Monday, December 29, 2008

Finding Wisdom in Marriage

It has been one month today since I tied the knot so to speak and entered into one of the most wonderfully challenging stages of life. In the past month I have a learned a few things that I would like to share, realizing that one month makes me no more than a beginner and no more excused from learning a ton. So here are the top ten:

1. Wow, and I thought toddlers were selfish. I had no idea how much self I needed to die to, marriage has a way of showing how truly selfish I am.

2. Morning breath is terrible and I am not talking about his. I never thought I had it, but there is something about waking up to someone in the morning that makes you frighteningly aware of the foul odor escaping your own mouth.

3. The Team. I did not realize how extraordinary it would be to always have someone by your side living practically every moment with you. Praying, Worshiping, Going into battle, Eating, and Laughing will never be the same again.

4. Guys are so strange. Not only do they have some of the funniest looking feet I have ever seen but I really do think they are from a different planet. What fun, I feel like I am learning a new culture every day.

5. Communication, Communication, Communication. I cannot take credit for this lesson, but I want to thank all of you who taught me this before we were married. I had no idea two people would need to talk so much. I love it!

6. Compromise. I thought I understood the definition of this word, but now I realize that I was overly confident. The truth is that I have had to give in on a more things in the last month than has been required of me in my entire life.

7. Husband. I have to admit that I still can not recognize my own voice as it introduces Tucker as my husband to friends and family, such a great yet big change.

8. Love. I have been amazed to discover how much love can change in such a short time. I am positive that I have just begun to brush the surface of loving Tucker as I have been called to love him.

9. Cooking. How do you know what to cook? I have been blessed to be in our parents' homes for the last few weeks, but in the number of days I spent cooking I have run out of new meal ideas. I feel like everything I ate as a child has been forgotten. Hopefully, this is one of those super powers you get as you spend more years in marriage, the power to create delicious meals out of nothing.

10. Learning what unity really means. I am so excited to unite more with Tuck in every aspect of my life. God's design takes my breath away. I can only imagine what the future years will bring. Who knows, maybe we will become one of those couples that can finish each others sentences and yet I know it is so much more.

Thank you all for your love and support of Tuck and I.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Redefining Discipleship

Life is full of trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows, laughter and mourning, and a constant shifting of sands that leaves us wondering at which point we will stand on solid ground. As I prepare for marriage, it is amazing to me that two lives consistent of such uncertainty can come together, striving for complete unity and intimacy...

Now lets move beyond the marriage relationship, beyond parental relationships and broaden our sense of unity to those outside our immediate circles. Can we ride on the unreliable road of life with others who are not within our natural circle of influence? Can we succeed, rejoice, suffer, and fail with others who may never give to us in return? Can we make disciples?

I am beginning to understand with a little more empathy the lamentations of Paul's letters to the churches he invested in. I can hear the cry in Chris'ts voice a little more clearly when he inquired as to why the three in the Garden could not keep watch with him for even an hour. I am beginning to understand that discipleship is more than just preaching or teaching. Discipleship is hard. Discipleship comes with sweat and tears, because it is more than just teaching a lesson once a week. To truly and intentionally disciple, you have to live life with strangers. When they fail, you fail. When they succeed, you succeed. When they are filled with sorrow, you are filled with sorrow. When they rejoice, you rejoice with them. Discipleship is taking a stranger alongside you and walking along the narrow road to eternal life, and through the journey realizing that that stranger becomes closer than a brother.

It is a hard command to obey, the last commandmant Christ gave, and maybe he gave it at the end so that all who had followed him would understand the true definition of making disciples of all nations. Maybe the hardest part of it all is knowing that there will always be people you will learn to love, walk with and then they will walk away and never look back. The question is, are we willing to suffer that loss so that the rest may find abundant life?

Just a thought...

Monday, September 8, 2008

The real Tucker and Pam


Tucker and I decided to take some engagement pictures, so I decided the honest thing to do would be to post the picture that most represents our relationship and not the obviously staged ones. Maybe not the most photogenic, but definitely the most representative.

Blindsided by Discipleship

After so many months of negligence, I have decided to write about that one thing that has taken me away from the blog community this summer, discipleship. This past year, I have spent hours contemplating the commission that I have based my life upon, "Go therefore into all the world and make disciples . . . .", and finding myself stopped short by this 9 letter word. After many meetings of strategy talks and sessions of verbally processing through all the different ways to disciple, I truly believe that God interrupted it by placing me in a summer where only Christ-like discipleship could happen.

I spent my summer living with and among 8 different summer interns who taught me what it is to love people enough to truly disciple them. What is discipleship anyway, I think I have finally figured it out. I believe disicipleship is loving people enough to live their life with them, and allow them to live yours so that you can learn how to walk with Christ together. I know, my definition is much more complicated then a weekly bible study, but I think that it is exactly what we have been taught by Christ himself. As I lived life daily with these 8 amazing followers of Christ, what I have learned about prayer, worship, obedience and freedom naturally were taught. How to walk with supernatural faith in the Holy Spirit was practiced. And a desire for more intimacy for the Lord was attained together. I must say that I walked away this summer blessed, blessed to see 8 amazing warriors for Christ want more of the Lord, and finding myself starving for more as well.

So, I guess what I have been told about not needing a seminary degree to teach people how to love God and people is true. But Love is absolutely vital, and without the Holy Spirit taking my flesh over, that love is impossible. Get ready to dance over all of the "GOD IS SO GOOD" moments yet to come.

Monday, May 26, 2008

A Call to Love


" Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,
that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,
so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.
"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."
This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. "
~Ephesians 5:25-33

I am Engaged


Many of you have written asking me to tell the story of my engagement, unfortunately I forgot my camera, so you will have to wait a little longer for pictures. I hope that this will do for now.

Tucker Martin is from Georgia, and has some good old southern roots. He attended the Missionary Training School in Oaxaca, Mexico for the 2007-2008 school year. I have known him since September, but we just recently started seeking God about marrying one another, and officially started seeing each other in March. These last couple of months have been incredible as I have waited on the Lord in this and have sought his glory over everything else. My prayer from the beginning has been that we would both fall more in love with the Lord as we got to know each other, and I still feel like I am falling more in love with Jesus as I fall in love with him.

May 21st 2008, Wednesday, Tucker picked me up and handed me a bouquet of red roses, it was our date day and I was so excited to see him. We jumped into a car that he had borrowed for the day and drove about 20 minutes up the road to a river running through a ravine that we had been told about. As we drove and talked, we scanned the river to find the "perfect" spot. Then we found it, the view overlooked the Oaxacan mountains and as you drew close to the river you saw it collect in peaceful pools following small trickling waterfalls. We decided to stop and hike down to the river. It was so peaceful and I found myself wanting to know what God had been teaching Tucker that week.

He opened the bible to Ephesians 5:25 and began to read through the end. The passage calls husbands to love their wife as Christ loves the church, giving sacrificially of himself so that she will be pure and blameless. Immediately my mind began to apply the words of Paul to our church planting movement, I was strategizing about how to plant churches that were immersed in this kind of love when Tucker went down on one knee. I could hardly breathe as he told me that he loved me and wanted to love me like this passage called him to for the rest of his life. I felt like I was in a movie, while the reality of the ecstatic joy surfacing in my heart became real.

When he placed the ring on my finger a few minutes later, I sat taking in the legacy of love that decorated my hand. His mom had offered him the ring after I visited with his family in April, it was the same ring that his father, Mr. Greg, had used to ask for Miss Donna's hand many years ago. There was such a spirit of thankfulness and joy as we sat next to that peaceful river. The urgency to praise the Lord came quickly, and as I strummed the strings of the guitar and praises began to rise from our lips to His ears, the presence of the Lord filled that place. I will never forget sitting on that stone in the middle of the Oaxacan Mountains, worshipping and praying to the Lord of lords with my husband to be. Thank you for celebrating this with me. I pray that we will learn to love each other like Christ calls us to, and that many will embrace Christ's love through the testimony of the life of unity and love He has called us to. Your prayers are much needed and priceless to us, I can not wait to introduce him to all of you back at home.

I love you all.
Pam

Friday, May 2, 2008

Miracle from Boulder





Praise God, I have a new hard drive and I am all set to go.



At the beginning of April my family came together for the first time in years to celebrate the life of my aunt Barbara who had passed away in late March. I returned to Colorado from Oaxaca and was greeted by an environment of incredible unity that can only be attributed to answered prayer and the work of the Spirit to unite my family. My two beautiful cousins from New York came for their mother's funeral, and I knew that barb would have been ecstatic to see us all together again after 12 long years.

My aunt had fought against schizophrenia for most of her adult life and unlike my mother and my auntie, who can separate Barb's life by the time in her life when she became "sick", I only knew my mom's older sister in this confused state. My aunt Barbara was an artist, an extraordinary artist, who expressed the way she viewed the world around her through sketches, water colors, inks, and other modes of art. After my aunt was diagnosed, she found it more difficult to artistically express herself due to the medications she took that caused her hands to shake. I never feared Barbara, but I always sensed that she felt trapped inside a world of voices unable to separate external reality from the internal.
My family had prayed for freedom for my aunt for years, however I think it was my mom's oldest sister, my aunt Carol, who had tasted the saltiness of her own tears as she mourned over Barb's imprisonment. I still remember the night I found out about my aunt's death. I went outside under the Oaxaca sky and wept, wondering if she had ever known the heart of the Savior who had given everything for her ultimate freedom. I wept because I had no idea if I would ever see Barb again. I wept because I didn't know if I would ever be able to harmonize with Barb again as she hit notes that were literally impossible to reach in her high soprano vibrato. I wept because I would miss the socks hanging from the Christmas tree, her little gifts of love. I wept because I didn't know if she would ever experience true freedom from the prison her mind had become.
And then God answered my weeping and dried the tears of my family. From the mental hospital my dear aunt had lived in for the past two years came stories of an extraordinary love. Barbara had spent her last years loving the unlovable of this world through the power of Christ. She prayed for those in pain, sang hymns to those in despair, pushed the wheel-chair bound to eat with her, and showed the love of Christ tangibly to the least-loved of our society. Even after her death, the celebration of Barb's life and the freedom she had found through Christ was a testimony to many who attended her funeral. A handful of family friends, co-workers, and even family members acknowledged a need to know the one true living God who could set Barbara free. Thank you Jesus, you are so good. And I praise you because now yours is the only voice that Barb is hearing, and I know that her voice is ringing in praise to you.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Las Botijas




This last Saturday the CPT was able to spend the afternoon harvesting botijas. A man in the village of Yucunama taught us how to dig into the dirt and find tons of these little creatures hanging from the walls of the tunnels they live in. The process was very exciting, but the best part of the day was sharing these delightful little snacks with the rest of the gringos (white folks) on the base. Ok, I know that you are dieing to know what a botija is, a botija is an ant, but a very special kind of ant. These ants spend their lives collecting nectar for all the other ants to drink. This nectar is collected in their behinds. So, a botija, is an ant with a large hinnie filled with juice. In order to eat these ants, you simply suck the juice out of their booties and enjoy the delicious flavor. Some of you may be feeling a little nauseous at this point. But I want to tell you with an honest heart that I enjoy them, it kind of tastes like fermented grape/apple juice.


This ant spends its life giving to others. I have thought about how blessed we are to have such a colony around us. The first church mentioned in Acts is painted much like a colony of believers: giving to those who had need. Let us remember to live in loving and generous giving as we learn to be the body together.
" And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. " ~Acts 2:44-47

Monday, March 3, 2008

Ezra; A True History Maker

This past week I have been reading the book of Ezra, it has greatly impacted by the testimony of this mighty man of God. He saw the unfaithfulness of the Isrealites and was broken over it. Ezra wept and threw himself down before the house of God over the sin of His people, seeing the heart of God and pleading for his people over their disobedience He saught change. While he was mourning over this , a large crowd of Israelite men, women and children gathered around him and began to weep along with Ezra. Through a heart for righteousness of this priest of God, Israel began to purge themselves of this sin.
As I have thought about this I have been convicted by the heart of this man. Do I weep over the sin of my people and the judgement that will one day come on them from a Just God? The answer is no. I pray for this type of spirit for purity, the kind that abhors sin like God does, but also loves the sinner more than life itself.
I have also been challenged to pray for such a man to be raised up among the people of this colorful town. Only through true repentance will Tlaxiaco see transformation and recognize it's purpose the King of kings has for it. I pray that the Lord would take His rightful thrown over this place. However, I know, just like Ezra, that it must start in my life.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Just a Splash of Color on my 20th




The small, humble room with chairs and mirrors looked inviting from the Oaxacan streets. It was my 20th birthday and I was ready to do something I had never done before, a whole new look to accompany the end of my teenage years. My friend and I walked into this small hair salon ready to celebrate completing another year with a little change. After talking to the middle aged woman about what I envisioned for my new look, I sat down in the revolving chair waiting for the transformation process to begin. CHOP! " Well that is definitely higher than my shoulders," I thought to myself, simultaneously convincing my racing thoughts that this is exactly what I wanted. The short cute layers were definitely a change, but I decided that I liked it, and after all, hair always grows.


Then the dye came. The thin, subtle red streaks that I had timidly requested revealed themselves to be large thick stripes of red; six to be exact, three on each side. Then I laughed, okay, well first I cried due to the shock of my new punk rocker look, and then I laughed. It was just so funny.

You live and learn, and then you never choose to take a new risk with your hair in a small whole in the wall salon in the middle of Mexico. We bought another box of dye and made the stripes much more subtle. My friend's perm that ended up leaving her hair looking similar in likeness to a wet poodle came out when she washed it. And I now have a neat hat that I used to cover my red streaked head walking away from the salon to remember the excitement of the day. It was worth it, and I am so glad that I can add this to the memories I have in this incredible country. I am excited to grow and become more of the woman God desires me to be, and that is a transformation worth waiting for. But most of all, I am learning to see myself through Christ's eyes. And when you find your beauty in Christ, red streaks or not, it takes your breath away.

Monday, February 4, 2008


Living alone these last few days has been a very new experience for me. I feel the Holy Spirit very near to me when feelings of loneliness begin to creep in. It has been truly amazing. This view of the market town of Tlaxiaco was taken from the side of my apartment. The passion and desire to pray has begun to grow in me as I see Tlaxiaco every morning from my window. Prayer is so powerful, my desire is to grow in going to my knees in prayer before the Lord. I truly believe that it is only by prayer that the battles will be won in Oaxaca. Please keep praying for Tlaxiaco and all the Lord is doing here; for open minds, hearts, and freed lives. Freedom for Tlaxiaco, to walk in the life which Christ gave us through His resurrection.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Truth will set you free!

I was sent some more verses about truth that I wanted to share with all of you, they encouraged me so much that I knew I could not keep them to myself:


"So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples,
and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." ~John 8:31-32



"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." ~ Philippians 4:8

I am moving into a small apartment tomorrow in the center of town. It will be the first time in my life that I have lived alone. Truth be told I am a little nervous as I think about it tonight. In this I will need to cling to God and His truth, please keep me accountable in this. I pray that my time in this small cuartito will be one of incredible opportunities to shine as a bright light (phil. 2:15) and serve my neighbors in love. Pictures of my new room coming soon.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Philippians 4:13

Phi 4:13 I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

The monotonous words "I can't do this" seemed to run through my mind continually, until finally I heard my own voice speak them with resounding resignation. The lies the enemy had planted in my head had been accepted for so long in my heart that they had become accepted by me as fact. The more I believed Satan's lies the more I felt I had come to a point of complete burn out and failure. The joy of the life I was living, a life of excitement in seeing people meet with the Lord face to face and begin to follow Him, disappeared and instead I began to feel great discouragement and dissapointment in myself as a church planter. This is the bondage in walking in the lies of the enemy. I truly believe that too many Christians today are falling into the trap of accepting these lies and fighting to minister while believing them. At first we try to ignore them, and by our own strength attempt to drown them out. But I have learned in the last months that the great deceiver will only be quieted when truth becomes our weapon of defense. Ephesians 6:14 tells us to "stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth" and to take the "sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Truth will set you free from any chains of doubt and discouragement.
It was only when I began to speak the simple truth found in Philippians 4:13 against the lie of my inability was I able to find freedom from the heavy yoke it placed on my life and ministry. I believe that too many Christians are walking in slavery because they have allowed shackles to be placed around their hands and feet as they open their ears and hearts to the lies of the enemy. We need to learn to slam all doors shut to tactics of deceit and walk with the authority the Lord has given us. In the desert Jesus stood firm against the temptations of the devil by fighting with the truth of the Living God. Let us also write God's word on our hearts and dress ourselves in the armor we have been given to go into battle. If we are not free ourselves, how are we to bring freedom to others who are walking in captivity. I challenge you my brothers to;
Gal 5:1 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
I want to walk in truth. As I walk in truth I have found that the people I disciple are beginning to find freedom from truth as well. God has not set us on His path to watch us fail, but to use us to let His kingdom come and exalt His name from every nation. I am here because I have a big Daddy who cherishes me, delights in me, and strengthens me to do His work. I have all I need to make disciples of all nations because I have His Holy Spirit. Amen.

Bienvenidos

I want to personally invite each and every one of you to be a part of my adventures in Oaxaca, Mexico and wherever the Lord may take me. This is a place to rejoice together, share concerns, struggles, laughter, prayers, and wrestle with the task of how to complete the Great Commission we have all been called to be a part of. I pray that through this site you will all gain a passion for the people who have never heard about the transforming love of Jesus Christ. I am so excited to start this, and ready to lay down my own pride to share myself and this work with you vulnerably. As we all strive to run this race to completion, let us encourage one another to the finish line. On your mark, get set, GO!