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.

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...

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.

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

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.