Feeling Like I Failed, but I think . . .

That my timing is just off.  Now is not the time to make some major changes or commit to challenges.  So the two challenges I started and only did a post or two are the Maximizing Your Mornings and the Completing Him Challenge.  I think these are great challenges and really wanted to participate, but at this time in my life I just need to do the next thing.   I may very well need to work on these areas, but right now is not the time.  I think most would agree.I need to get my sleep when I can and not schedule it.  I feel like just getting the basics done is more than enough.  Once we are settled into life with our new baby and settled into a good school / MOTH routine that works for us, then I think I can tackle something else.    So for now, I’m bowing out of the Maximize Your Mornings Challenge.

Completing Him Challenge – Pray for him.

The challenge this week (taken from the Women Living Well site):

Prayer changes things - do you believe that? Then let's get started! Here's a list of items you can begin to pray through for your husband (taken from Stormie's book):

1. His Wife -that's a good place to start right? lol!

2. His Work

3. His Finances

4. His Sexuality

5. His Affections

6. His Temptations

7. His Mind

8. His Fears

9. His Purpose

10. His Choices

11. His Health

12. His Protection

13. His Trials

14. His Integrity

15. His Reputation

16. His Priorities

17. His Relationships

18. His Fatherhood

19. His Past

20. His Attitude

21. His Marriage

22. His Emotions

23. His Walk

24. His Talk

25. His Repentance

26. His Deliverance

27. His Obedience

28. His Self-Image

29. His Faith

30. His Future

Challenge: Print this list out and pray through this list daily. Also, do not forget to ask your husband each morning for any specific prayer requests he has for the day. I do this regularly and my husband always answers with a detailed situation he is concerned about. It's a blessing to pray for him and watch God work and answer. Our intimacy has grown through this and he always knows he has a prayer warrior in me. If you don't pray daily for him - who will?

I plan to accept this challenge!  I’m not sure what J’s response is going to be to the question, but I’ll give it a shot and I’ll pray through this list.  Off to print it now.

Striving to learn and live God's purposes,

Complete Him Challenge – Until Death Do Us Part

 

I take you, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; this is my solemn vow.

This weeks challenge is simply to Remember.

Remember the day you entered your sacred vows. If you are a blogger, please join us by posting pictures from that day and sharing your story. Then  link up at Women Living Well.

 

Here’s a little about our wedding day:

As I said in my first challenge post, we were married over my Christmas break from college.

I travelled home with my maid of honour on December 19th, just ten days before wedding day.  That trip was the most eventful I’d had travelling back and forth from home to school.  We hit some ice and buried the car.  Thankfully I was able to drive out of the ditch with some help from passersby.  We stopped to visit my MOH’s grandmother in  a hospital that was on the way and picked up the wedding cake at my aunt Gwen’s.  We stayed to visit there for a bit as well to let the car dry out some in the garage.

The heater in that car never worked properly, ever.  And wouldn’t you know it but we ran into a storm after leaving my aunt’s home.  The whole trip from school to home should have taken 6 hours at the most.  I think we took 12.  Once we got there though, I got my engagement ring!  I find it hilarious that the wedding was planned and in place before I even received my ring.  But I’m different like that.  A ring is a symbol and I didn’t need the ring to know he and I were serious about this.  I used to think I was a romantic but I’m not.

The week of Christmas was FULL of shopping and planning and decorating and organizing.  I  remember the day J went to get his brother from the airport.  I wanted to go with him so badly, but Mom wanted to hem my dress right then.  So J went without me; I put the dress on and we decided that the dress didn’t need to be hemmed after all, so I begged to borrow the vehicle and catch him.  I never did.  I finally came to my senses and turned around and returned home.  (Now when I think back, that dress should have been hemmed; I remember tripping on it or kicking it out of my way to walk across the floor.)

Wedding day arrived.  My parents did an amazing job of organizing and planning and “hiring” family and friends to fill in each spot that needed a special person to do the job.  I couldn’t have been more pleased.  A couple other things I remember, an aunt telling me to smile as I was walking down the aisle, my cousin Dale playing and singing “Other Side of Me”.  I remember J waiting for me at the front of the church.  My best friend, who was unable to attend, sent a message and a song that my uncle sang at the reception.  J having to break the icing on the cake with the butt of the knife so we could cut and share our cake!

We spent a couple of nights in hotels (gifts from guests) before leaving for the Bible Camp where J had worked that summer.  We stayed in one of the staff cabins and spent three days, just the two of us.  The rest of our honeymoon was spent settling in to our new home before school started the first week of January.

There have been many times in our marriage where we have come back to our wedding vows and evaluated whether we living those promises in our day to day life.  I think this is important to do, even on a casual basis, to bring us back to reality.  Life gets hard and tempers rise.  Work and kids “get in the way”.  We need to remember the covenant we entered that day in December 2000.

 

I take you, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; this is my solemn vow.

 

Striving to learn and live God's purposes,

Completing Him Challenge (June 14 – a little late)

I am starting late with this challenge.  Posts will be put up on Mondays.  They started June 7.

 

At this link, you an find the topics for each week.  And if you watch this short video, you can find out what the challenge is all about:

 

Now, on to the meat of this post!

Instructions from Women Living Well:

June 14 – Post Pictures from your dating days (or tell us all about it!). Think about one thing you used to do or have as a couple that you have lost in the shuffle of life. How can you regain it?

This is Jason and I at the Bible camp in Saskatchewan that he worked at the summer that we met.  My dad was the director there and Jason did everything from prep work, to counselling to activities coordinator.  I was doing a pastoral internship at my parents’ church that summer.  We met the first week of June at an activity I had planned at the church.  We did not have good first impressions of each other.  I thought he was a snob.  He thought I was annoying.

The annual family camp was the last weekend of June, I believe.  I did not want to go.  Jason had already put out “a fleece” that if I was not the one that I would not be at family camp.  We had a few interactions through the month of June with the church’s youth group / college and career activities.  The pastor I was interning under and I had a very strong relationship and I had shared (or he’d picked up on) the feelings and sparks that were flying whether we wanted them to or not.  The pastor made it a requirement for me to attend the family camp with him; my own family was going to be there.  So I went.  I had a great time and got to know Jason a little more with some late night talks.  I left the camp at the end of the weekend in tears with NO IDEA WHY!  It was the strangest thing.  I guess that’s when our relationship started, as Jason says that he knew then that I was the one he was going to marry.

Officially, we did not start dating until late July when I confronted him with what his intentions were.  I don’t know why.  I would have been okay with a “summer fling” but if this was going to be a serious, long term thing, I wanted to know that too.  He said he wanted to make it something serious.

The summer was WAY TOO SHORT and soon my internship was completed and college was starting again, in another province.  He chose not to return to his home farm in Ontario but found a place to live and employment in the community where my parents live.  We continued a long distance relationship with lots of letters (on my part) and lots of LONG phone calls.  We were very thankful for unlimited long distance calling!

He came to visit me at the college in November.  After a four day visit, he went home and back to work.  Within that first week of his departure we had decided that when I was home for Christmas break that we would be married.  We planned to elope, almost – we wanted both sets of parents there in the pastor’s office.  That’s all we wanted.  However my parents wanted to have a more traditional wedding for their only daughter.  So we made some arrangements – my mom and dad planned and paid for the wedding.  I was in final exams and Jason was working lots.  Between studying and writing exams I found us a place to live so I could finish my last semester of college.  I returned to school after Christmas as a married student.

 

As a dating couple we had and made lots of time to just sit and visit.  We talked and talked and talked.  We took time to watch movies together.  We just wanted to be in each others’ company.  I don’t think that the desire to be in one another’s company has changed, but the taking the time to do so has changed.  We don’t take the time to talk to each other except about the necessary and important things.  With a busy family of 5 (almost 6) children we just haven’t taken the time.  Jason’s current job is such that when it’s busy it’s really really busy.  When it’s not busy, it’s really really slow.  We are adjusting to many things in our lives almost daily.  We need to start taking the time to visit with one another again.  We’ve talked about weekly date nights, but it never seems to work out.  Again it is often his job that interferes.  He’s on call 24/7 as a fire fighter for two different locations. 

When we do get time to be alone together there are a couple of issues that keep us from talking.  Electronics – TV, computer, telephone, etc. and we just enjoy the silence.  Our life is so busy that  when we are driving somewhere without the children, we just don’t talk; we are thinking without being interrupted a gazillion times but we just don’t talk.  I think that having a regularly scheduled time to be together without the children is going to be key to getting back that time we used to take to get to know each other better.

 

Striving to learn and live God's purposes,