God's Pursuit of Me
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love. - A.W. Tozer
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a parenting reminder to myself.
Hi friends. Lean in a little closer. There, that’s good. I’ve got something so profound to say …….. parenting is hard work. Tremendously difficult work in the manner in which no soul alive can adequately explain. Yes. Right. I know that wasn’t exactly profound. I could list the ways in which it’s so difficult if that would help. Long hours. Selfless giving of time and energy. Changing diapers full of excrement. The worry. The late nights. The what-if’s and the why-did-I’s. The inconvenience to time and schedule and cost. The heartbreak and tears. The fears. The struggle to find consistency. The struggle to find time alone. The struggle to find…
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What Renting Has Taught Me …
You know I’m a lover of land and open space and farms and fields and long driveways. And growing up under my dad’s leading, I believe in the value of land. Of ownership. Of property and the freedom to do what you’d like with that property. The thought of belonging to a place and a place belonging to me is strong and settled within my bones. Which is why I’ve known it to be frustrating curious interesting challenging to have found myself at forty years old (you didn’t forget that number – did you?) having never owned our own home. I’ve traveled through various seasons of feelings about this truth. Discontent.…
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a giving of thanks and days I’d rather forget, but cannot.
And then in the middle of thanks-giving sometimes I cry. It’s the thankful. It’s the stacked up, overflowing, spilling out, grateful-for-this-cup kind of cry mixed in with the still-tender, always shocking anniversary of one of the saddest seasons of my life. It’s the anniversary of the beginning of the passing of my kind mother from this life to another. I look at all I have, And all I’ve had. And seven years has truly been but a breath – a sigh and a laugh and a weekend and a joy and a valley and an everything you would imagine it to be. I’m still here. And hope reigns stronger than…
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I will not define myself by my flaws.
Why do we define ourselves by the very thing we like least about ourselves? Victim. The shy one. Divorced. The girl with the scar on her left cheek. Like some dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps us low before anyone has a chance to push us back down. We do it with our homes. The house with the broken shutter. Right next to the dumpster. The one whose lawn is unruly and whose trees need to be trimmed. With ourselves. The bad haircut. The out of date clothes. The acne scars. Like we’re asking people to see what’s awful about us. I dare you to like me. I dare you to…
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the answer for the long days and the hard ones.
You’re sure the kitchen will never be clean. The yard can never stay tidy. The laundry will always be dirty. The dirt on the floors will always return. The water dripping from the tub can never be controlled. The mold fights back harder than you. The taste of hopelessness. The smell of it heavy and lingering on your clothes, like the smell of burned chicken or a lone french fry lost in the bottom of your oven. It tastes bad and it seems to last and last. And the only hint of a cure I’ve ever found yet is sunshine, wind, grass and trees. A step outside and a look…
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it takes years . . .
It takes years and raising children and late nights and early mornings and heartache and mending heartache to afford a person the opportunity to step back, look around, gather what you know (and what you’ll never know) and find some sort of peace with what is while still experiencing the pain of what the world takes from you – the giant losses – heart break. loneliness. broken promises. divorce. betrayal. the death of people you love. disease. – the lesser losses – sadness. bitterness. disappointment. unmet expectation. pain. and yet not missing the gifts the world still retains for you – the giant joys – healthy children. love. hope.…
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Sunday evening scratch scribbled on the blank side of a bulletin.
Grateful. People in a room. Strangers in so many ways. Words spoken into a microphone. Truth. Agony. Suffering shared and shared. We’re all a mess of ugly and grace, beauty and dark gaps. It’s all so much more than I could ever comprehend. And it bubbles up and trickles out and I wouldn’t stop it from splashing down my cheeks if I could. It’s beauty-filled and hope defined. And it’s more than church. It’s Jesus and feet and hands and heart and all things practical and holy.
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a lovely misery
The juxtaposition of lovely and miserable in this home is hard to ignore. Example One: The outside door of our bedroom. It opens to the porch. In the spring, in the summer, in the fall – it’s glorious. Waking up to a breeze, an old-fashioned lace curtain swaying, green trees, an inviting porch hammock. It’s picturesque. That same door – come winter – doesn’t seal appropriately and causes no end of frigid air to fill our room. Waking up to a breeze of a different nature is so much less inviting. Example Two: Old-fashioned, beautifully detailed fireplaces in three rooms. Lovely wood. Completely unusable fire places that are too pretty to cover…
Keep Reading . . .
sixteen. a birthday post.
weekend ramble (the stillest of weekends)
I’m over here …
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I think I’ll title this – Untitled.
Car Number Two is dead. See you later. Hasta la vista. Riley and I ride together early Monday morning to have Car Number One – The Last Surviving Great Maroon Hope Running Vehicle – serviced before our next road trip. Kevin is back at home with five children waiting to meet an HVAC repairman who might fulfill this fantasy of ours of having an air conditioned home. (Did I mention the dryer has been defunct and unplugged since January?) The smiling/grimacing mechanic steps out from the garage. “How many people are in your family?” he asks. “Uh. Eight,” I respond, wondering what the number of bodies the suburban carries has…
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when I need to remember
Sometimes I re-read my all own stuff. Because I forget. I forget and then I forget some more. I’m riduclous like that. I forget that I’ve struggled through the same problems. That I didn’t die. I forget that God was sufficient. That the worst case scenario didn’t happen. That I’m still here. Or that the worst case scenario did happen. And I’m still here. And this post comes to my mind most frequently. The one that helps me focus on The Right Now and The Forever.
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reminded.
I abhor watching the news. Fear-based reporting. Sensationalizing the vulgar, the mediocre, the irreverent and the irrelevant. It’s a wasteland. Mostly I’d prefer to bury my head in the sand. Focus on the lives in the view finder of myself and ignore the rise and the fall of all that is outside of my realm or reality. However. I know this isn’t entirely wise. I know this isn’t holy. I know this isn’t living the command of loving your neighbor and loving the world. And so I catch a video of a current news story. I scan the headlines at CNN.com. I read the Sunday paper while the kids peruse…
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me vs. expectations. a daily battle.
I struggle with expectations. I could start with that single sentence and go off in thirty different directions. (Maybe I’ll revisit expectations again later. It’s a beast of a problem, you know.) Today I’ll reign it all in around this: I struggle with this particular expectation – I should accomplish certain tasks every day. They could (and they do) vary with the rising of each sun. But I always go to bed with the next day’s to-do list on repeat in my brain. And I generally feel like a failure before my warm feet hit our freezing floor. I ignore the alarm too many times. There won’t be time to…
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Retrospective.
I’m home now. (I have been for several days.) The Asheville Girls Party has ceased. There are dirty dishes in our sink (but not because Kevin and Riley didn’t take care of all that. They were amazing- but that’s a post for another day.) Laundry needs to be shifted from washer to dryer. I need to unpack my suitcase and put away the excessive number of clothes I brought with me (just because I could). But it is good to be home actually. I always sleep better in my own crumpled dilapidated bed beside my husband. But it was good to be gone too. Good good good to relax with…
