the congregation for help)
• I asked the congregation if anyone polishes their shoes. The kids thought it was funny when so many people raised their hands.
• Why do we polish things?
• Are there other ways you get polished up?
• Dress nice for church, brush your teeth, comb your hair.
• What is Today?
• Does your mother help polish you?
• Make you clean your room
• Brush your teeth
• make your bed
• Then I gave an example how on Mother's Day 25 years ago I was baptized. 
• We talked about how going to church and something like baptism can help polish you into who you are going to become.
• If you raise a child up the way they should go they will never depart from it.
• We talked a little about the scripture.
• Then we decided we would help our mom's out by polishing for them
• Doing their duties
• Taking out the trash 
• Cleaning our rooms
• And as a special treat each mom got a bottle of fingernail polish!

The bottles say: Mom, thank you for polishing me to be the best that I can be. I have a bright future because you never give up on me.

I spent right at $60 for the fingernail polish and the labels I printed the saying on.

I figure since I "borrow" ideas from so many other people, and I haven't seen this idea anywhere else I should share it in case someone needs this idea next year!

Happy Mother's Day from Hesston UMC.