New Beginnings...

This weekend I had the absolute privilege to officiate another wedding for some dear friends from the church we helped plant. The wedding took place up in Northern California and truly was beautiful. Seeing and vicariously experiencing this new beginning was once again an eye opening opportunity for both Debbie and I.

The fascinating thing about the experience for Deb and I began when we checked our own hearts as I played this role in shooting the starting gun for this young couple's matrimony. As Debbie and I continue to attempt to peer into the future for SOME idea of what we would like to see happen in our lives, speaking into the hearts and minds of this bride and groom during their ceremony as they are just getting started in this process REALLY brought some significant questions to mind.

"If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you like to live?"

"Is there some other job or mission you could see yourself doing either here or somewhere else in the world?"

"How is your spiritual life right now and what needs to happen to place you where you would feel the most in-line with God's intent for your life?"

Of course these are the kinds of questions we've been asking ourselves for the last several months as we recover from all we've been through, but there's something much more jarring about these questions now as we see two young birds being kicked out of their nest together for the first time. Here Deb and I are coming up on our SIXTEENTH wedding anniversary! We've had TOO many of these existence changing opportunities that have tweaked our understanding of life to NOT know how to land well after a good nest kicking. Yet, for some reason we still feel WAY outside our familiar bearings to know what we're supposed to be doing.

So, we continue doing what we're doing and enjoying the ride as we keep our eyes out for some obvious call from God to where He wants us doing what He wants us to be doing!

Action Steps...

Earlier in our marriage, Debbie and I were all about taking action. On our honeymoon we began the pursuit of buying a hotel in the Bahamas and within a year sold all our stuff and moved to Florida so we could negotiate with the owners. Granted, the negotiations fell apart since the owner was in prison in Miami for money-laundering and the rest of the owner's family were, well...let's just say they were not negotiable. BUT - we still took action!

We decided to leave Florida and move back to So. Cal and within a year we joined forces in Orange County with seven other couples and helped plant a church.

After several years of this, we prayerfully decided to take our ministry on the road and move to South Africa to do missions training.

While in South Africa we discovered we weren't able to have children and couldn't adopt there, so we moved back to California to pursue foster/adoption. Within six months of our return we had three beautiful kids in our home. While stepping into the foster/adopt process, we developed a ministry at a rescue mission training groups about local and global mission opportunities.

This is how our lives have played out from the beginning of our marriage. Action steps have been our standard operating procedure through life. Since our return from South Africa and the brokenhearted ending of the foster/adoption process, we've both been sedated...stuck...not able to take action like we did in the past. This could be just a stage in our lives needing the kind of introspective thinking that demands less action and more processing. I'm willing to accept this right now, but quite honestly don't know how long I'll last. I've taken some thoughtful steps towards doing something innovative a couple of times this year, but so far it still feels pretty slow going. Not bad, just slow...and for a guy like me, slow just doesn't work.

I started working at a university earlier this year with the hopes that I could at some point plant a campus at the rescue mission I was serving. I still think that could work, but the position I had was too demanding and allowed little to no time to think outside the box of tasks I was responsible to complete each week. So I left the university.

I now am doing hospice care again and background work on television. I'm thinking of some ways of including some of the New Life Program participants at the rescue mission in the background work. My thought is, if I could get the production companies to use these participants, maybe they could pay in philanthropic ways and be able to right off this production cost. This way the participants get some outside work exposure and experience, and the production company gets a tax right off.

I know all this is pretty far out there, but this is the kind of thinking that has provoked our action steps in the past. I've no idea if and when such possibilities will present opportunities to take action...but I'm prayerfully watching for any sign of hope calling us to jump!

Re-Beginning

We're starting over.

Not quite sure where to begin, but after years of sojourning through too many ventures to count, we're trying to find a platform that fits, a foundation to build on, a structure that houses who we are and what we want to be about for the...uh...next venture we're called to pursue.

For several of these years we hosted a website called "FraserWorld" that served us well to communicate our life discoveries to those of you who have supported us prayerfully and financially as we pursued what we believed to be God's calling on our lives. Now, I don't want to in any way suggest the journey we were on was not within the realm of God's intent, but I don't want to assume we were doing all God intended for us either. That's why I've decided to create "fraserworldfutorial." Let's just say that's my way of laying out the editorial content of our future. Definitely being presumptive, assuming I'm in a position to know what the future holds, but I'm also hoping as I write and address the possible comments some of you may have regarding what I write, I'll get a clear glimpse of the path we're on and the direction its taking us.

Let me start on this path by entrusting to you a bit of the ponderings we're having about where we are in light of where we've been. Right now Debbie's working at the credit union and I'm finagling a possible full-time position in hospice care again. The advantage of this is Debbie has the security and sanity of a highly structured environment that serves her personality well. For me, I've got flexibility in my schedule to include some outside possibilities that fire me up. Most recently, as most of you know, we've been on the road to recovery after a very difficult several years, culminating in the heartbreaking experience of foster/adoption. Prior to our foster/adoption experience, we spent three and half years in South Africa serving a missions training organization called NieuCommunities. This was wonderful for me, but ultimately not so healthy for Debbie.

One thing that stands out, it seems, and has since our first year of NieuCommunities, is the idea of "The Imposter." The Imposter was a study of our motivations...why we have done what we've done, and why we're doing what we're doing. It's a chase down the areas of our upbringing that caused and cause us to make the choices we've made and are making in life. The study had us analyze ourselves as far back as possible...even as far back as the setting of our birth. Reviewing questions and observing answers surrounding our most preeminent modes of operation. Questions and answers revolving around the choices of activities, relationships, and occupations, and all other areas of life that impact us in ways we're frequently unaware.

Maybe you've been asked those haunting questions, "If money were not an issue, what would you want to do as an occupation?" or "If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you want to live?" or "If you were granted three wishes, what would they be?"

The heart of the answers to these questions reveal our imposter. They reveal what we've wanted out of life but have been unwilling or unable to pursue due to reasons beyond our understanding within ourselves. Voices deep within us that say "You can't do that!" or "That's a ridiculous idea!" or "You have responsibilities, you can't take those kinds of risks!" have prevented us from pursuing our deepest yearnings.

These voices, typically from parental or leader figures in our past lives, prevent us from pursuing what could very well be God's intent for our lives. And, in many cases, the direction these voices took our imposter have placed us in settings, relationships, and occupations where the imposter is compounded by others communicating what they observe in us.

And this is where we find ourselves, both Debbie and I, attempting to make sense of what we've missed out on up to this point in our lives due to living out the imposters intent rather than God's intent. Once again, that's not to assume God has not used us to impact the world in ways we are truly thankful for, but it is to assume God's heart may take us places we've always hoped for but never had the guts to pursue.

If any of this has opened up some questions in you...give us an idea of what those questions are! We'd love to "re-begin" with you on your journey, too!