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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needy people
The day my friends and I visited Charleston we found street parking near the ice cream shop we wanted to visit. The meter required actual coins and the four of us were digging around in our bags, searching for quarters and coming up mostly empty handed. A lady was standing nearby as we hopped out of the car, wallets opened as we searched. She said words to me but I had no idea what they were. She was rather difficult to understand. I stepped closer to her in an effort to understand what she was saying. The mumbling was so thick her words were basically incoherent. With my ear…
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switching words; seeing light
Sinking ship. Wheels falling off the cart. These are the words I have used to describe my life. My heart. My story. Sometimes they are the words I feel are true. Sometimes they are the words I assume other people feel are true when they look at me. They’re definitely the words I have felt have been chosen for me. I am beginning to see how they are also the words that I have chosen to sit under. The words I have circled in red. Underlined. Used a highlighter to accentuate. The words I might as well have tattooed on my body. (Don’t worry Dad – it’s just a…
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redemption: questions unanswered and perhaps rhetorical
I believe in redemption. Redeeming relationships. Redeeming situations. All sorts of redemption really. But is redemption possible in every situation? I guess, speaking specifically of the miraculous role God plays in redemption, the answer has to be yes. God can redeem anything. Any situation. Any wrong. Any relationship. God can, as in He has the ability. But we know, because we live and breathe it, that every situation that every relationship is not redeemed. Not right now. And I wonder how hard should we fight for redemption? How much effort should we give? Is it okay to allow some relationships to just live in the in-between? ______________________________…
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sunday reflections . . .
Once a year our church holds an outdoor service in May. It’s loud and sometimes it’s hot (although today it was chilly by turns) and the field is slam packed full of people on blankets and in camping chairs and you have to arrive early if you’d like a chance to park in the actual parking lot. And every year I am so glad I attend this particular service. People get baptized periodically all throughout the year at church but at this service there is usually a larger number of baptisms. For a person who really likes words, I don’t know why but I always get a bit tongue-tied…
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the plan we’re living . . .
Sometimes I know I can be a sub-par mother. We continually go to bed without taking the time to change into pajamas. I forget to have my children brush their teeth, especially in the mornings. That shower after swimming rule (and shower before swimming rule) has never been enforced strongly at our home. The kitchen lives in a perpetual state of dishes needing to be loaded, floor needing to be swept. It’s easy to let things slide when your plate is so very full. It’s hard to be the only grown up enforcing all the house rules. Early on in the Aftermath of the earthquake that shook…
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a state of being
I am altogether too often guilty of choosing Busy in my Soul (and Busy in my Life) so I can comfort myself with a bit of Numb. The distractions keep me from feeling all the stuff that threatens to drown me. (And. Some days, some moments, there is just So Much Stuff.) What is it all anyway? Why is it so easy to forget what I believe? To push aside what I know to be true? To look at the hill in front of me and to see a mountain I think I’ll never cross? To forget where I’ve been and what I’ve become? To forget that my legs…
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don’t sit in your struggle alone
Struggle. It sometimes seems like it’s the predominant characteristic of our lives. And, even when your own life isn’t full to the brim overflowing with hardship or disappointment, you still have people you know, love, care about, meet on the street, whose lives are slopping over the sides with struggle and hard and heavy. You can personally be floating along in a relative calm, a ray of sunshine across your canoe, and you just bump your oar right up against someone who has capsized, who is flailing around outside their canoe, clinging to their life jacket, head bobbing in the water next to you. It happens All The Time.…
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a little full circle story (and a little awkward story too): The Time I Met Andrew Peterson
Sometimes you get to see how it all comes together. Or, how bits and pieces of a story all come together. Sometimes you get to hear about ridiculous ways in which I behave and the special knack I have for saying the oddball comment out loud. Sometimes one single blog post features both of those things – the coming together and the awkward. This is that time. First, the backstory — About two years ago, the days of my life were dark, chaotic, stormy. (This is a euphemism. A gentle way to spin the reality the kids and I were actually living.) Times were terrible. My marriage was for…
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pause.
Pausing doubt. I don’t even know how long ago the leaders at our church taught a sermon series about doubt. The ideas from that series have rattled around in my mind for months – maybe a year. Which means that by now it’s trickled into regular thoughts and both morphed and grown from what I originally heard. In other words, I won’t be quoting anyone but myself today because my memory is not that well versed in word for word accuracy. There is this idea of saying to doubt, “Wait right here. I’ll be back later.” You know – putting this fear – this unknown – the questions I…
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never and always . . . words on parenting
In one of their songs, the Wood Brothers sing a lyric that says, “Sometimes I feel like I’m never and always alone.” In some ways, I think that’s the anthem of motherhood, particularly for the mother of young children. You’re never actually alone. Fingertips are reaching under the door of the bathroom, for the love. And yet the early years of motherhood can be some of the loneliest years of a mom’s life. You remain unconvinced that anyone else really understands how hard it is to begin (and to lose) a battle with a toddler or to negotiate snack time or to change eighty bazillion diapers or to read…
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the light that shines.
Recently I ate dinner at a wonderfully fancy restaurant. It was a perk of this new gig and it was fun. (I giggled at myself a little inside though. I was served oysters and bone marrow and beef cheeks and scallops and pork belly and champagne with fizzing pearls of sugar and chocolate covered strawberries with gold dusted on them and yet, I live in a house with approximately three Mount Rushmores of sullied laundry due to the dryer’s week long refusal to cooperate with the game plan and there is an unwelcome mouse in my kitchen, a dining room table often loaded with school books and notebooks and art…
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two heavies: divorce and remarriage
This will be an unpopular post. These are unpopular ideas. Unpopular thoughts. (Although I care so little about being popular these days. I cared deeply about being popular (or liked, or something) in middle school and high school – although you wouldn’t have known it if you were judging me by the way I dressed. My lemon yellow shorts in the summer. My hot pink plastic eyeglasses. The long johns I wore under my prairie skirts all winter. My horrific hair choices.) You know what? These issues are actually not just unpopular in our culture. These thoughts are deeply unpopular in my own heart and mind. I’ve been reading…
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I Believe — Lord, Help My Unbelief
I still look at my arm. I still need to. Nevertheless. I keep forgetting even though it is TATTOOED on my body in a prominent manner. ________________________
