He has done great things.

We renewed our vows last weekend.

I'm not exactly sure what I had envisioned for this celebration, but whatever I wanted was exactly what happened.  It was the perfect day.  When Andrew and I got married six years ago, I was convinced that our wedding day would be the best day of our lives, and it probably was up until that point.  But I'm really happy to think, now, that that wonderful day was just the beginning of several "best days" to come.  The day that Piper was born was a "best day", and this sixth anniversary celebration was another one.

There were many times in the last couple of years when I didn't think that we would make it to our fifth anniversary, much less to our sixth.  Though six years isn't necessarily one of the "big" or "special" anniversaries, it is the biggest and most special one to us.  This July 11th, we got to celebrate, not just the fact that we made it to year six, but that we made it to year six more in love and more grateful than we've ever been before- not in spite of the hard times, but because of them.

I complain a lot (at least in my head) about how huge and unattractive I feel because I'm nine months pregnant, but I think that when I look back at the pictures from our vow renewal ceremony years from now, I will realize that I was glowing and possibly more beautiful than I've ever been before.  There is something so precious about another life growing inside of a human being, and this life in particular is a marker or healing for us.  Our entire little family of four got to be a part of us recommitting our lives to each other and to God.

If I had to do our wedding over again, I'd most likely do a lot of things differently.  I was all about having a grand, fancy wedding at the time, but now I tend to think that the most important thing can easily get lost in the pursuit of perfect flowers, an expensive dress, and the most exquisite food.  My dress for this past weekend cost less than a tenth of my wedding dress, we had no flowers, and everyone ate sandwiches from Wal-Mart afterward (which were pretty tasty and economical, by the way).  We had no obligation to invite my mom's Great-Uncle Charlie (who doesn't actually exist, but you get my point), but we got to be with the people who have walked through our lives and our marriage with us, which happened to be about 60 people instead of 225.  We chose a lovely church for our wedding, but for renewing our vows, we got to be at this church, City Pres, that has loved us and become our home over the past four years.  And everything about all of that was perfect.  In the words of the song that we all sang together at our ceremony, truly, "He has done great things."

"We will feast in the house of Zion,

We will sing with our hearts restored,

'He has done great things,' we will say together

We will feast and weep no more!"

My greatest love on this earth

Our sweet Piper

Family.  Missed you, brother.

Two families are one.

My people.

Before "walking down the aisle" as a family

Forever, again.

Probably more pictures to come...

Minimizing the Miraculous

I remember sitting in a park in Alaska around this time last year, staring off at Denali in the distance while listening to the rush of a nearby stream that cut through the mountains and thinking simply, “This is nice.”  Not, “This is spectacular,” “What an amazing view,” or, “I’ve never seen such beautiful scenery anywhere.”  “This is nice” was all I felt.  Even in that moment, I knew that I should have been more aware of my surroundings and more appreciative of the Creator’s handiwork.  But I wasn’t.  

Continue reading here. 

I have a two-year-old.

This hardly seems possible.  Just a few days ago, I feel, we were driving to Edmond to meet Piper in the hospital.  As my mom always says about toddlerhood, "The days are long, but the years are short."   I couldn't be more thankful for this spunky, stubborn, intelligent, perceptive, kind, and beautiful gift.  Piper Anna, I love you and am so blessed to get to be your momma.

Here are a few pictures from her safari birthday party.

I made these!  Took a cake decorating class and crossed one off of my list of 30 things to do before turning 30. :)

Lots of presents to open...

"Wow this new kitchen is amazing!"

"Thank you, Papa, for building my cool new kitchen."

The girl loves her daddy (and cupcakes).

Bubbles.

A Good Life

Last week, I worked at Youth Leadership Forum, a leadership camp for high school juniors and seniors with disabilities that I've been a part of for the past six summers.  As always, camp was inspiring, fun, and exhausting.  One of the questions we helped campers ponder this summer was, "What is a good life to you?"  We, as counselors, prompted campers to think of their life after high school and to begin making decisions about housing, schooling, jobs, and other important aspects of "adult life".  While helping campers make plans for their futures, I found myself re-evaluating some of my life goals, as well.

I've been offered an opportunity to teach a blended full-day Pre-K class at a public elementary school here in Norman next year (although I technically won't be starting until October because I'll be on maternity leave).  "Blended" means that I will be teaching ten typically developing kiddos and five students with special needs in the same class.  Also, this is the first time that Norman Public Schools has offered full-day Pre-K.  (Normally, classes are split into a morning and an afternoon class.  I'll actually have the same students all day next year.)  And, for the first time in four years, I'll be at one school with the same job all day.  No more eating lunch in the car, no more switching gears and grade levels completely at noon, and only one set of lesson plans.  Y'all.  I'm sure that these are all things which most people take for granted, but for me, they're huge.  I'm also looking forward to teaching at this particular school because of the high-needs clientele of it.  I used to romanticize the idea of teaching in a school with 90+ percentage of its students qualifying for free or reduced lunch prices, and although I now better understand the many challenges that come with teaching students in poverty, I really can't wait to serve this often-overlooked population in an otherwise middle-class city and district.

Lately, I have been swinging on the pendulum between the ideas of staying home and continuing to work full-time.  For next year, I'm committed to my job.  But as Piper has gotten older, I've started to feel like I'm missing out somewhat on her life as she is at school and I am at work all day.  Admittedly, I'm not much of a newborn person, but the more interactive she has become in the past few months, the more I have wished I was around to see her developments and milestones.  We will continue to take one year at a time as far as work goes, but one thing I have decided for sure is that I am not going to continue pursuing my master's degree at this time.

This was a tough decision, and I really hate having to swallow my pride.  As I continued to think about my reasons for doing grad school, though, I realized that most of them didn't make a whole lot of sense.  Part of me wanted to get my degree because, according to Andrew's family, "the Fenricks marry up."  His brother and sister both married people who are more educated than they are, and I felt that I needed to "continue the tradition," even though it's not really a tradition and no one in his family is putting any pressure on me to do that.  Part of me wanted to get my degree because people in my profession will think I'm awesome and intelligent.  Truth be told, there are fantastic public school Pre-K teachers who have a master's degree, and there are equally good ones who do not.  Finally, I think a small part of me wanted to recreate the college experience, which, as I quickly discovered, cannot be recreated as a graduate student.  The four years of college undergraduate life truly are one-of-a-kind.  Oh, and I'm not completely sure that I want to be a reading specialist, which is what my degree would help me achieve.  Grad school is too much time and money to not be sure about something like that.  Aside from everything else, higher education is no longer an individual commitment; it is a decision that involves the whole family.  Perhaps there will be time, years down the road, when my whole family can more easily commit to this decision.  

When I think about my "good life," it is right now, watching my little girl "mow the yard" in her panties (because hey, she's potty-trained now!) with her dad.  It's having time to make supper for my family instead of popping a frozen pizza in the oven.  It's possessing energy at the end of the day to smile at Piper when she does something silly instead of getting frustrated with her because I'm out of steam.  It's saying "no" to being a stellar student so I can say "yes" to being a good teacher, wife, and mom.  And yes, sometimes it is watching Netflix instead of working on an end-of-semester presentation.  No shame in stating the obvious. :)

I'm giving birth in less than six weeks.  NBD.

Choosing to Believe

"Never mind that you are pregnant; you are just fat."

This is the voice that I hear when I first wake up in the mornings, and I struggle to turn it off all day long.  I know that the voice which I often hear the loudest speaks lies, and yet I find myself frequently believing that these lies are true, that I'm not good enough, that my worth is based on my appearance, and that beauty is a pant size or a number on a scale.  I always knew that if I were to ever get pregnant, these body image issues would be a struggle for me, but I never knew just how much I would struggle or the extent to which I would care about the perception others have of me.  I am fully aware that this pregnancy is a miracle, and I know that I should be far more grateful for it than I am, especially considering where we have been over the last few years.  I promised myself years ago that if God did choose to bless us with a baby one day, I would never complain about pregnancy.  But at times, I already find myself resenting my changing body and the good and precious gift that is growing inside of me.  Understanding that I'm not supposed to feel this way about the miraculous unfortunately ushers in a whole new realm of guilt and shame.

If I am being honest with myself, there is no number or size that would ever be "good enough."  When I was my skinniest, running marathons at a size two, I hated the way I looked.  I wanted to be thinner.  Now, I fight every day to quit comparing myself to other pregnant women, scrutinizing my belly, and trying to determine whether or not I am appropriately large or small for the number of gestational weeks that I am.  Some days, I feel as though the lack of control that I have over gaining weight and the worry that I have about losing it after baby girl comes will consume me.

My cousin had an eating disorder in high school and college.  At her thinnest, she weighed 98 pounds.  In family counseling, the therapist told her parents that this disorder couldn't be beat- that my cousin would continue to fight against negative thoughts and feelings about her body every day, nearly every hour, for the rest of her life.  She anticipated that my cousin would have to learn how to deal with it.  Forever.  "We just chose not to believe that," my aunt said.  "We chose to believe that God is bigger, and that he could heal our daughter of anything.  And He did."

We chose to believe that He is bigger.  What if I chose to believe that, too?  What if I chose to believe that perhaps I'm the one with cloudy vision, and not the people around me (particularly my husband) who tell me that I'm perfect?  What if I chose to believe, as the Dove commercial I've watched half a hundred times says, that perhaps I'm more beautiful than I think?  Or, as Eli the woodcarver tells wooden Punchinello in Max Lucado's children's book, You Are Special, that I'm infinitely valuable simply because He knows my name?

Pregnancy is a complicated thing.  It's amazing and nauseating (literally), scary, and joyful all at the same time.  What if I chose to start over tomorrow, or even tonight, and believe something different?  Change takes time, but for now, I'm working on straining to hear that still, small voice that speaks truth to me instead of believing the lies that are forever screaming in my ears.  He is bigger, and that is enough.

The trash in their backyard

We've had a whirlwind of a few months.  In the midst of preparing for a new baby, continuing to heal emotionally from some tough things in our marriage, going to grad school, raising our daughter, and working our full-time jobs, we decided to sell the first home that we bought five years ago.  There is never a good time to buy or sell a home, but I still think we were crazy!  On January 22, we put our house on the market.  Three days later, we had four offers on the house and sold it for over our asking price.  Four days after that, we made an offer on a new (to us), bigger house in Norman.  It got accepted.  We closed on that house on February 20 and moved the same weekend.  Then we closed on our old house on February 24.  We aren't exactly "settled" yet, but we are managing, and I'm learning more every day that I don't have to have the best decorations on the walls, the perfect paint colors, or the latest Pinterest project in Piper's room to have a happy home.

Before we even moved in, I was already complaining about our new neighbors to the south.  They have three yappy dogs, chickens, random boxes and wood scraps all over their backyard, and a citation from the city in their front yard.  They also have no less than four cars in their driveway and on the street at any given time.  "These are trashy people," I thought.  Though our pastor had posted a challenge on our church's website about loving our literal neighbors not even a week before we moved, I was determined to have as little to do with these people as possible.  "Maybe we could be friends with them," suggested my husband one day.  Or...maybe not.    

A couple of nights ago, we were in the backyard, enjoying the first sign of nice weather that we've had in awhile, when our neighbors came outside.  First, there was a girl about my age.  Then her fiance came out.  After that, her mother came out, eating an avocado straight out of the peel with a knife.  Next was a middle-school-aged boy.  Then his sister.  People just kept coming out of the house.  All in all, I think seven people live in a house that is much smaller than ours.  They introduced themselves, asked about us, wondered if we knew what happened to the lady who lived in the house before we moved in, and offered to help Andrew with the boxes that he was breaking down on the patio.  As the girl was talking, I began to feel smaller and smaller, embarrassed and ashamed that I had jumped to such quick conclusions about these people who now wave to us all the time and have been nothing but kind since we moved here.  The avocado lady had open heart surgery several weeks ago and had less than a 30 percent chance of living.  The rest of the family is just trying to help her out and make ends meet for themselves.  Yet, all I could see when we bought the house was the trash in their yard.

Last weekend, I shared one of my life's stories at our church's women's retreat.  It's not a pretty story, and I had been nervous about my talk for several weeks.  When I came up to the microphone and looked out at the audience of 60+ women, the two things that I wanted more than anything were for people to hear God in my words, and for them to love me in spite of my messiness.  I wanted them to extend the grace to me that I was so unwilling to extend to my neighbors.  And they did.  Beyond what I could have envisioned.

Don't all of us want that- acceptance regardless of what we've done?  Perhaps the more grace we receive, the more we understand how to give it to others.  Maybe, too, our neighbors' messes are not so ugly when we consider our own.  We might not have literal trash in our front yards or chickens in the back, but we all have garbage that we want people to overlook and simply see us.  I hope that we can become friends with our new neighbors- partly because they're nice people and deserve a chance, but mostly because people have seen past my junk and loved me anyway.

Ebenezer

A friend once told me that you can B.S. people by being a good writer.

I think that's true.  Words are powerful.  With my words, I can make people believe that I'm doing great when I'm actually miserable.  I can boldly display the parts of my life that I like, and I can carefully eliminate other, less desirable parts.  For years, I've used my blog as a journal without realizing that I was slowly starting to hide behind my words, painting a picture of myself that I wanted the world to see, and losing touch with my present (and often messy) reality.  In the past few months, I've picked up my leather journal again and processed thoughts that no one else will ever read.  I've been honest with myself without worrying about what others will see and think of me through my words.  I don't edit my writing in my journal- it's just raw emotion.  

I've thought a lot about whether I want to blog or not, and I decided that I want to keep it up, at least intermittently, for the same reason that I took a break from it initially: Words are powerful.  I'm not putting away my journal.  It will still be there for working through "the ugly," but some tales are worth telling to the world.  You don't need to know every detail.  I don't need to paint a perfect picture for you.  But I do need to keep writing in hopes that even one person's heart will be touched in reading this unfinished story of mine that has taught me so much about redemption, forgiveness, and love.

September 12.  In most ways, I wish I could completely erase it from my memory, but in every other way, it was the defining moment of my relationship with my husband.  This is one of those instances when you don't need to know every detail, but our world came crashing down that night.  Trust was broken.  We were both hurt and unsure of what to believe.  Our marriage seemed irreparable.  In the days immediately following September 12, we slept separately- not touching, not communicating, not able to be in the same house.  Piper cried a lot.  Even she knew that Mom and Dad were not okay.  Both of us sat, alone, amid a flood of tears, hopelessness, and shock.  I'm not being dramatic when I say that I have no idea how I managed to even get out of bed in the mornings, except that my 14-month-old still needed me.

Gradually, we independently began to tell a few close friends about what had happened- not out of bravery, but out of desperation.  We knew that this was something bigger than us, and we needed help.  We started going to counseling, which has helped tremendously.  And somehow, as He always does, God began to make something beautiful from the ashes.  Because the truth had come out, neither of us had anything to hide anymore.  In the past three or so months, we have learned what it means to be truly honest with each other.  More importantly, we have both experienced forgiveness in ways that we didn't know even existed.  I've found, for the first time in the 5.5 years that I've been married to my Andrew, that I am actually thankful for him.  In every great love, I that think there is always some sense of "I don't deserve you," and I've never had that until now.

It's impossible to explain the amount of healing we've had in just a few short months to anyone else.  Our marriage didn't just need to be repaired; it needed to be made new, and that is exactly what has happened.  We have recently spent many late nights on the floor in the living room, actually talking, actually praying, and actually forgiving.  Those quiet nights when no one else was around have been some of the most precious moments we've ever known.  I wonder if you know what it feels like, as you're admitting your biggest faults and ugliest mess, to have someone look you in the eye and say, "I love you.  I still choose you.  I've never been more attracted to you than I am right now."  That, friends, is freedom.

It is a miracle in itself that God chose to heal us emotionally, but it is equally miraculous that He chose to heal us physically.  I'm pregnant.  We weren't trying for another baby; we had long since given up on the idea of having a biological child.  I don't believe that God always tangibly rewards people for having great marriages or for "getting their lives together."  I definitely don't believe what people say about "just adopt and then you'll get pregnant" or "maybe you need to just stop trying and then you'll have a baby!"  (I have so many problems with both of those statements for so many reasons.)  I do believe that God does things that we don't understand, at times which make no sense to us, to people who least deserve it.  And I'm so thankful for this tiny miracle growing inside of me, defying the odds of what doctors told us was impossible.  Our prayers, over the past four years, have not fallen on deaf ears.

Today is Piper's "Gotcha Day," and as I think back over the past year of her life as an official member of our family, I can't imagine our lives without her.  She brought healing in her own sort of way by making this barren woman a mom, and she continues to make me smile and laugh (and sometimes cry and want to bang my head against the wall) every day.  Frequently, I think my heart will burst because I love her so much.  While there have been many moments that I doubted God's goodness because of our struggle with infertility, I now realize that, at the time, it was His kindness to us.  Piper is the perfect gift, and there is no other child that I would rather have as my first than our little girl.  If I had gotten pregnant four years ago, or even two years ago, we wouldn't have her.

At church, we often sing this favorite song of mine called "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."  The second verse goes like this:

Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by Thy help I've come;

And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God;

He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood.

For a long time, I used to sing that song without any idea of what an Ebenezer is.  Now, before we sing the hymn, there are two sentences in our church's Order of Worship which explain it: "An Ebenezer is a 'stone of help'.  It's a marker of God's grace in your life, when you have seen Him come through."  God gives us distinct, touchable evidences of His grace because we are a forgetful people.  This baby, for us, is that.  It's not an answer to all of our problems.  It's not an example of "getting our ducks in a row" and then waiting for God to bless us.  It's an Ebenezer, a simple reminder that He is good, that He helps desperate people, and that His grace really does bring healing.