Life in May

Wow - there have been so many life changes in May for us!

Reed graduated on May 14th and I honestly was teary when he walked across, which is so odd for me cause I'm not a usually hugely sentimental person. But I guess it was just the significance of his walk and journey through school. It wasn't the typically get in and out within 4 or maybe 5 years. Nope, he started this process when he was 18 and is now completing it at 27. And that's not a bad thing at all. God has used that time in some incredible and amazing ways. Reed and I wouldn't be married today if it wasn't for this "journey" in his life. Also, Reed wouldn't be the man he is today if he hadn't been refined through this undergrad journey. I can't even describe it, it just is truly amazing how much God has refined Reed into an amazing man through this whole process.

Now that he's done with this path of the journey, we've kind of been at a loss for what the next step is. Reed has been looking for jobs for months with no avail. He's even had some amazing interviews, where he really felt good about the job, but he keeps getting the response that he doesn't have enough experience. It's the "2 years of experience spiral". If no one gives you a job because you don't have experience, then you never end up getting the experience you need to in order to get a job at all. We know that God will provide for us, but during this time of job hunting we've seen lots of closed doors. So with that, we've started to look into grad school and found a masters in journalism program at UNT that has specific specializations in News, Media, and PUBLISHING. For those of you that may not know, that's Reed's dream job. We're really excited about the possibility of him going to pursue his passion and dream. Even if it takes another two years, its well worth it if it puts him in a position to get the job he wants.

So now its time to just pray and be diligent in the application process to grad school. We also are praying for patience in our hearts. We feel ready to move on to "next steps" in our lives, but are wondering if we should hold off on things like a family until grad school is over. These are really hard things to work out and its really hard to know when we're being cautious about having a family in a wise way, or if we are ignoring God's calling. Either way, we need clarity and peace. We need to not worry about what's next, but look at where we are with assurance that we're right where we are supposed to be, in God's hands.

Weight Loss

I know, its a touchy topic cause all of us girls feel like we need to lose weight, but if you mention you want to, people are convinced you have a low self esteem and that you should just "love yourself the way you are".

Well, I'm not fine with the way I am because I'm officially overweight and I'm ready to do something about it. I've felt like this for a while and have done really good for a couple of weeks and then back slid. I think the back slides happen mostly because I was keeping myself accountable with, well, myself. And that never really works.

With that I want to get back to a healthy weight for my height, build, etc. I don't want to be a crazy 120 pounder, but I want to lost about 17 pounds.

Wow.

That's a lot. Ugh. I recently looked at some pictures of myself and realized that I have a skewed perception of myself. I keep thinking of myself as that fit 19 year old. But the fact is I can't stay fit and at a good weight without working a lot harder at it. I sit at a desk for 8-11 hours a day (sure I get up to go to the restroom, but I don't know that that really counts) and I'm starting to realize I can't eat the same way I did when I was 19 and a lot more active. Also, I need to start exercising and just getting my overall health back.

So here's to my May resolution. I'm also putting a status tracker on my blog to help you guys (anyone who still reads this) track my progress. I think that will give me a little bit of healthy motivation knowing you guys are tracking my progress...eek!

Okay, thanks for listening...I just needed to get that out there.

My Wonderful Husband

I have the greatest guy around...seriously, he rocks. I don't know if I've shared this with everyone but a couple of weeks ago I had a mole removed and the biopsy came back as "dysplastic", which basically means my doctor believed it was pre-cancerous. They asked me to come back in so that they could perform a procedure to remove more of the mole, i.e. take a chunk out of my leg. It literally was a chunk.

Sorry if I made anyone queasy just then.

I'm a pretty big wimp, so when I knew I'd have to get numbed up real good for the chunk AND that stitches would be involved, I asked Reed's mom to come with me to help me get through. The worst part about it was the numbing medicine. It hurt pretty dang bad when she put the numbing shots in, but after that it was smooth sailing...I literally couldn't feel a thing. After the procedure I was told to keep it constantly moist with bacitracin, which is an antibiotic, and that I needed to keep it bandaged. Well the mole happened to be on the back of my thigh, in just the right spot to where it is in no way easy to look at, let alone take care of.

So my sweet husband has been cleaning it for me every day and I'm happy to say that it is looking like there will be minimal scarring!! Hurray!! Cancer free and no ugly scars!! I'm thankful that Reed takes such good care of me, that he doesn't mind looking at the ugly stitches or blood. I'm also thankful that he settles me when I freak out. For instance, I was all scared that my skin would grow over my stitches because they were constantly laying flat, as I sit most of the day and the weight of my thigh makes them lay flat against the chair. It literally freaked me out for an entire day. I called my sister, my mom, everyone. When I got home that night I made sure that Reed could pull them all up easily. I truly thought they would've grown into my thigh, and even though Reed thought I was a little crazy, he still did it for me, just to ease my mind. Oh and guess what, they were not growing into my skin.

And now not only do I not have stitches growing into my leg, but I also have a new found appreciation for my husband's patience and kindness. He is pretty much amazing :)

Also, in a COMPLETELY UNRELATED story, but similar topic of how Reed is patient and so sweet to me, especially in the little moments that I freak out or worry; the other day I went to get my haircut at a walk-in where my favorite hairdresser works. When I got there, she was with another customer and a different hairstylist, who happened to be a cute old lady, greeted me at the front. I told her I wanted to wait for Hue, my favorite, and I sat down feeling so mean and incredibly guilty. This cute, smiling, warm grandma just got turned down by me. I texted Reed about it and he replied,

"It's ok, repeat business is part of their job, if you were her customer she would want you to wait for her, I'm sure she understands."

Leave it to me to worry about hurting a random stranger's feelings and leave it to my wonderful husband to send me a sweet and gentle response assuring me that it's okay.

I just love him :) The end.

Updates!!

I can't believe how bad I've been at updating!! I took pictures and everything last weekend so that I could show you all the new building that OurCalling is blessed with. We even had our first woman's bible study there and it was AMAZING!! So stayed tuned, I'm going to be writing about last weekend soon :)

Happy Friday!!

I was blessed to have a work lunch today where this bad boy was served as our dessert:

This is a fresh strawberry shortcake from the Grand Lux Cafe in Dallas. Oh my goodness, it was AMAZING!

With that, I should probably join our firm's "20 Ton" weight loss challenge cause lately I've just been eating all of these not so healthy foods. At least I thoroughly enjoyed them :)

Oh yeah and I'm running a 5K on Sunday, so that kind of off-sets it right??

The Universe is Under Your Command

Here are a couple things that are going on in the hearts of the Milliken unit lately:

• The Unknown: Reed's job situation is completely unknown. There are no leads, there are no prospects. We don't even know the plan for the summer. It's a crazy feeling to not know. BUT, I do know that God promised that He has a plan for us. God's not a liar. Reed is being faithful in his search and other than that, all we need to do is believe that God keeps His promises. That sounds really beautiful and peaceful, doesn't it? Trusting God keeps His promises has looked messy in my life...involving a lot of tears and fear. I don't know if I can adequately describe how BIG of a thing this is for us. Reed feels the weight of this burden and is fighting the urge to feel defeated and inadequate. And for me, my biggest dream for us is to just have a definite purpose and directions...maybe cause right now we don't. If you wanted to know something to pray for us about, this would be requests 1-3.

Jeremiah 29:11

'For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.

• The Homeless: God is inexplicably gracious to allow us to be a part of what He is doing in the hearts of the homeless in Dallas. OurCalling recently signed a lease for a BUILDING!! We will be able to have our bible studies in a quiet environment that will allow us to better focus our study and not get distracted by the constant coffee shop atmosphere. ALSO, we will have a place to have mentoring relationships, teach celebrate recovery for those healing from addictions and SO much more (like a place to store and organize all of the boxes of things God has provided to us!). Crazy thing is, we signed the lease last Wednesday and then on SATURDAY we had a huge volunteer event and half of the volunteers helped us move out of our storage units into the new building. God is so perfect in His timing. That would have taken our normal labor force of volunteers weeks to accomplish. It happened on Saturday from 10-2.

• Missing Boerne: I don't know that I really need to explain missing my family. I just do. I miss my mom and being able to run around Boerne with her and talk to her. I miss my sister, my best friend, my confidant. We could talk about anything together. And we share clothes and that is so much fun :) I miss my brother and his family. I just want to snatch them all up and give them bear hugs. I miss Boerne in the spring. Its insanely beautiful and just thinking about the hill country gives me a sense of joy, peace and contentment.

• Running: We are running a 5K with my friend Maria this weekend!! More pictures to come :) I'm super excited and ready to run a race with my cute hubby :) He promised he would run the race with me, which is sweet because I know how fast he can run.

That's a little glimpse at our lives right now.

Running!!

Running is my new/old favorite thing.

I've always loved running but couldn't always do it because of health reasons...that pesky chronic mono.

Lately I've been running a lot more and was a week away from running a 10K before I got a nasty sinus infection that put me in bed for three days (including missing work, which is never a good feeling) Is it weird that I still feel guilty calling into work, even when I'm legitimately sick?? Not to get off topic, but seriously!!

Anyways, back on topic. I was kind of bummed this weekend that I couldn't run my race, BUT I realized that that's just silly because I've had so much victory in my running that I'm not going to let a week and a half of not running blind me of all that God has blessed me with.

For instance, did you know that the weekend before I got sick I ran 5.35 miles!! I ran for an hour straight!!

I got home from running and hung out with a friend who commented, "How do you have energy after running" and I honestly replied, "I don't know, God just is letting me do these things. He is so good to let me run".

I'm appreciating running now because I'm realizing that its only by God's grace that I'm staying healthy while doing it. The last time I got mono was because I was training for a half marathon, so its pretty spectacular that I've been running since mid-January and I haven't had a huge bought of just pure mono. Sure the sinus infection was magnified by my suppressed immune system (that's my fancy pants new term for chronic mono), BUT it is almost gone and things haven't drawn out for more than one week.

For me, that's saying something. That's God saying, "My mercy and grace is sufficient in all things". Even those little things like running :)

I'm a good blog stalker...

But not a good blog poster...

I really do need to do a better job of keeping everyone in the loop. I've decided I need to start writing shorter posts...to quote Michael Scott - "KISS. Keep it simple stupid". Well actually Dwight used the quote when taking Ryan out for his first sales call: "Michael says KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. Hurts my feelings every time." Haha. Oh the Office, makes me smile :)

As far as life, work has been busy and chaotic (or at least it makes my life feel chaotic). More than it simply taking all my time, its really that work is totally stressing me out. This past week I had 4 different clients that I needed to wrap up...but with there only being 24 hours in a day and I need to sleep, it just wasn't possible to finish each one. So I feel like a disappointment. Like I can't deliver. In reality, I can't, its just not possible. Sometimes I get frustrated that I'm even put in the position, when I really don't have any control. I end up having to tell one of my managers, "Sorry, I can't do this cause the audit partner wants everything done for this other client in two days."

Everyone at work is experiencing this. So its not just me. But still, I really don't like what it does to me. I lose sleep. I feel guilty for working on one client over another (yes, you read that right I feel guilty for working). I can't spend quality time with my husband. And friends? What friends? I know I shouldn't complain, but work is just tough now. There is no way of getting around it. My peers and I are all just plain burnt out. And it makes you question your purpose in working so much...are we living to work or working to live?

Two more weeks and hopefully everything will settle down...hopefully. Actually, I'll be safe and say it'll probably be three more weeks...