My name is Meg. I am a pastor’s wife of over 22 years and momma of seven miracle children. I adore my family, will never cease to be in awe of the ocean and am a sucker for just about anything sweet.
Aside from a silly intro line about sugar and nature, I want you to know if there’s anything I’ve learned in life it isn’t easy. It can be difficult and challenging and often does not go as we would have dreamed up.
But I also would want you to know, the hardships, struggles, and redirected plans, and trials we face are intentional, purposeful, by design and used to draw us into a relationship with God. Through the life, work, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are invited to be a part of the grandest story that has ever been written. It is a story that includes you and me but does not revolve around you and me—God’s redemption story.
You see, we were never meant to find purpose, meaning, or fulfillment apart from our Creator. And I know that’s easier said than done.
We cope with life in a myriad of ways: we distract, we joke, we fill, we escape, we eat, we exercise, we vacation, we work, we do whatever we can to get out from underneath the weight of the imperfect, unexpected, and unfulfilling turns we face in life. We so easily love the wrong things.
We go everywhere, turn to everything, and indulge in all things avoiding the one thing that offers true and lasting hope.
My desire is to remind you of the one and only gospel-truth: The resurrection of Jesus Christ has given us a secure identity, new hearts, and new desires, and all are invited to be a part of His forever family.
The grace, forgiveness, and redemption offered restores you to your original purpose to image God with your life and worship.
My hope is to encourage you through the written word as I share thoughts and pieces of my own imperfect, unfinished story to live our lives in light of His perfect story.
No matter how you feel about motherhood, marriage, or life in general, the grace of God is extended to you, and for you, through the person and work of Jesus.
Let this one thing be abundantly clear as you read through the pages of this space: I have been made totally new by the power of Christ and yet am imperfect, always learning, always growing and fully recognizing I do not have it all together, but I know the One who does.
If you do not know Him yet, my hope is to introduce you to Him. And if you do know Him, my hope is to continually point you back to Him. Life abundant is found only in His presence.
By way of introduction, here’s a broad-brush overview of my life, how I met Jesus, as well as my husband, and how in the world we got all these kids!
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As a daughter of a former Marine turned FBI agent we moved around a number of times in my early childhood. High school was the first school I didn’t transfer out of and I am forever grateful for my parents turning down relocation orders so that I could stay put during those four years.
I graduated in 1997 from La Cueva High School in Albuquerque, NM. I then went to college in Norman, Oklahoma, and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2001 with a Bachelors’s degree in Communication.
My junior year of college, after a very unexpected breakup from a past boyfriend, I impulsively, meaning within two days, left Oklahoma, my job, my classes, my sorority, and my friends to move back home with my family…smack dab in the middle of the semester, forfeiting all of my class credit hours.
Months later, still devastated and heartbroken, and likely somewhat depressed, I begrudgingly accepted an invitation from my younger brother to be a leader at a church camp for a group of middle school kids at Ft. Lewis College in Durango, CO.
Little did I know that camp would completely alter the course of my entire life…
Sick, alone, tired, angry, and frustrated I walked away from my group of sixth-graders to the side of the mountain that overlooked the town below.
As I read my Bible and hastily and angrily wrote in my journal about my horrible, messed up life, it was as if a train hit me going a hundred miles an hour.
It was then, for the first time ever, I realized life was not at all, in any way, whatsoever about me. And it was in that same instant that I knew without a shadow of a doubt life was most certainly, in every way, altogether all about Jesus.
Immediately I recognized I was a sinner in need of grace. I had tried to build my life as I saw fit, with my wants, my needs, and my desires at the center. And what I ended up with was a complete mess.
I understood for the first time ever what repentance was. And better yet, what grace was.
My life has never been the same since then.
A blue-eyed, blonde-haired, soccer-playing young man with a kind heart, a gift in preaching, and a passion for Jesus named Matt was the youth pastor at that same camp.
Over the next year and a half, distant respect turned into generic conversations, then eventually a friendship, crush, boyfriend, and fiancé. (Obviously, I’m rushing through quite a bit of this timeline here!)
He became my forever-best friend and husband in April of 2002. And life has been the perfect fairy tale ever since….oh wait….nope…
As a newly married couple, we had reached that point in our marriage where the topic of beginning a family and having children had become not only more frequent but a strong desire.
Yet, as is found often in life, our plans, our agenda, and our time table are not at all how things played out.
We endured years of fertility struggles, two miscarriages, and extremely challenging pregnancies.
For a season I was bitter and angry. Not getting what I wanted when I wanted it was frustrating and I can confidently say now I handled it poorly. But God was so gracious to begin to show me my clenched fists and my stubborn closed-off heart.
Martin Luther is quoted as saying the life of the believer is one of continual repentance and it was through the struggle of being told by our fertility doctors we would never have children of our own I began to understand that truth on a personal level.
I learned, after miraculously becoming pregnant for the first time, how the gifts I desire cannot ever compare to the Giver Himself.
The Lord faithful, repetitively and consistently, has used the most painful, difficult, and challenging experiences in my life to break me in all of the best ways and show me more and more of Himself in all of the most beautiful ways.
I would not wish for those painful experiences on my worst enemy, yet I would also not trade them for all the riches in the world. The insight, wisdom, strength, and lessons learned through all of the fiery trials in life are worth more than any wealth that could possibly be offered.
The struggle of infertility was just the beginning of learning to walk with the Lord through hard times.
In 2014 there were some extremely difficult circumstances involving our church that had nothing to do with us and were in great part completely out of our control. My husband was the lead pastor of Huntington Beach Mars Hill Church, a part of an even larger mega-church with 16 locations in 5 different states. The church went from “thriving” to nothing at all and ended up closing its doors in a matter of a few short months.
For years I intentionally chose not to speak or write much of the church, its name, or the events that occurred because we have learned through the years just how polarizing it can be. The point here is not to cause friction, harm, division, or alarm but to simply make mention we lost our church home. To this day we still grieve for the families and friendships we loved so dearly.
At that same time, my family was going through some extremely difficult circumstances as well. My parents dealt with adultery, divorce, and remarriage which has caused an incomparable ripple effect of pain and continued hurt.
On top of that, our own marriage was struggling, our children were a handful, we had some intense financial hardships, and, quite frankly, we were all just a mess.
Matt and I spent the greater portion of 2015 and 2016 seeking counsel, resting, healing, and simplifying. There was a lot that needed to be ripped out, reset, redone, and redeemed.
Our story did not end there…after our second miscarriage and once we found out we were expecting our 6th child we knew we couldn’t stay living in CA. We began looking for the next place for our family to settle and came across a church in south TX that seemed to align. A friendship began between my husband and the lead pastor and soon the plans to move were in the making.
Upon our arrival here in TX my health during that 6th pregnancy began to rapidly decline. I became very ill, which resulted in three dislocated ribs from severe coughing and even a cracked tailbone midway through the pregnancy. After delivering our sweet Cosette, we then were shocked to find out yet another 7th child was on the way. I sincerely thought my body would not make it through another delivery, but was amazed to find that my 7th pregnancy was the easiest of all. Praise be to God!
The Lord gifted us with our two precious little girls just before Covid rocked the entire world. Soon, I found myself a homeschooling mom to five with two babies 12 months apart. There’s a LOT more to the story of what happened after this, in fact one day I think it could make for a good movie script, but rather than write it here I’ll simply link to the posts that go into more detail.
The story and family you see now is riddled with sorrow, brokenness, pain, hardship, and grief…but also such beauty in the work He has done, is doing and will do in spite of us. We truly see God using all things to not only draw us closer to Himself but to shape us and morph us into the image of Jesus.
Although there are parts of the past we will forever grieve, and parts of our future we will never be able to predict, but we are learning more and more each day to be content with where the Lord has us right now.
We are learning to seek and create beauty in the every-day, to walk by faith and not sight, to recognize the joy in the mundane and live in the hope of grace alone by Christ alone.
With that said, take a look around, stay as long as you’d like, and by all means reach out and say hello sometime. I’d love to hear from you!
