brushing up on looking up....

in lopitland, i ended my nights brushing my teeth under a sky packed with stars.

it was hard, looking at the beauty in that creation, and thinking too much of myself.

i think i might take up brushing my teeth outside again, here in oglesby. lately i hardly give the sky--or its Creator--a second glance as i'm blistering through my to-do list for the day.

and, wow, that's just an absolute shame.

praise the Lord, maker of heaven and earth...

Who's counting?

Tonight, Eric gave me a wet willy.

He fancies himself a really funny guy.

A guy I have to marry.

In only 36 (looooooooooong) days. :)

Household name...

I think the single most encouraging thing anyone has ever said to us about our relationship came from the mouth of our pastor here at Grace.

He said he was excited about our household--about the ministry we could have as a couple.

Now, a lot of folks have been super supportive and encouraging. But I think Pastor Steve--having read our answers to some pre-marriage counseling questions--spoke perfectly to the heart I have for our ministry as a couple.

When I left JESUS Film, I begged the Lord to show me what he had for me here--what ministry (formal or informal) I was meant to be a part of. He didn't see fit to show me then, but lately things are becoming clearer. As I'm learning about being a godly woman (like I've said in previous posts) and as we're anticipating and preparing for our life together, I see how our household can be my ministry.

And that's no small thing, praise the Lord. :)

What a blessing, that I'm marrying a man who sees the value in that, and who is willing to make decisions and even sacrifices to make it happen. When we talk about the potential of moving out of his loft apartment and on to somewhere else (somewhere bigger?), the motivation there is mostly on moving so we can have a better set up for opening our house to people. He sees that as a priority.

He wants to make sure we're getting out and reaching out and not focusing only on ourselves. And that's my heart, too, though my introverted self sometimes needs an extra push to get there.

Even when we were registering for gifts and most all of his being was repulsed by the idea of having such a "complicated" stash of things and more silverware to wash, he endured, at least in part because he knew my goal was to make an inviting, functional home. He even started to repeat my mantra back to me, that this is my ministry and I want us to be able to host people.

So, I'm beginning to see the puzzling puzzle pieces fall into place--my questions about what God has here for me are being answered. And I'm really excited about what that means for our household!

Cold feet on our hot date?

Eric sometimes surprises me by his little bits of romance.

I suppose it doesn't take much.

I mean, I was shocked simply because he got me a Valentine's Day gift. I guess I assumed he'd be the type who'd grumble about how it's a Hallmark holiday and refuse to even acknowledge it. (In fact, I was so bold in my assumption that I didn't get him a gift. I had a great idea to make him a bouquet of can openers, but thought it'd be wasted or even spurned because of the day on which I gave it.... Whoops.)

But how sweet is my Eric?

My gift was a homemade card with a single Hershey's kiss on the outside. He won't give me a real kiss, you see--the "you may kiss the bride" will be our first go at it!--but the inside promised he'd give me a real date, at this super nice restaurant Saturday night.

Weee!
(Small dance of jubilee.)
We get to dress up all nice and have a real date!

But, we'll see how it goes. Last time we had a real date on the docket, it dumped snow and Eric balked. And I've heard we're supposed to get something like six inches this weekend...

So.... I'm not going to get my hopes up.

Even in his romantic moments, my fiance still loathes the cold. ;)

Continuing education...

I remember being at Stratford a few weeks back and hearing a marriage-related sermon. This wasn’t the first I’ve heard, obviously. Marriage is an important thing because the Bible has a lot to say about it, so it’s only natural pastors have a lot to say about it, too. But about halfway through, I realized, Hey! These sorts of things suddenly have more relevance in my life. Hooray! (Weird!)

God’s been using these past few months to continue my education on what it means to be a godly woman. And, to be honest, I love it.

Eric got into trouble last night at dinner with my folks for saying I’ve become increasingly girlie since we first met. My instinct was to be offended and give him a not-so-girlie punch on the shoulder. But as I thought about it more, I wasn’t so put off by the idea.

Seems this thing with Eric has unlocked in me a lot of the woman God wants me to be. And that’s exciting.

I’ve been listening to a lot of sermons about women has wives, women as mothers, women as homebuilders. And all of that resonates within me these days. I’m so content, so happy, so fulfilled to “simply” be E’s wife and serve God in that way, in the role he created me for.

(I can imagine the look on my high school friends’ faces if they knew how God had turned the Andi they knew completely around! Haha.)

Eric says I’m a strange dichotomy—I have this part of me (Eric calls it business mode) that’s confident and competent and sure and bold. But then there’s this other, seemingly conflicting side of me that’s just a little girl who needs to be held.

I guess learning about being a godly woman has for me involved accepting both of those parts, embracing the dissonance and using who God has created me—all parts of me—to be, for his glory.

Nerdy dancing...

E and I are taking dance lessons.

Yuppers.

With my parents, too.

How adorable are we?

(Very adorable.)

We’re taking this class Tuesday nights through the community college—Ballroom Basics, which is actually taught by the couple who will be DJing our wedding. (So, double bonus.) My mom thought it’d be fun, and my dad even agreed to it. Eric was surprisingly easy to win over to the idea, as well, and I’m here to tell you, we even survived our first lesson this week.

Applause, applause.

I’m not so good at the dancing thing. (Read: I do NOT dance.) I don’t like not knowing what I’m doing, and I certainly don’t like making a fool of myself.

So E kept having to remind me to smile. And he often brought up our commitment to always have the most fun of anyone in any given situation.

The thing is, I had to concentrate really hard. And that occupied all my faculties, leaving no resources or awareness with which to smile or carry on in the general style of banter and goofiness in which Eric and me so often exist.

The nice thing is, we weren’t the worst couple out there.

Though I rarely looked up from my feet or away from Eric’s face to check out our classmates, I did stop dead in my tracks at least once to gawk at a particularly hopeless couple.

And I do, of course, mean my parents.

My dad was rigid and all business (this is where I get it from) but my mom couldn’t keep herself from leading or tangling up their feet. At one point, we actually saw dad take a firm grip on mom’s sweater and tug her around in the proper direction. He said that was the only effective method. Well, it was second only to simply letting her lead, he says.

So, dance lessons have the potential to be a really good time. Or a super miserable battle against my pride. I pray it’s the former, and that we’ll really wow you with our cha cha and foxtrot at the reception!

Wedding Details (part II)...

Sooooo, they messed up the wedding invitations.

It's going to be a bit longer 'til we get them out. (Ugh.)

But you don't have to be in suspense about the details.

It's all right here, at our wedding web site. Which is still a work in progress. So bear with me. But also book with me, the day and at a hotel, so you can come celebrate with us. Because, honestly, it's gonna be a blast!

Ramblings.

There are some things I wonder about as Eric and I approach marriage and as, in some ways, we transition there.

OK, that actually brings up something I wonder about--transitioning. I'm not so sure I'm good at that. And can you really transition into marriage? It's it a bit black and white? You're either married or you're not, yeah? It's a covenantal relationship, or it's not. And so I see it as a really hard thing to ease into, because it isn't really different until it is. Am I losing you?

Take this for example.

I've never had someone in my life who has a justifiable, indisputable claim on being the most important person in my life. Yes, there is family and good friends, and they're very important. But the nature of life is that those relationships grow and change. Never before have I had any binding agreement that singles someone out as the most important person, always.

I've never had the responsibility of always putting one person first. But, somewhat conversely, I've never been so free as to make a person the single most important person. And that's a nice freedom.

But now there's Eric. And soon he will be that person. Or should he already technically be, even without the covenant? 'Cause that's what I'm talking about. It's a hard thing for a girl who sees things as black and white. I'm either free to put him first (and responsible for that) under the covenant, or I'm simply not. Right? Or?

It's not that I don't want to; it's more of finally having the freedom and justification to do that. Does that make any sense? I guess I have this ingrained guilt complex about putting a man first in my life, at the possible expense of/ridicule from my girl friends.

Either way, soon I've have my sure-as-anything, No. 1, go-to person. And I wonder how I'll do with that, since I have no experience.

Or, well, with one obvious exception. For six years I've had my No. 1 person in my life clearly defined: Jesus. But that opens up a whole world of other questions.

No doubt, Jesus will still be #1. But I can already see that's a position I guard very jealously for him. And when I even get the suspicion that something in my life is beginning to rival Jesus for my ultimate affections, I have a tendency to throw it off pretty furiously.

That's why resigning from Jesus Film was so hard for me. It was easy to see Eric as something in the way, between Jesus and me. But I simply had to come to the point where I realized God put E in my life, in many ways to be to me as Jesus was to the church.

I have to keep Eric where he should be and follow and submit to Eric as I should, but also keep Jesus above all. It'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.

Wow, this was rambling.

Counting down.

The first thing our friend said to me at church Wednesday was, "52 days!!!"

Apparently, she's counting down for/with me. :)

So, it's official: We've got our wedding date set--March 28th.

And I do mean this March.

2009.

Yeah, most people are less like Candise ("52 days!!!") and more like... "52 days?!?!?!"

Sure, lots of folks think they need 52 weeks to pull off a wedding. But we simply don't buy that.

And we're probably a touch crazy.

Crazy in LoOoOoOovE.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist...)

Besides, why stress for a year (or a year and a half, or two years, or... more) when you can just stress for two months?

Things are coming together swimmingly. We know the where--at Oglesby Union Church, where so many prayers went up for me during my time in Sudan--and the when--soon! hooray! We're casting out invites next week to the who. And we certainly know the Why.

It should be mentioned, my mom has taken this on as her new fulltime job. And she really seems to enjoy it. Actually, I know she enjoys it. She told me so. When I called her while she was at a flower place, paging through book upon book of flower decorating ideas.

So, life is a bit insane right now, but insane in a really good way. I get to marry Eric. And not only that, I get to marry Eric in less than two months.

Fifty days (!!!!), today, to be exact.

Crime and Punishment

Aforementioned puppy chewed up my shoes.

Currently searching OT Scriptures for proper (and, I hope, severe) punishment.

(I'm a hardline theonomist when I want to be.)

Six months.

I’ve been home six months now. Nearly to the day, I realized just now.

That’s really hard to believe. Six months is a lot of time. And there’s no small distance between Oglesby and Lopit, either. But they still hit me—the waves, I mean, of missing it and feeling that burden for the Lopit, my friends, my kids to know Christ, to experience freedom in Him.

We watched a video at church tonight, about a radical, Jihad-bent Muslim who came to Christ, and about the life he left behind in the West Bank. There was some B-roll of a little kid hoisted up on his gun-toting father’s shoulders. And the toddler was carrying a purple plastic machine gun. And my mind, my heart went straight back to our Grasshopper, and how, if things get really bad again in Sudan, he could be made to be a child soldier, or would be fleeing into the mountain caves to hide from Antonov bombings. (It doesn’t take much to get my mind and heart back to Sudan.)

I felt afresh that that would just crush me. That it will perhaps crush me more, not being there, not knowing. Not even being able to be there to do my best to make sure he and little Ellen and Franco make it through malaria season.

Sigh. Six months. Unbelievable.

Now I’m here. In such a different place than I ever imagined.

I know the Lord has me here. It’s where I’m supposed to be.

As I took communion this past weekend at Grace Bible Fellowship—Eric and my church in Peru—I was able to thank God for a lot of things. First, that I’m so blessed to share this new church home with Eric. It’s hard, leaving behind your local church full of familiar faces and people who’ve battled beside you for years. I miss it. I’ve had to mourn the loss in that. But the transition is certainly easier when I see how the Lord is using Eric at Grace, how he can use us both there, and how exalted he is by the teaching and fellowship.

And, second, I was able to thank God simply in remembering what we are celebrating in the Lord’s Supper—that God is such a gracious God that he sent his Son to die for my sins, that I may have eternal life in him. And that I might approach his throne with confidence, even in my prayers for the lost in the dark hills of Lopit. And that I can trust his Holy Spirit not only for my own ongoing sanctification and final salvation, but for those of his sheep in the mountains, of which perhaps Grasshopper is a number.

Six months have gone by. And with the seasons, a lot of things have changed.

But Jesus is still the same—Lord of my life, Lord of my path and Lord of his effectual grace.

Wow.

We're not fooled.

I had ice cream for dinner tonight.

I’m trying to get that kind of thing out of my system, as Eric said these terror-inducing words about a month ago…

“I think we need to start making healthier decisions.”

This was, of course, another situation in which “we” really meant “you.” I mean, don’t get me wrong—I love being a “we,” but you can’t fool me with the “you” masquerading around as a “we.” Oh, no, we’re much too sharp for that nonsense.

So, healthier decisions. Got it. Check.

Or, well, check… soon. For now, until that blessed day on which the “we” is biblical and legally binding, this part of the “we” is eating ice cream for dinner and cereal for dinner and whatever else she fancies.

Let’s just hope... we... fit into our wedding dress. Gulp.

Can (opener) of worms...

One of the things I admire about Eric is that he’s a simple guy.

Not simple as in unintelligent; simple as in, he’s sort of a minimalist and gets by on very little.

But as much as I do admire him in that way, things got a little out of hand the other day.

The man wanted chili, so of course I—in my desire to prove myself domestically capable—was more than happy to cook him up a good meal. But when I was elbow-deep in the process, things came to jarring halt.

I had cans of kidney beans, tomatoes and tomato juice, but I had no can opener.

No. Can. Opener.

The man has lived there for more than two years, and he doesn’t own a can opener?!
Honestly. Wow.

But, I thought—oh, ok, no problem. He’s an army guy—surely he has a Leatherman or something with an opener on it. But when he brandished his Gerber, it didn’t have an opener, either. Alright, so, plan C: pull out the ol’ “One time, when I lived in the bush…” flathead-screwdriver-and-hammer approach.

No flathead.

I mean, honestly. Who is this man?!

And as I’m there, flabbergasted, all he can say is… “I guess we should have planned a little better before we started cooking.” And by “we,” I can assure you he meant “you.”

I should have planned better.

(Wild hand gestures.)

Speechless. Just speechless.

So you could say the first week of being engaged has been eye-opening. I’ve learned two big truths.

First, Eric needs me. And that’s just strange.

I’ve long acknowledged that I need him, that he makes me a better version of me, and that God created him just for me. There’s so much about the way he is that challenges me and makes him able to serve me.

But this whole thing where he needs me, where I can serve him—that’s just bizarre.

But I suppose the writing is on the wall now.

I mean, he doesn’t have a can opener.

That’s clearly a cry for help.

And, the second great realization I’ve come to: Registering for wedding gifts with him is really going to be a bear.

Yeah. Something else you should know about E—he owns three spoons. Each one is different. I know what you’re thinking, “Wow… Classy.” And so I, in yet another desire to show myself wife-esque, dug through my boxes in the basement and brought him over a whole set of nice silverware, along with a can opener and some nice Rubbermaid stuff.

I got it all washed up and put away in the cabinets, and you know what he said when I showed him?

“Hmm. Looks like more stuff to wash.”

(More wild hand gestures.)

Oh, but it gets worse.

“I would say thank you. But I’m not really sure I’m thankful.”

OUCH.

So, I’m certain you can picture us there, registering at some department store. My scanner-wielding hand hovering dangerously close to some wildly superfluous item, such as… oh, I don’t know… towels. Or plates. Or—gasp!—a ladle.

And the eyebrow will go up. And he’ll tilt his head that certain way, as if to say, “Do we really need that, Andrea?” And my shoulders will slump. And I’ll remember the can opener.

And I’ll try to be happy that I’ll have so few things to wash. ;)

Preschool perks...

There’s one bummer about working fulltime in the preschool now, and that’s not being able to be around the high school kids as a sub. I was really, really enjoying that—chatting with them, being a sounding board, building relationships and trying to be an example of Christ for them.

But, there’s a lot of benefits to working with wee people. I think it keeps me young.

For example, Gretchen (the teacher) and I have really embraced being the youngest and weirdest people on the staff. We were thrown into this thing with not only no clue, but also with no furniture. So when we finally got our first table and chairs last week, we broke out our best dance moves, right there in the hallway.

Just last week, I had a particularly hard time not grabbing one of the tricycles that happened to be in the hallway and riding it down to the office, where I was headed anyway. Because, really, how much more fun is that than walking like a grown-up?

We sit in teensy chairs. We play with the kids in the teensy kitchen with the teensy fake food. We thoroughly enjoy snack time. And nap time. Sometimes, we watch Barney movies. We dance. We sing. We play with play-dough.

And my students, by their examples, have given me a whole new arsenal in my wrestling with Eric. So now, when we get to grappling because he’s sparked my fury by making fun of my grammar or trying to smell my armpit or getting on me about the endless Kim stories I tell, I can just break out their moves and win every time. My most favorite of late is my little guy’s limp-noodle move he pulls when I’m trying to get him to move from one place to another. I’m telling you, it works like a charm. I win every single time. Every. Single. Time.

So, sure, it’s a bummer not being in the high schools. But, there’s lots of perks to preschool.

Back to school...

Where’ve I been and what have I been up to these days?

Well, just before Christmas break, the Lord blessed me with a fulltime job. It was such an answer to prayer, and I’m more and more thankful each day to have an income and benefits, especially in this economy. It’s simply amazing how the Lord provides.

I’m working at Oglesby Lincoln as a teacher’s aide for a special education preschool class. It’s a new program and really small; we have just three students—each with their own unique personality and developmental disability, and each just needing an extra bit of attention and patience. And the Lord has so far given me the strength to give both.

It’s overwhelming, being trusted to help these kids reach their education goals—which are often as “simple” as following two-step directions, communicating basic needs, zipping a zipper or being able to match colors. Sometimes I wonder if we’re being enough to them, if we’re even getting anywhere. But, as much as it is overwhelming, it’s also exciting, because we do get to joy with them when they do take tiny steps forward. And we get to be part of opening up their minds to even the most basic things—and I think in that, I’m reminded of God’s goodness in those basic things.

The teacher and the sign language interpreter that I work with are also really cool. We’re the youngest folks there, and certainly the least experienced, but probably with the hardest bunch of kids. We’re getting on well, and I’m thankful! I’m trying to get them to adopt my maxim of always being the person having the most fun, regardless of the circumstances. We sure do laugh a lot, so I think we’re on the right road.