icky feeling

So when Josh and I talk about our experience in Hamilton--where we were living during the majority of the pregnancy we get an icky feeling. It wasn't always that way. I think when I began seminary there in the fall, I was so caught up in my extended college experience that I was unaware of a lot of reality. Come on, i didn't have to worry about having money to eat: ate at the cafeteria, or living expenses or anything, it was all paid for by student loans at the beginning of the semester. All I had to do was go to class, study with my roomate Kaitlyn, goof around with our friend Kerry and look forward to my Rhode Island weekends with Josh.

In anticipation or our upcoming marriage we looked everywhere for a place to live finding to our surprise nothing that was affordable. Campus living was even too much! I'm not going to tell this whole story mainly because I'd like to (though I do believe that this experience gave us a firm foundation for our marriage) erase Hamilton from my memories. I know harsh right?

SO I found this flier in the mailroom for a live-in position that said 15 hours a week of work in exchange for a free place to live. Nothing in life is free. Nothing. Apart from the grace of God.. and perhaps free hotdogs and pop from a church outreach!

Hamilton was so so so incredibly hard. People say that the first year of marriage is the hardest: yeah right, that was the easy part. It was truly our marriage and our desperate love for God and each other that kept up afloat.

I'm reading this book "Same kind of different as me" and honestly when i recall our experience in Hamilton, I feel like Denver before he came to Ft. Worth. Though slavery was "over" in America, he was still picking cotton in exchange for a free place to live (and food and things). The Man said I'll give you this house and this food and you can just pay me back through picking cotton. But the debt was never paid off, it couldn't be! The Man even stopped weighing the cotton, just said that he owed him. So day in and day out he'd pick and pick and it didn't matter how hard he worked, he was always indebted to the Man.

School (the reason that we moved up there in the first place), wasn't going as well as I thought. I felt like even though Gordon Conwell is a good name and there are a lot of distinguished and recognized professors there, I just wasn't challenged like i wanted to be. Many people i encountered loved to debate and challenge each other on matters of theology for countless hours a day. And though there is nothing wrong with growing intellectually, I longed for practicality... and to learn things that I hadn't already been taught in undergrad. Josh and I did make some friends up there, but not a full community to support and help us in our faith--which was incredibly challenging. I actually didn't realize how much i took for granted a solid community. I took my friends at Renaissance Church for granted thats for sure, and thought that we could find a community like that anywhere.

In the face of all of this loneliness Josh and I seemed to be in a funk. Despite reading the Bible, and oodles of books on theology, attending a church that though it lacked ...love.. had great teaching, going to class (Josh was auditing one w/ me), we felt SO far away from God. It was so dark ... we finally thought you know what? i'd rather be blissfully ignorant of the whole of church history and be close to God then to just study and study and study and have just that...words and thoughts and concepts in my head. This is not to say that you shouldn't study, or I shouldn't study ( I love studying).. but you know what i mean... I guess i saw that studying theology : the study of God.. distracted people from actually living it out and being so so close to the Father.. you know.. in the secret place.

so one night we were sitting in our office/music room "the purple room" and Josh forced me to play my keyboard.. which i hadn't felt inspired to do since we moved there. And I did, and we sang and started crying.. we were blubbering all over our faces and I was just playing a few random chords...I don't even remember the song but we could just feel the presence of the Lord. Incredible. He didn't leave us... and he won't