Snow & 5 months!!

So, Shiloh turned 5 months yesterday, and we celebrated by playing in the snow!
Her eyeballs are amazing. :] And she loved chewing on my snowball!!

Shiloh and Daddy walking through the snow...

I've got some verses that were sticking out to me at 6:22 that I can't wait to write some about...so maybe tomorrow I'll do that.

my family.

I think this is how God is with us. :]

conviction.

1 Corinthians 10:31-33

³¹So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. ³²Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God— ³³even as I try to please everybody in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.

I got hit with a major conviction last thursday, as I was driving back to Greenville from Farmville [my mom's house]. All girls struggle with self-image, but adding the 60 pounds you gain while being pregnant and then only losing 30 of them by month 4 after giving birth can really bring out some issues. Now add years of battling [not very successfully] an eating disorder or two, and being dumb enough to get on a scale other than at the doctor's office, and you have a good picture of my state of mind last thursday when Jesus got me.

Here's the problem: I am selfish. Sure I care about health issues, and want to be a healthy weight for those reasons, but that's not really what motivates me, or most females.

We have a deep longing [which I believe is from God] to be found beautiful. To be adored. It's why guys have a natural ability to find women beautiful. These are both good things. But what we have done is taken these natural, in-God's-image desires, and twisted and perverted them into things like porn, lust, pre-marital sex, and eating disorders, to name a few.

The male side of this struggle is pretty obvious, for the most part. The female side is veiled, and yet celebrated.

Vanity.

Vanity and insecurity so severe that we spend large amounts of time, money, and energy making sure that as many people as possible find us attractive. Vanity so consuming and uninhibited that we are willing to put our brothers in a position where they may stumble in order to appease our neediness. Sometimes we even go so far as to engage in physical relationships we'll later regret and that the other party will regret so that we feel "wanted".

This is sin. Yes, society feeds it and encourages it, but we have to take responsibility-this is sin. If I stand in front of the mirror before I leave and am thinking about what any person other than my husband will think, I'm cheating in my heart. Desiring any attention in that manner from anyone but your spouse, honestly, is a sin. It is idolatry, adultery, and being a stumbling block.

Thinking back to the above verse, we need to dress in a way that is pleasing to God and even that glorifies him [I do not mean cheesy Christian t-shirts! LoL]. We need to be loving towards the males in our lives by helping them not to lust. We need to be different from the world. We need to be more concerned about others' struggles than about our egos.

I'm not trying to offend anyone, or push my convictions on anyone. All I can do is read my bible and pray, and then listen. And this is what I get from that. I'm also not saying that males don't struggle with this - don't even get me started on male vanity! :]

So pray for me about this, and ask Jesus about it in your own life. And dress really cute for your spouse! After all, they're the person God designed to be enamored with you!

discipline.

I need more discipline in my life. I know I'm supposed to write [blog or whatever] about scripture, to dissect it and get revelation from it on a personal level and then write about it in an edifying way for other people [not just "believers"]. I know that. So why don't I do that? Probably lots of reasons...but they're all just excuses. I'm going to try to be better at this.

Grace, Shiloh, and The Fire Escape.

First off, I've been gone for a while, and that's because I'm a mom now. :] September 13th, 2009 at 4:18am we had our baby girl. And it has changed everything!

I was always aware of the huge amount of Grace in my life, especially when Matthew and I got married. But when I got to see Shiloh for the first time, I was overwhelmed by it and suddenly found myself searching for a better word to describe it, because Grace didn't feel big enough to contain what I felt. That's because we belittle words like Love and Grace by just throwing them around. But looking at this perfect, beautiful baby made me think of all the bad decisions and destructive behaviors in my past that should have gotten in the way of this happening for me, and I knew it was only by Grace that I didn't miss out on her. Think about it...how many good things are in your life that you cannot take the credit for? How many things have you done to get in the way of goodness in your life? And yet here we are, with plenty to be thankful for, no thanks to us. It's all Grace.

Just wanted to share that...it's been a huge lesson for me. -shepardlilley

As for The Fire Escape: We are back on track! We missed a few weeks due to super hot weather and then baby related craziness, but we are re-focused and ready to go. There's a lot of work to be done before we open full-time in January, and some of it will require some awesome volunteers. :] We will need people to get some flyers from Shepard and flyer the crap out of ECU campus over Christmas Break. We also will need people to volunteer to work some hours in the shop at first, until we steadily make enough to pay minimum wage. Any time you volunteer, you get to keep the tips from that shift. And the shifts can be broken up into as short as 1 hour or as long as 6, depending on your availability. We are flexible. :] So if you're a student at ECU and have an hour or 2 between classes and you'd like to come earn some tips, we can work that in. You're welcome to sit and do schoolwork or whatever while you're there, too. Some volunteers will also be needed for some artsy/decorative stuff.

So just let us know! You can comment on this as a response, e-mail shepard.lilley@gmail.com, or message us on facebook. Have an awesome FALL day [finally!]!!

Now Hiring!

If you haven't become a fan on facebook already, go ahead and look up The Fire Escape on facebook and join! If you are a fan, then you've likely seen the last post that we are looking for trainees for the fall, so that we'll have employees for the spring. We'll go into more detail here, since there are way too many people on facebook:

Starting August 14th [the grand opening!], Shepard will be working regular hours every friday. On the 14th, it'll just be noon to 7, but after that it will be 7:30am to 7pm. That's every friday this semester! What we need is a group of people that can come in to be trained on fridays - obviously not all at once, but if we could get 2 or 3 at most in there with Shepard each friday we could hopefully have a pool of staff members of 4 to 6 people to pull from in the spring, when we're open monday through saturday. You'd basically show up when she needs you to [probably not at 7am the first few weeks, unless we find some morning people in a college town ;) ] and hang out while she works with customers and can go over the normal operations plus closing and opening duties. Then once it gets to around 5pm people will probably start coming in to hang out before 6:22 starts and you can try some stuff on your own. We'd like to have a face to face meeting with anyone who's interested sometime in the next few weeks, so look at your calendars, spread the word to anyone you think might be interested, and if nothing else, show up on the 14th and buy some coffee. :]

Any questions you have can either be left here as comments, e-mailed to shepard.lilley@gmail.com, or left on the 6:22 answering machine at 252-551-5973.

Worshipfest in 15 days!! Get excited!

The Fire Escape

I am in the process of realizing a dream I've had since I was 16[click on "coffeehouses" on the left, and then "The Fire Escape"].

When I was 16, I did a research paper on something I had heard Matthew mention before called The Jesus Movement. It was basically hippies in the late 60's who got saved and created a whole new culture of Christianity mixed with the lifestyle of the youth of that day. Amazing! One of the catalysts for spreading the culture was the coffeehouses opened by some of the guys involved, and when I was learning about them, some thing just erupted inside me and I haven't been able to shake it. I've always felt pulled to the culture of that time period anyway, and finding out about this jesus-infused sub-culture just made it better. So I knew that one day I wanted to open my own coffee shop, to be a tribute to The Fire Escape of that day.

Now, thanks to the opening of The Boiler Room, it's happening. If you don't know what The Boiler Room is, check out matthewlilley.com or 622ministries.org - it's cool stuff. Getting that space has opened up an opportunity for so much, and one part of that is me being able to open The Fire Escape to help fund what's going on up there.

When 6:22 starts back up every friday night this fall, The Fire Escape will be open every friday, from 7:30am to 7:00pm [when 6:22 starts]. Our grand opening will be August 14th, the friday after Worshipfest, at Noon. If you come to Worshipfest, I'll have a coffee shop open there an hour before each session, and I'll be handing out flyers for The Fire Escape - each one is good for 50 cents off any drink on the day we open!

When the spring semester at ECU starts in January, we will have regular weekly hours - Monday through Friday, 7:30-6:00, and Saturday 8:00-2:00. That will start January 11th. Hopefully by that point I'll have a couple people hired and maybe another person to help me run it, and it will also give me a few months with the baby when she gets here in September. Pretty excited!

I'll use this blog to post updates as we get things ready to open, possibly put hiring information up, post polls about flavors and ideas, and post any discounts or coupons we put out. So be sure to check back at least every couple weeks! I may not post a ton at first, but it will pick up as it gets closer to opening.