Beautifully Anchored

The other day I posted a picture (on Facebook) of Jeff and I wearing matching anchor bracelets. Some of you probably think it is quite silly for us to have matching bracelets and it might be, but of course there's a story behind them.

First let me say I'm a visual person. Sometimes I need to see things to remember them. Having a visual reminder makes my heart happy. It isn't that I will actually forget, but having a visual reminder helps keep it top of mind and sometimes the pressure of missions gets to me and I need reminders, lots of reminders.

As many of you know we got to meet our sending church while in the states (I will be blogging about all of that soon.). The simple version is that we walked away from that week feeling VERY connected to these amazing people we had just met. When we left Wisconsin we didn't leave a bunch of random people, it felt like we were leaving our best, closest friends and family. As I was processing all the unexpected feelings I had about the whole thing I said "I feel like we are anchored now. No more floating on an island, we are actually anchored".

Wednesday night Bible study at the Kinsella's home.

On our last Friday in Texas, as part of our weekend away that was gifted to us (I will be blogging about this soon as well), we were dropped off at the mall with some money and told to go spend it on something we wouldn't normally spend it on. Honestly Jeff and I were quite lost on what we would do with this money. For several minutes we just walked around trying to think of something to buy. We stopped by a sunglasses store only to realize that no way were we going to pay $200 for a pair of sunglasses especially since they weren't purple 😂. After walking around some more I started thinking about the James Avery store. I was thinking about getting a necklace with a taco charm on it, but felt like that was kind of a waste of money. As we were headed to the James Avery store to look around I remembered that at some point I saw an anchor bracelet and suddenly I knew I wanted something with an anchor in it. Since we are now anchored a visual reminder would be perfect for me and I wouldn't feel like I was spending money to just spend it.

Once in the store my choices were limited, but they had one option that I loved. Just so happened that it was a men's bracelet and Jeff wanted one as well. Us having matching bracelets isn't about us matching at all, but all about how we now feel like we are anchored. We now have a church family, we now have a pastor, we have elders we fall under, we have lifelong friendships that will continue to strengthen us while we are thousands of miles away. We are loved and cared for by many and not just our sending church, these bracelets are a visual and daily reminder of that. God is far better than we deserve.

Revival Church in Fall Creek, Wisconsin-Some of our anchors