Keep On Dreaming Even if it Breaks Your Heart

I am a little frustrated this beautiful day-off morning. I stayed up two hours past my usual bedtime last night, believing I would be able to sleep in. I obviously wasn't taking into account my internal clock that set my adrenaline pumping at 8:00 to begin another work day.

I was so mad!

So now I sit here at 9:00, a little grumpy with a FAT to-do list ahead of me and sleep completely having left my still tired eyes. Perhaps this is a good thing; I did want to get back into the swing of posting daily (trying to). So I'll use this extra time to do just that.

I decided to take this post and back-track to the days before the joys and excitements of finding a wedding date, and explain how we were able to get to this point in the first place.

After I got home in March of this year, Matthew was in the swing of a job after having been unemployed for five months. When I started having to pay rent down here, gas expenses started climbing and bills clamored for our attention, we quickly realized, even thoug the job was a blessing, the income it was giving was far from enough.

I was soon blessed with a job, and we began to see if married life was possible for us. After adding up all our bills, we realized we shouldn't even be making it.

It was a miserable feeling that swept over both of us as we realized marriage was probably farther then we hoped. I can remember going to sleep some night in tears, wondering why these hard circumstances were happening to us. Weren't we good people? Even a little bit? Why weren't our financial prayers getting answered?

In due time, we expressed this information to a family member who told us to pray, expect more. They challenged us to not only pray for an exceeding income from another job, but to also pray it was doing something Matthew LOVED to do.

We both sat at the kitchen table staring at them, ready to give up right there. There was no way we would be able to find a job that paid that much without either of us having college degrees and especially not getting a job that Matthew liked.
I felt like we were staring into the face of defeat every day and it was miserable. In that time, we must have had faith as small as a mustard seed, forgetting it could move mountains.

We waited about two months more, the agony was overwhelming and my faith was slipping. But just as fast as you are reading this sentence is how fast the job Matthew now has with his security firm came.
You would not believe the amount of hours Matthew puts in a week. We are finally able to make enough money to survive as a married couple AND have a little left over for savings.

Not only that, but Matthew is loving it; he gets to carry a gun now, a badge, wears a pretty rad uniform, the works. AND to top it off, he gets to guard ships carrying detained workers from other countries; he says it's like getting to go to a new country with every new ship that sails into our little ol' Mississip river.

Then to top it off, not too much longer after that, we found a little apartment complex we ABSOLUTELY love. It is in SUCH a convenient spot (we are waiting on the finalization of that right now, keep us in prayer!) right between our families and closer to work then before; after finding that, we finally felt the go-ahead in our hearts to set an official wedding date.


I'm shaking my head right now, realizing how much of a miracle it all is. It is such a sigh of relief to not have to constantly fight in my faith, KNOWING God would take care of everything but the circumstances of life screaming otherwise.

When I go back and think about those days, I even realize how it was impossible sometimes for bills to be met, but they always were. I know God will put us in that position again at some point, but I will be able to stand on that experience to get us through it again.

Now some of our friends are going through the same predicament and my heart goes out to them. Matthew and I cover them in prayer from a heart of understanding and empathy, not that of just a name on a prayer list. I KNOW this is just a season of preparing THEM for marriage and strengthening their commitment to God and to each other as it did for us. I know God has big things for them like he has for us too.

So that is how we got to 12.12.12 in a nut shell. It is also one of my greatest testimonies that God works outside of "the odds" of life and takes care of every.single.one of us.
Like my mother-in-law says, "He's into details. If someone can know how many hairs I have on my head, then he is into detail."
That's my official update concerning finances.

Now I'll use the rest of my blogposts to talk about the wedding planning lol.

~Rose

And I leave you with a song I love and think is acurate to the post. lol