the year in review: 2014

 

me.

It’s been a big year for me. I got married and I moved to a new city and I got a new job and I wrote a new book and I started a new business. It’s been so crazy but so good!

i love you.

And this is the really amazing person that I married. I love him so, so, so much!

still laughing…

…at the constant antics of these two. Never mind that they’re only a few months away from their first birthdays; they still play and fight like kittens, get into everything they aren’t supposed to, drive us crazy, and bring us a whole lot of fun and delight. :)

winter wonderland.

This is from February, just a couple of weeks before my wedding. It was all gone by the time February 22 came around though, which was a little disappointing. Snowy wedding pictures would have been so cool!

birthday.

My youngest sister turned nine this year and it was fun to be back home for her birthday! I miss her a lot between my visits home. I can always count on her to steal my phone, go horseback riding with me, and generally keep me in line. :)

friends.

“I pretty much only feel comfortable when I’m around you. You’re like the sweatpants of my life.” – a very apt Pinterest quote which describes my relationship with this lovely lady perfectly. ;) And I’m traveling to PA to visit her as we speak!!

spring.

travel.

Sam and I made two big trips this year: one to Florida for my dear friend’s wedding, and one to Montana for a long, lazy week at his aunt’s beautiful farm.

 

summer.

Sweet raspberries, sunny days. The beach, the lake, and trips back home. That was my summer. :)

a day in my life.

This kitty (along with his brother, who is never cooperative for having his picture taken) is one of the few constants in my somewhat uninteresting day to day life. He comes in every morning purring like a little engine, happy to see me and snuggle with me for his allotted half hour before he gets big-eyed and crazy with Loki.

smiles.

My little sister and her catch of rainbow trout from the creek that crosses our property:

autumn.

home.

I’m pretty lucky to have grown up in this place. :)

celebrate.

This was the view from our honeymoon suite, looking over the Columbia River Gorge. There’s nothing like the culmination of years of waiting and months of planning!

let’s do it again.

I loved having a fancy photo shoot with Tim and Sam in Corvallis in August!

i miss you.

It’s hard to see this girl only once every month or two. I just love her.

beautiful.

dress up.

Definitely the biggest dress up event of my life… :)

macro.

christmas.

favorite.

I really just love this picture. The three of us have been friends since we could talk and this picture pretty much sums up our entire history.

never change.

The farm at sunset, the horses on the horizon, the mountain overlooking it all in solemn magnificence. This is the beauty that is the lifeblood of my joy and creativity in all that I do, because it is this beauty that makes me look to my glorious Creator.

just because.

A few pictures from the fruit of my photography business this year…

hopes and dreams for 2015.

Ah, so many. I dream of making more progress on my current writing project… of developing my photography business into something solid and profitable. Of pouring more hours into the study of the Word of God, which never gets old or dry. Of walking alongside my husband as we follow Jesus together.

It’s going to be good.

stephen & andrea

 

Guess what I got to do on Christmas Day?

My favorite thing in the whole, wide world: an engagement session. Even better? It was for my brother and my soon-to-be sister-in-law!

 

It was a short one due to the lighting and the December chill and the busy day, but it was so much fun. :)

february snow

 

One: bff (and bridesmaid!) visiting me from Pennsylvania.
Two: long drives in scary winter weather, mercifully protected by God.
Three: dates with my beloved last weekend (one of them a fancy dress-up banquet in a soft nighttime snowfall).
Seven: East Coast friends and family visiting next weekend.
Ten: days till I marry my best friend.
Eighteen: inches of snow.

Countless: graces and mercies of God.

winter

 

It wasn’t supposed to snow.

It was supposed to be like November and December—winter months pretending to be spring, with forty-degree-sunshine days and muddy fields and the smell of soggy grass. It was a little odd to have a summery Christmas, but I was too busy to complain, and I just assumed the warm trend would continue till May.

But not so. February wants to be the last week of December. There’s a blizzard in the gorge, twenty-car collisions on the I-5 corridor. Schools are closing in the middle of the day, sending kids back home to white-painted houses hunkered against single-digit cold. Winter slept late, but it’s waking now.

the spell begins to break

 

Can you hear it?

The unmistakable sound of a million branches snapping back into position after the weight of their ice-glaze has shattered. The loud rain falling from the wet burden of the trees. The silent gray world is suddenly roaring with sound—even the birds whistle louder when the rays of sunshine fall on their wings for the first time in weeks. Gray bursts into sparkling diamond-silver and I can see green in the pine trees. And look—I even have a shadow again.

The sky. It’s blue. The sun. It’s there. My soul feels alive for the first time in many long, dismal days.

They say Aslan is on the move.

grace for the gray days

 

It’s here. That long stretch of winter that is January and February, gray and thick and cold like murky pond water. Not a breath of wind stirs the fog from the valley; the mountains are shrouded beneath it like huge sleeping bodies. The trees are silent sentries, bony as skeletons, lifeless and still. It’s cold like death, in a way that makes every pain and fear in my heart throb harder.

So I stop, and in the dismal gray of winter I choose to find grace.

Grace: that God has given us His Word, and that daily I’ve been able to make time for its chapters. That I have a community of friends who are also believers and are reading alongside me, day by day, with a goal of having read the whole Bible by June. That words millennia old can still be relevant to me, here, now. That God is sovereign and good even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Grace: that I have a healthy brain and the will to use it. That I got to finish high school, to devour college-level algebra with A++ scores even though math is my weak subject, to spend a year studying the Bible. That even now I can choose to learn nearly anything because the Internet is available to me. That my brother and sister showed me a site called Duolingo, where I have learned 95 German words in only a few days and can speak in the sentences of a foreign tongue better than I could after a whole year of high school Spanish. That when God scattered the people and confused the tongues at Babel, He paved the way for words like “Entschuldigung,” which I can’t even say without smiling.

Grace: that my sister and I are such friends, and that even when swamped by her homework, she makes the time to watch an episode or two of Once Upon a Time with me in the evenings. That she understands my movie references and that we feud over whether Rumplestiltskin or Captain Hook is the more awesome villain, but are both in wholehearted agreement about the epicness of Loki and Darth Vader.

Grace: that I can run, jump, lift, and work out without getting exhausted. It wasn’t always that way; there have been whole chunks of my adult life when I was too sick and too weak to do much of anything without severe repercussions. But in the past few weeks I’ve found, finally, an energy that I haven’t had for a long time, and with it has come a joy in hard work and an optimism and confidence for every other area of my life.

Grace: that I have been blessed in so many ways, that God has orchestrated my life perfectly so that my path would cross with the paths of untold others who would have huge impacts on my life. That He made a young man perfectly imperfect enough to fit perfectly into my own imperfections. That He chose my parents and my siblings so that I would be molded into who I have become, that He sent me to Florida to meet the roommate I needed most so that I could later be changed by a community of other believers in PA who still give me prayer, counsel, happy memories, and many smiles from 2,500 miles away.

Grace. Grace that He knows all. That He cares about all. That He is the Source of joy, and that His love will never let me go.