Where Does The Time Go??

Well, it's halfway through June. It's getting close to my wedding anniversary. David and I will be married for 6 years come the 29th. I can't believe it has been that long! It seems like just yesterday we were meeting for the first time and falling in love. A lot of things have changed in 6 years. We've lost one child by miscarriage, had two beautiful children, sat nervously as our child went through 2 surgeries. David lost his mother and one of his uncles, who was like a second father to him. We've moved about a hundred times, it feels like, lived in two different states, made new friends and lost touch with old ones. We've been through a lot, but through all the laughter and tears, joys and sorrows, celebrations and heartbreaks, we've been there for one another.

Though a lot has changed, one thing has remained the same. We are very much in love with one another. In fact, a lot of the things we have been through may have broken other marriages, but it has only served to make our relationship stronger and our love deeper. I'd like to take credit for that, but I can't. Neither one of us can. All the honor belongs to God. We have worked to keep God in the center of our marriage and our family, and though at times we have forgotten and tried to take control ourselves, we have always come back to Him. He is what has kept our marriage strong and caused it to grow and caused us to grow as people and as Christians.

Another thing that is happening in a couple of weeks is David's birthday. His birthday is the day before our anniversary. Lucky him. He doesn't have the problem that a lot of men do. It's easy for him to remember our anniversary. Anyway, he is going to be 29 this year. For some reason, that is freaking both of us out. I think for him the problem is that his father had a heart attack and stroke at the age of 44. The closer he gets to that age, the more it bothers him. For me, it just makes me wonder how and when I got old enough to be married to a man that is almost 30 and have 2 children. I can't believe how time flies, and where in the world does it go??? Don't get me wrong, 30 is not old by any means! Believe me, I'm only 4 1/2 years shy of it myself. I guess it just scares me that I used to see it as old, and now, I see it as young. And most of the people in my circle of friends are 30 or older or are close to it. I just don't know how I got here. However I got here though, I am happy to be here. I love my husband and my children very much, and I wouldn't trade 30 (or almost 30) for 16 any day!

Long Time, No Write

I haven't had the chance to write for a long time. After Kayleah's first surgery, it ended up she had to have a second one, and she was in the hospital for almost 2 weeks. Since she got out of the hospital, we've been driving back and forth to St. Louis for appointments. Thank God, she is doing well now, and the appointments are only once a month, so things are finally starting to slow down.

In other news, I have a new niece! Her name is Elizabeth Rose. She was born April 9, 2007. She weighed 7 lbs. 4 oz. and was 19 3/4 in. long. I haven't had the privilege of meeting her yet, but I can't wait to see her and hold her! My poor nephew though is surrounded by girls on this side of the family. He has two sisters, and then his two cousins, which are girls. David and I are probably going to have at least one more. Hopefully, we'll even things up a little bit with a boy. That would thrill David to death. He loves his little girls to death, but, like most guys, he wants that little boy to carry on his name. We'll see. I told him he better be careful though. My aunt and uncle had two girls, and my uncle wanted a boy. They tried one more time and got twin girls. :o)

So, anyway, I just thought I would write a new blog to let people know I am still alive. :o) So, there you have it. I'm here. I'll try to keep the blog up a little better now that things are slowing down for us.

God is Awesome!

Well, as we already know, God is awesome. It's just wonderful to see Him prove it over and over. We went to the hospital expecting a 5-7 night stay. We got home Wednesday night at 11:30. She only had to stay one night. (Imagine how overpacked we were!) lol

It turns out, the cyst was not where the surgeon thought it was. He thought it was a bulge on the main bile duct, which would have meant removing it and pulling a loop of the small intestine up and connecting it. It turns out, when he got her in surgery, the cyst was just a branch off of the smaller bile duct leading from the main one to the gallbladder. All he had to do was remove this smaller duct. A surgery we were expecting to last 4 hours lasted an hour and a half. This was the best case scenario discussed at the pre-op visit in his office, but he really thought it was the worst case scenario. It's good it wasn't because that surgery can lead to complications later down the road. The worst thing about this one is that she is without a gallbladder now, which, with our family history is not such a bad thing for her. She probably would have had to have it removed sooner or later.

She made it through the surgery just fine, and by Wednesday afternoon was back to her old self and using only Motrin and Tylenol for the pain. When she started eating and did fine, he told us to go home. We gladly obliged. :o)

It was also a blessing to have a Christian surgeon. David, my husband, asked the surgeon if we could pray with him before the surgery. The surgeon said absolutely, and that that was going to be his next question to us. He always offers to pray for his patients before surgery. Although, he did say David was the first to ask him. I guess he'd never operated on a Baptist preacher's kid before. :o) Anyway, we bowed our heads, and David was all ready to pray, and the surgeon jumped right in before David had a chance and just started praying. Now, of course, we can't judge his heart, but judging from his prayer, his demeanor, and the fact that he was willing to offer made us pretty sure we were dealing with a Christian man. That made us feel better about handing our daughter over to him of course. A physician who looks to the Great Physician for guidance is my kind of doctor. :o)

Anyway, God definitely answered prayers. Kayleah is just fine, better than expected and is back to her old self. She is even flipping over onto her belly, which makes me wince and cringe but doesn't seem to bother her. lol Thank you for all your prayers!

Pray for Kayleah

My youngest daughter, who is almost 7 months old, is going to be having surgery this Tuesday. She has a cyst on her bile duct. They are going to have to remove most of the bile duct and then attach her small intestine to what is left.

Please pray for her for strength and a quick recovery. Also, pray for her surgeon, for wisdom and that God would guide his hands as he is performing this surgery. David and I have a peace about the surgery, a peace that can only come from God because, believe me, having your baby go under the knife is a scary thing, but we know that the Great Physician is in control.

Thanks for all your prayers!

Curl up with a Good Book

I have always loved to read, always loved to curl up with a good book. My love for reading came from my mother. She has always loved to read too, and she read to us and took us to the library from the time we were babies on up. I always LOVED going to the library, although, when I was little, our library was this really old big building. It was beautiful, but at the time, it creeped me out. I wouldn't even go to the bathroom by myself.

Anyway, I've always loved to read, and I credit my mother with the fact that I was one of the very few kids who could read and write before I got to kindergarten. I attribute it to the many trips to the library and her reading to me and getting me interested in books. I am very much like my mother in that I can get lost in a book for hours and cut off everything around me. It's almost like I have been absorbed right into the book and am standing in the middle of the story watching the characters play everything out. My mother is the same way. I can remember her reading and us trying to get her attention. Many times, it would take 6 or 7 times of calling her name loudly to get her attention. I am the exact same way. I began reading a book right after David left for work last night, and did not put it down until he came home. (Don't worry. He works nights, so my children were sleeping.)

I had gotten away from reading for a while, but lately, I have been taking my own kids to the library, and I have been reading to my girls since they were babies as well. I have been reading books by an author named Gilbert Morris. He is a wonderful writer. I love his books! He was a Baptist pastor for 10 years, and then he became an English professor at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas, which by the way I believe is the school Mike Huckabee went to, but I digress. His books are wonderful. He uses history and makes it come alive by wrapping a fictional story around it. I am a big history buff, and I love a good story, so his books are perfect for me. Many of them do have a romantic story embedded in them, but it is of course clean romance because he is a Christian writer.

Lately, I have been reading his "The House of Winslow" series. It tracks a family all the way from the first ancestor that came to America to the 20 century. I have read the first two books and am on book 3. The history in these books incorporates American history and the history of the church. In fact, John Bunyan, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards have appeared in these books, and I have learned a lot about church history just from reading them. Of course, the stories are fictional, but he uses historical fact to tell them. Also, in a way, these books have helped me grow in my spiritual walk. Don't get me wrong. The Bible is absolutely the most important book to read, and without the Word of God, you can have no spiritual growth. However, his writing is very inspiring for people of faith.

Anyway, I just thought I would recommend these books to anyone looking for something good to read, especially anyone who likes history, also, anyone who likes romance but does not want to read the smut put out by most romance authors.

P.S. You can tell this guy used to be a pastor too! In the book I am reading now, there is a party at Jonathan Edwards' house, and one of the guests says that if people would quit fighting the pastor and start fighting the devil, the churches would be better off. I just laughed and said a quiet amen when I read that. You can definitely tell he pastored a Baptist church! LOL

Sweet Home Tennessee

Okay, so I changed the title of the song a little, sue me. :o) And technically, Tennessee is not my "home." I was born and raised in Illinois. Ever since I was a little girl, though, I have always wanted to live in Tennessee. I don't know if you remember those tourism commercials for Tennessee that had that little jingle, "Come to Tennessee. We're playing your song." Anyway, those commercials were running when I was a little girl. Ever since I saw those commercials, I was fascinated with Tennessee. Then, when I was probably about 12 or so, we went to Hendersonville, Tennessee for my cousin's wedding. It's where his wife was from. Anyway, driving through the hills and seeing the beautiful old plantation home they got married at (it was a bed and breakfast then) made me fall head over heels in love with Tennessee.

Fast forward a few years, and I met a guy on the internet. He just happened to be from Tennessee. We fell in love and got married. (No, not just because he was from Tennessee. That was just a bonus.) He moved to Illinois, and we lived here until 2005 when he graduated college. Then, his friend from Tennessee called and said that he had found a job for him, and once he found a place, we all moved to the town where my husband was raised. I had been there a few times in the course of our relationship, and I always loved it. I liked Nashville too, which was where his mom lived, and even though that's where David's job was, I refused to live in the city. I am a small town girl. So, we lived in Dickson which is about 45 minutes west of Nashville. We started going to a church, which we liked, but through a series of events, we discovered that there were things going on there that we didn't agree with. I won't bore you with the long story, but we ended up leaving the church. We searched around for a while and were getting kind of frustrated because we couldn't find another church we liked. Finally, we decided to try one last church in the area, not expecting much. From the moment we walked in, it felt like home. The people were amazing, the worship was wonderful, and the church was alive and growing. It was the perfect church for us, so we joined. We LOVED our time there, but eventually, after David lost his job, we felt God calling us back to Illinois. I was kind of excited about moving back because I missed my family. On the other hand, I was really sad because I loved Dickson and the church.

So, we moved back up here, and God really blessed us. David has been preaching more than ever and is actually now the interim pastor for a church. I have missed Tennessee ever since we left, and even more so since David has been preaching/pastoring. Not because I don't enjoy joining my husband in his ministry. I do. It's just that the churches around here are nothing like the churches down South. I never realized how dead the churches up here were until I moved South and came back. I hate to tell you people, I love you, but most of your churches are either dead or dying a slow agonizing death. The church my husband is the interim pastor for has about 10-15 faithful members. And those members are happy just to warm a pew once a week. That's right, once a week. They only have services on Sunday morning. The worship is dead. It sounds like they are singing at a funeral or something, and when David preaches, it's almost like he is preaching in a morgue. I guess in a way, all that is kind of true, sadly. The church in dying and not far from closing their doors. It is horrible to think of any church closing their doors. It's only one of two churches in this small town. The fields are white for the harvest! The only problem is, the workers aren't in the field and refuse to do so. They've never done it before. That's the Baptist mantra. "We've never done it that way before." To change a bunch of Baptists is like trying to push an elephant up the stairs! My granfather was a Southern Baptist minister, and he always said that the Baptist theme song should be, "I Shall Not Be Moved." How true that is!

Anyway, David has been doing the evangelism alone, knocking on doors because no one else will. In fact, while he was knocking on doors, he came to the house of another pastor that has been pastoring for years and believes very strongly in door-to-door evangelism. He was shocked that David was even out witnessing. He was pleasantly surprised because not very many churches around here do it. They think it doesn't work. It does, and I've seen it work! As David likes to say, and has said in a sermon that ruffled a few feathers, "It doesn't work because you're not doing it!!"

People are out there searching and begging for something, and we need to be taking Christ to them! In the little community around the church David pastors there were 3 suicides in the span of 2 weeks! Three in two weeks!!! Doesn't that tell them something?!?!?! These people NEED to hear the Gospel! They are begging for answers! Had the Gospel been taken to these people, perhaps their lives would have been spared. Perhaps they would have felt like their lives were more important, like they had something to live for! God could do so much with this church, and we believe He wants to. We just have to convince the members to let Him.

Whew! Sorry! I will step down off my soap box now. I think David is rubbing off on me. :o) Anyway, the point of this blog was, although reading back through it I think it turned into something else, I MISS TENNESSEE! I know God has us here for a reason, maybe to use David to build this little church up and reach out to the community around it. I don't know. I just know we are supposed to be here. I would never want to go against God's will, and I love watching God work through my husband and use him in His ministry. And I know that He is using me too. When your husband is called to be a pastor, you are called to be a pastor's wife. It's definitely a calling. I hope I can live up to what God wants me to be. I am trying. Anyway, I know God wants us to be here, but I can't help but feel that my heart is in Tennessee.

Lost and Found

If you've been married for a while, you know that occasionally, a little something gets lost. That happened to my husband and me. Don't get me wrong, love wasn't lost between us. We've always been madly in love, but between kids, work, bills, and the ministry, a little bit of the romance was lost. When we were dating, my husband was so romantic. He always surprised me, always found something romantic to do, especially on special occasions. Lately, though, the romantic side of him has been lost. Last night, we found it again!

As most of you know, yesterday was Valentine's Day. All day, my husband apologized because he didn't get me anything. It was no big deal. He woke me up when he got home from work and told me Happy Valentine's Day. Just the fact that he remembered was enough for me. I'm not picky. And, he was upset all day because he had to work last night. He works the night shift. So, he left for work at 10:00, and I settled in to watch TV as I normally do. I stay up late because I cannot sleep when he is not here. At 3:00 in the morning, there was a knock on the door. That's not unusual because that's about the time he takes his break at work and comes home. I answered the door, and there stood my husband with a rose, a card, and some candy. Then, he said, "You've got me for the rest of the night." It turns out, he wasn't scheduled to work last night. He has been setting me up all day. What a surprise! And if you know me at all, you know it's hard to surprise me.

That's the romantic guy I married! We found him again! I have the best husband in the world. I've always known it, and I've always been madly in love with him. Last night was one of those times though that made me fall in love with him all over again. I'm the luckiest woman in the world!