We've Had A Makeover!

So we had a makeover! A blog makeover, thanks to our dear friend Allie, who is much more creative than I am! I haven't completed it yet (haven't added the links for each of our stories on the left hand side, and fixing all the category links. Maybe next time the kids are sleeping!) We've been contemplating a new look, feel, and theme for our blog for awhile, and wanted something that meant something specific to us and what we desire for our family. The longer we parent,  the more we grow in our marriage, the more we walk through the trials of life, the more we are beginning to see how much we want to "bring our kids home."

I frequently read Ann Voskamp's blog, A Holy Experience, and love how she talks about living a one piece life with her family. As soon as I heard that phrase, I knew it was the one! It was the perfect tag line for our "new" blog and the perfect phrase to describe what we are after as we build and nurture our family.

Families today are so fragmented. Most of their days and activities are spent separate from each other, gaining most of their perspectives, beliefs, and likings from other people (peers, teachers, coaches, etc). Children spend the majority of their waking hours at school, away from their families, and then the majority of evenings are spent ushering kids all over creation to activity after activity. Meals are rushed, if eaten together at all, and it seems as though children prefer the company of their friends rather than their siblings. Even the way churches are often set up, have families walking in the door to worship on Sunday morning, and kids and parents go their separate ways, only to regroup in the parking lot afterwards and drive home.

We are messy, fallen, sinners and we desire to gather around our children, living out this crazy and glorious mess all day, every day, together. With that comes great paint, great joy, and great transparency. We strive to model the supremacy of God and the Gospel to our children and feel we can't do that properly if we are time-torn, fragmented, and living most of our days apart, rather than together. We do not want our children growing up and seeing life as a dichotomy, where family and faith are separate from the rest of the world. We want that "one piece life" where we do family, faith, and everything else as a complete whole, together.

With each new stage and season of life, we are learning how that "one piece life" looks every day. It doesn't mean our kids aren't going to do sports, and doesn't mean that our kids won't participate in age segregated church activities, and doesn't mean we will homeschool indefinitely. We will tackle each road and season of life as it comes. What it does mean, is that we will pay close attention to our own hearts and the hearts of our children, and constantly look for ways to nurture the whole being of our family as ONE- not time-torn and not fragmented...

living out  a one piece life. 

We are not declaring a certain kind of life as better than the next, we just know that the pursuit of a "one piece life" is where God is directing our family. A certain kind of life-style does not fix our sin soaked problems and does not change the condition of our hearts, or the "tune" of our family... only the grace of the Gospel can do that.