Onto the next year... 2010!!!

Well the holidays are over! That's always a good feeling and a bad feeling for me. Especially this last Christmas. It was really relaxing and we were able to celebrate with family and friends over a spread of four days. It was so much fun! I really had a goal of focusing on the reason for the season (JESUS!) and wanted to take in all the time with family and savor the season. I feel like that was accomplished fully.

Now, back to the daily grind of winter in Iowa. We are in a winter storm warning this evening. I was thinking this would be the first week in 3 or 4 weeks that I will have all of my clients at their normal times... Tomorrow may be snowed in. It's a welcome break already :).

Here's some pics from the holidays... None from New Year's Eve... we actually didn't take any pics and we left our camera in Iowa City by accident so wouldn't have them uploaded yet anyway :)

Updating is always better with pictures...

So, the last two weeks have been quite the experience. On Tuesday 11/24 I got into a car accident that was not my fault that totaled my car (it was a 97 pontiac grand am) I wasn't sad to see it go except for the fact that I lost my ride and I had a client with me which complicated matters....


Then Thanksgiving came and went... I had an aunt get married on Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was really small and quaint but enjoyable. Congrats to Aunt Pam and Scott!


We went back to work as normal and i got a rental car (2010 Hyundai Elantra... pretty nice) and we got our insurance settlement and really began looking for the next car in our family....



We are so far so happy with our 2004 Chevy Malibu! It's a really fun car for us to drive!

Here's our Christmas tree all decked out:



Friday I went to see Toby Mac and Kutless in concert. I realized why I don't prefer loud concerts (my ears rang the rest of the evening) but had a ton of fun! I really enjoyed how both bands brought a worship element into the concert.



And finally, we've been living in our duplex for just over 2 months now and I would like to share pictures of the outside:



Here's to hoping I will be a little more consistent with this blogging thing and will ahve an update and more pictures of our new car soon! :)

Way too long!

So looking at this blog I can see all the posts of this year on the first page... Not a good thing. Guess I'm just not that good at sharing my life and writing things down constantly. Stuff is always happening!

Hmmm.... So, starting where we are at right now.

Matt and I have our first real Christmas tree up and decorated. We took 3 hours to make popcorn and cranberry garland to decorate it (don't know that we'll do that again until we have more hands to help with it... which will be a while)

Matt is currently deer hunting which his dad and brothers traditionally do every year the first weekend in December. I took some time to attempt to Christmas shop today but didn't get very far on my list. I did get to go out to eat with Amy and Suzy which has become our tradition the first weekend of December because we are without husbands. I think it was especially fun for Amy because Andrew can't eat wherever he wants and so we went where there is gluten in everything: the Olive Garden (yum!)

I had a lot of fun with my nephew Jacob he was very sweet on me tonight giving me lots of attention... we visited a lot of places and every time he wanted to walk with me or have me hold him and while at his house he brought me a lot of his toys to show them to me and gave me a chat about them. He is very very cute these days!

Thanksgiving was really nice this year. We decided to only go to one family's festivities because it just wears us out otherwise so we went to Matt's aunt's home in Jesup. We then got ourselves a game plan and went shopping on BLACK FRIDAY! We have grown accustomed to getting ourselves out of bed ridiculously early and getting some good bargains. This year we got a new tv, some shirts from Old Navy and some Christmas decorations. We didn't go for much but we had a lot of fun doing it together and had some great conversations while waiting in line at Target from 4:15-5:00 am when the doors opened...

I was also forced to get a 'new' car... that just happened yesterday. Perhaps I will post pictures tomorrow... because my battery on the laptop is dying....

Mother daughter time.

My mom and I are in the midst of a trip to South Carolina to visit family. Her father, my grandfather. We arrived yesterday in the late evening. We flew in and were scheduled to be in right around 10:00 pm but with a series of events including weather and airplane issues we finally landed at 11:30 pm. That's not too bad, I've suffered through worse delays...

My grandpa will be turning 76 on Tuesday so it's really neat that we get to be here to help him celebrate. Although I'm not so sure he is really looking forward to celebrating :).

It has been a pretty lazy day for our first full day here. We got up had the $.50 garden tour and really just sat around and visited. We visitined some family members that I haven't seen since I was very little and got to use a hot tub... it felt surprisingly good in the middle of summer!

We will be here until Thursday morning so for now we are just here to be present with them. I have not seen my Grandpa and Grandma here in over 4 years. So far so good. I will have to take hold of my short attention span, reel it in a little and get over being away from my love for almost a week!

This week I am focusing on being present in relationships and conversations with others. I want to see my mom and I enjoy each others presence and come out of this trip closer than we were when we took off of the run way in Cedar Rapids, IA.

Pretty boring post, no pictures. Perhaps a later post this week will lend you some pics of the scenery.

No more clear now than then...

So, I have finished more than 90 days of my commitment to prayer and reading the bible daily. I was not entirely successful in praying and reading every day but I have noticed much more of a commitment to put forth an effort. I have a "day by day" bible and it really guides me through. I find enough time most days to get through the reading for the day and find that my thoughts are more directed towards prayer throughout the day. Overall I am in a much better place for taking this challenge even though I didn't fully complete the challenge. God is good.

Matt and I are in transition (which seems like a constant state of our lives and is becoming quite exhausting). Matt was planning on starting a missionary aviation school in Colorado in September but in mid July it was cancelled because of health reasons of people that would be teaching Matt to learn to fly. We had moved out of the home we were renting in June and moved into his parent's basement because we were planning on leaving. Now, Matt is going to continue with leaving his job, either when he gets replaced or we find our next step... And we have no idea what that is. We have leadings but we are really wanting to know it's going to follow through before we step out again...

As of right now we are planning to stay in the Cedar Falls/Waterloo area and we hope to be finding a place to live by September... we have really appreciated Matt's parents for letting us crash with them for a while but we so desperately appreciate our independence and are excited to be there once again.

There are lots of other things going on but that's the main highlights... Summer has been good to us. We took a trip to the Czech Republic but that's another story that maybe i'll get to take a part of this week... :)

Praying for the rest of my days....

Starting with 90 days.

Today I made a commitment to myself and my Jesus to pray for an hour a day for the rest of my life. That sounds huge. But I believe with all my being it is doable. In the past few months my daily prayer life has been fairly close to non-existent. So, it is safe to say this is going to be quite the culture shock for me.

I really feel this is a challenge I need to take. I have the choice of doing it or not but I feel that the choice to sit back and continue to do basically nothing in my spiritual walk with Christ is close to spiritual suicide. I would be letting myself miss out on so many things God has for me and I would be missing the point of my existence.

It's interesting in the last few days and weeks I have really been struggling with how to meet with God and how to hear him and at times was even wondering if all these things I claimed were really things I was willing to give everything up for (as in going into missions full time... I want to do it but I have been struggling if I am really willing to give up everything now, not really knowing what is going to happen).

Through a series of unpredictable circumstances, I was able to go to a Women's conference at my church last night and today... Honestly, i saw the advertisement for the conference and I gave no second thought to it. I had a big misperception and a bad attitude about paying money to go to an event that is meant to feed Christians that are already saturated with information on how to meet God on a weekly basis. i wasn't interested in spending some of my free time with a bunch of older ladies from my church. Nothing against them, I just felt like it wasn't something I would be the least bit interested in.

I had the opportunity to attend last night which with my job normally on Fridays that would be impossible because I have a client until 7:00 that lives 30 mins away and the program started at 6:30. Yesterday it so happened that he didn't have school and so I jumped at the opportunity to take him earlier in the day. Then my husband had a need for someone to run slides for the music. I was like "well, i'm not going to be doing anything else important, so why not?" So I went to the program last night.

After the program I honestly wanted to come today but still wasn't willing to pay the money or ask anyone about it. Then it turned out the person that was going to run slides for today's session wasn't going to be able to make it... and they asked me to help... How funny. I jumped at that opportunity and brought my laptop to take notes...

Amazing. And I can honestly say the speaker, Becky Tirabassi, is not who changed my heart. But God totally met me at the conference today. I was really placed there because he had a purpose for me. My heart was in an open place and I was (and still am) willing to try most anything because I am desperate for some intervention from the one I have placed my trust in, Jesus.

So, long story short, Becky Tirabassi has this company called Change Your Life Inc. and doesn't give you answers on what God wants from you or what you should do with your life but teaches you how to pray and gives you a plan of organization. And she encourages you not to do it alone, which I am officially held accountable to pray every day by one of my wonderful sister-in-laws! :)

The recommendation is that praying every day will not really become an inherent part of you until you've been doing it for about 90 days. So we are committed to e-mailing daily for 90 days and I am hoping, but not certain it will happen, to invite the blog world in on my beginning journey. Although I doubt it will be terribly interesting because i don't know how much i'll want to share. I'm thinking it's more an accountability thing for myself to blog and have it known out there, even if no one really reads this that I have made a commitment to myself and God...

I want to pray an hour a day for the rest of my life!

It's a picture day!

This is of Matt at Christmas time. We had a lot of fun at his parents house. Being able to see all of the family is always a blast!

This is some of us just after we sang happy birthday to Jesus. A tradition that will live on now that there is grandchildren in the family... only it won't be fully real until Jacob can talk and sing! Also, this picture tells me that Jacob is not going to have any problem eating his birthday cake come February... :)

The grandparents were sure to start outfitting the grandchild with John Deere stuff... He will grow into it. Still a little big for him.

This is our house after the 7.5 inches of snow that came last night and after Matt spent an hour shoveling! I offered to help but i was a little sick yesterday so he told me not to help... I think he'll want me to eventually!

This is our house after a lot of snow but before the latest drop in snow... It was actually this past Monday because we got 3 or so inches then! It's been a snow-filled winter!

Finally I got some pics up!! :)