Learning Peace.

I'm not one to ever share my thoughts, my questions or comments. I never freely offer my opinion and when it is asked for, I coat it so heavily in carefully chosen words to lessen it's importance. I grew up with a mindset that my words had no value or importance so to this day I still hold them back. Now don't get me wrong, I loveee to use words- in a very literal way because I’m a girl who reads the dictionary for fun, but also, when I'm comfortable with someone my words usually don't stop and I could talk for hours. I'm introverted but not necessarily shy. I'm a professional observer and analyzer, anything that requires inward thought, I've got that down. And while I don't lack opinion or thoughts, I just lack the ability to let them loose most of the time. 

No one may ever read these words when I send them out and they get lost in a sea of top notch writers but none the less, here I'm going to let some out; allowing the vulnerability that I fear so, to take a step out into the real world. I don't expect to make even a dent of impact with my prattling but my purpose in this space is to use it as a tool to learn that God gave me a voice that holds value and as a reminder of the things that He is continuously teaching me in the quiet isolation of my living room. And my prayer is that God would use these words He gives me to encourage you, my reader, whoever you may be. 

This entry will be geared as a general introduction of me and my life currently so let's dive in! I'm a Canadian married to an American hunk, living in Pennsylvania with our dog, Bean. My husband, Caleb is my hero, my rock and my best friend and I fall more madly in love with him by the hour! Roll your eyes if you want but when God writes your love story you can't shut up about it! When we got married almost 2 years ago, being a stay at home wife (sahw), sounded like the dream to me! I’d get to spend my days cleaning, decorating our little home, making bread and what not. I would have truly thrived in the 1950’s; I will gladly make my husband a sandwich any day.

When I was little, everyone else was dreaming of becoming doctors, veterinarians and chefs, but I was dreaming of being a wife and a mom. Thankfully my dreams were God-given and He sent me to bible school right after high school so I didn’t have to choose the dreaded career and then marriage came just over a year after that! For the whole first year + of our marriage, I wasn’t even allowed to work because of my immigration process so I fell into the ‘sahw’ position by default.

Being able to live like this, Caleb working a job that pays enough and gives us four day “weekends” has so many perks! We get to spend sooo much time together, and that part never gets old. Living every day with your best friend is the a complete blast! But right now the word I use to describe our life is “limbo”. While it’s the best thing in the world, we are still not where we want to be. Marriage wise, everything is fantastic but day to day life I long for something more; something bigger than just cooking supper and scrubbing the shower. I’m not talking about longing to have a career or anything like that. I long to be a helper to anyone I can, to be a part of something bigger than me. Though our schedule is flexible and spent majority-ly together, it is less than ideal. Caleb  works a weekend shift (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) for 12 hours each, we live 45 minutes away from all our friends and our church which we can only attend on Thursday nights anyway (thank you Sunday shift...) and I am still unable to drive (immigration again) to go anywhere if I wanted while Caleb is at work. All that added together can result in a lot of days feeling very lonely and pointless. It is almost a daily topic between us that we know we were created for so much more than shift work in a warehouse and spending endless hours alone.        

While at Summit our bible school God specifically spoke to both of us, that He had big plans for our lives and as a fresh Jesus freak graduate, I  assumed that meant we would jump head first into doing huge things for the kingdom but ‘waiting’ is a word that God loves to write into my story. We aren’t where we dream to be, but regardless, we are perfectly happy to be together in whatever our season looks like right now. So while I wait out my long weekend days alone on my couch with my snoring puppy, I invite you to join me in all my learning about how to be the wife I’m supposed to be and mostly all the heart work that God is doing in me.

Now I don’t want to bore you with a ridiculously long first post because that might not bode well for my future posts so for now I’ll briefly cover the basics of what I have been learning as of late and then I can expand individually on them in later entries.

Since the beginning of this year God has really been addressing the issue of peace, or lack thereof, in me. I am a perfectionist to the max, I (reluctantly) count worrying as a hobby, stress comes very naturally and too often I'm dictated by my emotions. Clearly peace is something I really need.

One of the aspect of the bible college I attended was that every school year, God gave the president of the school a theme to look to for those following months. For example, my first year was “Year of Light”, second year was “Year of Victory”. It was a theme given as a starting ground for how to pray and what to seek for. Just before I graduated I felt like God gave me my own theme for the coming year: “Year of Courage” and boy oh boy, was it. It was a year that was full of so many moments of needing to trust Him when I felt like I had nowhere to step next without falling completely. Next came my first year of marriage and God gave me yet another, “Year of Truth”. It was last year that He asked me to lay down all that I had set in my own mind as truth and to replace it with what He said was true- two very different things. I had to learn to believe truth in the face of the lies I’d been telling myself for literally years. Now jump ahead to the turn of this year, 2018. I was praying about the coming months and as clear as day again, God set a new word in my heart: Peace.

Peace is the absence of fear, it is calm, free from disturbance, content and safe. It made so much sense to me because I had just spent 12 months working on learning truth and actively doing the action of trusting that truth even when I didn’t want it but now God was addressing my feelings part of it all. Peace is the result of perfect trust in a perfect God.

In these first weeks of 2018, I’ve had to hold to that when I haven’t wanted to and I've pushed peace away out of habit more times than I want to admit but that’s all part of the learning. More than ever I want all that God is and none of myself and I hope that you, if you have made it this far reading my less than polished rambling, that you want that too. So I will try my best to share my ups and my downs (as scary as that is for me to offer) and we will keep learning to cling to His peace that passes all understanding.