So... WE'RE MOVING TO MONTANA?

The CliffNotes version is this: We've been asked to be one of five staff couples involved in a start-up men's ministry in Montana called Mentoring Timothy. The hopeful, tentative goal is to move in about a year.

It will be a 10-month program in the mountains, with the primary purpose of giving young men a season of life after high school and before college in which they can unplug from the distractions of today, learn skills and live life in a challenging environment, be mentored by older men while observing marriage and family life, experience short-term international missions trips, and most of all, have the time to cease looking at the Bible as a textbook and learn to really develop a close and personal relationship with Jesus. It's life-on-life discipleship, plain and simple.

How and when and why did all of this transpire?  Read on!  :)

The last post I published on this blog was on November 9th.  I was milling over the fact that we hadn't really had a home since being married, and sharing thoughts as we were preparing to move from the RV to the basement of the yurt while finishing construction.  Mostly, I was thinking about how temporary even a "home" really is in light of eternity, and wrapped up with this:

Yes, I am cherishing this unsettled feeling and the reminder that it brings.  I am cherishing the sehnsucht... cherishing the longing. 

And when we have our own "home," it still will not be home.  Our brand new abode, in all spiritual reality, will not be home any more than the moldy house or the RV could be considered "home" right now. 

Always, always, always, I want to remember that.

There's no doubt in my mind that God had those thoughts swirling in my head during the entire building process for a good and specific reason.  How could we have possibly known how timely they would be?

The week we moved from the RV into the basement, we had begun praying seriously that the Lord would show us the next step for our lives. And it was that same week that we got a call from Dave Schroeder.

Dave was the Dean of Men when Joey and I attended NTBI,  and at our request, he and his wife Missy had been our premarital counselors in the months leading up to our wedding.  Shortly after we graduated, the Schroeders had left New Tribes in order to establish a new ministry God had planted firmly in their hearts; we've been aware of it for a few years. Now, Dave was calling to have us answer some preliminary questions and consider entering full-time ministry as staff with them.

Forms, references, a few hours of FaceTime, and many calls later, our little family packed into the car and drove out to Nebraska this past January for an interview with the board of Mentoring Timothy.  We were unanimously accepted.

Checking out Mt. Rushmore on the way back from Nebraska.

So many things happened all at once.  Very shortly after our return from Nebraska, we finished the house enough to be able to move up out of the basement.  After two years of waiting and RV living, it was surreal, hard to believe, and a bit of a fairytale.  It felt like too much luxury in so many ways (though you all know that our secondhand-materials-abode is far from opulent... haha).

We publicized our move into the house, and so many dear people rejoiced with us; all the while, we and family were the only ones who knew our future plans, and our hearts were already bracing to break away from this place.  We moved up with the bittersweet knowledge that we'll soon be moving on.

...I'd thought on many occasions, as I cooked on the campstove in the RV while wrangling a one-year-old and a newborn, that in so many ways it would be a loss to move into a house and get comfortable.  I asked Jesus, over and over again, not to let us lose that feeling of being unsettled, because it was such a great reminder that we're not to settle into this life... this world that's not our home.  Well, He answered those prayers with a YES.

Both of our immediate families are here in Wisconsin, and it's sad to think about taking our grandbabies away from their new grandparents.  Not to mention our church family, and my midwife... I know everyone does it.  It's common, and in a lot of ways, it's not a big deal.  But that doesn't make it easy.

From a young age, Joey and I have both known what it is to move over and over again.  I know what it's like to fix up a place that was dead, make it your own, scratch out a living there, and then leave.  But somehow, there's something different and more difficult about this.  We staked out an area that was just a patch of grass, dug a hole in the ground, and built a round house atop it for our family.  It does hurt to leave the home we've poured literal blood, sweat, tears, and so much more into for the last two years. Joey's fingerprints are on everything... We'd envisioned being able to rent it out and come back to it while visiting home, even if we ended up overseas as missionaries.  

A day or two after moving up, we just sat together by the fireplace one night as it all sank in, and cried.

It is strange to have these conflicting emotions-- to be weepy at the same time that we're genuinely over-the-moon thrilled for something that's so wonderful it seems like a dream come true.

I don't share all of this to seem pitiful or to convey that we're somehow suffering through this decision.  The purpose of sharing the inner sadness is only to to let you into our hearts a bit and to emphasize THIS: that as hard as it is to leave the house we haven't even finished yet, that feeling pales in comparison to the passion we have for this ministry, the excitement we have for the next step, and the utter sureness we have that this is where God is leading us.  It's only a house.  It's going to burn in the end.  All we're doing is giving up something that we can't keep anyway, that was never ours to hold onto.

There has been such a void in our society and churches of the strong, intentional mentoring of men.  Marriages are falling apart, pornography addiction is commonplace, and families are shattering.  Paul says in Thessalonians 3, speaking of believers, "...When I could bear it no longer, I sent to learn about your faith, for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you and our labor would be in vain." As much as we have a heart to see the Gospel go where it has never been taken before, we also recognize the need for believers to be rooted, grounded, established, and thriving in Jesus, living out what they believe: discipled.  

Discipleship is something we have both been involved in and felt called to for years now, even when we were considering missions.  Thinking about our personal strengths and passions, it's mind-boggling how God has brought us to this place that in so many ways seems like our dream.  It is certainly something we never could have even imagined.  We pray that God will use this raw environment and the day-to-day of simple life for His glory, to raise up men of courage who love Him, love their churches, love their wives,  love their children, and are not afraid to lead boldly and love sacrificially.

"God said to Abram: Leave your country, your family, and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you."  

We'd both happened to read through or be reminded of Genesis 12 right around the time that all of this was first happening.  How amazing that we serve a God who brings encouragement at just the right time through words that were written centuries ago!

There is no way to know what the future holds.  For that matter, there's no way to know much about even the near future of this ministry and our involvement.  The goal is to move in about a year, and for so many reasons, it would be best to get out there as soon as possible; but we have no way of knowing how long it will take to raise support. We're trusting God to make that happen.  No idea when we'll be able to sell or rent our house.  The unknowns are countless.  Our confidence is not in anything except the firm belief that God is clearly leading us here right now, and we want to be faithful and obedient to His leading.  I don't have time to share all the unbelievable ways God is opening doors to make this ministry happen, beyond reason, and the things that have confirmed it for us personally along the way.  We have no idea what's in store, but we trust Him fully and are utterly thrilled to be on this adventure with Him!!

Designing and building our own home, only to leave it behind so quickly and start from the ground up all over again?  No, it doesn't make sense from a logical perspective.  But God's timing is perfect.  I believe that with all of my heart-- more than I believe that it will be hard to leave, more than I believe that the future is uncertain, and more than I believe that there are physically and spiritually difficult days ahead. His timing is perfect and He is a GOOD Father.  These are things I know beyond knowledge.  We are leaving our achey hearts in His ever-capable hands, knowing that we can trust Him implicitly.

We need so much prayer and would be immensely thankful if you'd partner with us in that way! Pray that we keep our eyes on Him daily, looking to Him for each step rather than taking grasp of this and just trying to run with it ourselves. The whole process will undoubtedly be incredibly humbling as well, so pray also that we respond well to God's sanctifying process in our lives.

We realize that a blog post doesn't answer all the questions, so please feel free to ask! You can call us, text us, email us, Facebook message us, or come on over and hang out. :)

If you'd like to receive our news and updates in the future, please note that they won't be here on the blog. Please send us your email address by any of the above avenues, or even just as a comment here.

Thank you for sharing in this journey with us, heart and soul! We deeply love you all.

View from the Lord-willing location of Mentoring Timothy.

Is Life So Bland?

I've been coming to grips with a very raw, brutal, hard truth lately. (Hard for me, anyway.) It's this: Life isn't always a crisis. But it is. My definition may just be wrong. And yours might be, too.

...Completely confusing, I know... I'll get there. Here's my heart.

First of all, let's talk about "crisis."

Paramedics know what crisis is. So do firefighters, combat soldiers, law enforcement, and doctors in the ER. If you've ever been to basic training, or first on the scene of a car wreck, or found yourself in a hostile country, or some other "I'm gonna die" emergency situation (possibly even, "The house looks like World War III and mom will be home in five minutes"), you probably know what it means to find that elusive third gear.

It's "do or die trying." Everything else slows down (yes, like the movies) and you find your adrenaline-infused self operating at a speed, dexterity, brilliance and competence you never thought possible.

Well the thing is, I kind of live for those times. I live for stuff that is difficult and challenging and painful and, well, miserable (and not only for the heck of it, but especially for the greater good or when no one else wants to do it--my idea of "helping people"). So much so that sometimes, despite my attempts to adjust, "normal life" feels unbearably dull and painfully purposeless by comparison.

I'm sure part of it is my personality. But recently I'm also realizing that, until now, I have never really had to live outside of crisis mode very much.

All my growing up years were straight-up survival on our primitive family farm. It may as well have been Mars. (When your reason for getting out of bed in the morning has always been, "To live," other average reasons are just not quite as motivating.)

From there I joined the Air Force auxiliary and lived off of emergency services/search and rescue training and military discipline.

Then I helped start and then run a military youth academy, working with youth who had been into everything you could name, of which I was made the Cadet Commander (which brought new stresses and challenges, to put it mildly).

From there was living in Egypt (enough said?). Middle Eastern drama, persecution, a new and difficult language to learn. Awesome third-world-country life that I never tired of.

Three jobs, a marathon, CNA.

Next, New Tribes Bible Institute. Which was not crisis mode per se; but still rather new, exciting, lots of vision and inspiration and deadlines, and I got the occasional, brief adrenaline fix by working as a Driver's Ed teacher. (My foot still unconsciously hovers the imaginary emergency brake, so you may not want to ask me to sit in the front passenger's seat...)

My genuine ache and struggle to find significance and meaning in normalcy, my addiction to crisis mode, my stressing over lack of stress, may be hard for most people to understand. But the resulting symptom mimics something our Hollywood-saturated culture and everyone else struggles with, too: Discontentment. And unrealistic expectations.

Let's put it this way...

Maybe, you want to marry a country boy. Because you think they're all as great as Phil Robertson. And so you marry a country boy, but he's nothing like what you thought a country boy should be, definitely not romantic or as understanding as you expected, or even a gentleman... and you're crushed. Maybe, by crazy chance, he's everything you thought he would be. But you find other things about him that you don't like, and you pick on them. And you're crushed. Disappointed.

Maybe you've always wanted to be a nurse. You just want to help people, you say, but of course you want to enjoy yourself and look great doing it. And at some enlightened point in your stressful, black coffee-drugged four years of classes and clinicals that are harder than you ever thought possible, you wake up. And you realize: It's not going to be like Grey's Anatomy. And it's certainly, definitely not like Scrubs. At all.

Perhaps you've always wanted a small, primitive family farm. Want to live off the land. So you start the slow, difficult journey toward what you're sure will, someday, be romantic and picturesque--it must!--but something just seems "off." You find yourself aching from entire days of unglamorous, monotonous weed-pulling in a field that goes on and on for acres; stitching up a calf with a quilting needle in your living room; twice-a-day milkings with no respite; scampering to can and preserve a winter's worth of food for a whole family; slaughtering animals by hand in the freezing cold; working all night by the headlights of a truck to pick up all the potatoes before morning's delivery; wondering when in the world, oh dear God, there will ever be time to do laundry or cook or wash the dishes or rest your back. And there's nobody there to capture the essence of what looks a lot.. better.. than it feels.. sometimes.

Or what about this: You really, really want to be a missionary. Missionary biographies captivate you. You're "on fire" for God. And all you can think about is missions (and deep down, somewhere you won't admit, you might feel you'd be viewed as a "better Christian"). You're very compassionate and empathize with the plight of the people in, say, Somalia, and -- excitement!! -- you end up there. It's amazing and wonderful and different at first. But soon you notice things you didn't before. Like how the different food and the habits of the people are extremely annoying now, and it's a lot of work to fit in and you just want things to be how they were; and you find your compassion is dwindling because the people don't even want you there and nobody's getting saved. And you can't figure out why it's nothing like that two-month or maybe even just one-week missions trip you took, once upon a time.

Could go on and on with other situations: Marriage. The dream career. Parenthood. Retirement. The cake you baked or the picture you drew or the house you built. Disappointment. Not how it was supposed to go. Nothing ever going how it was supposed to. (Side note here being that disappointment happens and is neither rare nor wrong. Sadly, our default setting is to turn it into bitterness and cynicism, which certainly is wrong.)

The Dean of Students while I was a student at NTBI spoke in chapel one day, and said something like this about living for your personal dream, no matter how good: "If you don't achieve it, you will be depressed because you didn't; if you do achieve it, you will be depressed because you have nothing left to live for." (Queue King Solomon and the book of Ecclesiastes.) Point being, Jesus Himself is the only thing worth living for. Not even dreams that involve Jesus. Because who knows what may happen to them.

Here's something my Heaven-sent husband reminded me of the other day (paraphrased):

Part of what I'm feeling is not wrong. We are to live in crisis mode, we need to live in crisis mode, because we are living a crisis. There are people's souls, and the state of the Church, and our stance before Jesus one day, at stake. It's just hard to see from our current vantage point. And Satan, the world and our flesh use that blurriness against us.

I'm not saying we should have no expectations at all. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what I'm saying about a conclusion regarding degree of expectations. But here's what I am saying:

Thankfully-- probably because of the way I was raised-- I've never been disappointed by life in that everything is, frankly, just so much more awesome than I ever would have planned or imagined (from ice cream to my husband to my in-laws). I still get excited and giddy inside about watching a movie or getting new toothpaste or the fact that the inside of my house is warm in the winter!!!

However... most of my expectations still tend to be unrealistic because they envision a life that by necessity is much more difficult (or challenging or characterized by crisis), whereas a lot of other people's expectations are unrealistic because they envision a life that is much easier (or more comfortable or picturesque or like the movies). But neither of them are much like "normal" life. So both produce discontentment if we focus on them too strongly.

Now, God may not end up calling Joey and I to something "normal" (or even to another day of life on this earth). But He might. Because He calls the shots. We could live out our lives in Aleppo, Syria or the mountains of Tibet or in a town of 300 people in rural Wisconsin. The point is that it should not matter. The heart that is God's says, "I am Yours. You bought me. It is my joy to live for You, wherever, doing whatever!" Like Paul:

"I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through Him who gives me strength." [Philippians 4:11-13]

Obviously, this is easier said than done, and requires daily renewal by the Spirit of God. It is so much harder to learn to live content with the idea of either, or oscillate between the two, than to stick with one.

I would like to implore us all toward this:

Relish true love stories, but not chick flicks. Don't feed on things that you find produce discontentment, which are all different things for each of us. Live in the real world. I encourage you, with every breath I have... Live here, in this real, imperfect world, with real, imperfect people, acknowledging your very imperfect self, before our loving and perfect God.

Because the real world (even in all its fallen nature), when it's not being compared to grand delusions (lies), is still pretty dang beautiful.

"In acceptance lieth peace."

She who laments her singleness or married-ness, 

children or lack of children, 

finances or lack of finances, 

overabundance or absence of work,

busyness or lack of busyness,

happiness or lack of happiness, 

"calling" or lack of "calling,"

"too"-spiritually-focused husband or completely ungodly husband... 

...She has not come to know peace. She has not yet realized that each season of life is a gift of God--always either allowed by God or GIVEN by God, who knows precisely what each of us needs. This is an incredible fact... Why doesn't it inspire gratitude and joy!?

…Maybe because we don’t really believe it. Not of every circumstance, anyway.

Emotions are God-given (some of them), but they are not our god.

Contentment is a priceless thing. To long for what is not, is to miss what is. And that "is" has been allowed or orchestrated BY GOD. For some purpose. Our spiritual act of worship is to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. Period. This says nothing about location or circumstances. 

~ thoughts and notes to self today

Wife stuff that bothers me.

Fellow wives, soon-to-be wives, and may-be-wives-in-the-future (in other words, every woman out there): 

Do you realize we are called, commanded, to “reverence” our husbands? REVERENCE. So I’m thinking about the word, “revere," and the fact that it goes beyond niceness, grudging obedience, even love.

A thousand times I've heard this: “You don’t know him… he doesn’t deserve to be reverenced.”

Of course he doesn’t.

You and I don’t deserve to be loved sacrificially, unconditionally, AS CHRIST HIMSELF LOVED THE CHURCH and GAVE HIMSELF UP FOR HER, either. Yet that is what husbands are called to.

“Well he doesn’t love me like that. He’s not holding up his end of the deal.”

Does that make it harder, sometimes seemingly impossible? For sure. But does it actually matter? Is that what we’re going to tell God when we stand before Him one day? I sure don't have the guts for that. We are responsible only for the commands given us, not the commands given to our husbands.

In the military, you show a particular level of respect for your authorities not because they deserve it – they often don’t – but because there is a higher regulation, put in place for many good reasons, that says so. Well, I feel like we as believers have it easier. 

Why? 

We are called to show that respect and submission to our husbands not just out of adherence to some steely regulation, in fact, not only out of our love for our husbands... but out of OUR LOVE FOR GOD, Who is worth pleasing always, even when others aren’t or we don’t feel like it. (I think that’s really freeing, by the way. It means that my husband doesn’t have to deserve it, and that I don’t have to feel like it, to show it. That also means I am always without excuse. The exciting thing is, attitudes often follow actions!) 

And how do we (hopefully) obey God? Joyfully, not in a self-pitying manner. God thought up this whole thing called “marriage,” so I'm pretty sure He knows exactly what makes it work best!

I’ve only been married three months. This is all easy for me to say, I grant; though I’ve always been saying it, even as a teen. I practiced with my dad. And it is I who will need to challenge myself, for all my life. The level of respect shown to husbands – not only out in the world and our pathetic Western culture, but in the church - has always bothered and nauseated me. Note that I said RESPECT. We're not talking about mere kindness, or even love.

We have got to be careful – in a proactive, intentional way – that our messed-up, radical feminist culture and our own rebellious flesh do not set the standard for our behavior toward our husbands. 

This is huge! 

Everything we feed on, it seems, carries this disease and makes it seem both normal and amusing. It would be tragic to allow such things to rob us of a beautiful marriage relationship and, worse, the fullness of closeness with God that can be experienced when things are right in our other relationships. 

We can’t privately belittle, disregard, ignore, order around, spiritually manipulate, make fun of, run over, publicly call out, argue or be cold and stubborn with our husbands and at the same time think that we and God are as tight as we’re going to get.

In other words... this is a big deal.

"Let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband." [Ephesians 5:33]

I mean... this is the WORD OF GOD we're talking about.

Why is it that in our culture, it's funny to disrespect men, including one's own husband... but it's a jerk move not to love and treasure one's wife? When did unconditional love ever take precedence over unconditional respect?

Maybe because we have this warped idea that women need love like their lifeblood, but men don't need respect. And to that I ask, says who??

Where the heck did that come from?

(Well. Don't start me on an anti-radical-feminist tirade just yet.)

These aren't deep solutions or strategies right now... just thoughts. But I think we all need time with our thoughts and with God to get serious about changing habits, especially when it involves standing against what happens to be the vast majority perspective.

Now just watch... In the next two minutes, inside of me there may well up a less-than-rosy attitude about something my husband says-- proving to myself two things: That I have a flesh, and that God cares enough about my growth to humble me. Regularly.......