Tuesday SHINE....

Feb 7

Tuesday's Reading: 1 Samuel 27

Good Tuesday morning, girls! Today is my favorite SHINE day of the week!

It's our SHINE spotlight day!

If you are new to SHINE, each week we spotlight one of our fellow SHINE girls and then she picks the next week's SHINE spotlight.

So, grab your coffee, hot tea, coke, or sweet tea, and enjoy today's beautiful testimony.

Get ready to be blessed, sweet friends. Our friend and fellow SHINE sister, Freda, was last week's spotlight, so she will be introducing our SHINE spotlight today.

Freda's introduction of today's SHINE spotlight:

I have so much to say about this week’s Shine girl that I don’t know where to begin!! She is beautiful on the inside and out and has so many admirable qualities. She is a wonderful wife and the mother of two precious children. She makes everything look so easy even though it is not. Her husband’s job keeps him away for weeks at a time, yet she manages to keep everything running smoothly and her children thriving and happy.

She has a very strong faith and it is reflected beautifully in her children as well as in her everyday life .She is kind and giving and I could go on and on (she was our 200th Shine Girl follower!) but I will simply say that I could not be prouder to introduce you to my daughter-in-law, Beth Adams.

Beth's Story:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:24

When my Mother-in-Law asked me to write for this week's blog, I was standing by the 16th green at the beautiful Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, CA. I nonchalantly blew her off because I thought she had lost her mind. As I watched my husband make his putt I thought to myself, who would want to read my testimony? Fortunately, I have lived a pretty uneventful life in the terms of loss and tragedy. I will be the first to admit however, that my reluctancy to write was a result of allowing Satan to creep into my mind. I ignorantly believed that unless bad things happened and you come out on top you don’t really have a story worth sharing. Fortunately, my Mother in Law was not letting me off the hook that easy. She asked a couple more times, and I told her I would think about it and get back with her in a few days. Well, its been a few days and here I am typing on my computer trying to come up with something that sort of resembles a testimony. I prayed that God would guide my thoughts and give me the words that might somehow be a blessing to someone and ultimately bring glory to Him. So here goes…..

I always dreamed of becoming a wife and mother. I would often think of my husband coming home at 5:00pm and playing with our kids as I put the final touches on a delicious home cooked meal. I fantasized about the kids playing games and wrestling around in the floor as I cleaned up the kitchen. We would then tackle the bath time and the bedtime routines together. After the kids were tucked into bed, my husband and I would catch up with the activities of each others day, watch a few shows together, kiss each other goodnight, and get up and do it all over the next day. This was my dream before God shared Blake with me.

I met Blake during my senior year at Georgia Southern University. He was different from all the guys I had previously dated. He was sweet, kind, gentle and a GOLFER! My family did not grow up playing golf so I was never exposed to this crazy game. I had no idea that golf required so much practice, money, time, travel and energy. Nor did I have any idea that golf was about to become a huge part of my life and my ” dream” of my husband home everyday at 5:00pm for dinner would no longer be my dream.

Blake and I dated several years before marrying on March 5,2005. It was one of the happiest days of my life. We were married a whole two weeks before Blake left to travel the golf mini tours. Blake had turned professional right after we started dating, but dating a professional golfer and being married to one is totally different. The first year of our marriage Blake was gone 34 weeks while I stayed at home and worked as a dental hygienist. This may have been one of the loneliest years of my life. I longed to be with my husband and I was quickly realizing that my plan of our marriage was not God's plan. I vividly remember sitting on our swing and crying to Blake about never being together. I felt we had two completely separate lives. We prayed about it and felt that God was telling us to take a huge leap of faith and travel together full time. Now, just to be clear, golfers on mini tours are BROKE!!!!! We only had a little bit of money that some local sponsors of Blake gave him to play on, which we had to pay back. We decided that I would quit my job, sell our 3 bedroom starter home, buy a fifth wheel travel trailer, and travel the country playing golf. We traveled the U.S. playing in whole-in-the wall towns, eating beanie weenies, and playing UNO late into the evenings. I even caddied for Blake a few times. We truly put our lives into God’s hands and he showed out! I don’t mean that we had anymore money, but ask anybody that knows about professional golfers on mini tours and I promise they will tell you it is extremely difficult to make a living much less support two people. The only explanation to how we had any money left over after golf season was that God provided. He provided us with one of the happiest years of our lives and by the end of that year he also blessed us with the surprise pregnancy of our little boy, Jake.

The next nine months flew by as Blake continued to play golf, barely scratching by. On June 6th, 2007 Blake was Raleigh, NC when he got the call that Jake was about to enter into our family 3 weeks early. Blake immediately withdrew from the golf tournament and made it to the delivery about 5 hours before Jake was born. We welcomed Jake into our whirlwind of a life and three days later Blake left out on the road for two weeks. This was such a scary time to me as I was realizing again that my idea of coming home as the perfect little family and learning the ropes of parenting were quickly going down the drain. Here I was at home with a newborn, CRAZY hormones, and no husband. Blake and I talked and prayed about it and once again felt that God was telling us to be together…on the road. Blake came home, loaded Jake and me up in a motor home and we took off. I cried the whole way out of my parents driveway. I was scared to death to take a 4 week old baby on the road, but we were a family, a family in a 32 foot moterhome!

Blake continued to play golf and we continued to travel as much as possible. In August of 2009, as Blake was capturing his PGA tour card we found out we were expecting our little girl Libby. Fears once again set in for Blake and me. The added pressures of a new baby weighing on his rookie season on the PGA Tour, me not being able to travel as much, Blake missing the delivery, the list went on and on. Once again we put it into God’s hands and believed that everything would work out. One thing that I have learned is that God’s timing is truly perfect. We try and plan and worry and then God shows up and shows out in BIG ways. Blake flew in from New Orleans and I went into labor 2 hours after he got home. I was amazed that God had worked it out again for Blake to be home for the delivery of our precious baby girl. Unfortunately, Blake had to leave the next day so Jake, Libby, my parents and me came home without Blake. The next two weeks were horrible, I cried everyday. I missed Blake so badly. When Libby turned 3 weeks old we hopped on a plane to Dallas, TX to be with Blake.

I wholeheartedly believe that God’s plans and timing are sometimes totally opposite of our own plans and timing. Sometimes He takes us out of our comfort zones to make us grow spiritually and strengthen our relationships with each other and Him. If I didn’t have faith in my Heavenly Father I never would have given up on my dream of the “perfect” little family at home and boy would I have missed out. Even though it gets extremely difficult with travel and Blake sometimes being away, this is the life God has planned for us and I am blessed beyond belief to be living it. We have had our ups and downs, disappointments and failures but God has continued to show us that he is taking care of us each step of the way.

We have an awesome and exciting life with the opportunity to glorify God in a unique setting. We encounter people on a daily basis that don’t know the Lord as their personal Savior, but love golf. We share this common likeness which gives us an opportunity to share the Good News with them. My family and I do not travel every single week anymore but we still travel as much as we can. In fact, we all just got home from 2 weeks on the road with Blake and headed back out in a couple more weeks. When we are home without Blake, the kids and I regularly Skype, call at night during prayer time, and write letters that say, “I love you Daddy and make lots of birdies this week.” Blake and I try to instill in our children the importance of being a family when we are together and when we are not. I do look forward to the day when golf slows down a bit, but until it does, we sure are enjoying this awesome journey God has put us on.

Thank you God for the daily blessings that you give to my family. Thank you for humbling us on a daily basis and for that first year on the road together. Thank you for allowing us to travel with Blake on the road as much as possible. Thank you for our faith and our families. Thank you for teaching me that my role as a wife is to support and love my husband. Thank you for the godly example Blake is to our children. Thank you God for the people reading this. Please help us to glorify You in all that we do. Amen