• Marriage

    Bliss

    A word I would use to describe how I feel about my relationship with Tommy. I’m not naive enough to think it’s because of how great of a guy he is, though that’s true. I also know that it isn’t because we are practically the same person, just different genders – though that’s true as well.

    I’ve been at this dating thing for quite some time now. I’ve always been one of those girls who wished and dreamed of the day that she got married. It’s always sounded like it was going to be amazing, but I also wanted it for the wrong reasons as well. I don’t come from the greatest of families so I used to be on a quest to get married so that I could move out and start my own family. Although God has corrected my view of wanting to get married, it took a lot of pain and heartbreak to get me to where I am now.

    Bliss would be the word I would use to describe my relationship with Tommy and I know the only reason it is this way is because I know that God is with us and growing us towards each other and towards himself.

    I want to encourage anyone out there who is struggling with singleness and doesn’t know if God is even there at all. Struggling to believe if He even cares about your desires to be married. I want to you to know that He is there and He cares. More than you could ever know. He wants more for your life than you do and that’s why He has you in this season. Don’t do what I did and take things into your own hands, it will only leave you more alone and hurt than you’re feeling now.

    Trust.

    God knows your desires and He wants you to know that He hears you and your prayers for the future. He wants you to trust Him to bring to pass whatever is best for you. Use this season to get closer to Him, singleness is only for a season.

    Lay your desires down at the foot of the cross.

    Let God fulfill you like only He can.

    It’s never easy but always worth it.

  • Faith,  Marriage

    Life Update: God Cares About The Small Things Too!

    Disclaimer: This is super long and way more personal than my prior posts. I hope you guys will enjoy learning more about my life and what God is doing in it. I’d love to hear about yours as well! Leave a comment with your blog website and I’d love to check it out 🙂

    God is SO good guys! My main reason for documenting this is because I really want to be able to clearly remember how God showed up and answered my prayers in such an amazing way. My hopes is that it encourages you too and helps you to remember that God is always here with us and cares so so much about us.

    So let me let you to what’s currently going on in my life a little bit. As I’ve written about in an older post, I have been dating Tommy for quite some time now – tomorrow is actually our 9 month anniversary! Tommy and I by no means have a perfect relationship, we have our struggles just as everybody else does but I know that this is the man that God has made for me to marry. He is the most thoughtful and caring guy I have ever known. He loves Jesus, most importantly, which is what makes our relationship so great.

    Tommy and I have gotten to the point where we know that we want to marry each other but we are trying to figure out the details and getting ready for that point. Obviously this means that we would both need to be financially able to live on our own. I am most likely going to have to find a new job within the next six months or so because my bank has been pending a merger for about 3 years now (lol) so if/when that goes through I will be let go. I just graduated from college in May though and am not too worried about finding something, just because I know that God will provide and take care of me.

    Tommy happens to be two years younger than I am and he has not exactly figured out which direction he wants to go in when it comes to jobs. His dad is a welder and for a while his plan was to learn from his dad and become a welder also. This path however is a little uncertain because his dad would have to be able to get him a job at the quarry that he works at and we weren’t sure that this was 100% going to be able to happen. Tommy also has an interest in business and has been debating continuing his education and getting a business degree. (Did you catch that?? He’s hands on (wanting to be a welder) and also super smart when it comes to managing money… am I a lucky girl or what?!)

    But this has been tough for me because I can be quite an impatient person sometimes and always one to want to be in control of things. Both Tommy and I have felt that our relationship is at the point where we want to take the next step (& get engaged!!) but we obviously need to make a mature decision and make sure that we can provide for ourselves once we’re married. So to the impatient part lol I have realized that if Tommy chooses to continue with his education that we will most likely have to wait until he graduates before we are able to get married, which could be about 2-3 years. I’m not going to lie I went through a time where I was really struggling with this. I admit that I don’t want to wait that long, and I had a time where I was really unhappy thinking about him doing this. But I also really wanted to be able to support him no matter what he chose to do and I wanted him to make the right decision for himself. I spent a lot of time praying and telling God how I was feeling about it and I can honestly say that He gave me the grace to trust that His plan was way better than mine and be 100% okay with whatever Tommy chose to do, even if that meant that we had to wait 2 or 3 years to get married.

    Now to the exciting part… God seems to really have answered Tommy and I’s prayers in a crazy way. Right when we felt that working with his dad was not really an option anymore, God brought this option back and I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Tommy’s dad is planning to try to get him learning more about welding throughout the rest of this year and hopefully get him in at the quarry sometime early next year! When Tommy told me about this I couldn’t believe it, I’ve never had God surprise me in such a way and it really shows me how much he actually cares about the details of our lives. If Tommy gets the job with his dad, we will be able to get married, and he will also probably have enough time to go back to school to learn business as well. It’s a win all around and so amazing.

    Although I do recognize that God could change his plans again, and it is possible for Tommy to not get the job with his dad, I still am insanely grateful for the hope that He has given us that this is the path that He is leading us down. I’m so excited to see what He has in store for us, even if things do change and Tommy and I aren’t able to get married for 2-3 years. I just am so grateful to have such an amazing man in my life and a God who loves us so much that He takes the time to care about the small details and leads us down the correct path.

    If you managed to read all of this and make it this far, you’re the best!! This was super long haha but something I felt I really wanted to share. Would you mind just praying for Tommy and I – that we would keep following down God’s path for us? Thanks so much guys!

  • Life,  Marriage

    4 Ways To Keep Your Relationship Centered on Jesus / Meet Tommy!

    Hi Everyone! Meet Tommy, my other half/the best guy out there.

    I wanted to write about something a little more personal this time and something I’ve been struggling with this past week.

    I wanted to write about idolizing someone in a relationship because I haven’t been able to find too many posts about this topic and my hope is to help others that might be struggling with this as well.

    What I’ve come to learn about this is that it is much easier to idolize a relationship than I had originally thought. In the past I have been in relationships that were not pleasing to God and I thought that because of that sole fact was what made me idolize those relationships since I had replaced them with following what God had wanted for my life.

    But I’ve been dating Tommy for 8 months now and we both have realized that even though are hearts were in the right place (we wanted our relationship to be centered around Jesus) that didn’t mean that it was just going to happen by itself. We realized that this meant that in order for our relationship to stay centered on Jesus we needed to be intentional about it.

    So me and Tommy sat down and wrote a practical list of how we were going to start doing this. Here’s our list – 4 ways to keep your relationship centered on Jesus:

    4 ways to center your relationship on jesus

    Now we only made this list last week, so we are starting out small to make sure that we don’t set unrealistic goals for ourselves but my plan is to hopefully build on it once these things become habits for us. I think the most important thing we did though was to ask Jesus for help with these goals because we know that without His grace there’s no way we can do this.

    Oh and I almost forgot, after we finished making the list we came up with two other ideas that we thought might help us. We decided that it was important for us to make time for ourselves and make our friends more of a priority so that we have more to focus on besides of each other.

    But how about you guys? Does anyone else struggle with this/have any other tips that might help?