searching for a homeland

I know this is the day of the week that my post that is supposed to be wordless. But considering the fact that I blog like once every two months, and our current situation, I probably have plenty to say. Let me preface this with the obvious... I am blessed beyond measure. Blessed with a husband that is incredibly wonderful, one that makes my heart so happy. He is not part of my rant... But our current situation is. I am so incredibly frustrated right now. We have had one hell of a time trying to find a place to live, to no avail. Either we find something amazing and no one calls us back, or when we find a place that seems like it might be amazing it turns out to be a dump or a scam and the KICKER? We MOVED in to a place 40 minutes away last week south of Ft. Worth only to end up moving out within 24 hours. Yes, you read that correctly. After I spent 12 hours packing, unloading, even scrubbing the bathrooms from the crap that the previous tenants had left (and the landlord had failed to clean after they left) Unpacked all of our kitchen appliances, set up the house and within 24 hours John called to tell me that our landlord was psycho and we were moving out TODAY. It turned out to be one hell of a fiasco of moving twice (both ways) 2 days in a row, 40 minutes away. Somehow the Lord put supernatural grace on me for those 24 hours and enabled me to not only leave the house better than we found it, but also to forgive them, pray for them, and bless them. This was a week ago and I would probably pay $ for that same attitude (if we had any, I might have to substitute with a BB&B gift card) Ultimately I am so thankful that we did not stay in that house. If John had moved the shop in to the house already, we would have been in a world of trouble. And not to mention if we had stayed there we would have had to deal with (God bless her) Doris for the next year of our lives which would make for an unhappy wife, and an even more unhappy husband (I have never seen him actually angry at anyone until she happened).....
So that leaves me to the present day. We are currently back at John's parents' house until we find a solid place to live in Ft. Worth. (and let me preface you with this, I am very thankful to have a place to stay) John has a job, and I have enormous amounts of free time on my hands that has never proven to be good for me. I know 5 million things that I could do to occupy my time that would be more worthwhile than what I am currently doing, but have hit a wall of frustration and am not doing any of them. It is an incredibly frustrating feeling to have the desire to want to try and build a life with your husband but feel like everything is on hold at the moment with no hopes of being able to move anywhere until July. Even though we have a side of the house that is pretty much our own, it is extremely hard to have the desire to want to build something solid with your husband in your own home, and not be able to. It is super hard not being able to get a job right now, since we are 40 minutes away from where we will be moving. (I tend to crumble in the absence of structure)
Other thoughts that have crossed my mind? Maybe God doesn't want us in Ft. Worth. Maybe he doesn't want us in Texas for that matter! Who knows? I am bad a the guessing game, and am apparently lacking in discernment at the moment. We pray every time we start looking for places to live that God will lead us to the right place, and if we are not supposed to be there, that He will shut the door. So this is an extremely exhausted me declaring that I am out of answers. We want to be where God wants us. Whether it's Texas, or Tennessee, or freaking Arkansas for that matter. We want someplace to call home. So this is me begging the Lord to show us where home is.

23

This is just your friendly neighborhood Therese, dropping in with an update from lovely Dayton, Ohio. I have reached the "homestretch." 23 days. Thank the Lord in Heaven for that number. I must admit that I am a bit overwhelmed by that number in the sense that DEAR LORD we have a lot to accomplish in those little over 3 weeks. But I've decided that I would like to enjoy them instead of stress over them, knowing that very soon I get to CLEAVE to the most amazing man that I know. Until then, back to the LIST.

30 Days

I sit on this lovely couch on a lovely spring day in Dallas, Texas accompanied by a large box of assorted chocolates, a wonderful fiance, and probably the worst cold I've had in years. I am getting married in exactly 30 days to the most wonderful man I know, and our lives are full of sunshine and roses!
..........
That last statement I mean with my whole very heart, I promise. HAHA. We have not had your typical engagement. In fact, if you had told me that we would go through what we have gone through and continue to go through over the last 2 months, we would have eloped to Tahiti. (I am not joking when i say this either) It has literally been one thing after another. I think I finally hit my wall yesterday after we lost half our wedding party, and then I was told by my mother that my wedding seems to be "doomed." This made me want to elope even more. I had to fight disappointment literally the entire day yesterday, fighting the feeling that we are not important enough... that it would be BETTER for us to just quietly escape and elope than continue on with our plans. I know that this is not technically true (so I've been told) but I'd say that there is a huge part of me that doesn't actually believe that right now. The beautiful thing is that at the end of the day, Jesus is our standard. And he says that He made himself nothing. This means that he didn't get offended if he felt un-important and didn't make equality with the world something to be grasped. I (in all of my fleshly splendor) have a very hard time with this most days. It's hard to not compare your life with others... It's also a terribly bad idea to compare your wedding with other weddings... at the end of the day it is a wedding, not a marriage. These are just some of the thoughts that have been swimming through my head over the last couple days.
........
Now to the beautiful part. Going through trial has formed a love and a bond to my fiance that I may never would have experienced if we had had a typical engagement. I love him more than I did a week ago. And it has not been easy by any means! We have had to (on many many occasions) throw up our hands in weakness and surrender not knowing what to do. We have made decisions, changed decisions, re-changed decisions, and then came back to some original decisions on many things. At the end of the day, and even on the really hard days, I am so honored that I get to spend my life learning to love with him.
........
So here's my toast to the unknown. Over and over and over and over for the rest of my life.

February Update

I like blogging sometimes. Usually it takes me several weeks or months of going through a season of life to be able to articulate in words what has been going on inside of me. This season has been no exception. It has been a winter full of love, snow, beauty, confusion, indecision, and more indecision at that. I will spare you most of the details, but over the last 3 months we have had 3 venue changes, 2 family crises, one broken ankle in 3 pieces, 1 surgery, 3 bottles of Vicodin, (a few of them cured my migraine BUT made it hard to pee) and 2 separate ice storms that broke my mom's roof and blew up the converter box leaving us without power for 4 days. But at the end of the day we are getting married on May 1st and this is a beautiful thing!


It is a good thing to know that you are marrying someone that you just generally like to spend time with. Sometimes he gets my jokes and sometimes he doesn't... but he loves to laugh with me even when ridiculous things fly out of my mouth, and this is a REALLY good thing. Feeling understood even when they only partly understand is such a precious gift that has been bestowed on my life. When someone holds your heart, there is reassurance even when understanding is absent.

I can say that I have learned some very valuble lessons since our January 3rd engagement. The first one is: "let your yes be YES and let your no be NO, everything else comes from the evil one." I can testify with full assurance folks that this indeed is the truth. Wait on the Lord. Don't act when you are in a crunch and don't have peace. You will never make everyone happy! These are just a few more of the things I have learned by planning a wedding. Oh, and don't start on birth control when you are in the middle of planning a wedding. He will eventually tell you to stop taking it, that it would be better to be pregnant than to have a wife that is losing her mind. I actually don't really recommend taking birth control at all, at least not Sprintec. I was simultaneously nauseous, starving, didn't want to be hugged, wanted to cry all the time, was super depressed, and had the most strange dreams i've ever had in my life. (We watched 2 straight weeks of Confessions: Extreme Animal Hoarders during this time to soothe the hormonal insanity) I don't know if there is another type of birth control that won't bring havoc on my body, but at the end of the day kids are a blessing from the Lord and we both know that God doesn't believe in accidents. So as of right now we have no plans to put any more chemicals in to my body unless they come in a bottle and have the words "Maker's Mark" written on the front.

So anyways, I just flew home from Dallas after being there taking care of John for the last 3 weeks. Now I am in full wedding planning mode. We have a date, a venue, and a cake lady. Hallelujah. More to come very soon.

 

Our Story

It all began in Atlanta, GA. John was playing bass with the same band as Therese's good friend Andrea. Andrea had no way to get home to Wilmington, NC and asked Therese if she would want to come to Atlanta and spend a few days there while they finished up playing for a youth conference, and then drive back to Wilmington together. Therese gladly loved any opportunity to leave the Charlotte city limits for any reason and gladly agreed. Therese hopped in her faithful blue Corolla with her good friend Kaitlin and spent the weekend with the band in Atlanta. After the first night of worship there, everyone was loading gear in the parking lot as a mysterious red Volvo station wagon approached Therese and Kaitlin. The words "Hey, do you know anyone that needs to buy a car?" came humming out the window of the volvo. Therese immediately replied "YES"!!! Her good friend Mandy had been looking for a car to no avail, and Therese was thrilled at the idea of a potential seller. They spent the next 20 minutes or so talking about the specs of the car, while Therese secretly wanted to buy the car for herself and trash the Corolla. After a few more moments of awkward parking lot conversation, Therese was informed that she would be following the red volvo to the Waffle House for a fun filled night of hash browns. I would love to tickle your fancy and say that they sat in the Waffle House booth together and gazed in to eachother's eyes while eating their hash browns covered and smothered, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, they were both distracted by other love interests in other cities and didn't even have the batteries installed in their love meters. So the whole band plus Therese and Kaitlin spent the next day shopping at Atlantic Station and awkwardly ended their excursion in the abandoned parking lot across from a local prison after they spent an hour and a half trying to locate the Coca Cola Factory. Therese was actually greatly annoyed having been lost in about 15 sketchy neighborhoods in Atlanta and just wanted to get on I-85 and head back to Charlotte for the night. So after a long drawn out goodbye, the girls all got in Therese's car and went back to Charlotte.

THE END....

Besides the fact that John requested Therese and Kaitlin's friendship on Facebook, I'm sad to inform you that it was the bitter end of the story my friends. That is, until about one year later.
Now let me just preface you with the fact that John and Therese had hardly any communication throughout that year. They were both distracted with other things, and weren't even a blip on eachother's radars. One day Therese noticed that John had commented on one of her status updates on Facebook. She responded back and didn't think anything of it. Then it happened again. This time she said something to him. And then it began to go back and forth and back and forth. Before they knew it, they were having "full blown conversations" pretty much every 2 hours. Therese began to find herself in a constant state of laughter because of this mystery man who understood her sense of humor as they would interact. He was just as weird as she was. This was a rare find! So it all started to go downhill on a fateful Monday night as Therese found herself stranded in her town home due to Tropical Storm Nicole. She was very frustrated being stuck at home while the winds of change violently blew rain at her window pane. As she sought for a remedy to cure her cabin fever, she began playing old episodes of Rescue 911 on Youtube and then posting them on Facebook. As soon as she posted an episode about a man being bit by his pet Asian Albino Cobra, John Romero came to the rescue. He began instantly talking about snakes and jelly fish, and commented about how this video clip was "such a touching reenactment with such neatly trimmed facial hair." This sent Therese rolling right off her memory foam in laughter. And she didn't get up for 3 days. Yes, the storm continued for days and days. And with every passing night of rain and wind, the mysterious man from Texas sent the corn fed girl from southwest Ohio in to a lovesick frenzy. Okay, so maybe that's jumping the gun a little bit- but not by much.
And so the interaction continued. By this time, Therese (being a girl) was reading in to things. (All girls read in to things, guys!) Every time Therese would say something on Facebook, John would either reply with an opinion or a solution. In fact Therese began to catch on to this, which meant that she found herself posting more status updates than in her entire Facebook career.
John, (being a man) was not reading in to things yet. After this continued on for several weeks, Therese (being a girl) wanted to know if she was crazy for reading in to things, and was beginning to wonder if John might be interested in her. After this had been going on for about a month, Therese found herself in Knoxville, TN in a car with her good friend Andrea. Andrea then informed her that she had been "noticing" that her and John had been talking all the time and that she thought that it was basically "the greatest idea ever." This caused Therese a great deal of relief, and affirmed that she was not indeed insane. Then Andrea and her soon to be fiance Will stepped in to full matchmaking mode. Andrea and the rest of the band were getting ready to fly to Portland, for several gigs in Oregon and Washington. She didn't know that this was actually a surprise engagement trip for her that would end in Seattle with all of her family flying in to surprise her after Will proposed. All she knew was that John was going to be on that trip, and immediately tried to get me to come on the trip with them.
This would have been a wonderful idea if Therese wasn't already scheduled to watch Andrea's little sisters while her parents secretly flew out to Seattle for the proposal. So Therese had to make up a story about how she couldn't fly out there because of work. So by this point, John and Therese had switched from Facebook to email. They emailed eachother basically every 2 hours, and talked about their days and told childhood stories. It was awesome! Therese informed John that although she was unable to come on the Portland trip, that she would be in Springfield, Il on the next trip that she knew they would be on. Now John was not originally scheduled to be on this trip.. but with Will and Andrea in full matchmaking mode, Will quickly convinced everyone putting on the conference that they desperately needed a bass player. And not just any bass player... only John Romero would be acceptable.
Now John, being a man has not read in to things up until this point. He had come to realize that he enjoyed talking to Therese all day long, but not much more than that. But as the days passed, he started noticing that he didn't even pay attention to potential prospects anymore. As another week passed by, John was in his shop filling a work order late one night. He found himself leaving his press about every 5 minutes to check his phone to see if Therese had sent him an email. He realized he had been doing this for days now. And then, he had a moment. He said to himself that "if I don't marry this girl, I'm crazy."
One week later they both headed to Springfield Illinois for their first meeting since Atlanta. They met at baggage claim in the St. Louis airport in a state of awkward, blissful insomnia. They got in the Tahoe with Will and Andrea talked the whole car ride to Illinois.
The rest is pretty much history. As soon as they got in the same room together they realized they had passed their chemistry exam with flying colors. Within 48 hours they decided that there was "nobody else in the world" besides eachother.
Their friends tried to send them off on their first date to a fancy italian restaurant. They got lost, split a burrito bowl at Chipotle and decided on that date that they were going to get married. They immediately started assessing the sum of the household items that each of them owned.
The one thing that both of them were so amazed by was the "easy yoke" of all of this. Neither of them had ever had this kind of peace, this kind of incredible assurance. Even knowing that trials are sure to come in their lives, there was a sweet knowing, and a still small voice that silenced every other one that had always previously come in with doubt and fear and insecurity. This is good news. And its just the beginning of a story that God is writing with our lives. He is ridiculously good to us, and loves to give good gifts to His children!
So fast forward 2 months later. John drove from Texas to Wilmington the day after Christmas to help move Therese to Ohio so that she could prepare for their wedding that they wanted to have in April. They made the snowy trek up the east coast to New York where John proposed to Therese in Washington Square on January 3rd :)
So this is beginning of our journey! We would love for you to join with us on April 30th celebrate our marriage. Each one of you is dear to us, and we would love for you to be a part of this day.