The funny thing is that as soon as we started talking about and praying for the courage to give up some of our material goods, He really began to open our eyes about our other areas of ministry. It’s been an exciting and wonderful day. It seems like a day of big steps being decided after several months of God stirring our hearts again.

Two years ago, a large brick wall appeared out of nowhere, and seemed to be directly in the path we felt called to go. This wall was the reality of undeniable physical pain Becca was experiencing daily from a tear in the tissue of her hip sockets.  She could barely walk, and so our lives became very different. We had to back out of a short term missions trip because of it, but we felt tremendous peace, and looked back on that peace for sustainment in the days that followed.

Hiking and some of the things we loved very much were taken away, but mainly it felt like a dream was gone, and that lead to fear and depression in Becca, and frustration and helplessness in Tim.  Becca spent her time in great pain in bed, and Tim struggled trying to keep things together and portray a positive attitude about everything.  The hardest time was those first few months, which combined with some other life events, led us to an emotional breaking point.  For that and the changes it brought about we will always be thankful.

Now that we’ve come to the end of the second surgery I, Becca, find myself excited to be moving on with a new chapter in life, yet also at a bit of a loss.  I’ve spent so many months fighting with the insurance company, praying, surrendering and having my mind fixed on this goal that now I’m going through that moment you experience after graduation or quitting a job or losing a bad job or getting married or basically anything where all you dreamed of finally comes true.

In the weeks following surgery, I dreamt I was fighting and arguing with people to have my surgery.  It’s hard to let go sometimes.

Thanks for all of your prayers and support.

Now that we’ve discussed why building an invincible foundation in our marriage is a goal, we need to tell you why one of our goals is to be financially unencumbered. We believe we should work towards being free from major financial commitments so we can pick up and go wherever God calls us.

He has made this easier for us in many more ways than expected. What we mean by this is that He has taken it out of our control. We have incurred new health bills, and we have had to get by on unemployment recently. This has made the goal seem distant, and yet it’s oddly taken the pressure off of us, because we are obviously incapable of taking care of these financial burdens on our own!

We can say this easily now, but this wasn’t always the case. When we were first married we were both fresh out of college and started our first real full-time jobs. It took a while to figure out what our budget was supposed to look like, and to give up the very tempting dream of eating out for lunch every day of the week. :)

Tim felt a strong desire to be a responsible adult who takes care of the financial burden. When it came down to it, he really loved working a regular job and getting fulfillment from being a web designer and developer. In fact, it’s an area where he was desperate to hold on to the responsibility because it gave him a sense of validation in life. When he was laid off in May from his first professional job of 5 years, it was a pretty devastating emotional blow.

He could no longer turn to the status of being an employed productive member of the workforce to keep his self-image intact. He felt a total lack of control over his future, something very new to him. There had always been a next step planned out and waiting just over horizon. He was sick of school from a young age and eagerly began working at age 14. After high-school it was time to go to college, with very little doubt in his mind about the necessity of that. He was employed almost continuously throughout college and was driven to finish college as quickly as possible.

After college it was time to immediately transition to the professional working world, a world that had seemed like the final payout after all those tortuous years of education. So, with a gap of about 5 days between graduation and the first day on the job, he continued chasing the feeling of value and worth that working brought. The layoff that came after five years as a professional was an opportunity to recalibrate life and figure out how God wanted him to look at his value and identity apart from his employment.

Becca felt called to quit her full-time job three years ago.  She was later called to give up most of her freelance work, and through circumstances, lost a lot of the rest of it.  This all felt a little crazy and a lot like rejection.  The last few years have been a dance with pride in the area of “accomplishment” with a grand pay out of…surrender.   She has wrestled a lot with feelings of uselessness and questioned a lot, but in the end wouldn’t change a thing.  She wants to do what God called her to do without feeling ashamed.

Learning to really trust God in this area, being unemployed during some of the most stressful and difficult times in our lives, has been challenging and encouraging. Seeing that He is really faithful to bring us through this and take care of our financial needs is astonishing. So it is with great hope that we look to God to carry this goal to completion.

Epilogue: After writing this post Tim started a new position as a contractor with a ministry, and just before writing this Becca got some very fulfilling freelance work for a different ministry.

Your rubber-bands had many names: more time together, deep conversations, compromises, unspoken agreements and high expectations. We can see how these seemingly healthy and harmless rubber-bands had us fooled. We believed that your rubber-bands were necessary in order to have a healthy marriage. You sure kept us busy working to maintain the perfect “healthy relationship.” You gave us a feeling of superiority with all those tightly wound bands, to compensate for our insecurities. The dense ball of connections seemed invincible.

Boy, were we surprised with what a little dynamite in the center could do. We know you would have preferred if that bomb never went off. You tried to protect us from it the only way you knew how, by pulling us tighter through your control. Happily, you were unsuccessful.

BOOM! Each band disintegrated and unraveled so quickly when the truth finally came out. Those dirty brown rubber-bands were no longer hidden. Hello guilt trips, shaming, blaming, lying, selfishness, rages, criticisms, control, manipulation, false masks and attempted compensation for the other person’s deficits. All these things certainly were holding us close together. We had seen the ugly rubber-bands faintly before, but remember, we were distracted by your beauty.

We thought you were doing a really good thing for us. And in some ways you did. We really did love to be together, and we really did grow in some cool ways. But, you were an empty, powerless idol. You could only react to situations by snapping us back together.

God let you live for a little while, but His jealousy for our hearts called to us and, you see, we heard Him. Even if we tried to reform you, I’m afraid it will never be the same. We have to give you up. It’s hard because you were there in almost all our most pleasurable moments. We see your form in picture after picture, but you were never real — you were the figment of our imagination, not part of God’s plan. I’m sorry if that is hard for you to hear.

So, that’s who your replacement is, God Himself, the Creator of the whole universe and Redeemer of our souls. When you fell apart under the pressure of circumstances, He was there to start picking up our pieces. Instead of bouncing around believing that we were safe and sound wrapped up with rubber bands, we saw that we would only be safe wrapped up with Him.

We are now welded onto an immovable steel pylon. We say this with all humility, but any weaker structure would be an insult to God’s capabilities.

You just weren’t good enough, rubber-band ball. We thank you for your temporary stability, but God numbered your days. Living in tents, Abraham knew his architect and builder would ultimately be God. Let it be known Tim and Becca are no longer in the construction business. God now has the titles of Architect and Builder of our hearts too.

Rest in Peace,
Tim and Becca

“If the size of your dream isn’t intimidating to you, there is a good chance it is insulting to God.” Steven Furtick

When Tim lost his job we felt a loss of the security that we had been relying on in our day-to-day lives. This was a chance for God to say, “You need to learn that you must trust Me for everything.” After a little time of panicking we heard some advice from Becca’s dad, recommending that we don’t get frantic, which is our natural reaction in stressful situations. So we took some time to plant ourselves in the office and think.

We had wanted to formulate goals for our future for quite a while, but never really got down to it until that day. Equipped with a giant post-it pad, a sharpie, and our foggy dreams we set to work on creating our big picture goals that would shape all of our upcoming major life decisions. Now we can filter all decisions through these goals, and we can axe any idea that doesn’t help the big five.

God united our hearts on each of the following items through prayer that day.

A.)   To build an invincible foundation in our marriage.

B.)    To become financially unencumbered.

C.)    Be physically able to go where called.

D.)   To finish the 12 steps.

E.)    To be available to put energy into a global ministry right now.

We realize these are very broad goals, and that’s intentional. After we came up with the big five, we made lists of potential methods for reaching these goals. We know that “Man plans the dream but God directs the steps…”

Over the next week or so we are going to be revealing where we are with each one of these, and where the past five months has brought us.

Coming soon, marriage and the emotional rubber-band ball!

So, please subscribe to our rss feed, join our mailing list, follow us on twitter, or watch our facebook status updates to find out when we add the next article in the series.

“Prayer is the greatest power God has put into our hands for service — praying is harder than doing, at least I find it so, but the dynamic lies that way to advance the Kingdom.” Mary Slessor

The second speaker was at our Perspectives class in the evening, he was talking about the eras of mission history and he started talking about the changing roles of churches and missions agencies in the church today. He spoke of churches that are expressing their heart for the kingdom through global missions and local community service at the same time. We feel like our home church has room to grow into more excitement and a bigger heart for the whole world. Yet, we are very excited to be a part of this young vibrant church that’s making an amazing impact on the local community.

When we spoke to the perspectives speaker after class he recommended finding other young people in our church who are already, or could become, excited about missions. We could all go on a short-term trip and tell everyone in the church all about it. Passion is contagious, by raising up more leaders and servants, we can inspire the whole church family to get behind this exciting new initiative.

So, we suddenly realized that means we need to find other people in our church who share our heart for the world and we need to set up a short-term missions trip with them. This wouldn’t be just a short-term trip for the sake of itself, this needs to be part of a larger long-term strategy to build a heart for global missions in the church that we love being a part of.

It’s time for young people in the church to reach out and grasp our potential as leaders. The statistics say that we in America are the smallest and least enthusiastic generation in the church in a long time. I’m not willing to allow that to hold us back from being excited and effective in the Kingdom. It’s time to do something so big and so amazing that it’s doomed to failure without God. I’m glad we are afraid of jumping into something so big, if it wasn’t terrifying it would be insulting to Him.

If you know someone who wants to do this, and do it right, let us know. We will need partners and mentors for this.

The third annual symposium on Human Trafficking in Colorado was held 2 weeks ago at the YWAM Campus here in Colorado Springs. Becca and I attended to increase our own awareness of this serious problem which plagues many of the poorest countries on earth, and rears its ugly head in the United States in many forms.

Law enforcement, community organizations, and national anti-trafficking organizations were in attendance. It was also open to the public. This conference was an intense experience where we learned a great deal about the nature of this particular evil and what people are doing to fight it here and abroad. We heard the harrowing tale of a survivor of trafficking in the US.

There are some very neat things happening in the Colorado Springs region, there is the beginnings of several trafficking rehabilitation programs, and there is a serious focus by local, state, and federal law enforcement on this issue. There are very few dedicated homes for rehabilitating victims of trafficking in the US, but there are local social services who care, and are working to provide as much help as they can.

One area that was particularly frightening and interesting was the connection between traveling magazine sales crews and human trafficking in the US. The teens, who any apartment dweller will be familiar with, come to your door trying to “win a contest” or get college money, are often victims of trafficking. They are being coerced into forced labor in very poor, sometimes abusive, working conditions and with almost no means of escape. I had no idea what was going on with these people before, but it’s amazing how often we see this sort of thing happen and just try to ignore the pushy sales-pitch without considering what is really wrong with the situation they are in.

The Art of Social Change

We also heard from Kevin Austin of Not for Sale, who had some very interesting things to say about the role of art and media in all of our efforts to change the world. His session was apt for our interest in communicating with people in the US about serious topics affecting the larger world they may not be aware of. His points included the importance of approaching people with a proclamation rather than propaganda, showing vs. telling, and not manipulating people through shame.

This last point was something we had already seen as very relevant for our efforts. We want to tell people in the church about what is really happening around the world in the global christian movement, not just try to shame them into giving more money to missions. Sometimes people deserve to feel like they should be doing more, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be an effective way to get your message across. If they just give out of guilt they aren’t really engaging with a cause or a message, they are just trying to assuage their own fear.

Last weekend was the first PodCamp held in Denver. Pod camp is a great idea, an “un-conference” where the attendees determine the schedule and sessions the night before and the all the sessions are run by whoever is able to talk about that topic for a while. Or, in the case of the project management session it was just a nice intimate facilitated discussion of everyone’s experiences and methods. It was pretty great, Becca and I decided it was just close enough to make the trip up there worth it, and we were definitely right. We learned a lot and were able to meet some really cool people in the Denver hip tech scene. Surprisingly this was their first time holding this event in Denver.

Becca and I went into it looking for some inspiration about how to use social media and some of the emerging trends in the online world. Mainly for our goals of creating something useful for ministries to communicate more effectively. We got some great conversations and contact with people there and really got a feel for the power of a community that’s really tied together and talking openly.

We had some great inspiration and are really looking forward to putting what we learned into practice.

Something that we have been thinking about ever since May of 2008 is the idea of global missions. That May, Rebecca and I went on a backpacking trip in the Rocky Mountains. It was to be a three-day loop in the wilderness and we had already accomplished several trips of a similar nature the previous two years. We started on that trip as well prepared as we could be and seemed to be doing well until the third day. We came into a section of mountains that was still heavily covered in snow from the winter. In the high mountains, snow hangs around into June.

This was a lot more snow that we were really prepared for and we ended up “post-holing”, where our boots would break right through the upper crust of the snow and our entire leg would sink in up the knee or thigh. We did this for hours, since it was too far to turn back, and we had no snow shoes along. We eventually realized we couldn’t find the trail we were supposed to be following, even though we knew where we were on the map.

We ended up deciding to bushwhack our way down out of the valley we were in, hoping to come out of the wilderness area and follow a gravel road back to our car at the trail-head. This idea proved to be a difficult one to execute because of the increasingly steep and treacherous terrain as well as the fading light. So, we found a tiny ledge that was just flat enough for us to set up our tent and rest for the evening. Scared, cold, wet and exhausted we made camp that night, and a change was already taking place inside of us. We had just endured the most physically demanding day ever, and were feeling totally incapable of handling what was happening to us.

That night it began to snow and the next morning it was pretty clear that it was too dangerous to try descending the sheer and rocky slopes that were our only way out, visibility was very poor and we probably would have broken a leg. So, I made some calls to work and family to let them know what was going on with us. We were miraculously high enough up that we had a decent cell phone signal. Eventually we got frightened enough that we called search and rescue to ask if they could help us get out. They weren’t able to get to us that day, communication was difficult to maintain, and there was some confusion about our exact location.

We melted snow for our water that day, and finished the last crumbs of our trail mix. That night we were cold and scared, we were barely able to sleep because we were camped on a slope and we kept sliding down to the bottom of our tent where a puddle of icy water had formed. We had good sleeping bags and warm clothes and a stove and were not in any immediate danger from the elements but it was still a very emotionally exhausting situation to be in. Throughout this time we prayed constantly for God to take care of us and show us a way out.

²⁹ He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;

³¹ but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Isaiah 40:29-31

The next day we woke up and the snow had finally stopped. Our cellphone was dead at this point, but we had spoken to the SAR coordinator the previous day and asked if we could try to hike out that day if the weather was clear and the situation looked OK. He seemed to think it would be alright if we attempted to do what we could, if we knew where we were going.

So in the middle of that morning we packed up camp, laced up our frozen boots and prayed for God to guide our steps. He completely took care of us during that descent. Steep and slippery with melting snow, we could have been in a bad situation very easily, but he completely guided us and kept us from falling though we were weak, tired, and thirsty. We eventually found our way back to the car and talked to the SAR volunteer who was waiting there. They were able to call back the crews out searching for us.

For days after that we felt like we were in shock. When you come down off that adrenaline and stress you kind of feel like you are floating and your body is disconnected from your brain. We spent a lot of time thinking about what that time meant, and what happened to us spiritually up there. One thing we definitely learned was that God is more than able to take care of us in any situation. The idea that there are people around the world that survive with little or no food and water and are in a struggle for their lives every day became very relevant all of a sudden. The ability to drive down the street and pick up a pizza with a few minutes notice seems like the most extravagant ridiculous luxury ever. We saw that our life as Americans has insulated us from some of the realities that most of the world faces every day.

Our entire perspective changed on materialism that week, and we began to pray for God to show us what he wanted us to do with our lives now. The answer sounded a lot like “foreign missions” and that was terrifying in an entirely new way.

There is, of course, a lot of question in our minds about what specifically this might look like. We have to somehow continue to survive in our lives, but in so many ways we are completely free to pursue whatever doors God might open. Neither of us are employed full-time right now, so we are in a transition time. We haven’t had children, yet, and that offers us some freedom to change our lives pretty drastically. We of course have complications and we have to deal with some serious circumstances (including finances and health issues) while we are starting down this path, but I feel blessed for where we are at and what we face right now.

Our intention with this blog is to ask some questions, answer some questions, and share our experiences with others who are interested in what it looks like when a person stops living just for themselves and starts giving something for the kingdom. The title is of course an answer to the question we have been asking ourselves for some time now “What do you want to do with your life?” And just to show where we are at and how vaguely defined our objective is we’ve included the weak and imprecise word “something” in our answer. But, whatever that something is, it has to fulfill the purpose of being for God’s kingdom.