Elise-the-Niece got married two years ago this week.
I had always imagined getting to go make her a cake, but I didn’t get to be there. *sniff:(
The other day, I was looking through photographs on my computer and ran across some images Stormie snapped while in Aberdeen for the wedding. I selected a few that are just tooooooo cute not to see. These can be inspiration shots for other brides-to-be.
Her venue in Aberdeen S. Dakota
The sign (held by the cutie-patootie, Christiana ~ sister-of-the-bride)
The truck: it held the gifts!
Brown-paper bag lanterns.
The guest book table.
While the wedding party got pictures…
This one was from the actual photographer, of Elise and her maids.
Then the real celebration of love began…
So congratulations to Matt and Elise on two years of wedded bliss.
The P.S.
It was also Elise’s birthday this week. AND their baby, the darling-adorable little Blake Matthew was dedicated to Jesus this past weekend. He is 4 months of beauty and oh-so-beloved by all. They are loved and highly favored by God and their Aunt Jeanie.
Love you, Elise, sweet niece, you and you familia!
One son, urged to marry carefully ~ he got the sweetest one ever!
A black-sky, vicious storm-brewing day was overtaken by the burst of bright-light sun-shining, as you spoke your vows in that window-walled cafe. The light (and the love) were nearly blinding!
Seven years, 3 baby girls, a mean, bow-tie wearing dog named Steve (Steve-Holt), some guinea pigs, a new house, a lot of video-game playing, music and worship and little-girl hair-brushing + one major flood later…
Moats and boats and waterfalls,
Alleyways and payphone calls
I been everywhere with you (that’s true)
And here we are. Oh goodness, the years have been blessed. Of all the girls who ever tried to turn my little boy’s head, you were the best choice for him, Jovanie. Congratulations, to you both on such a great decision then and now.
I am so sorry for the week you have had, for the loss you have experienced – not so much about the “things,” the washer and dryer and hot water heater and furnace and carpet. Not even about the physical “things” that included Rocky’s studio and all his guitars and sound systems and computers and recording equipment. Even that, we know – the guitars represent so many precious times in the Presence, the memory of songs sung to the heavens, we feel that loss. We know The LORD will provide and He is your Provider! But it is what those material possessions have represented – a really good life.
You’re safe, your family is good. But it’s hard. Scary to awake in the night to see the waters rising from the lower level and have to be “rescued” in the dark, by flashlight grabbing everything 3 little girls will need until…who knows when?
I love that you have chosen the song for this day of celebration to be, “Home is Wherever I’m with You,” Jovan. Because that is the secret you know.
Laugh until we think we’ll die,
Barefoot on a summer night
Never could be sweeter than with you
So while you’re displaced, not even knowing how long until you can return to “the house,” I am so glad you have found refuge in each other, not just for these days but for life and that even today, in such an unsettled moment – you are home.
A sweet, really sweet wedding, so joyous, so full of love.
A wedding I will always recall with great joy. I shared a little about it last week, but my favorite part was when the bride and groom served communion to all their guests. I had never seen that done before or since. The song was, “I Pour My Love on You.” It was amazing.
Like oil upon your feet ~ Like wine for you to drink
Like water from my heart ~ I pour my love on you
If praise is like perfume ~ I’ll lavish mine on you
Till every drop is gone ~ I’ll pour my love on you
I think the fact that you not only speak on dating at youth conferences, but also still {actually date} is a really good thing.
And now your love is displayed in and through your sons.
And oh, how I love those boys, a double scoop of wonder and delight, with kisses sprinkled freely! You’re not only good friends and lovers, but amazing parents, too.
Hunter’s first day of 3rd grade
It’s beautiful~your love and marriage. Many more happy years to come! Love you, my sweets!
Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply. ~Zane Grey
Ryan and Tredessa are 20 1/2 weeks along now, more than halfway there.
They revealed the gender of my grandbebe-to-be (due date December 15!) at a little family picnic in Estes Park last Saturday.
Factor these things into the equation::
The Faalands are boys-all-boys. Ryan was 1 of 4 brothers and so far 2 grandsons on his side.
Tredessa was 1 of 4 sisters and 1 brother, who have thus far produced 5 granddaughters and 3 grandsons.
We all submitted our guesses and I wanted-wanted-wanted a girl for them because the Faalands need some girls. Tredessa and Stormie can even out that boy count for us later, but I guessed a girl.
Wasn’t it just yesterday we were up in the mountains, a staff retreat for a church I worked at, and didn’t we just get the call, “Stephanie is on her way to the hospital to have the baby,” and wasn’t it, of course in {the middle of the night}??! And didn’t we JUST throw our things together and hit the road, passing over the Continental Divide and zooming down the mountain to be there for her birth? And wasn’t it the most beautiful early morning thing ever? No, it wasn’t yesterday, it was 8 very fun-filled, fast-flying years ago.
As grandbebes go, Guin-Guin was number three, only her big brother, Gavin and her cousin, Hunter-Magoo ahead of her. Right away, she established that she wasn’t anything like the boys. She was, indeed, a girl, an adorable little love-muffin. Quiet, gentle-spirited, thoughtful and determined, Guini’s feet are firmly planted, no push-over, she, but a focused, peaceful and calm disposition emmanates like sun-rays from Guinivere Eden!
“A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.”
Oh, how I love her!
She is my Guini-muggins, my sweet-pea, my Guin-Guin, my darling girl, my first sugar-and-spice grandbebe, my sweet-sweet girly-q! And ~ my flower girl, for ever and always…{below, a video Guini and I made when she turned 5}:
Now…
May the God of all hope and comfort, the God who excitedly fashioned you from the His brightest, loveliest and most creative thoughts and made you so gentle and sensitive in spirit {such a depository of His love and grace}, may that God make His very own will for you known and may it be done and settled here on earth just as He decreed it from heaven. And may you be an agent of His love and grace from your middle-child vantage point and I pray He will deliver you from all evil and that the {fire of your faith} in Jesus Christ {{our Savior!}} will set nations ablaze for His glory, yes! To the praise of His glory!
So be it!
I love you, Guinivere, my darling girl.
Freckles are kisses from the angels. They love to kiss-kiss Guini’s face. Me, too!
Where did June go? I loved June. I needed two full months of June, at least. June is the most romantic and lovely of them all, isn’t it? The days are long and the nights are sweet. *sigh…Yes, June, I shall miss you.
Snapshots I got and some of my favorite June quotes, below:
Averi J. She is my 5-year old beauty!
Did some retro-coloring. Snapped this on their porch one evening in between Taylor Swift YouTube videos on the iPad. They love them some Taylor Swift!
Cake Batter Rice Krispie Treats
Gemma May & Guini-Poo. And the Peonies.
Gavin & Gemma were checking out a kite in the sky.Uncle Rocky with Malakai.In Aunt Tara and Uncle Dave’ back yard. The older kids are getting tougher to get photos of. Always on the move. Trampoline or pool or chasing games.
This quote is funny. If I am not crying. Haha.
Here the my good-looking guy. Always hard-working. Always sweet. The world’s best dad to our kiddos and my 32-year lover!
Uncle Ryan and the nephews at the lake for Tredessa’s 30th celebration. They were all styling the backwards hats.
Kai and Poppa.
Amelie overseeing the sunset from Tara’s backyard.
And Gemma did indeed slide down the dirt pile in her pretty yellow sundress. Oh my.
Love a romantic June night. ALL June nights are romantic. You may quote me on that! :)
Title quote:“On a strawberry sundae of a day, all daisies and June sun and pastoral posing by world leaders on the Lancaster House lawn.” -John Vinocur
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him;
I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.
He will call on me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble,
I will deliver him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him
and show him my salvation.” Psalms 91.14-16
You are smack-dab in the middle of the same age-years Jesus was /living/walking/defeating the kingdom of darkness (on His way to a cross) one miracle at a time. He was changing water to wine, chatting it up with children and healing the sick. And that is where you are, too, changing the spiritual landscape, fathering your boys and establishing the Kingdom.
I have called you a spiritual iconoclast, by which I meant
A person who is actively breaking down the religious traditions that suck the life from people and instead, is revealing a whole new landscape of the life and love of the Father towards His people. A Kingdom man. A creative visionary. A history-maker.
I think earlier spiritual iconoclasts were guys like Elijah and Elisha. Especially, though, maybe: Jeremiah. Before the building up, there is the matter of tearing down (see Jeremiah 1, The Message subtitles it: Demolish and Then Start Over).
I see this clearly about you, but am not always able to express it openly or well. So on the occasion of your birthday [note: oops-now a few days past], your very own proverbial mother-in-law (frightening title, to be sure), shall attempt to communicate the true and deep to one son-in-love. Please receive them from my heart
On your birthday, I wanted to say {I want you to always know}…
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him…”
So, it turns out I have known you for like, 33% of your life. And you have known me for almost 19% of mine. For a girl who was raised moving from city to city and church to church and leaving behind everyone I knew and starting over sooooooooooooo many times that even a 2-year friendship felt like a lifetime, that puts you and I in the 98.987-percentile of my longest-ever-running relationships. Kind of kidding. I just made up that last statistic, but it’s pretty true. You probably couldn’t have known that you would hold a place that high in my life, my stats/personal data, or my heart for so long. I didn’t know it. But here it is.
You are sort of stuck with me.
And I know so many times it would be so much easier not to be. But I can say at least for me, God knew what He was doing and He still has a plan and His glory will be seen, right?
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name…”
I think I mention this in every single birthday post I ever write to you (and this is #7, I believe), but I just love to hear you play and sing and worship the Lord. Last month as we were re-painting the living room and had moved most everything out, save a few items in the middle covered with drop cloths, sound, once again had the ability to reverberate off the walls and ceilings and it took me back to when we first knew you, first moved into this house – before it had been “properly” appointed with lots of furniture and accessories. You would come every weekend, guitar in hand and sing in that room and worship would resound and hit the walls and ascend to the ceiling and go on to heaven and come back and change the atmosphere. Your worship in this house set a desired precedent for my heart and this place and when the acoustics are just so, I remember it. And I miss that as life has gotten louder and busier and fuller. I love being in a meeting with hundreds as you lead in worship, hearing your most amazing voice. I enjoy watching the Rez Live-Stream when you and Tara are leading. But you with your guitar and just a few of us right here: overwhelming goodness. Way better! You’re one of my all-time fav singers. And always will be.
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will be with him in trouble…”
When you chose my amazing firstborn daughter to be your wife, and then the two of you blessed us with these cherished boys – oh, be still my heart. You are such a wonderful husband to Tara and an incredible daddy to Hunter and Malakai. I also love you for the sacrifices you have made to perpetuate the legacy of adoption in our family. Because dad, who was adopted knew he was born to adopt Tara. And when the two of you opened your heart to do the same with Baby-Kai, well, all of us are beginning to understand in a way we maybe hadn’t before, this whole spirit of adoption, of truly becoming sons of God, crying out to Him, ‘Abba, Father.” The spiritual treasure of this in-the-natural adoption is changing our family. Thank-you for paying the cost and being obedient to welcoming this son into your family, into ours. Our family DNA-chain is being forged unbreakable – what blessing it is going to be for so many through the generations…
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will deliver him and honor him…”
When you share your heart and the secrets of the Lord and reveal vision, it is life-giving. Many times I have stood in the back of a room and as you spoke with such crystal clarity something I had already heard many times before, I would still be left breathless with the strength, the perspicuity of the message. I always wondered, looking around, do the rest of you understand the power of what is happening here? That is a gift of God in your life. You have been given a strong gift of revealing, communicating. Your words, falling like rain, will have the ability to change people and situations and lives and nations.
So I pray that all the God-given dreams of your heart will come to pass and that the Lord will send you mighty warriors to run with you, those who are strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. And I pray that hopeless people will hear the vision and be energized to pick it up and take it to new levels you never dreamed possible (beyond all you could ask or imagine) and finally understand why they were born. And I pray He sends you the weakest ones, too, for they are indispensable to the Body of Christ. So may you be surrounded by those who will bring you all the help you need {to be all He has called you to be, and to do all He has called you to do} from the sanctuary. There is great help available from the sanctuary.
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “With long life I will satisfy him…”
I deeply respect the strong call and anointing of God on your life. That God is opening doors to big rooms and your gift is bringing you before great men, that you have been set forth to shake nations and declare the Kingdom of God over regions is not in question. But I maintain that you are never stronger in your anointing than the times you are releasing the light of the joy of the Lord over people. For seriousness and heaviness need not be cultivated, as a rule. Jesus didn’t say, “I have come that your worry, care, concern and apprehension would be appropriately full,” but rather that our JOY would be full. And you have made me laugh so many times. Your humor and ability to see the silly side of life have been a perfect foil to my desolation, as the enemy himself wishes to keep us from our very strength (the joy of the Lord) by causing us consternation, super-responsible trepidation, woe and worry. So let the TV preachers work on bringing everybody down about the terrible times in which we live (as if the Word didn’t promise greater grace in these troubling times, and greater is He that is in us, for crying out loud) and you keep dispensing garments of praise for the spirit of heaviness and releasing the light and life of the love of the Father and be full of joy through the Holy Spirit (like Jesus was) and dispense it, too. You are hilarious. That is an anointing.
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will…show him my salvation.”
I love you most, maybe, because you love the LORD. That fact alone brings me peace no matter what happens – for His promises towards you will be true, and somehow we’ll all figure everything out and get lined back up.
We have been to heaven and back a few times in 10 years. Being your m-i-l, believe it or not, has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Seasons come and go. The way we interact or the actual time we’ll spend together has and will probably continue to change between us, but I will always thank God for you. I will always believe the best of you. I will never write you off or write you out of my story. I will always be proud to say you are my son-in-love and the father of my grandsons and the beautiful man of my daughter’s dreams.
And with the exception of a few horrendous meetings and the bloody attack of the enemy against our unity last year, I would do it all again, with gratefulness for your love and openness for what I had to bring {and I was honored to give anything/everything I could} – in spite of me being your “m-i-l.” *faint smile
Have another wonderful, blessed year of favor. So many more to come, I just know it. Don’t be afraid – because you love Him (you are covered)… {me}
But p.s…I am voting against a duck-dynasty beard, puleeeeeeezzzzzze…
Which came first? The perfect day? Or the perfect baby being born to make a regular, old day so perfect?
Q: What do exotic eyes and head-full of thick, dark hair, a yellow-embroidered sun-suit with a yellow bonnet, ginger-molasses cookies from the grocery store bakery, my first “private room” at the hospital, water breaking at a church softball game while dad was in the outfield, being 11 days past my due date, a Scrabble game (which I still contend I was winning) and Howard Community Hospital in Kokomo, IN all have in common?
These are the bits and pieces of your arrival, your story, your birth, your place in the family history. Tredessa Christine Rhoades Faaland: You made us mommy and daddy and 3 adorable girlies, the Rhoades Family, 1983.
Monday’s child is fair of face…
I have been re-living your beginnings so much this spring because of Bailey Sophia. So many thing about her remind me of you, her hair, her kissable cheeks, her content and laid-back disposition. June of 1983 was one of the most notable months of my life, the summer that followed memorable and lovely: your father was ordained, there were long afternoons in the backyard with your two sisters splashing in a pool, great music on the radio, and my little baby girl in a yellow carrier, right by my side in the green grass on sun-shiney days.
Dessa at 2 weeks
Dessa at 6 weeks
And now here we are, 30 years down the road – celebrating your extraordinary life, unable to fathom what we’d ever have done without the most-middle-child of them all. You are a center-point, a bridge, an equidistant intermediary. You are observant and intuitive; careful, but powerful. You’re a challenging, but honoring daughter and your trust in God is an inspiration.
Dessa at 5
I am so pleased to see the life you are leading. I am so happy God sent you love in a very good-looking, strong, humble package. I am so thrilled that you have gotten to go to the nations in Jesus’ Name and serve selflessly in high-places for the glory of God.
More than anything this year, I am so excited with you and for you that you are with child, that you carry a dream within – as you have so longed to have children. I am rejoicing with you and counting down the days. Your child will be loved and adored and watched over with great zeal – because you have sown that into the lives of so many other children while you were waiting. It will all come back to you.
For your 30th birthday, I pray and wish and bless you with this (my version of a birthday card):
So HAPPY 30th BIRTHDAY, Dessy-Poo. Your momma loves you, girl. You bless my heart and set me straight. LOVE YOU BUNCHES!!! xxoo
He was all of 21 when I was born, my dad. He practiced being a parent on me. :) It worked because he has become truly fabulous at it. I am my father’s daughter.
Love you, dad.
I like THESE dads, too:
My husband Dave, whose children are his most treasured possessions in this life. He thinks about them, prays for them, tends to their requests and loves them so much more deeply and passionately than they could probably ever know. You, all my sweet children, have a dad whose everything, heart and soul, is invested in you.
Tristan, DP, Rocky and soon, Ryan: These amazing young men {{my 4 sons}} are unleashing godly, Kingdom-building, generation-honoring, thoughtful, intelligent, giving, loving, world-changing, worshiping, joyous children on the earth. I call said children my grandbebes. But the 8 + 1-in-the-oven {Gavin+Guini+Gemma+Averi+Amelie+Bailey+Hunter+Malakai+baby-to-be-Faaland}? Have WONDERFUL daddies! They are so blessed!!!
Thanks, Maurice Chevalier, for this happy 1930 tune, “Sweepin’ the Clouds Away!” It seemed a nice accompaniment to the day I recently had with the girlies.
Don’t go ’round moping, hoping happiness will come,
That’s not the way; it doesn’t pay!
If you want happiness, just help yourself to some,
Why don’t you try to take life the way I do:
Guinivere (7 1/2), and her little sister Gemma (6) and their cousins, Averi (5) and little Amelie Belle (3) came over on a sunny morning and we did each other’s hair and put on make-up and everyone got to dress up in Nonna’s old clothes and shoes if they wanted to. Or not.
Then we made paper chains and stars for decoration and set the patio up for some fun-fun-fun!
Let the whole world sigh or cry,
I’ll be high in the sky,
Up on top of a rainbow,
Sweeping the clouds away!
I don’t care what’s down below,
Let it rain, let it snow,
I’ll be up on a rainbow,
Sweeping the clouds away!
Averi and her little sister, Amelie – above.
Gemma just eats the camera up (above).
Averi got her momma’s pretty eyes (above)
Guini is growing up so fast (above). She’ll be 8 in July.
And this little silly (Amelie, 3, below) keeps us laughing.
Then the real celebration of love began…
