So today, I’m starting something new. In my Freestyle Friday posts, I’m going to, in bullet-form, freely share things on my mind & going on in my real life. It may be short, it may be long, and some Fridays, it may be entirely non-existent.
Some readers observed (via the comments of the recent survey– CLICK HERE to take the survey, if you haven’t already) that I don’t share as many personal things here as I did on my old blog, and I think that’s a fair and accurate observation. There are many reasons why I think that is. But for now I’ll just say that I, too, have missed the freedom of sharing life freely with readers.
So… that brings us to our first Freestyle Friday.
Let’s jump in. This one’s going to be full of my favorite things that happened in 2014.
- We moved to Washington state. AND WE LOVE IT. We love our church. My husband is flourishing as an Associate Pastor, growing as a counselor, and exercising his gifts in one-on-one discipleship relationships with young men in the church. We host a weekly home fellowship, too, which has been a joy. We love it!
After 20 years of having one “home church” in Texas, I have been pleasantly surprised at the way God has quickly knit our hearts together with the church Body here. I guess I thought the sort of depth of loving relationships we enjoyed in Texas could only happen over such a long period of knowing… but it’s happening here. Beach camp, weekly dinners with one family in the church, a church camping week, living with two different families for 5-6 weeks each (while we waited for our house to close), a weekly home fellowship, and more, have connected us quickly and deeply with these people. We LOVE our church! Wait. I said that on my first bullet point. Well, here it is on the second one, too. WE LOVE OUR CHURCH FAMILY.
God has given us a neat couple to serve alongside here. Our Senior Pastor is an excellent Bible teacher & preacher, and his wife is a fun & godly lady who I actually first connected with, years ago, BECAUSE of blogging. 🙂 Crazy, huh? They are roughly our same age and have 5 kids 7 and under… which makes it fun for our kids and theirs, to have built-in playmates at church events and times when we get together as “the entire pastoral staff and their families.” (There are just the two pastors, so we all jokingly refer to “the entire pastoral staff.”) They truly are a blessing to us, and we are learning from them and thankful for the way they have welcomed us in and befriended us.
Doug & I get to counsel couples together!!! This has been such a special thing for us to get to do together– marriage counseling… and then pre-marital counseling too (just started with our 3rd couple!). We LOVE it. Getting to purposefully pour into marriages has long been a desire of ours, and to have such an outlet to do so (even before vows are spoken) has been a true delight for us.
Doug & I traveled to LA for a biblical counseling conference. Growing in this area has been a rich blessing for us– good for us as disciples, and for life as part of the Body. We are thankful for the ways God is already using, and look forward to seeing more ways that God will use, these deposits of truth and wisdom (from the conference) in our lives. It also happened to be the week of our anniversary, so we snuck in a couple special dates, and enjoyed time away just the two of us for the first time in several years.
We took our oldest son (12) away for a weekend of hiking and discussion about his growth toward manhood. We went through FamilyLife’s Passport2Purity curriculum and were blown away by how wonderful, deep, biblical, and exactly-on-point it was for this season in our relationship with him. I want to share more about this in my “The On-Going Talk” series about how to talk with your kids about sex, when I revisit it, but let me just say- it was a wonderful time with our son, full of rich and biblical discussion about growing as a young man.
I think that’s it. 🙂
- Let me hear from you if any of this sparked interest/questions on your part.
- Also– Let me know what you think of Freestyle Friday.