Today we had a big day... Doug and I made a significant promise to Ian :) Our church, Branches, created an opportunity to make this promise to him in front of our congregation and church family.


For our family and friends that could not make it to the ceremony, I thought I would type up our promise to Ian (somewhat abbreviated so I don't have to type the whole thing LOL!).  The following promise was provided to us from our church leaders:

To Our Family,
We recognize that family is God's designand that He knew about our family before it was even formed. We believe that God has great dreams for this family. He proved this to us by giving us His son Jesus, so that we may have eternal life.

Because of God's great love for us, it is our desire as the parents of this home to make this promise to our family:
     1) We Promise to make Jesus Christ the center of this home, creating an atmosphere for your
         personal faith in Him to grow. (John 3:16-17 and Romans 8:38-39)
     2) We Promise to pray out loud for you and each other with a desire to see God at work in all of
         our lives. (Phillippians 4:4-7)
     3) We Promise to practice mutual sumbission, providing a culture of selfless service in our home.
         (Matthew 7:12)
    4) We Promise to work on having the best marriage with the understanding that the best homes
         have the best marriages (1 Corinthians 13:1-7, 13)

It is our desire that you would discover God's amazing plan for your life because we love you.

Love,
Your Parents

Now I would love to be able to post pictures of this promise within this post...  And I will eventually, however, my camera cord is hiding from me so I cannot upload my photos yet.  We also received a canvas to commemorate our promise.  It has the scripture Joshua 24:15 "As for me & my house we will serve the Lord" and lists all our names (Doug Tara Ian) in small print over the word "house".  It has the sheet listing the promise and scriptures from above on the backside of the canvas.  It's pretty cool and we can't wait to hang it up.  I'm planning on putting up our family photos on either side of this too to create a nice grouping above the fireplace as a daily reminder of our promise...

Anyway, just thought I would share this with all of you.  I'm pretty excited about it!  I know it will be hard and some of these promises will be challenging at times...  But the end result will be worth every challenge and obstacle!!!

Love to all!
Tara