Weather the Storm

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I was supposed to wake up and see the sun shining, hear the seagulls in the sky, and the waves from the ocean gently crashing.  It was my wedding day, after all.  The man of my dreams has asked me to marry him and we were getting married on the beach, barefoot, at sunset.

Ahhhhh, but these are stories of MY life...real life.  Upon waking at the beach house my soon-to-be-father-in-law had rented for our wedding weekend, instead of the scenario I had envisioned, what I got was storms...RAGING storms.  And it had gone from 70 degrees the day before to 35 degrees that morning.    On.  My.  WEDDING DAY.

I walked out onto the balcony of the beach house, into the freezing cold.  And I started to cry.  What were we going to do??  I went back in the house, and continued to cry.

Trying to stay positive (after my nervous breakdown), Adrian and I talked it through.  At the end of the lane the beach house was on, there was a little bar and grill - and I mean LITTLE.  I remembered it specifically because it was painted a bright yellow and purple, with a sign that had a cow on it that said 'Come as You Are'.  It was called "The Purple Cow".  THE PURPLE FRICKIN' COW.  If the weather didn't subside, we were going to move the vow exchange to The Purple Cow Bar and Grill...come as you are.  Story of my life.

So there I sat on the couch, listening to the wind roar, feeling the entire house sway in the wind,  with my fiancé holding me, crying my eyes out, getting prepared to spend one of the greatest moments of my life at The Purple Cow.  Adrian looked at me and said, "You know, we haven't prayed about this."  I looked up at him and just stared, blinking a few times to digest what he had just said.  He was right.  I had the Lord to thank for bringing Adrian into mine and my children's life and I hadn't even prayed about the nuptials that would make us a family.

Well, we did pray.  We sat together and prayed, asking for whatever God's will was and to be able to have a peace about it, even if it meant we couldn't have it our way.  We prayed for His blessing over our union and our family.  We prayed for Him to be the center of our entire life.  But we never once prayed for good weather.  When we were done, I felt better.  It was time to go into action.  We called family that was in the area, and got warehouse-worthy plastic wrap and a staple gun, and started to just wrap the entire underneath of the house - it was a beach house, after all, and it was on stilts.  We wrapped in the rain and the cold, making an armored fort against the storm, all the while laughing and having a genuinely good time.

You should know that as soon as we were done creating the fort, the storm ceased, and the weather got warmer.  It made for the best sunset and sky full of colors I had ever seen and have ever seen since.  There were two seagulls coasting over our head the entire time we exchanged our own written vows to one another - on the beach as we had originally planned.  It got chilly that night while we partied the night away, celebrating our wedding.  But guess what?  We had already built a fort and a shelter from the cold.  And we all danced and sang and made absolute MERRY in that fort.

Sometimes the rain comes...and it POURS all over you...sometimes the storms come...and they THROW you around...sometimes the cold comes...and you feel completely FROZEN...

KEEP THE FAITH. Come as you are.  Pray for peace.   Build your fort.  You'll weather the storm and come out to a beautiful sunset.  I'm sure of it.

This image is © 2015 by Life As She Does It. Please link back or credit if any content or images are used. 

This image is © 2015 by Life As She Does It. Please link back or credit if any content or images are used.

This image is © 2015 by Life As She Does It. Please link back or credit if any content or images are used.

The Constant Struggle

I was a single mother of Chelsea and Cameron for quite awhile before Adrian rode in on his white horse (with Jordan in tow) and our blended family was created.  There was that time it was just the three of us though, and I often think of the things I did or said as their only parental figure that I wish I could change.  I don't have any regrets, really, because they both turned out to be incredible human beings.  I think so much of that has to do with the one constant they have had their entire life together:  each other.  From the time Chelsea was 16-months old and Cameron came into the world, they have been together through thick and thin.  

No matter who they were with, no matter where they were, they were always together and were there to protect each other.

There was one time - Chelsea was in the fifth grade and Cameron was in the fourth - there was a bully that had been picking on Cameron and was meeting him after school to beat him up...turns out the bully was a jy-nor-mus young lady (of sorts).  According to legend, Chelsea saw the crowd gathering and went to see what was going on.  Seeing the victim was her little brother, she stopped the bully cold, (using methods we will save for another story) and when she looked around to see if her brother was okay.............he had hidden himself under a bush (he says it's because he was told never to hit a girl, and we "believe him").

To help Cameron save face, I will tell you that years later we had moved into a new house during the summer months, so the kids weren't in school.  Chelsea and Cameron were old enough to stay home by themselves, and were playing a board game when they heard a noise outside.  Cameron looked out the window and saw a man on the side of the house.  He shuffled his sister into the closet, telling her not to move and to cover herself up with a blanket, picked up one of Adrian's golf clubs, called Adrian, and proceeded to tell him in a whisper that Chelsea was safely concealed in the closet and he had a golf club and he was ready to use it - he was 11.  Turns out he protected Chelsea from the man that was turning our water on for us.  What would he have done had it been a real predator??  I shudder to think how helpless a golf club-wielding 11-year-old would have fared, but the point is he was protecting his older sister from any harm at all costs.

Don't get me wrong, they have fought like cats and dogs most of their life and even said terrible things to one another, but let anyone ELSE say something out of sorts and it's AWN.

Last July, Chelsea got married.  We all dealt with it differently.  Cameron loves Sam (we all do!) and he was so happy to welcome an older brother into the family.  He never once said he was sad to see his sister move out (he was thrilled to move into her room).  But the wedding photographer caught the truth in his heart when she took the following picture that was taken at the end of the reception when Sam and Chelsea rode off into the sunset together...