meet Annabelle.

One of our favorite parts of Sashes is introducing you to wise & wonderful women who just happen to have amazing talents & shops. Annabelle is no exception. It's our honor to introduce you. 

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It's December 9th, it's Christmas, we are celebrating the birth of our Lord! 

Oh yeah, I'm Annabelle from Humdiddly.  Hi.  And since I'm not so good at small talk, here we go.

This year has been such a sweet time of looking back at how God carried me through some lean, hard, scary years.  Years where I had no idea what I was supposed to be learning, years of, occasionally,  opening the Word and having no idea what I was reading, years of refinement. 

I would have thought that being refined would look a lot different; something that involved just a little polish.  Oh no, my refining takes chisels, jack-hammers, pepper-spray, whatever I don't know-it takes God ripping out some big, beautiful things in my life; things I had warped and made idols of, so that he could be the only Lord of my life!  

But, I tell ya', He did the ripping so lovingly.  Losing my husband's health was a very hard, ongoing, battle, but the Lord filled me with such peace and such joy.  I was happy.  And scared, worried, uncertain, sad...But I was happy.  And it was because as He tore into my life and idols were cut away, they were replaced with the thrumming pulse of a living God- alive in me!  Day after day after day.  Weeks, months, years of being torn apart so that I could truly live!  Slowly, ever. so. achingly. slowly.  Small things (hobbies, style even...) and big things (where is my stability truly found) were given to the Lord.

At one point during this season of refining, I was working in a daycare (as a teacher and the ever-cool job of janitor) and my husband was working at Pizza Hut as, get this, a hostess (he, hostess, really?) after getting his law degree.  Our agenda was no more!  There was no hint of our agenda!  And a big part of me knew that the Lord wanted to use my husband's and my talents in a different way, but first the job at hand.  As, I often say now, I was learning how to keep sheep.  I needed to be dutiful to the Lord's plan in my life, whatever the cost.  God had to become my dream, my ambition.  And God has to remain as Lord of my life!

What does this have to do with an Etsy shop?  Everything.  God is Lord over it too.  He is in the dream of it and the work of it.  I'm keeping sheep, and this shop is one of them.