Living in community and in a body

Our friends Rainbow and Jeff have been living with us since the end of June. It's been crazy but also fantastic. There is just something that living with another couple brings into your life than if you're living solo. It of course helps that Rainbow and I are such good friends. Apparently, according to Meyer's Briggs she is my pedagogue. I should've married her :) God sure does have a sense of humor. Ben and I are so completely opposite. In some ways I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm sure we challenge each other like no other. But sometimes the differences can be rather painful.

Living in a body rocks! I had no idea what I was missing these last 27 years. I see so clearly how God intended for us to live interdependently with one another. VERY contrary to what our American culture teaches us to be, which is VERY individualistic. I find it challenging to fight against what comes natural to me in growing up in our culture. God has taken us on a journey that we're still on. I see him directing us every step of the way. HE is placing the body parts together. It's so amazing to see this and be apart of it. It is crazy to actually be able to relate to these verses in the Bible that talk about living in a body: 1 Corinthians 12 and 14. Right now our body consists of 4 couples but I have faith that God will only add to that number whoever He wants and in His timing and in His way. These 4 couples came together completely from God. I don't see how it could've happened any other way.

Some pics of Dove and Memory, Rainbow and Jeff and their girls, Lavinia and Sunshine:

Why I like sweeping my floor more than sex.

Alright folks here it is the long anticipated for post. This is kind of a complicated issue so I guess I need to preface this post with an explanation of my journey of my perception of sex. I don't think I had a very healthy perception of sex going into marriage. I saw it as a dirty deed that had to get done I guess. My parents barely talked to me about it so I guess I got this idea that it must not be a holy act cause we didn't talk about it. Plus, what I did see was Hollywood's version of sex which is messed up. But the last 8 years of marriage for me has taught me a lot about how to have the right or healthy perception of sex. Ben (go figure) has had a lot to do with this. He kept pursuing the issue with me so I was forced to either have an unhappy marriage or figure out what the hell is wrong with me. I knew in my head that sex was made by God and there should be nothing inherently wrong with it. But I couldn't quite believe this with my heart and it showed in our sex life big time. For the first 6 years of our marriage it was the main area of contention between us. We fought about it at least once a week but usually more. It sucked. I began to resent not only Ben but sex. Uh-oh. I had to go backwards before going forwards I guess. But once I let God shine light on this painful subject I began to start healing. I began to start actually believing in my heart that sex was a GOOD thing. Imagine that. I feel like it's such a deep seeded issue in me. It's actually hard to articulate but I'm trying hard and I hope you're following me. This has been a long journey for me to get where I'm at and I'm still on that journey. Things are definitely still not perfect. Ben and I still (but more on occasion) fight about sex. And this is where the sweeping floors comes in (I know you were wondering about that). So I feel like because of my natural (or maybe unnatural) view of sex I have to continually be working out in my mind and heart what I really believe about sex. Most days I just want to sweep my floor instead. There I said it. But I definitely wouldn't say I never want to have sex it's just less frequent than I want to sweep my floors. And Ben is vice-a-versa. But when it's all said and done I see sex as vital to our relationship. And without it we would be incredibly dysfunctional. I get that. But its frustrating because I have to continually be reminding myself of this. I'll be sweeping my floors (by the way 'sweeping the floors' is just an example but a good one because I'm a bit OCD about it so it comes up a lot) and Ben will say 'do you want to have sex?' And I'll say 'Yeah, maybe, but not right now.' There's this battle always going on in my head at this point. And I know that we should. So usually (these days but not in the past-and this is why it's been a journey) I will say yes because I know that it is so good for us. But my initial reaction is no. Does this even make any sense? I hope so cause if not I'm gonna feel stupid. I think I was peer pressured into posting but all in good will. I need a little kick in the pants once in awhile to just be real and not care what people might think of me. So hopefully this explains some of why I like sweeping my floors more than sex.

The End.
Or the beginning???

ps post your thoughts people cause I'm dying to know what you all are thinking :) You know who you are.

4th of July parade

I know this is backtracking quite a bit but I'm mostly putting these up for my Mom and sister to see. Dove, Eden and Memory were apart of the parade in Kirkland this year. We normally do the Bothell parade but our neighbor owns a Bridal shop and asked if the girls would model her dresses in the parade. They had a good time, especially Dove. She really got into it as you will see. They were supposed to wave and hand out candy. Normally the candy is thrown, but some kid last year got hit in the eye so they banned the throwing part. Although I heard people still threw the candy. All and all it was a sacrifice for me because normally we come away with bags of candy and this year I had to give it out :)

Eden on a date with her Dad

Drinking Bubble Tea with tapioca balls mmmmm...

Kicking and Screaming

Ben and I have created a schedule or rhythm for our day to day lives in an effort to live out our lives more purposefully. We have always had goals for our family but realized very little of these goals were actually being reached without making them apart of our daily schedule. So this is where the kicking and screaming comes in. I do not naturally swing with schedules. They make me feel claustrophobic. But I realized that I CAN adapt but there just will be kicking and screaming going on. And I WILL adapt because I know that big-picture wise this is better for our family as a whole. We've been doing this for the past six months and its been a process. I don't always even realize I haven't been following my schedule until Ben asks me how its going. Some days I forget that there was a schedule. Other days I just throw the schedule out because my house is messy and I want to clean it. Can you tell I don't naturally put a whole lot of worth in a schedule? But I put a lot of worth in a clean house:) However, if I keep forcing myself to see the bigger picture then there is a ton of worth in having a schedule. A few of the things that we have on our weekly schedule are:
walks/exercise with Dove & Eden,
library,
family swim,
homeschooling,
reading time,
date night (Ben and I),
kids date night w/ Dad,
Seven raquetball w/ Ben,
kids discipleship
Every so often we tweak our schedule but these things mostly stay the same.

Mere Christianity: Faith

I read Mere Christianity about 10 years ago and I just started reading it again. I feel like I'm reading it for the first time because I don't remember much from the first time I read it. I was only 18 and distracted, I guess. I've grown a lot since then. And I wanted to share as best as I can what that looks like now in regards to my faith. Since going through The Story Formed Life discipleship class several times over the last 9 months I feel like my faith was challenged a lot. I was forced to look at what I believe or don't believe and to what degree do I believe it. This caused a lot of doubts in my heart in regards to my faith in God and the Bible. But I feel like God took me through that and produced an even stronger faith than I ever had. Reading C.S. Lewis' chapter on Faith help put some of those experiences into words for me. It helped me understand what was really going on.

"It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other."

"Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."

"That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith."

Since starting to function as a body with other believers I've noticed that this also increases my faith. God knew what He was talking about I guess;)

Hmmmmm...Fasting

I don't know why it's so hard for me to keep up a blog, but it is!

Part of it is I like to use pictures to tell stuff and all our pics are on Ben's computer and so it's harder to find time to transfer the pics to my computer.

I'd thought I'd just go for it anyways...

Ben and I started the Master Cleanse last Wednesday and only made it to Sunday night. We made buffalo chicken strips and ate them together at 11pm. Believe me, food NEVER tasted so good. It was almost worth it for just that moment. So the reason why we cut it short was that neither one of us was doing it for the cleanse part, well at least that wasn't our first reason for doing it. And if you don't know anything about the Master Cleanse your supposed to do it for 10 days to have the full effect. (I know there's a lot of controversy on whether or not the thing even works or is dangerous...etc.) We both realized that the reason we were doing it was more for fasting purposes. And after four days we both felt that it served its purpose. That was the first time that I ever did any type of hard-core fasting. (I guess it's not as hard-core as not eating anything) Well, I learned a ton! And Ben and I both agreed that we wanted to do something like this on a more regular basis. I learned all the ways I viewed food that were healthy and unhealthy. It made me realize that in a land of plenty (and our human nature) it is so easy to overdue things and use them for the wrong reasons. And I know for me that happens with more than just food. I hope that I can hold onto the things that I've learned. One way to make sure that happens is to keep fasting on a regular basis from things. It's only when you take things away that you realize what a hold it had on you to begin with.