{Re}Engagement Photo Shoot- The Preservation Station

 OK so here is the first tangible thing I can post about the {Re}Wedding......lots of details to come but first,
 our {Re}Engagement Pictures!
 We have hired Kristin Sweeting  (www.kristinsweeting.com) to photograph all things {Re}Wedding.

                   These were taken at our favorite store ~ The Preservation Station in Nashville.

The Potter and His clay.

Ok so the plan was to blog all the way from the {re}proposal to the {re}wedding, telling the amazing story Jesus has written for us….but, apparently around February the p{re}parations took over my brain/computer time. (Those details will have to wait until after the {re}wedding to be told/viewed). This time however, has also been a season of great {re}fining and assignment of the marriage He has {re}made. Hopefully that assigning never ends but, those details too will have to wait until another day, as that chapter is still in the making.

 Today, I will reflect again on the early days, as I sit on a porch looking at a still lake over my love's shoulder.........

  When telling people the story of our saved marriage and life which I do a lot because “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony because
they did not love their lives so much  as to shrink from death.” Rev 12:11, they always want the “how-to” and the bottom line. I cant always give specific "how to" because certainly every couples issues are different but I can always give Jesus as the bottom line. 

  One of the things we learned early on was that we had no idea what a healthy marriage even looked like, let alone how to have one. We needed people to show us what to do. At that time though, we were hardly even speaking to each other- still in the early stages of  “you don’t like me and I don’t like you but we will stay together and see what Jesus want to do with us.” The Lord placed me in the hands of Stacey, most importantly who is a woman who thrives on submitting to the Lord’s lead but she is also an x-navy mother of 5, with a strong marriage and a strong- yet loving, way of telling it like it is. She has this wonderful gift of asking a million questions, and actually wanting to hear the answers. She seems to have an uncanny ability to ask just the right questions to get you thinking and examining the very things the Holy Spirit wants you to examine. She just walks in the Spirit that way. I was pretty scared of Stacy at first, but she grew in me the desire for truth and the grace to accept it. She taught me how to ask the hard questions of myself and modeled for me the way to give truth in such a way that does not push past the Holy Spirit in a desire to get to it faster.

 During one of the many afternoons sitting in her room having my world stirred up, she started asking about ways I was blessing my husband. Honestly, a stretch for my thinking since I was still stuck in the lie that until he gave me what I needed, I didn’t have or wouldn’t give him anything he might need or want. She asked about different things but landed on two (for that day). How I served Micah in a traditional wifely way- cooking for him- and how I drew him to me physically, specifically my unshaven legs.  The cooking part was pretty bad, I managed some pathetic “meals” for our dinners but they came down to about 3 dishes I served regularly - yet poorly. The physical attraction part I thought I had down pretty well. She suggested that maybe I should examine both.

  When Micah and I were first dating I had gone to a luncheon with my mom and her friends, and I am not too proud to admit she paid me to shave my legs. Being in my “au natural” stage of life that was something I had given up years before- but for her, ok the cash, I shaved. It was right around the time Micah and I had our 2^nd date and he remarked, upon seeing the smooth ankles peeking from my hippie skirt, that I just didn’t seem like the kind of girl who shaved and that he preferred girls who didn’t. Aaahhh, these are the things that won me over.  But years later and in a new place in life maybe it was time to {re}examine that…and the cooking thing. I didn’t know which topic freaked me out more, shaving or learning to cook, but Stacey suggested I ask him what his new preferences might be. The conversation went like this…”So Micah, Stacey thinks you might like some things different in our life….she thinks maybe you’d like me to start doing more cooking” to which he practically yelled “NO! I’d actually like you to do less cooking, you are really bad at it.” Whew, was I relieved. So I said “Good, I knew she was wrong about that stuff cuz she also said maybe you’d like me to shave my legs.”  “Well….” he said, my gut hitting the ground “I have kinda been thinking about that, do you think you could do that?” DOH!! I did NOT see that coming. I was very relieved about the cooking thing, I am really bad at it. But shaving my legs? That went against all the ways I had defined myself as a low maintenance, natural woman not conforming to the tv stereotypes of beauty and identity.   I had no idea he even thought about such things since I was perfectly content with it staying the same. But that is what I needed to learn: the old ways were not working anymore- even if I was comfortable with them. In the end it ended up being more about doing something for my husband just because I knew he’d like it then who my self made identity was. That was new for me. I am his wife, that is part of my identity- a part that is second only to my status of Daughter to Christ. So me learning to lay things down to be built back up in Him sometimes came in packages that I didn’t really want to give up or change- things that we “fine” the way they were- or so I thought.

 This illustrates the big point of what we had to learn and what is a big key to the “how to” of it all. We had to be willing to lay everything down to be {re}made- even the parts we liked about ourselves if necessary, even if those things were “working for us”. Also, we had to be willing to do these things even if the other one wasn’t doing the same or equal displays of laying things down (yet). This blog is written by me so it is my view but I was thinking about trying to add something equal to my leg shaving that he had “laid on the altar” to show a “balance of give and take”, but back then we weren’t seeing a balance of give and take. We were barely seeing each other at all. So to write about a similar experience on his side could make it seem as if I would have even noticed it back then. We had to learn to trust the fact that we were learning to serve each other whether it was balanced or not. We gained a trust that the work the Lord was doing in the other was deep and mountains were being moved from the inside out so it may take a while to actually see those movements. We were called to focus on what we could individually do to allow change in ourselves and trust the other one to Jesus. I have since seen all kinds and deep levels of Micah laying things down for our marriage, and everyday I have no doubt that my husband puts my needs and desires above his. The mountains that Jesus moved in Micah have made him a man that I can no longer anticipate his responses. The only thing I can really know is that his actions and choices will look more like Jesus every time.

 We have placed our lives in His hands on His potter’s wheel. By allowing Him to place people in our life that we can trust with the very vulnerable statement which has become another one of the huge “how-to’s” in our new life: “Please look into our life and our marriage and tell us what does not look like Jesus and help us get to the place where it does.”  He has molded us into a very different couple then we had ever hoped. By being willing to sit under mentors to show us Jesus’s way, we have learned to trust that as He {re}molds different parts of us what He {re}places them with are infinitely better and fit together better then we could have ever made them to fit. Our ability to be {re}made into Jesus’s view of who we are and what our marriage should look like, no matter what parts had to go, has only been possible because we have fully yielded to Jesus’s hand. He has seen it in us all along. Just as a sculptor would see the potential in a block of marble or a potter a slab of clay. “ LORD, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You are our potter;
we all are the work of Your hands. “ Is. 64:8  In us He sees the best we can be and He sees a marriage that could mirror our marriage to our eternal Bridegroom- Himself. In a relationship of mutual submission the Trinity models what our life is to be like.  The marriage we have now is looking more and more like Jesus’s vision: one that puts God above all else and draws others to Him, thinks of the other before one’s self, spends time seeking the places in each other that are whole and celebrating them and holding each other lifted up to Jesus, as the broken parts get mended. We are daily and eternal grateful for the eye and the hands of our Father the Potter.