Unbelievable Generosity

This past summer, VBS at my church was also my last week as a nanny for the two greatest boys on earth, Finn and Declan. That was a hard week for me, especially since I've worked with them both for so long! I was already dreading the changes, broken hearted at them moving away from me, and not sure what in the world I was going to do with myself; add to that all the commitments I had with VBS and you can imagine my stress.

Wednesday night of that week, Brian and Holley (Finn and Declan's parents) came up to me after VBS was done for the night and asked if they could talk to me.
"Sure!" I said (for a fun little visual, I was still in costume from the skits. A cape, long skirt, and creepy "evil queen" makeup).
"We know you don't want to leave your family behind. But if you come with us and work for a year, we'll pay you more than we're paying you now. After that, you'd only work part time...and we want to pay for you to go to college for 4 years."
*Me, speechless, looking at them with my jaw dropped while trying to keep my composure*

I was in shock. I'm STILL in shock. I don't even remember what I said after they told me all that. I remember that they told me I didn't have to give them an answer right away. So...I thought about it...prayed about it...talked to some people about it...then, that Saturday (while I was watching Monsters University) I realized I'd be an absolute idiot to turn it down.

So I said yes.

I'm moving to Louisiana the first week of January, 2014.

And my mind is completely blown because of how God has been providing for me in such an awesome way. He's brought me through so many good and bad times, delivered me from the toxic relationships I was in, helped me grow and develop good, godly friendships, and now this. HOW AWESOME IS HE?!?!? Even as I sit here writing this, 3.5 months later, I still can't believe it's real!

Wow, I'm amazed!!

Oh, and in case you were wondering, these are the boys I get to see again in January. I can't wait. :)

(Photos courtesy of my friend Amanda at www.amanda-joy-photography.com. Check it out. She's amazing!)

Grace

 "God's grace has a drenching about it.

A wildness about it.

A white-water, riptide, turn-you-upside-downness about it.

Grace comes after you."

                                                                Max Lucado

Wow. Grace. I love grace! I love the idea of having such a beautiful reminder of God's love and mercies and what He did for the world when He died on the cross! 

I WANT MORE GRACE! 

Dump it on me, God. I'll take all You have, thank You very much! Yes, I sure do love grace. I love the fact that I don't need to be motivated by guilt or fear. I have grace!

And sure, let's show it to others. I have no problem with that...as long as they haven't seriously wronged me! So yes, people that I approve of can have grace shown to them. There's plenty to go around, but seriously, ONLY people that pass my invisible set of rules they should know better than to break. I really don't think that's too much to ask. 

Not gracious of me, you say? How is it my fault that they sinned against me? I sure didn't ask them to! 

Nobody's perfect? Maybe...but I come a lot closer than they do. Obviously!

That's not fair of me? Please don't judge. 

     I'm just going through a lot that you don't even know about. 

     I'm really emotional. 

     I've been struggling a lot lately.

     I haven't been getting enough sleep.

     Work has been so crazy, it's unbelievable.

     I'm so stressed about so many things!

Those are excuses? As if! You don't know me! You don't know my life!

I've sinned against you? When? I was probably just really tired...did I mention I haven't been getting enough sleep?

Ahhh. There it is. My sin is excusable because of my excellent reasoning behind it. Absolutely I still deserve grace! But...do I?

It's obvious that I don't. No one does! However, I'm proud, selfish, arrogant, obnoxious enough to think I do. 

HOW

WRONG

OF

ME.

It doesn't matter how many people have wronged me, how much it hurt, when they did it, or what they did. If I'm going to base how much grace they get on that, and if I'm going to keep track of all those details, then I need to start with myself. 

No, this is not excusing what people have done to hurt me. I've been hurt deeply and the people who did the hurting will never know my pain. And at the same time, it's not excusing what I've done to hurt people...because in the same way, I'll never know how deeply I've hurt others. I'll never be able to feel their pain caused by me at its most intense, unfortunately. 

Thankfully, though, this isn't where the story ends. 

Enter forgiveness and grace. The dynamic duo. A necessity for us to have and the best weapon to fight against bitterness and hatred. Because when you allow bitterness and hatred to creep in and whisper in your ear, you'll just be miserable. Trust me, I know! Once the seed is planted, it's very difficult to uproot. 

I'll never understand grace. In all honesty, it doesn't even make sense to me. But I know I can't live without it...and I sure wouldn't want to.

Have a heart of forgiveness. You'll need to use it often.

Love, even when you only see hate.

Show grace. It's been shown to you, more than you'll ever know. More than you can comprehend. 

"To accept grace is to accept the vow to give it."

                                     Max Lucado

My Family

  I love my family and I'm probably going to become very emotional and cry while writing this, since I'm making plans to be moving soon. I'll let you know if the tears come. :) (Ps: they will.)

  My parents are some of the most incredible people on this earth. They've put up with an insane amount of just plain old mean people who wanted to watch our family fall apart. They fought back, though, and their marriage and our family is stronger than ever. Take that, world! They both have an intense love for their kids, their grandkids, their ministries - both work and church related, and obviously for each other. They give selflessly and taught us all a whole lot about loving Jesus and others, and giving (which some of us had an easier time learning than others. I'm talking about my sister, Amy. She's pretty much perfect.), working hard, and having good attitudes no matter what (some of us had a harder time learning that than others. I'm talking about myself. I'm pretty much the exact opposite of Amy.) No, they're not perfect. They're humans with human problems, even though they usually seem superhuman! 

  My siblings and siblings-in-law are awesome. You WISH they were yours! They're hilarious, incredibly kind, love to quote movies with me, are great at being in pictures, let me hit 2 baseballs for every 100 I fetched, make really weird flavored cookies, spill cinnamon like pros, and my sisters are all almost suspiciously good at volleyball. I am not. I don't know who to blame for that, but it seems strange to me. (Funny story about the movie quotes: I guess we used to sing a LOT, especially at the dinner table, so my parents banned us from doing so. We didn't know what else to do, so instead of talking to each other like normal people, we quoted movie lines at each other. That was our conversation. That was put to an end about a week after it started. I'm not really sure how we communicated with each other after that...) But above all that, they have hearts that are just radiant for Christ. It's a beautiful thing. :)

  And also...I have the cutest niece and nephew in the world. In. The. World.  Don't believe me? Here's the proof!

 

(I don't like to say I told you so...but come on. I totally told you so.)

  So to sum it up: I'm blessed beyond belief to have the family that I have and I'm crazy thankful for each and every one of them! (And also, I surprisingly didn't cry!)