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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Steady
Sometimes keeping a house remotely neat or tidy when eight people share that house is a nearly impossible task. Nearly. Impossible. And there are days when I feel as if all I do is clean one room and then move to another room. And the second I exit the clean room some inanimate object explodes and destroys all of my productivity before anyone can even rejoice in it momentarily. Really. The other night I took Wilder out of his booster seat at the kitchen table where he had just dumped his bowl of peaches on the floor (peaches = sticky madness) plus his container of chicken and couscous. I carried…
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Love Wins
Love Wins. That’s what a bumper sticker on the back of our Suburban says. In black and white. There are some topics about which I really don’t care to write. Like this one. Because when I throw this stuff out there into the blogosphere I become accountable. If I keep these ideas in my mind then no one can judge me when I blow it. (Which I will.) But, the thing is I don’t always let Love win. But I want to. I want Love to be victorious. In my relationships. In my actions. In my attitudes. In my thoughts. In my heart. So I’ve been repeating the words of…
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confessions of a bad soccer mom
I am a bad soccer mom. I purposely park the stroller at the end of the field where no one else is. I usually don’t stroll right up to the line of canvas foldable chairs and picnic blankets placed down the sidelines. I’m not that mom that the whole team knows and who hugs and high-fives all the little players as they exit the field. That’s not me. I don’t know why exactly. I don’t dislike those people. Shoot, I don’t even know those people. I think maybe I feel inadequate. I am usually late. Soccer uniform-clad kids rushing down the hill before Kevin and I wheel the double stroller down…
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worship.
I went running today. (You know, my once a week if Riley is cool with hanging out with the wee ones in the afternoon“habit”.) Before I hit the trail, still in my closet putting on my shoes, I decided again (for the bazillionth time) that I did not like my body after all. It wasn’t really beautiful. No matter what I said or what I typed or what I tried to think about true beauty and all that internal beauty stuff. My shorts seemed silly. My legs were winter-pale. (And I am not foolish enough to believe that summer will actually change that. That’s just not the way my skin…
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The Dentist
Last week we experienced what I will call A Terrible Dental Experience. And all because of my former arch nemesis – fear. But this time it wasn’t my fear. It was London’s fear. (Is the same principle about sins of the father passed to the son true for sins of the mother passed to the daughter?) Because this kid looks like me. (I wish I could locate photographic evidence. You would be convinced. I’ll start looking. I promise.) And, in this area at least, this kid acts like me. Although I feel sorry that she looks like me – teenage years were not kind to my sense of self in…
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A Quiet Forgiveness
Forgiveness is really such a personal quest. A lonely journey. Isn’t it? I mean, there’s the public forgiveness – announcing it, requesting it, bestowing, granting it. All of that. But the true work of forgiveness, the nitty gritty, happens almost entirely inside your head (or heart). And the impossibly challenging part is how invisible it is. How thankless. How not noticed not appreciated not acknowledged by anyone. Forgiveness is occurring when you refrain from making that nasty comeback out loud to someone who may really deserve it. It happens when you stop yourself from saying cruel words to your other friends about the one who harmed you. Forgiveness is taking…
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Sufficient
My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:9-10) My friend recently e-mailed this verse to me. And when I read her e-mail, I was encouraged. But today, I feel more like a character in the Dr. Seuss book “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” because what do you do when it seems His grace…
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Wrong Again
I don’t know if you have ever noticed, but I have these little categories on the right side of this page. (You know, like a billion other bloggers.) And one of my categories is entitled “My Pursuit of God”. And I think I have just been realizing something. I have had that all wrong. Mislabeled really. This whole time it has never been about my pursuit of God. It has always been about God’s pursuit of me. There I go again – making it all about me. Because I can be such an idiot sometimes when it comes to perspective. This story, my life, has been entirely a picture of…
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Change
As far as our circumstances go, change is the only constant. The world in which I fall asleep is not the world in which I wake. And this is true every day. In good seasons and in bad. Which is endlessly depressing and eternally hopeful.
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Community
I am taking a crash course in community right now. Call it Community 101. Or something like that. And it’s beautiful. I don’t mean virtual community. (Although I think that’s pretty fun and actually, more helpful than I imagined it could be.) But I mean – flesh and bones, hands and feet, I will meet your needs – community. It might just be the first time in my life I am seeing what it looks like to let someone other than my family (or framily) rally around me and carry me when my legs are broken. (Not literally, alright guys?) And there’s a power in that weakness. And a peace…
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Fear
I have allowed fear to rule my heart for most of my life. I don’t mean that “most of my life” in a cliche way. Or even in a “most of my adult life” way. I mean most of my life. As in since I was eight years old. Around the time I was eight I developed some hyper-fear that my mother was going to die. I became obsessed. Obsessed. As in every night I crept down to my parent’s bedroom. I hovered beside my mother’s bed. And I watched her. Two sleepy eight-year-old eyes peering just over the bed covers at my resting mother. I just stared at her.…
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The 3 R’s
It’s elementary, right? My favorite three r’s are not reading, writing or arithmetic. (Besides, I think it says something about American education that we ever even used the phrase “the three r’s” to describe three words of which only one correctly begins with an “r”. But maybe I’ll blog about that later.) And, despite my green efforts, I’m not even talking about reduce, reuse and recycle. Nah. There are three other r’s that have been changing and shaping and altering the life I know. Redemption. Reconciliation Restoration. Those are my favorite “r” words. I love them. And every day I feel as if my life is more defined by them…
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Stride
I’m not a runner. But I try to get outside and pretend to be one every now and again. If you’ve had the misfortune of seeing me out there, you know I don’t exactly look like a runner. (More like a sweaty-toothed madman.) But today I actually had a moment. While I was running. Not my standard why-am-I-doing-this type of moment. Like an epiphany kind of moment. I reached a hill. (What felt like a crazy-steep, insurmountable hill that seemed to want to claim my very life.) And so I started to walk. And for the first time in my limited running experience walking felt slow. It was weird. I…
