Slow Goodbyes: The Room That's Seen it All

As I write these goodbyes to our home, I'm amazed at how many rich and full memories can be packed into rooms that in the grand scheme of rooms, are not all that big.

Today's room may win the prize for most functions. Technically it's a bedroom, but I think it's seen as much {maybe more!} life as another kind of room as it has a bedroom. {Including right now!}

The room isn't huge, but it still boasts its original hardwood floors and has a surprisingly nice-sized closet for being in a house that was built before closets were really a thing. And my mother's favorite part about this room is her birth. Right within these four now-yellow walls, she came into the world and took her first breath. My aunt probably did too. Life actually began in this room and much life has been lived in it since.

My grandparents used it as their bedroom much of the time, and I remember watching Grandma tug at the rolled blinds each morning until they scurried up and let the light flow in for the day. Back then it had royal blue carpet and an accordion door that never quite wanted to stay shut like it should.

By the time my sister bought this house in 2000, the room had been given quite an overhaul. Melissa, who lived here between Grandma's death and our repurchase of the home, had pulled up the royal blue carpet and refinished the gorgeous hardwoods underneath. She'd painted the walls a classy forest green and hung sheer curtains at the windows. I think she used the room as kind of a little study area, and the accordion door had long been removed.

I had two roommates in my early years here, and it was the room each of them used as their bedroom. When Angela moved out in 2004, I decided to make it my bedroom. The forest green walls felt a bit like they were closing in on me, so armed with a can of bright yellow paint I acquired free of charge from a friend at church, I painted those walls, and the room remains that cheery yellow to this day.

In the last twelve years, the room has rotated through a variety of functions. As I said, it started as my bedroom, and it was the last room in which I slept on the twin half-a-bunk I'd brought with me from my parents' house. When I moved into a different room, I transitioned this into my office and craft room, and I wrote a lot of articles, blogs, journal entries, Bible studies, and even my first book right in this very room. I made hundreds of cards and scrapbooked my single life and invited friends over to join me in crafting. For a short while, this was a guest room of sorts, with an air mattress that possessed a stubborn hole that refused to stay patched. And Ryan and I used it as a sitting room, too, when we had two sets of living room furniture and needed a place to put one. Most recently, it was our dining room, and we not only ate some of our own meals in there, but we invited friends over to gather around our tall, square table and enjoy the smallest kinds of feasts.

As we prepare to leave, the latest function of this room is our home gym. This is the room where we meet each day to sweat it out on the floor mats covering the hardwoods. This is where we dab our wet faces with towels and slurp water on ten second breaks before resuming the jumping and punching. This is the room where we fall to the floor thirty minutes later, exhausted and relieved that the workout is over. It's been a good purpose for this room, although we occasionally crash into the pile of boxes waiting in the corner, boxes on deck to be packed.

{Sorry for the poor photo quality. It goes along with our current state.}

Our new home will have a "home gym" as well, and while I plan to change the color away from yellow, I've been mentally decorating, excited to see how it comes together to inspire us to keep working out.

A little room with about eight million times more memories than size. I've asked much of this room and it has delivered everything required - starting with my mother's life.

Slow Goodbyes: The Living Room

If you missed yesterday, this might be a confusing start to the blog. :) In preparation for our upcoming move, I'm working through the potential onslaught of emotions by paying tribute to our current home here in a little series of posts. Yesterday I reminisced about the memories made in our little kitchen, which is now a bare-bones cooking operation, and today I look at our living room, which is actually one of the still-most-put-together rooms in our house.

I did that on purpose because our living room is just that: where we live. It's hard to live for long in a space so completely upended, so I've tried to leave this room as put-together as I can for now. In truth, the only thing that might clue you in to this season is the stack of flattened boxes leaning up against the fat chair, and the utter lack of any personality in the room, since I've taken down every single thing from the wall except the big clock I bought Ryan our first Christmas together.

The fireplace is void of decoration but we run the lights in it for ambiance, and it couples with Albert, the plant we bought at IKEA on our second anniversary and have managed to keep alive for one year and four months. {WHAT!?!??!}

This room, though, even if it's somewhat haphazard right now, holds a billion memories.

When I was little and my grandparents still lived here, this was the room where they sat to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune on their big console TV. This was where I slept on the "davenport" as they called it, with dining room chairs lined up along the side so I wouldn't fall out if I rolled over. This is where I would wake up in the morning to the smell of coffee and the sights of them reading their Bibles and the newspaper. This was the room where they put up a Christmas tree every year and we all gathered around to open gifts as a family, some of us on the davenport and some on dining room chairs tucked into corners. This was where Grandma and I sat almost every weekend to watch the true classics on Nick at Nite, after she was a widow and I was done with babysitting for the night and would come to stay with her.

This was the room I painted after I owned the house - and while it was supposed to be a lovely shade of terra cotta, there was just no mistaking that it was straight up PINK and all attempts to make it better essentially failed. So it was also the room  my friend Amber helped me repaint a soft yellow with an accent wall of sage, and that's what it remains to this day. So I guess you could say it was the room where I learned the hard way the ups and downs of paint choice.

In this room, Ryan confessed his feelings for me, told me he loved me {for the first time and a billion times thereafter}, offered me our first kiss, and prayed with me for the first time. And during one heart-to-heart conversation while we were still dating, it's also where he told me he planned to marry me. {Not the official proposal, but the moment in which I started breathing normally again because I knew his intent.} It is possibly going to be all I can do to not cut that little square of carpet out and take it with me! The square where all that happened.

This is where we planned much of our wedding, took our first at-home photo as a married couple, and took about a billion more pictures after that. We have spent probably more hours of our married life in this room than anywhere else.

We have truly lived in this room. We've eaten most of our meals in here, prayed in here, done Bible study in here, hosted Bible study in here, decorated for Christmas in here, hung out on Mo in here, watched TV in here, and talked for hours in here.

This is the room where I recuperated from gallbladder surgery and oral surgery, too, come to think of it.

I've gone to war in this room, falling on my knees and sometimes my face in earnest prayer. 

We've lived a whole lot of life in this room. It's not a huge room, but it's huge in memories. Huge in failures and successes and everything that falls in between.

I'm excited for our new living space at our new house, and I know the same kind of living that we've done here and that generations before us did here will be carried on within new walls of new color {and not terra cotta/pink}. The praying and laughing and crying and living will march on in that place, and I'm eager to see what unfolds in our new home, but I'm always grateful for the life lived in this very room.

Slow Goodbyes: The Kitchen

One of our friends texted with me for a bit yesterday and said he imagined saying goodbye to our present home will be an emotional journey for me. I have no idea why he would ever think anything related to me could be categorized as emotional. {If you're new here, please insert sarcasm here and pass me a box of Kleenex.}

He knows, as do many of you, that this home where we began married life holds sentiment far beyond the fact that this is where we began married life. This was where I began adulthood. This was my first home purchase. And this was my grandparents' home for most of their married life. So yes, I do imagine there is a bit of a grieving process involved, and I don't fully expect it to hit me until it's all over and I come back for what I know is the last time.

But since I do about 50% of my emotional dumping through words, I thought throughout these next few days, I would take advantage of your extreme kindness and say goodbye to our house here, in this place. We're not done here, but this seems as good a time as any to say goodbye, room by room, and pay a well-deserved tribute to this place we called home.

And of course, we start with the kitchen, because...why wouldn't we?

The kitchen is nearly packed. The only things left on shelves and in cabinets are actual food and whatever items are needed on a daily basis to cook and eat said food. All duplicates are packed. All superfluous items are packed. All decorations are packed. And the room looks shockingly like the last scene of Friends, when the camera pans the empty apartment and the cast walks out for their final coffee shop run.

This kitchen was the first room we overhauled after we got married. The room where we spent our entire first Memorial Day weekend, hauling cabinets and appliances into other rooms, painting the walls a color I still love so dearly, refinishing the countertops, and laying new flooring. {That last part was done entirely by Ryan and Adam. I just took pictures.} This was the room in which we learned to work as a team in a brand new way and where we decided we wanted to be Carl and Ellie {from Up}.

Our kitchen isn't huge, and some find it awkward, even, but it has served us so well over the last three years we've been married. And it served me well for twelve years before that. You learn to move in rhythm in this room - almost a dance of moving back and forth, side to side, sometimes colliding and then finding the rhythm again.

It's a simple room that used to be decked out in coffee love. There used to be an espresso machine sitting atop that cabinet there, and our little white curlicue "S" in the corner. Our mug tree was by the coffee pot, and the night light sat on a shelf. And now it's pretty bare.

Now we've just got the necessities left: the coffee pot and enough light to pour by in the late night and early morning hours.

That corner used to hold a TV, and I watched hours of sitcom reruns while moving back and forth over the old carpet we ripped up, baking and learning to cook.

The microwave was a gift from my sisters when I graduated from college: my first grown up appliance. Our new house has a built in microwave, so we leave this one behind. It warmed up thousands of coffee cups and popped a lot of movie-watching popcorn for us, and we trust it to care for its new {and yet-to-be-determined} owners well.

This picture shows the tug of war between living and packing. The mixer left out to shred our chicken and whip up desserts between now and moving day. The empty granola canister awaits the baking of a fresh batch. The towel has been relocated to the counter because I packed the bar that once served as its home. The bread sits out after I packed its sleek hiding box.

The push and pull of living in a space that needs to function and needs to be packed.

The sink where my grandma peeled potatoes for Easter, Thanksgiving, and all the other family gatherings. Where she used to hook up the hoses to the dishwasher after she pulled it across the floor from its hiding place in the corner. {It's been updated to a permanent appliance now, thank goodness!}The garbage disposal that Ryan installed for me back when we first started dating, and he wanted me to know that he would take care of me, no matter what. {So he started with researching, purchasing, and replacing my disposal - all as a gift.}

The cooking space - small though it may be - where I turned out hundreds of cookies and chopped not quite that many vegetables. The stove where I learned to cook, including the disasters of the "burnies" and the undercooked chicken thighs. It actually was the OLD stove where I learned to cook - the one with the huge chip out of the white porcelain where I dropped a hot dish on the surface. The one with the white stain on the burner where Grandma let a tea kettle boil dry on the hot coil. The stove that Ryan declared we could not move back into our brand new kitchen after our Carl and Ellie weekend. So he surprised me with this beautiful new treasure with its flat top and working oven light.

This is the room where Grandma provided for her family. Where my aunt and mom learned to cook. Where every holiday meal originated for my entire childhood. It's where I learned to cook and to make meals come together in proper time and order. Where I cooked the first meal I ever made for Ryan. Where we cooked together for the first time and for a hundred times since.

It's small, but it sure does have a host of memories crammed between the walls.

Our new kitchen is a little bigger. It has a pantry, which I'm so excited about. It has a microwave over the stove that won't require tip-toeing food in and out. It has a refrigerator with water and ice in the door which is something I've never had in my entire natural-born life. And when Ryan gets done with his demo day, it will have a straight shot view into the living area, which is something neither of us has ever enjoyed in either of our homes.

The new kitchen will hold more memories for us, more family dinners, more cups of coffee. It will hold more of the same and more of the unknown.

Our first purchase for that new kitchen is the perfect little table to put inside where we can share those cups of coffee and conversations about everything imaginable.

But this little kitchen - the one too small to hold a table - will always be precious to us. It's been carefully taken apart, lovingly packed up, and we're ready to reconstruct it in similar ways in a new space. But the memories made in this house, in this kitchen, have been carefully recorded, lovingly documented and will never be taken away.

So. About That House...

This doesn't happen every week, but today the blog and the podcast go hand in hand. Hope you enjoy both!!

Click here to listen.

 So it's been a few days since I told you about this new adventure we were embarking upon, but we've had a pretty major development. Namely...this:

 WHAT?!?!?

Yes, it's true! This is officially official!

I know some of you are new here, so you missed the first part of this story, so if you want to go back and read, here is part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, and part eight.

And then...I left you in silence. We waited what felt like an eternity, but in truth, it really was very little time at all, for all the paperwork to go through. We were scared out of our ever-lovin' minds, because of the RIDICULOUS debacles we went through in selling Ryan's Greentown house after we got married. I'm thrilled to report that our experience this time was 100% opposite that mess and was actually quite pleasant in every single way. 

We found out the day Ryan left for his retreat that we were on board to close on the house in just over one week. And that day was yesterday.

In truth, I told Ryan {even up through yesterday morning} that I would believe it when I saw it. I'd been burned too much the last time. 

Ryan went to work and I followed about an hour later, picked him up, and we drove to the title company to sign 3904823949237498273849723948298347298374298374928374 papers. 

I was still suffering the after-effects of DST, so I looked pretty rough and felt even worse when we arrived, and we just sat and waited while the paperwork began in the other room!

We had our picture taken with our Realtor, Cathy, who was so sweet to document our day for us. {Unasked. Does she know me or WHAT?!?!!?!?!?!!}

{Bless her heart, she was so not feeling well, and she was SUCH a trooper the entire morning.} 

We signed and signed and signed and signed and signed {you get the idea...}

And then we were done!! And the house will be ours very soon. {I should say the KEYS will be ours very soon. The house is already ours.}

We are just so excited. This is a journey that two months ago, we had not even begun, and now we're HERE. What!?!?! How??? 

We're still praying over the sale of our home and trusting God with the timing of that, but for today, we pause to have a praise party for the new home that is now ours. What a joy!!!!

It's not our first home, but it's the first home we've picked out together, and we could not be more excited about that.

When it's Time

I've told you a couple of times before that this year, for my personal devotions, I've been reading through books I already had on my shelf, rather than going out and buying something new. the first book I read was about faith, and the next one was about trust, and now I'm' reading one on prayer. All three are perfectly timed for this season of waiting/believing/trusting/praying for a house sale.

And every now and then, as I'm sure you can relate to, because I'm sure you have been there yourself, I wrestle with whether or not God is listening/cares/is paying attention/remembers that I have this house request. Let me quickly say that I KNOW the answer to all those things. Of course He does. I've known that truth since I was a kid, and never in any corner of my logical mind, do I doubt that. But sometimes getting my heart to jump on board with that...

So that's the big stuff. Gotta sell a house. But wherever big stuff sits on display, small stuff lurks, and sometimes it's in the small stuff that I learn best.

And that's what happened last week.

Ryan and I went to the grocery store pretty late one evening, came home, got all the groceries hauled inside, and as I put away the bags, Ryan walked through the house with a sad and almost sick look on his face.

Fearing the loss of his wallet, I asked {with total panic}, "Did you lose something?"

He looked at me miserably and said, "My cross. It must have come out of my pocket when I pulled my keys out in the parking lot."

When Ryan worked the retreat a weekend ago, one of the guys there gave him this beautiful smooth wooden cross that fits perfectly in his pocket. He carries it everywhere and it has become something that not only marks the pivotal moments he and God shared that weekend, but also serves as a reminder for him to pray.

I will say that I don't fully grasp why this particular cross means so much to him, but I do know about things being spiritually pivotal in a way that sickens the stomach if they disappear. I've had that before in different seasons of my own life.

He grabbed his keys to drive back to the store to look for that little cross, and as soon as the door shut behind him, I got down on my knees beside the fat chair and straight up begged God to help him find it. And that if it wasn't in the parking lot, that he'd find it wherever it was, even if it was a place he'd already looked twice before.

I employed everything I'd learned so far from that prayer book, and I did not MOVE until my phone buzzed from across the room.

I practically jumped over the ottoman to get to it, and I saw these words: "Found it!"

It was right where he thought it would be - in the middle of the parking lot, resting on wet pavement, and bearing a couple of minor scars from where cars had driven over it in the ten or so minutes it was out of his pocket.

Scarred or not, it was back. And I was so relieved. His faith is boosted in ways I can't fully know by the presence of that little cross in his pocket, and my faith was boosted, because He heard my prayer about a little wooden cross, and He brought it back.

And the biggest lesson I learned was that on that rainy night, we needed to find that cross. If much more time went by, someone else might have picked it up, or it could have cracked under the weight of multiple cars rolling over it. We needed an answer then - really needed it - and it came.

On the flip side, as much as I want to sell our house on this day, I have to remember that my need is still more of a want. When it becomes an urgent need in His eyes, it will sell. Because He really does hear prayers. All of them. Even little prayers about wooden crosses lost in parking lots.

The Shafferland Shuffle

I hope you remembered to change your clocks! If not, you're officially late! Come back to read later and GET UP!!!!

* Last Sunday was my last day of being apart from Ryan, and it proved to be the longest day EVER. I worked the cafe at church and he spoke at the retreat. I was so excited to go get him that I ended up getting ready an hour EARLY that afternoon! It was probably close to 8 that night before I got my  hug and kiss and I cried all the way through them both. SO happy to have him HOME!!!!!!!!

* Monday, Ryan took a vacation day, and we spent the WHOLE day together. I felt like I might be coming down with the flu: running a fever and feeling blah, but I tried not to let that kill our fun! We met my parents for lunch, relaxed with Braeya JoJo, watched TV, went for a walk on IWU's campus {they were on spring break so it was quiet and empty} and I did my weigh in for the next round of working out and learned I hit the 20 pound mark on weight loss! YAY!!

* Tuesday morning, I still wasn't feeling very well, so Braeya and I rested while Ryan went back to work. I felt much better as the day went on, and it was just BEAUTIFUL outside, so we went for a long walk after work! The yucky part of the day? Calling the sewer guys to clean out our lines. It was just time for our routine maintenance that we do every year or so. But I always feel weird when I have to call!

* We had noticed that this week the flu seems to have hit our county HARD. Some friends of ours got hit with it Wednesday, so I did a hydration run for them {and shared some oils as well}. So far we haven't gotten it, but I think we both fought it a bit this week! Ryan and Braeya kicked back to watch some videos that night, and I NEARLY died from my workout. This new one is brutal!!!

* Thursday would have been my cat Kaegan's 15th birthday. He died 5 years ago, and I still miss him! I spent the day cleaning up the house for a showing we had on Friday, and when I waterred the plant, I accidentally spilled some water. Before I could get back with a towel, Braeya had kicked into high cleaning gear. Kinda cracked me up! Know what else cracked me up? Face Timing with Ryan at lunch - the whole family!

* Friday turned out to be a chilly, but beautiful day, and when Ryan came home from work, we went for a walk through campus. I took some pictures to make some memories before we move! And while my picture turned out fuzzy, I was SO EXCITED to see the first real green buds on our lilac trees!! WELCOME, SPRING!!!! Please stay!

* Ryan and I went on a date last night - all dressed up! We went out for dinner, and after I saw this picture, I cracked up, because I thought he looked like Wilson from Home Improvement! LOL!! Dinner, coffee, time by the lake, YES PLEASE!

The Saturday Six

One.

Source

My parents had a garden {a BIG garden} when I was a kid, and of course I was required {as I should have been!} to help with it. I hate gardens. It could be one of those things I eventually outgrow, but I'm going to be 38 soon, so you'd think if that's true, it would happen to me soon, right? Anyway. Ryan and I have ZERO desire to have a garden of our own, but I have to admit that growing a few things - container gardening, if you will - intrigues me. And that's only because I know it would be cheaper than buying everything in the store. My friend Sarah had a guest blogger this week who shared about some easy things to grow. I have to say the blueberry bushes intrigued me. So if you're a gardener or a wannabe gardener, check out this post!

Two.

Source

When I worked at the station, life was big. There was a grandness about the job, and there was a sense of responsibility and representation everywhere I went. The platform was huge, and much more far-reaching than I probably ever knew. But when I left, I knew God was calling me to downsize. Not just my stuff, although there was that, but my life. Crystal Stine articulates it well here. It's about living a life that is true and saturated with integrity and obedience, even if no one outside the four walls of your house knows your name.

Three.

Virginia Tech Athletics - Patriotism
Kudos to Coach Buzz Williams, VT Basketball Coach. Given the ignorance or disrespect evidenced by most of today's athletes during our National Anthem, he decided to "have a talk with his players”. All coaches need to do something like this with their players!Coach Buzz Williams, VT Basketball Coach Don’t you wish all college coaches would do this? In a few years, there would a re-birth of patriotism on college campuses!
Posted by Changing the Game Project on Sunday, March 6, 2016

Have you seen this video? The coach teaches his players proper respect of the National Anthem. Moving.  

Four.

Two of the last women I met before leaving WBCL were Sheila Walsh and Mary Graham, who came to the studio prior to Women of Faith coming to Fort Wayne. They spent an hour on the air with Lynne, and while I've always had a fondness for Sheila {that only grew with meeting her}, meeting Mary Graham was an honor and delight. She was the quiet force behind the women on stage and for that last tour, she joined them on stage. She shared this post this week about her recent diagnosis of Alzheimer's, and my goodness. What a testimony! Read it!

Five.

Source

I'm not happy about it {still, lo these many years later} but here's your reminder of this weekend's big news. If you need me, I'll be sleeping somewhere to try to recoup my hour. 

Six.

Source

Right about a year ago, I read Marissa Shrock's debut novel, The First Principle. You can read my review of it here, and I'll mention again that while this book is targeted for a young adult audience, I felt it held great truths for readers of any age. Marissa just released the sequel, an equally fascinating book called The Liberation. 

The sequel picks up where the first book left off, in an undisclosed future year, when the world is not as we know it today. Vivica Wilkins is now seventeen years old, a new Christian, a fugitive from the government, and heavily committed to the work of the Emancipation Warriors, an anti-government group that really is her only hope for staying alive.

Vivica undergoes a radical transformation to alter her identity and keep her safe, and she uses her multi-lingual and computer hacking skills to aid the Warriors, with a personal motivation of finding her imprisoned mother and boyfriend, and doing what she can to spare them from execution. Along the way, she finds herself, her country, and her entire world in much greater danger than she ever anticipated, and her faith challenged beyond anything she ever expected.

As I said in my review of the first book, I don't normally read in this genre and truthfully, there are things about it that scare me. Though written as fiction, there is much about this that could easily be our reality in the future, or certainly a version of it, anyway. It is convicting to think about the sorts of freedoms we consider rights at this moment that could so very easily become a battle or grounds for imprisonment.

Vivica {or Fredrica, as she became known in her alter identity} showed incredible courage beyond her seventeen years as she fought mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical battles to stay alive and one step ahead of danger. The storyline was suspenseful from beginning to end, and I'm eager to read the next piece of this story, as I do believe there is more to come.

If you have teens in your life who enjoy reading, I recommend this as a solid Christian book that offers every bit of the suspense any secular book in this genre would give, but with the added bonus of sound Christian underlying values. If you enjoy novels in this genre, but aren't accused of being young, don't let that stop you from picking up this book. I don't think you'll be disappointed at all.

I would recommend that you read The First Principle before you read The Liberation so you can have a better understanding of the characters, as they do carry from one book to the next. I think you'll enjoy the second book much more if you've read the first part of the story.

Marissa, congratulations on a well-crafted sequel to your novel. Looking forward to the next installment!

* Marissa provided me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own! *

It's Not What We Thought

I loved reading your stories yesterday! Thanks for telling me more about what you dreamed of being back when you were a kid and how that does or does not look like your life today.

I found it rather amusing that several of you are doing the one thing you either swore you wouldn't or couldn't imagine doing back in the day. Funny how life works that way sometimes, isn't it?

One of my dreams, back in high school, was to marry a pastor. This dream was partially driven by my crush-of-the-month, who actually was a pastor, and for me to adequately dream about our life together, obviously I had to be ready to be the proper pastor's wife.

Back then, pastors' wives were supposed to be proficient on the piano, rock at children's ministry and hospitality, and keep an immaculate house to be able to host meetings for ladies at the drop of a hat. Well, I was an eleven-years-of-lessons piano flunkie, but I rather hoped the potential congregations considering my imaginary husband would overlook my lack of talent in that department and appreciate all I could do in other realms.

My senior year of high school, one of our English class assignments involved writing an essay about what we would do with our lives if we were guaranteed we wouldn't fail. My essay was about how I would be a pastor's wife. The best. pastor's. wife. ever.

I still have that essay somewhere, and with a little effort and my trusty binder, I could actually tell you which box it's packed in. But I don't need to look at it to remember this: my teacher gave me an A and scribbled a little note at the bottom that perhaps I should just consider ministry myself.

I remember laughing when I read that. I wasn't minister material. Ridiculous.

But you know what? I think she saw a little something in me I couldn't see in myself. Obviously I've not grown up to be a minister, but I have grown up to do ministry. In dozens of little ways, I've gone on to plant seeds through teaching, through radio, through writing. Things I never imagined myself doing. {And if you'd thrown the speaking part in there, I can guarantee you SHE never would have imagined it either.}

Funny, isn't it, how God ends up using us in ways we never imagined, and in some cases, ways we vowed NOT to be used.

When He's in charge, anything goes. Pretty grand, isn't it?

What Did You Want To Be?

Yesterday I sat myself down on the couch and told myself I could not get up until I had made some serious headway on the presentation I'm delivering at the women's conference in April. I've worked on it several times, but it struggled to be born. {Writers, you know, often compare the delivery of words to birth.} I hadn't reached freak-out level yet, as I still have a few weeks before I have to actually present it, but I really wanted it done in advance so I could learn it well before that day.

Apparently I listened to my own time-out because by the time I finally took a shower about 3 in the afternoon, the bulk of the presentation was written.

Much tweaking remains to be done, but here's a happy dance for having it on paper in some form.

ANYWAY. Since I won't know the women I'm speaking to this round, I crafted a bit of a get-to-know-you session, and that took me on a little trip down memory lane regarding my early life goals. And that, of course, led to me just getting curious about your early life goals!

My first career choice {as told to me by my mother...I don't actually remember this} was to be a zookeeper.

{Yeah. This is as close as I get now. And this took some mental convincing.}

Stop laughing. Actually, don't stop laughing. It's laughable. I love animals as in cats and dogs. DOMESTICATED cats and dogs. Lions? Tigers? Anything that moves quickly or makes a loud noise or could be remotely considered dangerous? Scared. Out. Of. My. Ever. Loving. Mind.

What on earth made me think I wanted to be a zookeeper? Mom said that in my explanation to her, I said it was because I didn't want to go to college, and apparently in my kindergarten minds, zookeepers didn't have to go to college. I did actually go to college {NOT to be a zookeeper}, but I won't lie: I wasn't crazy about going. So apparently some things never change.

The first thing I remember wanting to be was a singer. Specifically Sandi Patty.

I had all her cassettes {EEK!} and memorized her VHS tapes {eek again!} and wanted to sing just like her. I learned every song, her part AND the background vocals and I sang in my room right into the tip of my curling iron. This was my favorite song. 

Little hiccup to that plan. Can't sing. Some dreams just dies.

But guess who did show up in three separate locations on three separate days of our first anniversary trip?

So once I let the singing/world tour dreams go, I decided I wanted to be a nurse.

Little problem. I don't do fluids, germs, or emergencies. And then of course, we're back to the prolonged education thing.

I did, however, participate in a photo shoot at IWU once in which I wore scrubs for ads for their nursing program. Of course I can't find any of those photos right now, so you'll have to settle for the floor display of my business look. But being a nurse on a billboard was the beginning and end of my medical career:

And then...my final career choice was to be a teacher. My parents both worked in education, so it was just sort of a natural flow, I suppose. And truthfully, had the whole education system not started to derail when it did, I believe I might have actually followed that career path. {Funny, isn't it, for someone who dreaded college?} But I watched my parents as the system began to change and decided it was not the place for me.


I do still love to teach and have done it in other capacities {Bible studies, speaking, this blog, etc.}, but it never became my career.

Know what never made it on my "when I grow up" wannabe list? 

Financial Aid...

...and...

radio. :)



Funny how God's plans are TOTALLY different than ours, isn't it??



So now you have to tell me: what did YOU want to do when you grew up? And did you?

Three Years

What were you doing three years ago today?

We were here:

Our reception took place three months {and a few days} after our wedding, and we spent the day shivering in the post-heavy-snow outdoors. A far cry from the actual wedding day temps:

And though the reception proved to be FAR more work than the wedding itself, we had a wonderful day celebrating with our family and friends.

We transformed the reception hall into the beach - as much as we could.

And we were blessed by the friends and family who gave up a Saturday to celebrate our wedding with us.

We showed pictures from our wedding day and played the recording that our amazing videographer worked so hard to put together for us:

Our wedding party traveled and sacrificed to be with us again, and we watched together, remembering the day three months before.

We prayed together and laid another stone in the altar of the Shaffer family.

We cut cake and toasted with coffee and set everyone free to enjoy ice cream sundaes.

We spent the afternoon, making the rounds and greeting everyone:

{It's always a mystery what I might be saying.}

It was a truly wonderful day that ended with a large pizza and coke {reward for three months of salads to get me back IN that dress} and the opening of generous gifts that we still appreciate and use every day!

We had no idea, that day, what would be ahead for us. The job changes, the house changes, the surgeries, the fun, the excitement, the dreams, the challenges. No idea.

It was a day of joy, and we still look back on it with much fondness. No parties today, no fifteen gallons of ice cream in the freezer, and no sitting in the salon chair being remade into a bride. But I still feel as loved and cherished and chosen by this man as I did on that day, and I celebrate that today.