pray for this man

our Father knows why - please bend the knee and stand alongside this wonderful tanzanian brother (and his family) as he faces dangers today. ask for strength and peace that passes understanding.

what fall looks like

last weekend we went to o-hi-o to see nine of our favorite people ... and discovered what fall looks like.

umm, yeah. felt like we were in a painting the whole time.

oh, and we discovered why it's called fall ... because that's what the leaves do. check out the sweet attempted catching going on here ...

and we were sad to say goodbye. thanks for a WONDERFUL time, spansels! we love ya!

held

our dear ruth is now at rest. she went home to her Father at 12:40 a.m. yesterday. her husband cradled ruth in his arms and released his Bride into her Father's arms. it was a beautiful and tragic moment. we rejoice in knowing her fight is over. there is no more pain. no more tears. no more exhaustion. ruth is now held close in Her father's arms.

and so are we ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOufqWodFNo

almost ...

a few weeks ago our cousin al was feeding ruth and got the impression that ruth was looking past her. she asked "do you see anyone you know?", surprising even herself with that question. ruth's answer: "almost."

well, almost is a lot closer now. we are gathered with the family expecting to usher her into Glory sometime today, maybe tomorrow. in some ways this has been four long months, and in other ways it's been just a blink since "cancer" was first on our tongues.

go to her blog and celebrate this precious life. http://ruth.apsley.org. play the song and read the comments as people say their farewells. she's almost there ... can almost see ... and will no longer have to imagine.

safe and sound

baby caleb is home safe and sound with his family. thanks for all the prayers during their scary chapter.

updates

just received an update on baby caleb and wanted to update everyone on ruth as well.

we're expecting ruth to start hospice care this week. she has been slowly slipping away - very painful to watch someone lose a little bit more of life each day. please pray that the Father takes her home gently, and pray that the rest of us would know "what it means to be held" (new favorite song by natalie grant - not a new song, just a new favorite). here is a recent picture of ruth with her sister faith and dear friend "al" as we waited for her radiation appointment and enjoyed some great conversations with this incredible woman.

baby caleb's parents wrote an update and i wanted to post it for you here to share in this family's journey as you continue to pray for them:

caleb has continued to have a normal temperature and reasonable energy. However, there are a few unresolved issues regarding which we covet your thoughts:
1. His first urine culture showed a very small amount of bacteria, but enough for the doctor to order a retest to confirm a negative result.
2. The blood tests have shown an enzyme that indicates damage to the heart muscle. This might be a permanent or temporary effect of a viral or bacterial infection. We have to wait to see if it goes down. There is currently no obvious sign of heart dysfunction.
3. However, This morning, when he was asleep, the doctor heard, for the first time, a heart murmur. It is only noticeable when his heart rate is very low. This is likely benign and unrelated to his fever, however, they are ordering an ultrasound to further investigate.

Despite a difficult couple of nights in the hallway due to a lack of beds, we are now in a private room and we feel we are well taken care of and believe the medical care is competent and good. We have been overwhelmed by the help and pr of friends, gratefully receiving that and other reminders of the Shepherd’s presence with us. Please ask that we’d have wisdom and endurance and that by trusting Him we would miss none of the good He intends to work through this painful, frightening chapter.

…The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. I am the good shepherd.

baby caleb

please join with us in lifting up baby caleb to the Father right now. he is the newborn son of our dear friends that we got to spend time with in China. he was hospitalized last week for jaundice and they ran tests to see whether the cause is simple or serious. they then sent him home and an hour later he vomited and is running a 102 fever. they are taking him back to the hospital and while there, they are restricted from seeing him - can you imagine much harder on a mom while wondering whether your baby is going to be okay? so please friends, join us on your knees for baby caleb and his precious family ... here are his big brother and sister (esther and james) ... thanks.

wedding details

we had the privilege this weekend of sharing in charlie & brooke weaver's wedding ... wanted to share some photos - many more are on the link. wedding prep couldn't help but make me think of the wedding feast that is being prepared for us - really, two thousand years of preparation, can you imagine? all the details that go into a wedding, and He goes to prepare a place for us ... wow. working on little name cards made me think of ruth's name card being prepared with anticipation and joy by those who are waiting to welcome her. so enjoy the pictures of these beautiful people and be encouraged as i was to think of the wedding that is yet to come ...

and yet ...

We are losing our lovely Aunt Ruth to Pancreatic Cancer. Jason's Aunt Ruth, but it's torn me up something terrible. She will be graduating to heaven very soon. This is a time when your theology really forces it's way into your reality. We KNOW that she will be with Christ. We KNOW that we will all follow. We KNOW that God is sovereign. And yet our hearts cry out that this is WRONG ... it aches to see her body lose strength even when her eyes are still bright. It screams out against a 29-year marriage being ended with such force. It cries out against this world losing someone of such grace and beauty. It mourns because simple things like Christmases just won't be the same.

The heart cries out that it is wrong because it IS wrong. Our bodies are not made for decay and brokenness brought on by this fallen world, AND YET we know that God is sovereign over it all. It's just that His power over death will not be seen by our eyes just yet. It will be the faith He asks from us that will carry us through ... assurance of that which we do not see, that which we hope for.

Here is a picture of her with the Miller Family from a few weeks ago - Ruth is the beauty in the middle. And if you are a glutton for humility, check out her blog - http://ruth.apsley.org/. She's been maintaining it faithfully since even before her diagnosis. In it you'll see the beauty of a woman who is prepared to meet her Maker.

Now, in other news ... because life keeps being life ... Jason has been given an interim opportunity at our home church - Northpoint, Corona - as the Ministry Director for Community & Outreach. We have been praying and searching for so long now that this came as a refreshing surprise to have the Leadership Team seek him out! The pastor in this position will be leaving this month to take a Senior Pastor position up North, and Jason is stepping in to maintain and continue building the ministry foundation he established in our Community. Already he has been excited to engage with the various non-profits that are hard at work in Corona, as our Church seeks ways to be engaged and in service alongside them. This is a big change for us and has included another new place to live as well ... more friends from Church invited us into their home for this interim time. Yes, we are blessed moochers and we know it.

Just the week before the job started, we had the chance to get a few days together in Yosemite and Mammoth ... tip, don't go to Yosemite in August - it's so dry! ... but it was still beautiful and we were so refreshed. With battered hearts from this summer's news, we really felt God come to us in His gentle way ... you know those moments when you feel like you need to work really hard to get yourself back before Him? And then He comes to you and the next thing you know His arms are around you and all that's left for you to do is sigh and relax. He's in control after all.

876 W. Kendall

Alright, for those of you that have talked to me within the last ten months, you've probably heard about 876 W. Kendall. Our fabulous friends own this fabulous home but God has called them to Ohio, so it's been on the market and has been in Escrow multiple times, but beyond all belief, has fallen out of Escrow yet again. So I thought why not post it on the Blog here and get the word out even further. You can check it out in detail at http://www.beautifulcoronahomes.com/. We LOVE this home and wish we could buy it for ourselves, so pass the word on for anyone that is in the market in Corona ...

fabulous four

four years of wedded life. not gonna lie, i love it. i love being married to jason. this year has probably been our most challenging so far, but what a blessing to be able to hold hands and squeeze just a little tighter than the year before, having lived that much more life together and knowing that much more about your own heart and the one your Father created for you.

we got to steal away for a night up to pasadena, after a day of pretending we were still teenagers at Raging Waters - so fun, but our muscles have been complaining ever since! our hotel was fabulous and luxurious and it was just so great to take a pause from life and focus on each other without any distractions.

thanks, Lord. for four fabulous years.

one year ago today

we set foot back on u.s. soil one year ago today. is anyone else caught off guard by year-marks? for me it feels like a birthday that snuck up on me. and not like the little-kid birthday where you're excited about the cake. the adult birthday where you get all reflective and kind of sad. weird. a whole year. a totally unexpected year. a bit of a desert year. but with manna from above. and hopefully less than 39 years left to wander ...

our aunt ruth

for those of you that know our aunt ruth, you know that she just might be the closest thing to an angel on this earth. seriously. we're asking that you'll join us in lifting her up to the Father. she's awaiting biopsy results on a mass the doctors have discovered behind her pancreas. there's quite a bit of concern as she's been weak, losing weight and in pain for awhile now, and the tumor was just discovered. please lift her up as well as the family that is surrounding and loving on her. thanks friends.

for anyone that wants to track it directly, she's joined the blog world for this journey and her site is http://ruth.apsley.org

the latest

It's probably not fair to call this a "new chapter" of life since we've been in transition since 2006, but we are entering another phase of transition.  The place we've called home since September of last year closed escrow this week - some people work themselves out of jobs, we work ourselves out of homes :} - so we moved out on Wednesday.  Most of our stuff moved into storage and we've accepted a gracious offer from some friends at Church to move into their guest room for the time being.  We're hopeful that the Father will be opening a more permanent door soon as Jason continues to submit his resume to various ministry opportunities and we look forward to an actual new chapter!

And for those who keep an address book, it's time to line through ours once again and replace it with the following for a mailing address:

387 Magnolia Ave. Suite 103 #322

Corona, CA 92879

and i looked up ...

... and it was MAY.

the horizon

i love the imagery of life having a horizon. because the horizon is always there. sometimes it's dark, sometimes painted in vibrant colors, sometimes cloudy, other times brilliantly bright. but always it holds mystery, promise, question.

change is on our horizon. yep, the millers are packing again. the home we're in has been sold and in about three weeks we'll be moving to ... ??? cast your vote now!

in the meantime, life is quite full and busy. the last few weeks have presented some really difficult challenges - and some cloudy horizons! but we had a fabulously refreshing weekend up in camarillo that helped put our hearts and heads back in perspective. check out these amazing pics of more time with the girls - we went whale watching but there wasn't a single whale on that horizon! thus the fun photo shoot with baby beautiful ...

umm, seriously, could they be any more beautiful?

like mother like daughter - check out those smiles!

and aunty boo's no fool to compete with that pose -

soph and i are going for delightfully awkward in this shot.

oh yeah, we so get each other ...

hope

hope. that all may experience hope in jesus christ. this is the heart and mission of 'hope of the nations', the non-profit organization we volunteer with that supports the ministry in tanzania that our friends, harold & coni, founded. we spent the last weekend+ with the missionaries and board members up above monterey (beautiful, anyone?). it was so fabulous to have days focused on the hearts and needs that God is calling them to meet there in various ways. opportunities abound to encourage real life change - real HOPE. we spent a lot of time talking about what we believe is an emerging paradigm of missions - the simplicity that we are all called to love God and love our neighbors. their neighbors are tanzanian. our neighbors are americans. the call is the same. the needs and means are different. neither those of us called abroad or called to stay are the answer in and of ourselves, and we are not here to DO for God. but we do have a reason for the Hope that lives within us.

we are excited to continue our service alongside those proclaiming this Hope on another continent. we are excited to remember the faces we love and lived alongside last year in tanzania. we are excited to know that the Body has different members with different purposes. but it is one Body with one Purpose. it is a great personal passion of ours to hope that the american church will recognize and remember these fundamental truths.

jambalaya

this is going to be a random assortment - a jambalaya, if you will - of thoughts that have been collecting in my head but are only now making their way into blog format. i'm not sure if anyone even reads this anymore, but i know i need to start using it again, if for nothing other than the pure discipline of identifying my own thoughts enough from time to time to try to explain them to others. so here goes ...

amazing grace. just watched the movie last night. never knew the slave trade was the origin of the song. totally blown away by wilberforce and his humility - took my mind to the passages our church has been teaching on ... "have mercy on me, a sinner". seems he didn't forget that, even in victory.

schemes. been really convicted lately to not forget there is an enemy who schemes against our hearts and souls. our weapon is prayer and to be honest, i'm pretty lazy in prayer. but lately my heart has been so encouraged by the Spirit to remember i'm not fighting against the flesh and blood and daily in-and-out struggles. the fight is how my heart responds to those flesh and blood struggles. and i'm not really the one fighting. i am the one who needs to turn to the One who will fight. Who am i turning to? myself or my God?

which brings me to my next link in the thought-chain. self. self is a four-letter word. and i really should treat it like that more often. again and again i rely on self. ugh, this is sin. just think of how many things we extol as a culture that are all about self. self-reliance. self-sufficiency. self-esteem. self-assurance. self-inflation. self-promotion. self-regulation. you might be thinking, "hey, this or that isn't a bad thing just because it has the word self in it." my point is not that all things with the word self are inherently evil, but seriously, if you really take the time to think about how MUCH we extol self, it gets rather nauseating. and here's why. we start believing we really are self-reliant, self-sufficient. let me change the pronoun here. I start believing that. I forget to rely wholly on my Maker.

the box. we live in a fast, demanding, expensive corner of the world. we've had some unexpected turns the last few months, and you know the saddest part is that i came home from our trip so determined not to just put it in a box with a pretty bow and look at it every so often with comments like "wasn't that such a lovely trip? ... why yes it was ... and what a lovely bow on that lovely box ... sigh ... ". gross. life was real then and life is real now. it's time for me to start connecting those dots. i plan on taking that box down and unpacking it more. i need to take that box down and unpack it.

the power of three

if you've talked to us this month you know we moved right from Christmas into THREE weddings. and if you haven't talked to us this month ...

well, now you know why.

introducing the triumphant and glowing mr. and mrs. guy e. white the fourth ...

and the stunning mr. and mrs. jeremiah lee ...
and the brave mr. and mrs. timothy wayne isbell

(brave for having an outdoor wedding in january :) ) ...

we got some awesome times with some awesome friends ...

and it's not every weekend you get to dress up so shnazzy ... well, it was every weekend for three weeks, but it will probably be a while until we get to play dress up again ...

... and sorry ladies, but i will always think i got the BEST man ...

each one was as unique as the couple it celebrated. we were of course thrilled and honored to be a part of each one ... but we're also pretty happy about having a wedding-free weekend :)!