innovative.purpose

This is why I love my wife:

-Because she's kind and sweet and gentle...
-Because she's wild and silly and exciting...
-Because she can make me laugh when I'm crying and cry when I'm laughing...
-Because she knows me better than anyone else...
-Because there's always something new to learn about her...
-Because she understands me when I'm not making sense...
-Because she's not afraid to tell me when I'm wrong...
-Because she always knows when to reach out, even when she's unsure of what I need...
-Because sometimes she seems stronger and braver than any other woman, and other times she's my very own little delicate daisy.

Now those are just the reasons that would fit on a Hallmark card, wildly decorated in little pink and red hearts that would typically be given to a significant other on Valentine's Day...and that's ok. I've learned that it's ok to be mushy-in-love. No, that isn't what sustains us through our marriage, but it's the sweetness in the middle that catches us off-guard. We've been married 2 and a half years almost and we are still considered "newlyweds," and in the past I would really defend that, not wanting our love to be categorized, like our love and affection for each other can be easily dismissed as merely "honeymoon" love. But now, I've grown up. I've learned to take such comments with a grateful attitude because they recognize the love we have for each other....

See, God has created in us a bond that is unbreakable and founded in Christ's initial love for us. For without the love that God has for us, we could never have loved each other. Because HE loved us first, through his unmerited Grace, we are able to love each other. And we both are learning that God's intentionality in bringing us together wasn't to fulfill some lifelong dream of getting married or some childhood fantasy of "never being alone" again, He brought us together and joined us in the Holy bond of matrimony to teach us 1) how to love Him and 2) how BETTER we're supposed to love people. That's it. And there's no coincidence that those 2 things are what Jesus says are the greatest commandments! That's exciting!!!


We both know that our love is so much stronger than candy hearts and chocolates in bed. But you know what, I do so cherish how affectionate we are to each other. Our little pet names, the little jokes we have together, the times when we can't stop laughing because after a very hard punch from her, I have just fallen off our bed (which, by the way, is perched pretty high up there), or how we'll say to each other, "I loathe you" around other people and to watch their faces, knowing that they don't know that that's a way we say "I love you"....

You want to know why I love my wife...
...because there's no one like her.

Labels: love

It has come to my attention that "our" blog has become "my" blog of sorts and hasn't really contained any information about "us" and that totally defeats the purpose of calling our blog "deharts.blogspot.com." Cause right now, it's only "dan.blogspot.com."

Anyway, you get the hint. So, from now on, periodically, hopefully as much as I can, I am going to be updating about "us," the DeHart's. And, yes, this would be one of those posts.

• Vivian has started back at UNT and we found out, through a ton of exhaustive professor conversations and discussions with her counselor, that she will be student teaching (granted she can take summer classes) in a year from now. She is super-excited and thrilled to finally see a preverbial end-of-the-tunnel. She's taking 12 hours this semester and among those hours she is taking a night class that meets twice a week. With this revelation, we started to pray about how we were going to "make time for each other" with 2 nights basically being out of the question for spending any quality time together. The Lord has definitely been answering our prayers...as He has really provided for us in that area.

• I am still working hard as the graphic artist at Valley View Productions. I passed my 1-yr anniversary back in July and am now looking forward to everything slowing down a little around here. (May-October is our craziest time)

• We are still comfortably living in our apartment in Bedford and decided about 2 months ago that we are going to renew our lease another year when it comes up in February. With that decision, we went ahead and painted some of our walls to make the place seem less like an "apartment" and feel more like a home. If we can get our camera working, I will take some pictures of it and post it for you to see.

• We are both going through a Soul Mates Devotional and reading a book called "Sacred Marriage" that has really created some much-needed spiritual and emotional intimacy. If you are married and you are reading this, I would highly recommend the book "Sacred Marriage" by Gary Thomas, as it really breaks a lot of traditions and complacencies often found in marriages. The subtitle of the book asks, "What if God designed marriage to make us Holy more than to make us Happy?" It has really challenged our marriage in that it delves into how God created marriage for us to best learn about His Love and how we are to love like Him.

• We have consistently been attending 121 Community Church here in Grapevine and have really grown to begin calling it our own. In our journey to find where God wants us to serve Him, we were led to a variety of churches, and although we didn't have that "burning bush" type-of-miracle letting us know that 121 is the ULTIMATE place for us, we both find peace in that this is where He wants us right now.

I hope this post has been informative and lets you in on what's going on in the DeHart world.

Love you all...

I think people boil down to 2 categories:

-those who dance
-those who don't dance

There are certain people, in any musical circumstance or musically-inclined social setting, that will inevitably dance their hearts out. It doesn't matter if it's a dance club, a rock concert, or at a local celtic rock concert out in front of a supermarket on a Friday evening...they are going to dance.

You know the types, they have obviously taken some form of dance lessons from the local Lion's Club Dance Champion and really want to "show off what they've learned" by getting out on the dance "floor" (either an actual dance floor, around their seat in a rock venue, or a concrete slab emmitting a ghastly 140 degrees of heat, out in front of a supermarket) and trying to adapt their 4 days of ballroom lessons to celtic rock. You've seen them, you've even shared a chuckle with your friends at their expense, silently poking fun at their bravery, which you refer to as "old-people-trying-to-be-young."

Taking a look at the next category, the other mix of people that I am trying to generalize into a genre are those people that don't dance. These people avoid, at all costs, any instance or situation that may call on dancing. They are the ones at weddings that spend the majority of the time hanging out by the food, hoping the supply never runs out so they'll have an excuse when someone asks them to dance, "Oh sorry, I'm still eating. Maybe the next one." And when you go to dance clubs, they are the ones that hang out at the bar and bob their heads to the music, hoping that no one will notice their off-rhythm beating on the bar. They would rather avoid the awkwardness that would surely ensue if they tried to get out there and dance, even if they really wanted to and even if they really COULD dance, these are the kind of people that you will see later dancing on the sidewalk outside a subway station.

I think if you broke those 2 groups of people down to their lowest molecular form, you could generally fit everyone in the world in one of those two categories...and I wouldn't doubt it if the split was close to 50%. You are either a dancer or someone that would dance given the chance, or you're the kind of person who only dances in the privacy of your own room or amongst your family at Thanksgiving when your grandma decides it would be fun to see all of the grandchildren dance together to the "Greatest Hits of Kenny Rogers."

Which one are you?

I wonder what it is about people's voices that can conjure up emotions and feelings and even actions. Is it something physical, like something a scientist would have to explain to me, using words like "septic" and "audible" and "hearing aid" and "osteoporosis?"

Or is it something psychological that a shrink might explain as "the shrillness of one's inner voice can carry with it a myriad of emotions and experiences, all emulating from the little child in all of us" while I lay down on a leather chair/sofa?

Emotional? Spiritual? Existential?

I don't know the answer, but I do know what I hear, and I know how I feel when I hear certain voices.

I do understand the experience that is conjured up when a person's voice makes it to my heart.

I have felt the pain/love/irritation of a lost memory well up when someone's voice reaches my ear.

I have prayed to hear God's voice.

I have run, farther and farther, away from voices that have haunted me for a long time, voices that speak of doubt and of selfishness, voices that remind me of my fallen condition and of how feeble my strength is, voices that appeal to the eternally-single guy that I was up until May 21, 2004, constantly reminding me how undeserved I am of Vivian's love or companionship...

If I don't voluntarily choose to fight those voices every single day, I will become as useless and as selfish and as feeble and as sorry and as single as they say I am...but in the end, the blues are still blue.

Whenever I watch movies that involve's a character who is a novel writer, or a newspaper colomnist, or an author...I get the urge to follow in their scripted footsteps and write myself.

It's not that I have anything particularly interesting to say, it's just that I like the idea of seeing my thoughts in real life. I like knowing that I somehow manage to convey and even organize my thoughts into poetry or a rambling display of paragraphs dealing with something about life. I also like knowing that some other person in this world might actually come across my thoughts and leave their own opinion of what I've just sounded off about.

I do have a lot of theories, and if you hang around me for, at the minimum, an hour, I'm sure you'll come face-to-face with one of them. I'll probably be trying to convince you that my theories are in fact truth. They might be on religion, theology, social practices, relationships, the way people act when they don't know they are being watched and analyzed, or any other facet of my so-called-life.

In my disposition of having a lot of theories, I usually have the urge to "jot them down on paper" as to not forget about them, fearing that in the future I might have to try and conjur them up again to, once again, prove their truthfullness. And since I really don't like the physical feeling of picking up a pen and actually "jotting them down on paper" I choose this venue as my avenue. See, on paper, I would have never written "venue and avenue" in the same sentence. Also, I don't think I have really good handwriting, so if I did start using a pen instead of a keyboard I would probably get self-conscious about my handwriting and how crappy and childish it looks, right in the middle of an obvious self-conscious thought or feeling that I am choosing to convey on paper.

So you see, it's a vicious cycle. I want to write, I want to share everything that's inside of me and that I think the world may benefit from reading, but in the end, I just end up writing about how I wish I had the guts to truly jot down what I feel. And, what you are now reading is the result of that previously stated cycle.

My friend and I are thinking about starting our own blog community. Well, essentially all that it is right now is just a couple of guys who like to write and share their heart and their opinions (and their theories) and who are wanting other people to listen and share their opinions about our opinions. Once we finally get it going, I'll be sure to post it here so all of you can go and read yet another blog of someone who is ranting and raving about life...silently hoping that they aren't alone. Because, in the end, that's what blogging is all about. It's about not being alone.

That's why every blog, or social site, or xanga, or anything like that, has the option for people to leave "comments" or "kudos" or "eprops..." People want to know that they are not alone, and the only way they can feel that is by visiting their blog everyday, hoping and praying that someone else had been there, read what they had to say, and hopefully....left a little post-it note acknowledging their visit.

So, big empty void out there, if you've read this, let me know.
I don't want to feel alone.

Everyday I receive an email with "Today's Word" from atgodstable.com, which is basically a verse or a coupling of verses from the Bible and this guys' take on the verse, deriving the original greek/hebrew from the verse and digging deeper into what the verse is trying to say.

Today's verse was from Philippians 4:8, where it says,

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.

I am not going to replay the entire message, but one thing that stuck out to me was this quote:

We are more likely to pass Jesus by as He sits with the homeless, while we hurry to get a comfortable seat in the pew.

Do you think that's true? I think it is. I think we rarely remember the life of Jesus. His actual life, His day-to-day livings...Or better yet, I think the real life of Jesus never comes to the forefront of our minds. The real life that speaks of ministering to the "worst of the worst" in today's society, spending time with tax collectors and criminals, loving them just as he loved his own beloved disciples, speaking the Word out in public to the masses, unashamed of offending anyone or hurting anyone's feelings, performing miracles after miracles...on SUNDAY no less!! That's the day that, back then, was supposed to be kept "Holy" and for no work to be done on that day. That was his life!

(sidenote) Isn't it funny, 2000 years later, that for a lot of us, our busiest day is Sunday?! The day that is supposed to be kept "holy" and free from work, the Sabbath day, is usually the day that everyone gets the busiest.....hmmm?

Do you think Jesus would go to church with us? Do you think he would wake up at 8:30, get the family up, make sure everyone is neatly pressed and primped nicely, grab some Starbucks on the way, and get there as fast as he can as to avoid having to talk to anyone in the lobby, just so he can grab the best seat in the house where he can see all of the guys on stage and can really get into the music??

Or would he be outside of the church, on some corner, sharing HIS story with the lost?

WWJD huh?

.sunday was our 2 year anniversary of being married.

.we spent the weekend in austin.

.we will have pictures later.

.i've never been more in love.

.life is fun with her.

.our life is fun.