Lisa Beth

I know I’ve been bit of a blogging maniac lately… For those of you who have been bored each time you check this blog and there are no changes, I guess I’m making up for lost time

I realized a few days ago that today, October 4th, marks the day that Eric and I said goodbye to our beloved friends and home in the Minneapolis area of Minnesota,

and moved together with all our earthly possessions to the sunny southern state of North Carolina  (aka: as Eric refers to it: “The Promised Land”).  I remember the day like it was yesterday… frought with so much emotion, both acute sadness and a stirring sense of anticipation of starting our next chapter together in a new state.

The first few hours of the trip I cried and cried to my plant, “Percy” sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my loaded up Honda,

driving behind Eric in our truck, (and later hitching the Honda behind the truck) missing so much all that I was driving away from.

But as the miles past,  I became more and more excited about what lay ahead.

Two days later, we found ourselves settling into the town of Holly Springs with the help of our new church family at GraceWay and Eric’s brother Joe!

Since last October, I think I have experienced more change in 1 single year of my life than I have in all my other 26 years combined.  Seriously.  I was having coffee with a new friend the other day, catching her up on our story since we moved from Minnesota, and I didn’t realize until I started telling our story chronologically, just how MUCH change we’ve experienced in 12 short months.  I’ve decided to be honest and put it all out there for you, my blog readers.  I don’t know how much you’ve heard or been updated on, as it is exhausting to update all the people you love when SO much change occurs.  Just when you’ve updated everyone, it seems like another change happens, and suddenly, everyone is out of the loop again.  So here is my attempt to summarize in bullet point fashion, some of what the Beavers’ past 12 months have looked like:

• Moved from our house in Richfield, MN—to someone else’s house in Holly Springs, NC– to renting an apartment in Garner, NC  (3 total places we’ve lived in 1 year)
• We have rented our house in MN to several tenants, all who have let us down and have had to be evicted because they did not pay rent.  We now have our house on the market for the month of October, and are praying it will sell soon!
• Eric has changed from working full time at The Hyatt Place in MN– to working part time at a christian bookstore and part time as worship pastor at Graceway Church—to working part time as a barista at Hope Cafe and part time as Pastor of creative arts at Hope Cafe Church (3 job changes total for Eric in 12 months)
• I went from working full time at a dental office in MN–to working part time at a dental office in Holly Springs, NC—to working full time at a different dental office in Garner, NC  (3 job changes for Lisa in less than 12 months…. are you keeping up so far?)
• Then, we as a couple went from being a part of an amazing church community in MN, “The Garden Communities”– to a new church plant in Angier, NC, GraceWay Fellowship — to a church re-plant in Raleigh, NC where we are now, Hope Cafe Church.   (transition from GraceWay to Hope Church being a long, long story and a very painful journey, but we are SO thankful for our new church and feel confident that Hope Cafe Church is where we belong.)

So many major life changes… so many lessons learned along the way.  We have struggled, and we have been hurt and disappointed.  We have experienced financial set-backs.  We have had our relationship tested by these things, and by God’s grace have come through these difficult times as an even closer united front in our marriage.   We can only humbly thank God for the gift of bringing us through one step at a time.  I can’t say I would have chosen any of the hard things, but I have seen this to be true of hard times:  it brings us to our knees and closer to God, and that is ALWAYS a good thing.  Even though this past year has been challenging in many ways, I would still declare from a mountain top at the top of my lungs that God is good… all the time, and that I love Him with all my heart.   He has truly been my refuge and strength… my ever-present help in trouble.

I would like to share a passage of scripture that has recently become dear to me.  Deuteronomy 8: 1-18 (ESV)… bold and italics, my own additions for emphasis…

Remember the LORD Your God

¹“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers. ²And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.³And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. ⁴Your clothing did not wear out on you and your foot did not swell these forty years. ⁵Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you. ⁶So you shall keep the commandments of the LORD your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. ⁷For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, ⁸a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, ⁹a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. ¹⁰And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.¹¹“Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, ¹² lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, ¹³and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, ¹⁴ then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, ¹⁵who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water,who brought you water out of the flinty rock, ¹⁶who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. ¹⁷Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ ¹⁸You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.

To close this blog, here are some pictures of me and Eric having dinner with our friend Kelly (taking the pictures of us) exactly a year ago this weekend at Macaroni Grill in Cary, NC to celebrate our arrival the evening we arrived at our Holly Springs house after driving for SO many hours.

Here’s us “prosting” (German version of a toast) to our new lives in NC… how could we ever have known then all the changes that awaited us in the coming months.  So here’s to the next year in North Carolina and all the adventures that await the Beavers!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 5:10 pm and is filed under My Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.