One Little Step

It's Earth Day, a 'holiday' I think I care about more this year than ever before. Oprah had a fascinating show today on the subject, and I'm still amazed at the number of families and people around the country that still don't ever think about the impact their choices have on our planet. It is astounding to me how many families still choose not to recycle or turn out lights or leave the air conditioning on while keeping the windows open. There's one HUGE thing though that if all of us stopped doing would make an enormous positive impact on our planet. Watch this short video on the true story of bottled water, I promise you will learn something and you will be surprised. We were. I know some people still think they want to buy bottled water that is flavored because of the taste, but I found last weekend a great solution. I cut up a lime and stuck a slice in my nalgene bottle with the water and for the whole weekend I had great flavored tap water :)

I think this is so much more than promoting another "soap box" idea, to me it truly is a deeply theological issue. In Genesis we were given the task of caring for our world, and I'm pretty sure if God showed up today he'd look at the piles of plastic bottles, the floating garbage islands in our oceans, and the pure amount of sheer waste we produce every week and tell us we haven't exactly lived up to the task he gave to us. I don't know, just an opinion. Seriously, watch this video, it's not long, and it does matter.

The Story of Bottled Water

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Random Tips & Tidbits

This is probably going to be a bizarre collection of tidbits, but that's okay :) None of these really warranted their own post, but are all new things I've discovered that are making my life happier, so I thought I'd share.

I don't know about all of you, but even with only 2 people living here, I am amazed at how quickly the apartment becomes cluttered. I can spend hours one day a week really cleaning, and it lasts about 40 minutes. For a bit of a neat-freak like me, this drives me nuts. This past month, in one section of the latest Real Simple they asked readers their best trick to keeping control of household clutter--how to keep your living space from becoming unlivable so quickly. My favorite trick is one I've started implementing--the 25 Item Rule. Once a day, I run around the apartment and pick up 25 items that have somehow made it to a location other than the one in which it lives. Even after only a few days I am amazed at how much this helps!

Has anyone ever cooked with Quinoa before? (Pronounced Keen-Wa) It's a whole grain that is super high in protein, gluten free, cholesterol free, and provides all 9 essential amino acids :) I wasn't sure what exactly to do with it, but knew it was super healthy and kind of rice-like. Since white rice is my husband's favorite side dish, but has zero nutritional value (especially when doused with soy sauce) I thought I'd try to experiment to see if Quinoa would be a passable substitute. It's super versatile, you can throw it in soups, salads, use with chopped veggies and chicken as a stir fry etc. Tonight I'm cooking it with chopped peppers and asparagus and using it to put baked salmon over. You cook it just like rice, boiling water and letting it absorb until fluffy, and then do anything you want with it. Anyone have any favorite quinoa recipes for me? The one we tried last week was from the back of the Trader Joe's box of Quinoa and was delicious! You can find it here.

I'm attempting to make my own granola tomorrow, from a recipe I found in this month's Real Simple. Breakfast around here has become my husband's new obsession (he has never been a breakfast fan!) and granola has become a big part of it. But it's kind of pricey, so at whole foods today I bought the ingredients I need for homemade granola way cheaper than a box of premade stuff. We've been making fruit smoothies every morning and mixing it in a bowl with granola and eating it like cereal for our morning meal (really, Charles is obsessed, he has to have his morning smoothie now!). It is kind of nice to start the day knowing you already have eaten about 4 servings of fruit, yogurt, and whole grains! But it's not the cheapest meal either--frozen fruit gets expensive! Costco and I are getting to know one another well when it comes to their frozen fruit aisle!

My new favorite entertainment while cooking/cleaning is to listen to NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on podcast. For those who haven't become acquainted with this fabulous show, it's a weekly news quiz put on by NPR with famous panelists trying to figure out the week's headlines by filling in rhymes, picking the true story out of a list of several absurd tales, deciding who people are by hearing quotes from them etc. It's hard to describe but it is seriously amazing--hysterical, and informative! Go to itunes and enter Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and you can download past episodes for your listening pleasure.

Well my timer just beeped, which means the salmon and quinoa should be done. Happy Monday night to you all!

7 Quick Takes Friday

Hi friends! Here's the latest from the Kennedy household this week!

**1**
Last night we hosted 3 high school kids on our couches for the night. I'm tired. They stay up late. I get up early. Yeah...but really they are great kids and their parents were out of town so they hung out here with us last night. We taught them Ticket to Ride (a favorite board game) and watched Aladdin before telling them at 12:30 that it was bedtime. I'm not sure we're ready to parent teenagers yet :)

**2**
I was supposed to have another interview with a church this morning, but for some reason they never called. Not sure where the communication breakdown happened, but seeing as how I'm wiped out it might be a good thing there was miscommunication.

**3**
My husband preached a great sermon last night for his preaching class, I was so proud of him! It was a tough text and he worked hard but he was awesome :)

**4**
I am reading Jodi Picoult's new book House Rules right now and as usual, am loving it. Seriously, she writes incredible stories that constantly amaze me and keep me guessing. It wasn't originally on my list of books to read this year, but that's because I didn't know it was coming out this spring. It's now one of my 28 books for the year.

**5**
I'm so thankful for my husband. I have just been reflecting on things this week a little deeper and realize how amazing he is. Not that I didn't already know that, but we had some cool opportunities to serve together this week and I just love him. Yesterday I was helping him with his sermon and he stopped looked at me and said "I hope you know how much I appreciate your help. I have the most amazing wife ever, I love being married to you." Melt my heart...:)

**6**
Wednesday night I got the opportunity to speak to our teenagers about The 5 Love Languages, which was such a great lesson! Several of them told me they really enjoyed it and want to bring it up with their friends now. For those who aren't familiar with the Love Languages, the basic principle is that everyone has a different way they receive love from people, and when we are aware of this we are much more effective in demonstrating love to the people we're close to. So we gave them the inventory (30 questions to help you figure out which one of the 5 is yours) and talked about what that meant for them. I broke them into groups based on their love language and had them teach the rest of the group what showing love and affection to them looked like. The 5 main ways that people receive love are through Gifts, Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, and Acts of Service. I think this is really important to realize about ourselves, our spouses, our kids, our friends and family because it can solve all kinds of problems! For instance, to show my husband love, I know gifts is dead last on his list. He doesn't usually enjoy receiving them, he doesn't really love thinking about them and shopping for them, it's just now how he's wired. On the other hand, Acts of Service or Quality Time is huge for him. So for his birthday or our anniversary, we go away together, do something together, share an experience together and that is WAY more satisfying for him than me buying him a book or a movie. For me, I'm a Words of Affirmation person, which means my most prized possession is the book of letters my parents put together for me when I turned 18 from all my friends & family telling me what they loved, appreciated, and remembered about me. Talk about a gift that spoke directly to my deepest love language! If you are interested, spend 5 minutes & take the online inventory here at this link and then let me know what your results were! I'm compiling a list of my friends/family's love languages cuz I think they are fascinating!

**7**
Confirmation starts on Sunday! I am SO proud of my husband and all the hard work and hours he has put in to designing a confirmation experience for these students that will hopefully be a great seven weeks. This week's topic, understanding our own faith stories and learning how to write/share that with others in a way that isn't "preachy" or even all that "theological," but simply sharing who Jesus is to each of us and what He's done in our lives.

Living Admist the Question Marks

It's definitely been an interesting season for us, one we are still very much in the midst of (or really probably at the beginning of). For the last year or so we've been living and thinking a lot about all the question marks that exist in our lives, which, we'll be honest, is starting to get a little frustrating. Our faith is definitely being strengthened as we're constantly reminding one another that God does have something for us, that God will lead us to the place we are supposed to be investing in. There are just so many unknowns for us right now, and we're both planners. We'd love to know where we will be heading next in life, and when that might happen. And it seems like that's not for us to know right now. Which is okay, just a little scary at times. Will we be moving to Seattle? Texas? the Midwest? Somewhere we haven't even applied to yet? What will we be doing? When will we be called to go? What happens if I get a job offer before my husband is done with his work/internship here? Do I go without him for a few months? That doesn't sound all that appealing to me :) We have a family reunion with my family in Colorado in August to celebrate Grandma and Papa's 60th wedding anniversary that we'll be going to, but we don't exactly know what city to buy plane tickets from! I am assuming we'll be in LA still, I know my husband will, but if I got a job on a college campus I presume they'll want me in time for the fall semester to start. So many unknowns. We're seeking God a lot right now, I'm slowly interviewing at places, and Charles is working hard to finish his seminary career well. And we're waiting. That's all we can do. Wait together for God to move, and we trust He will, we're just praying for the faith to follow where He leads.

A Marriage Moment

Last night was week 2 of our marriage small group/class (in case you missed last week's post you can read about it here), and this week we ventured into the world of conflict. Yes, that dreaded "C" word that we all have to deal with. Some of you may say "I don't have conflict in my marriage," or "I know people who don't have conflict in their marriage," but as our therapist pointed out last night, that's only because one of the partners chooses to go along with what the other says without making their opinions known. When two different people from different backgrounds come together, it is not possible for them to agree on absolutely everything. Therefore, conflict is inevitable.

Instead of talking about how to get out of conflict though (that may be coming in future weeks) we talked last night about how we each tend to react in the midst of conflict and why--where those reactions and feelings come from in ourselves. Basically, anytime there is a conflict, each of us feels some sense of pain (we may not realize it's pain, but it is, there is a hurt there that well...hurts). Based on our own past stories and experiences, we each have a few dominant feelings (Fear Buttons) that immediately trigger a reaction from us (Coping Behaviors) because of pain experienced previously in life. Here's what I mean: (this is just an example, I'm not thinking of any particular family/couple as I write this) say your family experienced a great amount of loss while you were young--from death, divorce, abandonment or other ways. In an adult who experienced this amount of loss as a child, the buttons she has that cause an immediate reaction from her are probably pushed when she is made to feel alone or unsafe. Which means, that anytime her husband says or does anything that pushes that button (it could be incredibly minor, such as telling her he doesn't like the church she wants to plug into--if she's new in town and starting to make friends here, that's immediately going to trigger her feeling "alone" button) she reacts in order to cope with her feeling.

Just like we all have our "Fear Buttons," we also each have a few favorite Coping Behaviors that immediately come out of us. These are things we may have learned watching our parents cope (or not cope) with conflict and feelings, or they may just be innate traits in us that come out when we're afraid, hurt, or having our fear buttons pushed. For instance, common coping behaviors are: withdraw, control, attack, criticize, blame, shut down, use humor, pacify, escalate etc. So in this situation, the wife is feeling alone, and immediately attacks the husband for an innocent opinion based comment "I don't really like this church." Meanwhile, husband also has his own fear buttons from his own past--which means that when she attacks him out of her own coping strategy, she often will hit one of his buttons, which could be feeling worthless, feeling unloved etc. Of course, husband then has to cope with feeling worthless somehow, so he reacts with one of his favorite coping strategies--maybe he withdraws or explodes in anger. And, if husband explodes in anger, wife now feels unsafe and alone again which just perpetuates the cycle to the point that nothing gets resolved. And here we have...conflict!

I think her ultimate point was that in arguments we focus so much on the coping behaviors. "Why are you withdrawing, come back and talk to me!" "You can't control me!" "You always criticize everything I do!" "Don't shut down on me!" etc. Very rarely do we recognize what feelings in us are causing that behavior to be triggered. We can't control how our spouse responds, but we can become more aware of where our buttons are, why we have those particular buttons, and where they come from. There is hope! We were taught last night that those feelings and knee jerk reactions can be undone. Brain research has shown that with great intentionality, those emotional pathways that were developed early on can be erased and redrawn, but it won't happen on it's own. In the above example, if the wife had recognized that her husband's negative comment about the new church she was hoping to plug into had made her feel alone and isolated in a new town, she could have called a time out and said "I am feeling something really strongly. I don't know where it's coming from, but I really want to lash out and attack you for not liking this church and I know that's not rational." Together they could have explored why she was feeling what she was experiencing instead of getting caught in this cycle of attacking and getting angry with one another. It's about increasing our own self awareness so we can understand why we have our pain buttons, where they come from, and then ask ourselves "In reality, and in scripture, are these feelings true? Am I unlovable? Am I worthless? Am I alone?" We can't begin to undo these feelings unless we recognize them and explore their validity in light of what God says about us--we can't take off the old and put on our new selves if we don't realize where our old selves come from.

An Invitation to Community

This past weekend was a weekend we had been waiting for, planning for, and praying for since about October...and it was finally here! For his internship project at our church my husband had been tasked with creating a confirmation program for our students, something that had not been done in years at this particular church for a variety of reasons. He really was given a lot of freedom to brainstorm and dream about what this might look like and his first task was to form a committee. (Duh, we're Presbyterian, that's of course what we'd do first!) Being his favorite Presbyterian I immediately was recruited :) Which means the two of us have been talking about this and planning this for months now. We felt it was really important to start with a big event, we didn't want to just pitch this as "another program you can come to." We really view the confirmation process (when done well) as the opportunity for a young person to begin to really grab hold of their faith and make it their own, to go deeper in community, not just with the youth but with the church as a whole. So we wanted to create a weekend retreat to begin it all that would demonstrate to these students that the community is genuinely excited about welcoming them into their midst, and dearly loves them and cares for them. It was a TON of work, but I have to say, I am SO proud of how it turned out and I know he is too. We got each adult Sunday School class to adopt a meal, and serve it to the students restaurant style (no camp food for our kids!) at tables with candles and flowers. We had the congregation write letters of encouragement to the students which we surprised them with on Sunday morning (each kid had a giant envelope of letters just to them from members of the church, they were pretty impressed!), and Saturday night we had members of the church show up to surprise the kids with a candle light worship service. We took them on a hike Saturday afternoon and asked them to do the first half in silence, giving God space to speak to them, which I'm not sure they loved, but they at least obeyed :) It was a very fun weekend. I am definitely tired and have spent most of today trying to recover a bit, but it was totally worth it. Confirmation starts next Sunday, so we'll see who chooses to go through the next 7 weeks with us and who really wants to commit to this process. Here are some highlights from the weekend:

Part of our youth space, which we decorated with drapes, lights and crosses to change it up from the normal Sunday morning.

Friday night we had them nail their sins to the cross, which was so powerful. To hear the pounding of nails echoing in the silence is really moving.Every time we had to move from one room to another, our Pied Piper, Ben, led us with a song he wrote for our kids and this weekend. The kids didn't have a schedule, or watches/ipods/cell phones, so they had no idea what time it was or what was next which was a leap of faith for them to trust us (but worked well when we told them to go to bed, for all they knew it was 1 AM) :) Of course there was play time :)Our silent hikeThe 4 leaders--George, me, Ashley, CharlesOur whole groupAt every meal we ate with our assigned table teams and had trivia questions to answer. Our team lost miserably, but it was quite fun. Here is George, our master trivia creator, reading our questions.

7 Quick Takes Friday

Whew! It's been a busy week! Here's what was going on...

**1**
My husband was put in charge of getting a confirmation program off the ground at our church, and has been working on this since October. We launch this weekend with a very cool spring retreat for our students, which we view as an invitation to them to begin the confirmation process. He has done an incredible job casting a vision for a VERY unique and wonderful set of experiences for our kids and I am SO proud of him! People who are involved LOVE what he's got planned for this retreat, and while it has been a ton of work we're looking forward to how it plays out! So we'll be sleeping on the floor of the church basement for the next two nights :)

**2**
We've spent the week running around getting everything ready to go, trying to coordinate a ton of people who are doing all kinds of things to help, and getting all the pieces pulled together. It's a lot of work planning an event like this! And it's not just this event, next Sunday starts our actual 7 week confirmation program which we are also in charge of overseeing, so that's even more coordinating...

**3**
I made my sisters delicious butternut squash quesadillas last night for my small group for dinner and they loved them. I was very skeptical as to whether or not my husband would eat his, and he did well! His comment was "wow, I guess someone finally found a way to get me to eat a squash!" Try them, you'll love them, I promise!

**4**
Favorite comment of the week: I was attempting to cut the squash in half last night and apparently was using the wrong knife because it was quite difficult. Charles comes in to see what I am doing that is causing all the racket and asks "uhh what is that?" "That's a squash honey." "Well if you can't get it cut, what are the chances I am actually going to be able to chew it??" "Uhh you cook them sweetie, you don't eat this raw." "Oh." Loved it, made me laugh for quite awhile :)

**5**
I'm also busy planning our midweek youth group for the month of April, which I am super excited about! We are going to do a series on friendship. This week I'm teaching on the 5 love languages, then we'll do a week on listening and how to be a good listener/question asker to help go deeper in relationships, then a week on cross-gender friendships, conflict, boundary setting and a week on how many "best friends" can you have at once? (the idea that we're only designed for about 3-4 "best friends" at once and then we usually have a group of about 12 who are really good friends, and that it's okay that people ebb and flow in and out of those circles throughout life.) I'm excited to help lead our students through these conversations!

**6**
My baby niece is cracking me up these days. I have gotten to talk to Megan a couple times this week and Lily is learning and growing so quickly right now! Hearing some of Megan's stories about her are hysterical, and I am sure they will only continue to entertain me as she grows!**7**
and that's about it, I have a ton to do today to get ready for this retreat, so for now, have a great weekend!