Parsonage Pictures

I wanted to posted some pics here, more will come to facebook soon...and please note, these pics are taken in the midst of messy unpacking!

The pictures are: Bathroom upstairs, deck on the back of the house, garage 9on the side of the house in the back), front of house, laundry roo, (just off the kitchen), living room, dining room, kitchen.

It's the little things...

Like having a drawer for the dish towels and one for the dish rags, so everything has a place! Having room for the dishes, clothes (well we haven't unpacked them all yet so time will tell with that one), the toothbrushes, the...well pretty much everything. I don't even know how to organize the bathroom going from our seminary one to the multiple drawers and cupboards one we have now! It even has a closest. The hall way has 3 closets! It's a blessing. It's overwhelming. It's weird. And by weird I mean we still sit here every night wondering if we really live here, and if indeed we do, if this place is really in small town Montana. It all seems very surreal. But as Joel schedules marriage counseling and prepares for his first Sunday and his first funeral next week, it all becomes more like regular normal every day life (as if being a pastor is regular or normal!). We're still getting our bearings which will take a while and we're still unpacking and begging for mercy if anyone from the church pops in and sees all of our boxes! But we have found the coffee shop in town, within walking distance (well I guess in this small town pretty much anything is), the library, the post office, the hardware store, we've been on 2 bike rides around town and the kitchen is all unpacked and the beds made...we're on a roll and we're very slowly making this place home. Oh and of course, we didn't forget to water last night! We wouldn't want to ruin that impression the first week here:)

Behind a glass wall

We can see through it but we cannot get to the other side, it's a glass wall. It's a glass wall of infertility. It's what separates us from so many people and so many things. It's silent, you can't see it, but we know it is there. We don't like it because the pain is so deep, but we don't know how to get rid of it. We hear news of people who have been on our side of the glass wall that no longer are, that have joyous news of miracles to be, and though we rejoice for them and the change in their story, we still have our pain. We have the hope that one day we will see the glass wall crumble, that we will get to be parents, but we don't see a way. We know that Jesus is with us in this desert place, in our hopelessness and our fear, he resides with us on our side of the glass wall, but we still don't understand. Some days we ignore the glass wall, we get pretty good at that, but other days we are so sad. Other days we allow ourselves to dream and pretend that it will happen, that this journey will have a happy ending, some days we wonder if we should open the adoption door back up, or if we're really ready to close the door for treatments. We wonder a lot and we think a lot. Maybe the Billings clinic, once we get around to calling it and once we have health insurance paperwork in place, maybe then they will help us in ways we could never have imagined. For now, we take some moments each day to pray for miracles and we wait and some days we even find a little bit of hope on our side of the glass wall.

Tears

I wrote this entry on July 10 but am just now posting it...I didn't have wireless internet at the time...
July 10, 2011
Tears, tears, tears…it feels hopeless. I think about why we started this blog and how here we are 3 and a half years into this journey and we still have a dream that seems impossible. We still blame God. We still don’t get his timing. We still have empty arms. It sucks, sucks, sucks. And we don’t understand it. Just when we start to have a little hope we are crushed again, ugh, ugh, ugh. Why, why, why? We both told the other today we were bummed about life. “Which part of life” I asked Joel…”the baby part” he said, “me too” I said. I guess it’s good to cry about it. It’s good to be sad and mad and scared and hopeful and hopeless…because it’s what we are and that is all we can offer before the feet of our Jesus...wholly ourselves. It’s the silent pain we share, with you here and with each other. You will see our tears from time to time and hear us voice our pain but it’s so much a silent pain we carry. It is such a HUGE part of our lives. But it is so quiet. We are meant to rejoice when good news is shared, while on the inside, and sometimes even the outside, the tears are falling. It’s rough but it’s our life.

It's a wine sort of day...

Yep, wine I said! A while ago we went out in the back yard at Joel's parents house with a blanket and a glass of wine each to hang in the great outdoors. The sun is what we needed. The conversation and relaxing is what we needed. We didn't even talk about another day 1 arriving today, we didn't talk about sadness, dreams, hope, hopelessness, babies, treatments, adoption, the billings clinic, our desires, our anger. They were all there. But a day one when you are not doing treatments is way more expected than when you are doing them. Today was more annoying than unexpected. We'll still get sad. But we're in a different place. The only way to explain it is to say that we don't have hope anymore. We had it when we were doing treatments, but we don't even know if we can get pregnant without treatments, and 5 treatments didn't work. So, such is our life. We still want babies and we still long for them and feel angry that we can't have them. But we don't know if we will ever have them. Instead of planning things like nurseries for our multiple treatment babies we will plan guest rooms, exercise rooms, craft rooms, a man cave, our bedroom...but nothing kid related. We'll keep the boxes marked "baby things" lost in the corner of a storage room in the basement and we'll stop looking with longing at all things baby...it's just where we're at. It's less emotional, maybe because we're mad and the sadness isn't new, just a part of our life. We'll still talk to God about it and we'll still wonder if it will ever happen. But we're also still processing why the heck we went through all of that Mayo stuff and felt God was part of it only to have 5 negative results. We'll still take the metformin and the increased dose of thyroid meds because the Mayo doc wants us to...but we'll be frustrated at the way the thyroid meds change me, and we'll be thankful that the metformin is hopefully doing something that can help the chemicals and hormones work together to create just the right numbers and combination for life creating. We'll be bummed that we can't take the clomid this month, or the next, or the next...because if we need that to make this happen, along with the shots, we're willing to go through all of it again, if we just knew it would work. Ugh! Bring on the coffee, the wine and the rest of our vacation...continued relaxing will indeed be good for our souls.