2015… really?!

Insane that we are in the year 2015, right?! Happy New Year to you and yours!

I’m working out some kinks still with the blog and hoping to upgrade soon. For now, this is what we get.

I don’t really do the whole resolution thing, but I do plan and set goals and challenges for the new year. One of the challenges I set for myself was to contribute to the blog… daily.

I’ll talk later about why I’ve been so wishy-washy about writing here, and it really all boils down to the other F-word: Fear.

But for today, I want to leave you with a picture that helped set this personal challenge. Though God obviously did not literally place this piece of paper into my hands, one of His servants did, and I know that he was 100% led by God.

Our dear friends, Sean & Joni came to visit last Memorial Day. A visit with them is always long overdue and highly anticipated. I become deliriously giddy in the hours that lead up to them pulling into our driveway. The weekend is never long enough, as we try to jam six months worth of activities into 24-48 hours. There is hysterical laughter, catching up, venting, food, shopping (for the boys), naps (yep, I said naps… you haven’t seen a nap until you’ve seen four adults laid out in one living area snoozing it up together like a litter of puppies, while our six combined children run the joint). And then there are precious Jesus moments, where we share what God has done, is doing, and what He’s spoken to us since our last pow-wow. Both couples being in youth ministry zaps our time, and these hours together are literal vomits of the last several months. (Our weekly texts are typically short and sweet “I-miss-you-terribly-lets-run-away-together” jargon. And for the record, naps only happen in a minimum 48-hr visit, nothing shorter… but they. are. lovely.).

Night one included a late night backyard tear-filled Jesus Fest. The boys were in one corner of the porch, and Joni and I in another. We agreed to talk collectively about all of it before the weekend was over. Sean mentioned at one time the following day that he felt like it was my time to be writing. He’d interrogated me a bit as to why I wasn’t currently working on anything, and we moved past that.

On Sunday morning, Sean & Joni attended church with us, and sat in on my sunday school class. I don’t even remember what the lesson I’d given was, but Sean said that during that class, he’d felt God ask him to write down a specific word. He wrote it on a piece of paper, and stuck it back in his Bible. After service we went out for lunch before our sad see-ya-later’s.

The Jesus Fest continued, and God was in my face the entire lunch. Words that were thrown around, scripture that was brought up for entirely different reasons, all were pointing arrows right at me. I think I cried more than I ate. As I sat bawling into my napkin at one point, Sean asked me this, “If you felt like there was one place God really wanted you to start… one place that would be the best jumping point for you… one area that you really needed to improve in order to set things in order… where would it be?” I sat for a moment, begging God to give me an answer, and He quickly placed onto my tongue this word, that I then blurted out, “Blog.”

Sean stared at me, looked at Joni, smiled, started laughing, and then said we all needed to go outside to their vehicle… immediately. Being the good parents that we are, we left our kids at the restaurant table and followed Sean outside. He told me of how he’d felt God had asked him to write a word down during sunday school, and he had absolutely no idea what it meant. He’d thought it was something for him, but said that it turned out, it was for me. He pulled this piece of paper out of his Bible.

Blog.

God, you crazy cool. And I like it. 

So, there ya have it. The story that you probably could care less about, but that means a whole lot to me. I obviously stewed on that word for a bit. Person after person confirmed that word from God for me, unbeknownst to them, in the last few months. And here we are. 2015. Promise to work hard on my challenge, God.

I’ll leave you with this quote:

“Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.” -Brian Tracy