Spiritual Sundays/Brides/Announcement

This week, I am participating in Spritual Sundays and am sharing an eDevotion, plus making a very big announcement!

It's been a long time since I last posted, a really long time. I think the last I posted was in January or February, and here it is May already!

So very, very much has happened during that time.

My sweetie Mike and I have been dating for just over a year now.


It was a long, cold, harsh winter.


But spring finally arrived.


I even got a new (to me) car!


Mike wrote another excellent eDevotion, this one about an interesting subject. He titled it:

My Day as a Bride

"“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” Revelation 21:2

Recently a big bridal show came to town and I was there. (It’s too hard to explain why.) They had a huge room full of booths where people sold the kinds of things that brides like. You could browse dresses, flowers, jewelry, cakes, crystal. There were photographers, disk jockeys, travel agents, and hotel managers. One lady would take your ordinary folding chairs and wrap them up in satin sheets which seemed like a bad idea to me because I couldn’t see what would keep old folks from sliding out of there. Caterers had toothpicked samples of their finest grub. A harpist would sit you down and pick a little for you.

But more than anything there were lots of excited young girls. They shot from table to table with no signs of waning enthusiasm. They giggled with their friends or their mothers and tasted cakes and tried on crowns. You could tell this was not work for them. There were a few grooms there too. They didn’t look so good. Most of them had the same expressions that I see on a lot of guys in church on Mother’s Day – like they were there against their will.

Like I said, the young ladies were the highlight of the day. They were so excited about becoming brides – and why not? I am too. According to scripture the Church will be the bride of Christ, and I owe it to those girls for reminding me what a big deal that is. It’s something to squeal about.

It seems to me that lent, if you care anything about it, is a time to prepare ourselves to be the bride. Lent can seem pretty gruesome, with all its thorns and ashes and fish dinners. But this is also a time for excitement. It’s a time to get ready for the Biggest Day of Your Life – and then to live happily ever after."

Maybe some of you have already guessed the reason why he was at a bridal show. In late February, Mike asked me to be his wife!!!

His church was very excited to learn that he was going to have a wife. Rumor got out ahead of time, so our big announcement came as no surprise. They were ready for us, with signs declaring their congratulations!


This is as close as we are going to get to an official engagement portrait.


Mike was pretty happy when I told him he didn't have to buy me a ring, as it has been my heart's desire to wear the ring that belonged to my grandmother. She became a bride in 1920, I believe!


The very first thing I did was buy a wedding dress! I was hoping for a proposal, so had already been searching eBay for a dress. I was very lucky and found one that I loved for only $111, and it was brand new with tags!


I found lovely earrings on sale for $10. The aqua and lime green are going to be my colors.


I'm making my own bouquets. Mine will be somewhat similar to the one pictured. I love hydrangeas and roses! Hydrangeas grew in my grandmother's garden.


This is the style of dress my bridesmaids and I selected, except it will be a lighter blue called "pool."


My future step-daughter Corinne will be a bridesmaid, and my daughter Tara is going to be my matron-of-honor.


A young woman that I knew from church since she was a little girl is starting a cake business and offered to do the cake at cost! This is a picture that she is using for inspiration.


Hopefully, I will be posting more pictures as I prepare for my wedding day, which is rapidly approaching: June 18, 2011! And if any of you reading this are pastor's wives, I would really love some input on what I can expect in that role. In three weeks, I'll be a preacher's wife!

Spiritual Sundays/An eDevotion -- China

I am going to venture out into something completely different for me and am going to be participating in Spiritual Sundays this week, and maybe every Sunday that I manage to get around to it.

You see, this is a really new thing dating a man of the cloth. I never, EVER pictured myself dating a minister! I mean, I haven't even been a church-goer for well over 10 years. Though I have always been a very spiritual woman, and have told people that I am a Christian, I described myself as a "disillusioned, disenchanted Christian." I have encountered a lot of weirdness in the body of Christ. Sad to say, some of the biggest hurts I have ever received in my life were at the hands of those who called themselves Christians. People have said some of the stupidest things to me, feeling that they were sharing through Christ.

It was enough to make me feel like I never wanted to go back to a mainstream church ever again. Still, I longed to be part of a church again. I have longed for that fellowship. But I just didn't know if I could do it.

One of the things I really like about my sweetheart is that he writes eDevotions. He recently even had one published in the Upper Room daily devotional! When I received the following one in my email, at first I wondered if he was purposely stepping on my toes. Read on: and by the way, these are copyright per Pastor Mike, but if you want to use it or share it, I would be thrilled to pass on a message to him so that you can get his eDevotions in your inbox too!

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This one is titled "China."



"Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world." 1 Peter 2:12

I’ve never been to China, but I bet it isn’t anything like Chinese restaurants.

For one thing, eating at Chinese restaurants you’d think that a nation of a billion people had only managed to come up with three kinds of soup. Also, fortune cookies aren’t Chinese. (True story – when fortune cookies were first marketed in China they were advertised as "Authentic – just like in America!") And they probably don’t really number all their food like that over there. And anyway, most "Chinese" dishes we see have been mutated into more American-type vittles. I bet when folks from China come here to visit they go to McDonalds, where at least they’ll have some idea what the heck they’re ordering.

What I’m trying to say is, you’d be nuts to make any judgments about the country of China based on your local neighborhood noodle house.

It’s no less crazy to draw conclusions about the Kingdom of God from your experiences with some church. But people do that all the time. Because they have found some congregations to be narrow, bigoted, insensitive, judgmental (you know this list as well as I do) they deduce that they are better off without the whole shebang. They can be "spiritual but not religious." OR, equally erroneous, because some churches have rubbed them that way at a particular time and place they conclude that they all must be that way. Listen, there are many, many churches where the love command is still on the books – where people who are different are welcomed, generosity is practiced, the sick and poor are treated with dignity, and folks are encouraged to use their brains. They just don’t show that kind on TV very much.

And while we’re at it some of those eggroll joints aren’t bad either. At least they’ll get you by until you finally get to make your big trip to China.
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Like I said, at first this eDevotion kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I thought, "well, I'm not going to like them all." I also wondered if he was quoting me with the "spiritual but not religious" part, since I say that a lot. Turns out that he wasn't.

It still got me to thinking. Maybe it's time I put aside some of the hurts. As a counselor, I had a whole lesson on Forgiveness. Though I thought I had forgiven all the hurts, I was still letting them affect my life today.

Time to put it all in the past. Time to move forward. Time to stop letting what stupid things other Christians have done to keep me from getting with others and worshipping and praising my Lord again in a church family.

So I am not yet going to my boyfriend's church. For him, it will be a Really Big Deal for me to hear him preach. I'm happy that he so highly values my opinion of his work, and that he wants to be impressive. I've decided to start attending my son's church in the meantime. It still feels a little awkward, and I feel like a little bit of a fake after being out of the loop for over a decade, but the people are warm and welcoming. I feel fed. I feel accepted.

And I feel pretty darn good about it. Hallelujah!