Overcommitted

I am downright depressed. It has been cold, raining and windy for weeks now with only the briefest glimpses of sun. It's so exhausting. Things are so stressful right now.
We used to volunteer to help with serving coffee at church on Sundays but kind of stopped after awhile when we got busier with work and school. It's just a time commitment we are not able to make at this stage in our lives.
Recently they have been looking for more volunteers but we were not interested. Somehow we got signed up anyways, and then eventually taken off the list... It's incredibly frustrating, especially right now. I am so burned out from working full time and trying to keep this house in order on top of working, Paul is in his last quarter of school which is extremely demanding, and Christmas is coming up so my work is becoming more and more busy and so is our home life. We already had to give up going to homegroup on Monday nights because we have so much stuff going on right now and Paul's homework load is quite heavy. I just want a balanced life with enough time to work and keep the house and enough energy left over to actually enjoy life. Apparently this is too much to ask.
So we stayed up late last night and couldn't really decide what to do. Turns out that we slept in too late to make it to church this morning anyways. We did go out to see Brittany today for her birthday and ended up staying and chatting for a couple hours which was fun. Then we did a bit of fruitless Christmas shopping and came home to nap and do more laundry. This is my glamorous life...

Rebel

Haha, very funny thing happened tonight. I was listening to a series of sermons from Mars Hill and I was listening to Pastor Mark talking when suddenly everything he was saying became ultra-familiar. It turns out that the sound bites on one of my favorite songs were taken from this sermon. The song is the intro to Lecrae's Rebel album. I listened to it over and over again while I was painting furniture a few months ago. It was so random to hear those words coming out of his mouth, my jaw dropped. I always kind of wondered whose voice it was and where the word had come from. The sound bite is:
"You're just a conformist
Drunken, Naked, Driving around on a loud motorcycle
Smoking cigarettes, Breaking commandments,
Getting pregnant out of wedlock,
Everyone's done that,
It's so tired,
If you really wanna be a rebel,
Read your bible,
Because no one's doing that,
That's rebellion,
That's the only rebellion left."

What is God's will for me? Obey, obey, obey

Today we had to say goodbye to our dear, dear friends who are leaving to plant a church in Vancouver. It was difficult to see them leave but they are following God's will, sewing into God's kingdom by living out the great commission with the ultimate obedience.
It has been a season of change. So many friends have been moving away and making big changes of their own. I feel like we have been frozen for the last 2 and a half years. I knew, when I married Paul, that his going back to school would mean staying in one place until he was finished school and really being intentional about not growing our family until he could provide for us. I have been so resigned to this and so focused on the light at the end of the tunnel that I didn't see how close that goal is. Paul finishes school in just over a month. We joke that it will be my Christmas present.
I don't know what we're going to do with that kind of freedom. We don't really have a plan because it is premature to have a plan. The tentative plan looks something like this: Paul finishes school, we breathe a huge sigh of gratitude and celebrate Christmas, the job hunt begins and then....

The first mark on the clean wall.

I never know what to say at the beginning. It's a new start. It's a new focus. It's a new perspective. There's no way to start a new blog but to get out your crayons and make that first mark on the wall. My hope for this blog is to have a place to be myself and to wrestle with the things that are happening in our life now and soon because changes are coming down the pipes. So, here's to new beginnings and new crayons and new...time will only tell what else.