Hi y'all, well we finally made it to Washington! The drive was beautiful, and vacation was fabulous! We spent time in Huntington Beach visiting my sister in law and her fiance, went to Disneyland, headed up and spent time with my nieces and nephews in Manteca, visited with old friends, and then headed up to Redding to spend time with my in-laws. I do have to say that I have still been losing weight since we have been on vacation and traveling. I haven't gained any and proud to say I have lost 71.2 pounds. It has been hard and taken a lot of mental rehearsing and compromise as far as food is concerned, but I am now only 20 pounds from goal!
Washington is certainly beautiful, and while it is beautiful it is dredging up old feelings of Germany. Between the rain and the beauty of the trees it is stirring up feelings from just last year and our fight to get Zechariah back to the US. I certainly don't want to forget Zechariah or pretend he was never with us, I just don't want to be that girl who's son died. That is who I was in Texas, and I don't want that for my time here in Washington. I want to be the girl who is being healed, restored, and living life to the fullest.
As I sit and write this I am feeling a bit anxious about our future. We found out Derek will most likely go to Afghanistan in March (if you are reading this and are on my Facebook, please don't post any of this we are not ready to tell Derek's parents), and we still don't have housing. Not having housing is not what is stressing me out it is the finances that have me stressed. I don't want to go financially in the hole for this move, Derek and I pretty much live on the if you charge it pay it right away motto, but I just keep going where is the money for all this coming from! I also have to keep my mind off of this deployment. I already lost part of my heart this year when Zechariah died all I can think about is what happens if something happens to Derek. I guess that brings me to church yesterday. On Saturday, Derek and I took to google to find Foursquare church's in Tacoma. We attended a Foursquare church in Manteca, CA, as well as an Assembly of God church, both are pretty much the same in beliefs, the difference is how each denomination appoints their pastors. Anyways so we found the church Puget Sound Christian Center. It was fabulous friends. The minute we walked in there was a wonderful guy named Steve who gave us a tour, and when we had Faith all checked in to kids church we headed over to the sanctuary for worship. While we were worshiping a guy came up to us shook our hands and started talking to us, low and behold this young nice guy was the pastor. When worship was nearly done he went and started talking about how he felt someone was struggling with fear, if it maybe about upcoming deployments, finances, and what the future holds, and needed to know that God wanted to take those fears and wants our complete and utter surrender. Those words spoke truly to my heart. The sermon was on surrender, and boy did I need to hear it. After the service was over we ran into the pastor again and he said, those words were for you. We never told him Derek would most likely be deployed, it was Jesus, speaking to us through this man who was willing to be Jesus' mouth piece.
So today, I don't know what the future holds, but I do know that I will surrender it to my Savior, and pray that I can make it through all this unscathed!
