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Sacked by the Quarterback

This is a song I wrote last month about learning some humility. I cannot even explain how slow and thick my brain (and I guess my heart as well) seems to be! It’s hard for me to sit back and accept whatever challenges come my way; I want to figure them out, fix them, and quickly move on. God is teaching me this: My place is not up, fighting. My place is down, trusting. So opposite of how I thought I’d live my life; I may not have even obeyed if I wasn’t simply forced to the ground!

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Sacked By the Quarterback (2009)
I know that this isn’t what people want to hear, but you see I’m falling here
One minute standing then out went the lights
Is nobody else crashing down on this battlefield it’s whirling around me still
little birdies and stars in the skies
Chorus: Well, now that I am down, I guess I’ll sing this song
all that I’ve tried is wrong, and all my fight is gone
Now that I’ve been sacked by the quarterback
here’s my new strategy, I’m taking time to see how much I need You.
Verse 2: Some people stop when they see they’re about to flop but I hold on ’til I drop
Mixing faith with my own stubborn dreams
Trying to stand so tall, trying to do it all, forgetting the root of me
is here in the ground, with my face to Your feet,
oh this gracious defeat, I can breath in relief,
I am chased to my knees once again, I am chased to my knees once again..
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This Week

There are so many things I’d like to blog about. Like ten different subjects! But I am just going to talk about my week. And I am going to try to keep my blogs to 3 paragraphs. Can I do it? Is it possible?

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A friend of mine and I were talking at the beginning of the week, and to make a long story short, I just feel this great longing to be known by the people closest to me. In my mind, there is this community that exists of loved ones from the school years through college through churches through missions through now…and I don’t feel very connected to them! My life is at home for this season. A lot of my community happens online. I want to be known and I really and truly want to know what is going on in the actual heart and soul of my loved ones. Wonder if blogs can help accomplish this? Or an old-fashioned phone call would work, too. It helps to just know what it is I’m trying to achieve by putting up pictures online, doing facebook, writing blogs, or even putting songs up on youtube. I want to give to others what I’d love to receive from them: a little taste of heart and mind.
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Anyway, I’m on my third paragraph now so I’ll make it quick! This week has been pretty good; after the total train wreck that Christmas was for me, I slapped myself into the schedule that I knew would get us closer to sanity. I am extremely tired and if I didn’t have kids, I would be in bed all day, so that is a bummer. But I feel a sustaining from the Lord as I follow through with this schedule and do the basics He has laid on my heart for me and my family. I have been soaking in more of His Word, thoroughly enjoying home school with Selah, feeding my family nutritiously, playing and getting lots of hugs and kisses from Yemi, and getting in bed early each night. I am extremely blessed.
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God’s Faithfulness to Yemi

So, in this next to last chapter of our marriage journey I am going to talk about our adoption. I felt blessed the entire time we were in the adoption process, because we were actually doing it! We were done discussing or praying for the right time, and that was an awesome feeling. After getting Yemi’s referral in Dec. 08, we had a court date set in February, and we hoped to bring her home in March or early April! But we had some more testing of our faith to endure…of course!

At the end of January, we received our second picture of Yemi. She was about 6 months old and had lost weight since her 4 month picture and weigh in. She looked very frail, and we questioned it 4 times but the adoption agency said everything was fine. Then in February, literally in one week, the following things happened.
So, the events of that week in February:
*Adoption agency said we and the other families who shared the same court date would need a miracle to pass court the first time because of a paperwork mishap. We all prayed and fasted, and God decided to move in an awesome way…for every single family except us. There was an additional problem with paperwork (not on our end) that couldn’t be solved quickly enough. I remember that phone call, and I remember the Lord saying immediately,” Will you choose to be offended by Me or will you choose faith?” You know, I have spent my whole life trying to live a life of faith, and be involved in things that challenge me to do that, but in that moment I knew that pleasing Him with my faith wasn’t so much about my actions but my reactions.
*In that same week, I can’t remember if it was right before or right after the court date, we got an email from our agency saying that the babies in our orphanage had not been getting food “for some time.” We had sensed something was wrong because of the picture of Yemi in January, and now our worst fears were coming to life. 2 babies in this orphanage had died that year before the parents could come rescue them. So, directly after this email, the families started a big formula drive, and a week later, 2 people were in the air with hundreds of pounds of formula. It’s confusing to explain, but I’ll just say that actually by the time we got that email, UNICEF had already started to give Plumpy’Nut to the babies and the children were already gaining weight and much better. We found out once we were actually in Ethiopia that the nurse during January and February was terrible, and finally quit. When she was replaced, the new nurse saved 9 babies’ lives by seeing the babies were not thriving and getting them what they needed. If you ever have a chance to watch this video and give to World Vision/Plumpy’Nut, do it. It is for real. We got a new picture of Yemi at the very end of February, and she looked good as gold. Praise the Lord!
It was awesome to go to Ethiopia and see this journey come to an end, although I would happily do it again. It had been a time to hang onto the Lord, see into reality that we would have never been forced to see otherwise, and join in the kingdom work of making the least of these family! I will write another time about prophetic words and scriptures the Lord gave during the journey, and His faithfulness to the present, as she is a healthy, chubby, happy, smart 17 month old running around as I type this!
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Our Marriage Journey; D.C. & Adoption Years

This last bit has been hard to write! I’ve shared really honestly about the difficulties and surprises of several periods of our lives, and this last segment (2007-2009) has probably topped them all (in regard to difficulties and surprises).

I guess to start it all off I have to say that I still don’t know or understand what is going on! I have learned to let go and move on, trusting that the Lord is faithful if not altogether weird and completely nonlinear. He doesn’t put puzzle pieces together like the picture on my box says to! He has His own thing going on. I wish He could see that if He doesn’t give me a clue I can’t possibly help Him! (Hope you know that was totally tongue in cheek.)
There is some truth brewing in my heart about people from the Bible who tried to do things the way God was telling them to–like Moses when he went through all of that with Pharoah, instead of it being a quick and easy task to free the Israelites–like Paul, when he kept getting thrown in prison or shipwrecked when he was supposed to be preaching to the Gentiles–It’s like we search and search (when we’re young anyway) to find out what potential or calling we have toward a certain area of serving God, and once we know it and set out to do it, He makes it nearly impossible. We go out with God on our side, and what good does it seem to do us? There is something to this.
Through the youth ministry of the Bridge since 2004, we were spending time with young guys and girls all the time, and Jack’s God-sized dream of Diverse City miraculously came to life in the Summer of 2007. We opened in a store in the Towne Mall, and were a safe place for kids to play video games, eat, hang out, have music lessons and Bible Study, and honestly just come to find adults who wanted to listen and “sit a spell”. We knew this was reaching students who were not going to come to church, and it was built on relationships, not activities where kids remain unknown and unnamed. This may be another blog in itself, but I struggle with living in Kentucky (vs. overseas) because I see many local ministries (especially ones within one church, like not in cooperation with others) with so much money and support poured into them and they never take a look back to see that they aren’t meeting true needs. They are just able to say they have this ministry…But Diverse City was not like that.
Also, in the fall of 2007, we started our adoption as if our lives weren’t crazy enough with a bunch of kids at church and the Mall! It was so exciting to finally get started after all my research and longing and tears over the orphan crisis in Ethiopia. 12% of Ethiopia’s citizens are orphans under 13 years old! We mailed in our applications on Oct. 31, 2007 & officially began waiting in January, 2008. Selah was 2 and a half years old, we practically lived at Diverse City, and we would soon have a new baby girl in our family!
In Spring of 2008, some things changed that started a downward spiral for Diverse City. It was pretty hurtful and we hoped for a miracle…but it didn’t come. It was hard to see other ministries get started and everyone get excited about them, when this amazing opportunity was passing us by. We closed our doors around Christmas, and that space is still empty. That death was really hard for Jack, and it was a hard death for me, too. This wasn’t the first time we had done our best to live out “His strength is perfect in our weakness”, only to (dare I say it?) be disappointed at how our limits and inadequacies shone brighter than the noonday sun. On a very personal note, it makes it hard to get excited about “stuff for God”. The good news about this is that sometimes in ministry you can get TOO excited about stuff for God and forget God; what a tragedy it would be to fly high in ministry but be grounded in the ditch relationally with Him. It happens.
On into the Summer and Fall of 2008, we were also getting pretty antsy about waiting for a referral for our baby girl. We were told a wait of 2-5 months. We waited 11. But Dec. 2nd, we received the referral of Yemi Abigail! It was wonderful and we had so many people supporting us in so many ways! The journey was far from over and I don’t know if we got a single good night of sleep from February to April 21st, 2009…
But I actually better save that story for another blog! Thanks for reading this far!
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Ah, New Years

New Years has always been a big deal to me. I’m big on focus and simplicity.

Here are my basic thoughts…
*I want to live surrendered, at the foot of Christ, enjoying Him, and not getting all freaked out about making everything happen. No day is a waste if I’m here, in my heart. (Mary, John 11 & 12)
*I want to use my spiritual gifts until Jesus returns: encouraging, giving, intercession, missions, mercy. I don’t want to look around and see if anyone gives me a thumbs up. i’m tired of that! I want to use my gifts for the Lord! (Col. 3:23)
*My marriage is going to get better every week! (Eph. 5:1)
*Raising up the girls in the truth and happy heart of the Lord; I want them to know Him intimately, not just about Him. Meeting more christian friends will be wonderful for them; praying about groups they will join.
*This year, we decide on Selah’s elementary education, or at least the first year of it. Lots of research and prayer there!
*This year, I feel like I need to realize the clues when I am getting exhausted and stay very flexible regardless of who is inconvenienced. Lots of discipline required here, which is difficult in itself but gets much harder when I’m tired.
*We want to work on our house, since we are always, always here! For 8 years, we’ve really disliked some things and some were just gross (carpet where 4 dogs, um, lived.) I was the queen of the “only buy what you must have because we need to practice equality with our global neighbors” parade, and we have changed very little about the house. But, although I still feel the same way as i did during my “reign” as queen, I never fully got an answer from God about what to do in regard to this situation of living in “The United Excess of America” except “be still and know Me, and live by the Spirit. Do what you CAN do, don’t worry about what you can’t.” Didn’t get those specific rules I was hoping for. But through the process my heart got where He wanted it to be. So, I don’t see things in such black and white, wrong and right anymore; I just sort of feel what we can do and what we can’t do. What we can give and what we can’t. It is not monetized or written law. It’s harder this way, and I bet you I’m not even halfway correct in the way I’m living. But that balance will ALWAYS be a tight rope I’m conscious of walking.
So, there’s my upcoming year–or at least what I think I’ll be spending it on. Cheers!
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A New Year

New Years has always been a big deal to me. I’m big on FOCUS. Otherwise, oreos are my breakfast until I get up the gumption to FOCUS. So right now I’m looking for info on all kinds of things. There are the small things like how do we rearrange our house/furniture to make each room as functional as it can be, but it’s also the big things like “we can honestly and earnestly homeschool? Do we have it in us?”

Here are my basic thoughts, or “end vision”-what I want in the end…
*I want to live surrendered, at the foot of Christ, enjoying Him, worshipping Him with my obedience of being a wife, mom, and daughter of Him, but not getting all freaked out about making everything happen. Loosely holding on to life, even compellings, even callings. Just obey and chill.
*I want to use my spiritual gifts until Jesus returns: encouraging, giving, intercession, missions, mercy. When I have the chance from GOD to serve outside my home, I don’t want to just do something. I want to be specifically gifted for it and happy to be in on it—and all unto the Lord, not to man. I don’t want to look around and see if anyone gives me a thumbs up. i’m tired of that! I want to use my gifts for the Lord!
*My marriage is going to get better every week, through prayer, learning, changing behaviors and time together. Wisdom about words and timing and loving another person how they need to feel loved. Marriage being fun, a place where neither person is the judge or the child.
*Raising up the girls in the truth and happy heart of the Lord; I want them to know Him intimately not just about Him. Meeting christian friends will be wonderful for them; praying about groups they will join.
*This year, we decide on Selah’s elementary education, or at least the first year of it. Lots of research and prayer there!
*This year, I feel like I need to realize the clues that I am getting exhausted and stay very flexible regardless of who is inconvenienced. I need to put those ducks in a row, and then be disciplined (argh!) to get what I need each day so that this sickness doesn’t sneak upon me like it does.
*We want to work on our house, since we are always, always here! for 8 years, we’ve really disliked some things and some were just gross (carpet where 4 dogs, um, lived.) I was the queen of the “only buy what you must have because we need to practice equality with our global neighbors” parade, and we have changed very little about the house. But, although I still feel the same way as i did during my “reign” as queen, I never fully got an answer from God about what to do in regard to this situation of living in “The United Excess of America” except “be still and know Me.” So, I have, and I don’t see things in such black and white wrong and right anymore; I just sort of feel what we can do and what we can’t do. What we can give and what we can’t. It is not monetized or written law. But when you lay it down and
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Christmas

Remember that holiday when Selah woke Jack up early on Christmas morning, and instead of saying, “Daddy, let’s get up and open presents!”, she says, “Daddy, daddy, wake up! I have a booger the size of an acorn in my nose! But thankfully, I have big –what are these called?–oh a nostril—Thankfully I have a big nostril and the ability to get it out.”

Remember that Christmas when Selah tackled Granmere in her exuberant joy and thankfulness for her presents? Ah, the memory of 50 faces in utter terror and silence; but my (80 year old with knee problems) Granmere didn’t officially fall down…she was just a little in shock. Thankfully she likes kids with a little spunk.

Remember that year when Yemi threw a fit throughout the beautiful reading of Luke Chapter 2 on Christmas Eve? Somehow 75 of my family members, along with their babies of all ages, are quiet and calm for these few precious moments…but not mine. This is always my daughters’ moment to either get in the middle of the room and dance (making everyone laugh instead of be reverent) OR embarrass me with their outrageous super sonic loudness. An aunt on one side says, “It’s okay, let her play”; an aunt on the other side gives me the evil eye. What to do, what to do?

Remember watching The Muppets sing the “12 Days of Christmas” with Jimmy Fallon, and Sesame Street’s manger scene clip, and laughing our heads off together at Bert’s hay fever and baby Natasha crawling? Remember watching Santa Clause 2 & 3 about 2 or 3 times more than we would have liked? Every day?

Well, this was not yester year my friends. It was this past week.

And to end on a personal note, I also remember eating too much sugar cookie dough and getting that icky feeling but not learning my lesson. I remember eating peanut butter balls in bed. Okay, that’s a lie. I literally do not remember it, thanks to ambien, but I am told by a reliable source that it happened. I remember losing it completely during one of Yemi’s tantrums because I was missing bedtime. Her’s, mine, and both of ours, and everybody elses in the world; bedtimes were missed.

But I also remember Christmas morning sleepy eyes and flannel pj’s and reclaiming bits of papers from a certain toddler’s mouth and seeing a 4 year old Princess receive a few more things to charge her imagination…and possibly her vanity. Oops. I remember a joy and relief deep down, knowing that all four of us were home for Christmas for the first time. It is easy to give thanks…

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. More to come about Marriage Step 4 next. 🙂

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Jack & Lyn, Part 3

SO…the next part of my and Jack’s 9 years together involves a little bit of everything. It was a crazy bunch of years, from 2002-2006. We had moved into the great gift of our home (given as inheritance from Jack’s family), with a sweet little dog named Lily. I was working at Lifeway, which I really liked. I was the stockroom manager and music section person; I loved helping people find stuff, praying with people in the store, and tidying up. Little did I know I would be doing SO much of that tidying up at home in the years to come! Jack worked probably 4 or 5 jobs during these 3 years; he was pretty creative and tried it all! He worked at a tree farm, a boys home, a lumber company, a printing press, plus we did a Lifeway camp (M-FUGE) in Jacksonville one summer. I’ll tell you, this was the beginning of being very disappointed in our career/degree choice from college. I was a Christian Social Ministries major, because I loved the nations and was positive that I would be an international missionary. It never occurred to me that I needed a skill other than talking to people about Jesus and singing songs. Jack was an Educational Ministries major, because he was then and has been for years an excellent, silly, much-loved youth minister. He felt he would always be on staff doing ministry, either in a para-church capacity or something creative along those lines. He is incredible at dreaming up and starting things; he’s also great with a video camera and sees things others don’t see in photography. It seemed so simple to us back in college. We would use these natural giftings for the rest of our lives and it would be great. But after just a few years into the game, it began to feel like we were only trained for this tiny margin of work, most of which did not pay enough to live on…most of which wanted you to work full time for part time pay. As much as I wanted to be on the mission field, I was struggling with my health here in the good ol’ safe and healthy U.S.A. and it just felt impossible. We had seen enough of church staff to wonder how we could “go there” again. We were wondering if we needed to go back to school or what! We chose “or what”. Probably not the best choice!

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But then in January of 2004 we met people who were starting the Bridge. That was a really fun year of servant evangelism projects, house worship, and getting to know an amazing core of church-planters-in-training. We were involved in everything! In September of 2004, two cool things happened while I was doing mission work in Panama for about a month. Our church began a partnership with a great little church plant in a poor neighborhood and I found out I was pregnant. I will never forget that time! Such great memories. Eventually, that partnership sort of ebbed away after their last visit here in 2006, but some good relationships were made. I can’t wait to go back and visit, both the city and the island of Mamitupu, where I slept in hammocks and drank orange soda out of a billion times recycled bottles with my friends lovingly called “the sisters”. Oh, and as for being pregnant, Jack and I had not been planning or trying…but it was a great surprise! I had a wonderful pregnancy, and in June 2005, our life was rock and rolled by Selah Jordan Taylor.
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That same month, two other things happened in our lives. Bad news first: Jack had to be scheduled for surgery on his spine. Having a newborn while this was going on was very difficult. I’ve been scaring my friends for years, telling them stories of how tired I was Selah’s first 6 months and how terribly demanding it was to have a baby. But the fact is, if you don’t have a sleep disorder or a husband who literally cannot get out of the recliner, it’s not that big of a deal! And I can’t forget about the good news: Jack’s volunteer position with the youth at the Bridge turned into a paid, full time gig. I also worked with the youth girls a lot, and continued to (try to) plan global focus services and events. For the rest of 2005 and 2006, our lives completely revolved around Selah and the life of the church. Next, we discuss the “diverse city & adoption years”. Stay tuned. 🙂
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How We Fell in L.O.V.E

I’ll backtrack a little, before the whole “first church, scary dog” phase. Jack and I met when we were in college; the first week he was on campus as a freshman to be exact. He was really the cutest thing, and he knew it. He had on this striped rainbow colored shirt, bell bottom jeans, and a train engineer’s hat. He was loud and funny, and already had lots of girls giggling and wanting to hang out on Stapp Lawn with him. I wasn’t impressed because I was a sophomore and my thoughts were: “Um, hello, we have studying to do, and you’re a goof-off.” But slowly my thoughts, as they always do, went to: “Um, actually, let’s goof off!” So, we did. We had a blast, but I knew after our first “date” he was too silly for me. He would have been bored with me, honestly.

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So, for the next three years of my college career, Jack and I were very close friends. We saw each other through relationships, both good and bad. Jack was always the guy I could count on. He would take me to Wal-mart (I didn’t have a car), cheer me up when I was lonely, and help explain stuff from math class to me. We were truly brother and sister. There are so many funny stories, but all so very incriminating!
Fast forward through my Senior Year, onto the summer after. Jack was a youth minister at a church near my parent’s house, and he asked me to start the youth praise band at his church. So all summer, my great friend Jack insisted on picking me up for church. We had a ton of fun with his youth and the other workers; then I spent several months in China that fall while Jack went back to college. The only person I really wanted to call when I had the chance was Jack. Suspicious, right? At different times for over 6 months, Jack and I both recognized that we had feelings for each other, but we didn’t say much. (I felt so mature, not just blabbing my feelings instantly like I had done with others in the past!)
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But then the day of blabbing came. At Joanna’s apartment in Campbellsville, a bunch of best friends were together because I was leaving for Africa in 2 weeks. Lots of my guy & girl friends were there, people I still love so much and had such good times with. I knew, sitting there with all these friends, that things would be changing. We might not even all be in the same room ever again. I wondered how I would live without those people in my daily life. College had really spoiled me; I had the best friends in the world to do everything with and that next stage of life maybe wasn’t going to be able to include them. But looking across that room, I saw Jack, and I felt so strongly that he was the one person I couldn’t bear to not come with me into the future. So, I got up off the couch, walked across the room, and squeezed myself right next to him. We talked all night. I still went to Africa, but we got engaged 6 months later when I was home recovering from surgery. I went back to Africa, but health problems sent me home after just 5 more months…then 8 weeks later, on New Years Day 2001, we were married!
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