On March 22, Andrew and I celebrated living in Boulder for a year! That same week we moved into our very own home.

In the year that we have lived here, Andrew and I have really felt at home. We’ve built a community that we truly cherish. We’ve been given jobs where we are able to use our gifts. Now, God has led us to our new home, where we can continue to plant roots in Boulder. The entire house buying process went incredibly smoothly, and we ended up buying the first house we looked at (after putting in an offer a week and a half after seeing it!). We both immediately felt at home and could picture ourselves building a family in this home. What a blessing!

And perhaps the best part – the house has a built-in climbing wall in the living room! HA! Strange but a total fit for us.

When I first saw the listing for this house, I immediately e-mailed Andrew. So amazing that this house is ours now.

On June 7, we celebrated 3 years of marriage! Our obvious milestone for our third year is the move to Colorado. We truly know and believe that God is sovereign and placed the desire to come here in our hearts for a purpose. And that purpose is to draw us closer to Himself and to pursuing a life that glorifies Him.

To celebrate 3 years, we took a Colorado-style anniversary trip — backpacking. We planned out our route and destination the night before, not knowing that the 8 mile forest service road to get to the trailhead would be closed and that feet of snowpack would meet us there as well. Not to be deterred, we hiked the dirt road and trudged through the snow sans snowshoes. Our original goal was to follow the Fall Creek Trail in the Holy Cross Wilderness to Lake Constantine. We reached the base of the trail at 5:15 p.m., over 5 hours past the original intention. Thankfully, satellite gps was still working on our handy dandy iPhones, so after 1.5 miles on the trail and the sun beginning to set, Andrew was able to locate a nearby clearing that seemed to have some extra elevation. We hiked to the top of the clearing (off trail for sure) and found the most excellent campsite. Direct view of Knob Mountain. Panoramic view of mountain peaks in the distance. Crisp, white snow dotted with trees. The perfect snow camping adventure. We cooked some spaghetti, slept for a few hours, then woke up to the warm sun and a breakfast of hashbrowns and summer sausage. Twas an awesome time with Andrew – a chance to adventure and a chance to be at peace.

A week and a half ago I got a job! My last post focused on the “beautiful uncertainty” of not knowing what God had next for me but being excited about knowing that God’s provision is perfect. And wow, how much God has blessed me! I got a job as a reading instructor at Summit Reading Center, doing one-on-one teaching with kids who are struggling in the area of reading/spelling/writing/comprehension. Last week was training, and today marks the first day of working with students. So much to learn, so many ways to grow, what an opportunity to serve. I am beyond thankful that God has given me the passions of communication and working with youth and has now led me to a professional niche to invest in and use those passions. And here’s the thing, I know that I will not be perfect for these kids, but my prayer is that their interaction with me will teach them that they are valuable and full of potential and worth.

Moving to Boulder was a leap of faith. But then again, in this life, all of our steps require faith. What a joy it is to experience God’s grace as we follow Him. The devotional I read this morning in Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest, made me smile: “Certainly is the mark of the common-sense life: gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness, it should be rather an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with surprises all the time.”

Our time so far in Boulder has been a great testimony to God’s faithfulness and provision. We’ve been visiting All Souls Church of Boulder and have already been so blessed and encouraged by the strength of the community there. Andrew is enjoying getting settled into his job, and I have been thankful to have a bit of break; this week though the job hunt has begun, and I have decided to pursue working in the education/youth field. “My career” has always been a source of angst for me, as I struggle to envision the “perfect” job. However, I am excited to see how God will direct and lead in this next chapter of my life. Here’s a blurb I wrote on one application for a Teacher’s Aide position at a local Christian school:

“I believe that God has gifted me with a personality and skill set that position me to advance His kingdom by serving children, youth and families. My personality is one that longs to nurture; I value people for who God has made them to be and seek to bring out the best in them. As a result, I thrive most in professional settings that allow me to serve and come alongside individuals to help them reach their goals. What better place to act this calling out than in a school, where all of the staff are seeking to educate children and raise them up in the knowledge of the Lord? All of my professional experiences so far in my young career have touched on different aspects of this calling in one way or another (serving children as a camp counselor, assisting students in the library, working to provide families with Christian resources, being the support representative in an office setting), but I have yet to serve directly in a school setting. I am excited to see how the Lord will use me to serve students as well as how He will use the students to challenge and grow me in return.”

I am uncertain of my path, but I am certain of God.

Moving out West has been an adventure that Andrew and I have desired to take for a long time. When God opened the door for us to go to Boulder, we took it! Our prayer is that God will use us mightily for His glory and our good. We are so excited to grow closer to one another and to Him as we start this new chapter of our marriage. [Andrew is now working for Rally Software in Boulder, and I'll be taking a little 'summer break' before the job hunt begins!]

Both Andrew and I are looking forward to and expecting a less frantic environment than city life. (Though we lived in the suburbs of D.C., we were close enough to feel its tug.) Though it’s easy to soak in the positives of such a life, I want to be intentional about the reality that many  ’go West’ to live out their own independence and escape. With this in mind, we must work to engage this culture and people with the love of Christ, even as we indulge in its pleasures (which, mind you, are of the Lord and only distorted and misused by us!). So here’s to living a God-honoring life of pleasure and joy, with the hope of being used by Him to renew and redeem the West.

Andrew and I took the train up to New York City a couple weekends ago, and I snapped this picture on the way.  I absolutely love the vivid colors and how big the sky looks. And the comfort and gentleness of the earth make me want to run, or maybe skip?

During college I messed around with Photoshop more than I do now, but I’m realizing more that I truly value and enjoy the process of creating. I wanted to impose words onto this image, to help describe what the image says to me without totally taking away from its visual impact. The word “move” popped into my head first – We’re on a train. We’re moving. And then came the opposite – “still” – the landscape and sky are quiet and calm. Still. The juxtaposition of these words speaks to a reality of life – even in our moments of stillness we are always on a path, always moving. This can be a rather depressing thought if taken as “Well, suck it up, time keeps marching on. You’re on fate’s path so just enjoy the ride and make of it what you can.” But the joy of faith in Christ is that I am on God’s path — always moving, always growing, always on a mission. Because of His sovereignty, I can be still. I am forever moving and forever still because He is forever at work and forever in control. In Him there is rest and adventure – 100% of both at the very same time. This is exciting.

We are currently going throug a series in church on callings — rethinking our jobs and vocations as callings from God to accomplish kingdom work and restoration through them. This month will focus on the “arts,” and today’s sermon drew, in part, from the life of J.R.R. Tolkien as an example of an artist whose works are saturated with the truths of creation, fall, redemption and restoration without being explicitly Christian, or even overtly “religious.” In fact, it was Tolkien’s love of story and myth that God used to draw the skeptic C.S. Lewis into a belief in Jesus. Lewis wrote the following letter explaining the change:

“What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St. Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” – “sacrifice” – “the blood of the Lamb”) – expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and as mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant”. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the other are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things.”

A passage from Isaiah 46 that I read yesterday speaks a similar theme I think. God says this to His people exiled in Babylon: “Bel bows down; Nebo stoops; their idols are on beasts and livestock; these things you carry are borne as burdens on weary beasts. They stoop; they bow down together; they cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity. Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from before your brith, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.” (Isaiah 46: 1-4). Like the Israelites who were tempted to follow after the gods and idols of Babylon for the “salvation” they promised, I so often follow the idols and “pictures of redemption” that this world offers (‘hard work will bring success,’ ‘relationships will bring security’). As God tells us through Isaiah, these idols “themselves go into captivity” and cannot save. We must embrace the only true salvation, that which is in Christ.

The above story of Lewis and Tolkien therefore seems to me to have a two-fold message, an encouragement and a challenge. Encouragement: The pattern of salvation myths we find in this world cry out for the necessity of Jesus. This is a great tool to discern the innate longings we all share and see how Jesus answers them, just as it did for Lewis. Use this to talk to people about Jesus. The challenge: Examine where in my life I have been satisfied to stop at the myth and not at the Truth behind it. As God says about the myth, the idol – “If one cries to it, it does not answer or save him from his trouble.” (Isaiah 46: 7b). But go to God, He will save.

So, Andrew and I have had a pretty awesome winter. Though we missed the huge DC snowstorm in December, we were here for the second round! Lots of fun in the snow.

It’s often the simple truths that I need to be reminded of the most frequently. One of those truths popped into my head today: God is not a means to an end, He is the end. By this I mean that when my relationship with God just becomes a tool I use to reach a desired end (even a good end like finding peace or joy or contentment), my focus has become on that end instead of on God himself. I thought about how much we miss of who God is when we only think of Him in relationship to whatever it is we are seeking to attain. We lose intimacy because it’s really all about us and not about Him at all.

Psalm 37:4 encapsulates this idea well: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”