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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the silver lining we get to choose to be
I stubbed my toe on a wooden baseball bat. A baseball bat most decidedly NOT placed in its proper home. It hurt, but I wasn’t angry about it. The Stuff of Childhood isn’t so annoying. I am a Changed Human. My daughter says that the silver lining in all this mess is me. I’m her Silver Lining. I don’t know how long I get to be seen like that by my daughter. So today I celebrate that. Today my heart rejoices and I decide that Grateful is my choice. _______________________________
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The Revel Ride at Lost Valley: A Picture of My Own Story
One of the special rides offered to guests at Lost Valley Ranch this summer was entitled The Revel Ride. It was a new idea for Lost Valley and it was a ride offered to women one morning while the kids were all enjoying their camp rides. Of course I said yes and I happily met the other ladies and the wranglers at the corral to head out. (There was so much good stuff all hidden around the corners on this ride, but I kind of don’t want to share it all because – like a great novel with fantastic plot twists – I don’t want to ruin the experience…
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You Tell Me
When I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, “You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.” – Shane Claiborne _________________________________
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thank you . . .
How do you follow a post like yesterday’s? I don’t know. I guess the same way you follow a day like last Thursday and a year like last year, you just do. And, in so many giant and in so many tiny ways, last Thursday was a day not unlike any other day. It was a legal end of a nearly twenty year marriage but the real death of the marriage had happened long before Thursday. I’m certain I’ll write more about this topic in the future – there’s a whole lotta processing and shifting and working through going on in my heart and in my life and I’m…
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…. than all my sorrows
Last Thursday my husband stood in a court room before a judge and officially declared me to be no longer his wife. That morning two kind friends took me out to breakfast. We talked about regular life and hope deferred and hope renewed. We ate cinnamon rolls and shared stories about our kids and our hearts and books we’ve read. Then we went back to my house. And Hilary pulled Jo and I to stand in my bedroom. Bed wildly unmade from the three kids and the one grown up who fitfully slept across its sheets the night before. Ridiculously large loads of laundry piled too high on the…
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scars. and healing.
My eyebrow has this little sliver of a space where no eyebrow grows. It’s a scar. From nearly forty years ago. I fell right out of my bunk bed when my younger brother was born and he was handed over my crib and I was forced to move to a top bunk bed. I fell right out of that bed in the middle of the night, directly hitting the hard wood floor far below on my wee little eyebrow. I needed middle of the night stitches and my head still bears the mark and my memory carries the story and it’s all right there, written on my face in a…
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unconditional love.
Unconditional love. We promise it. As if we could control it or offer it as a gift – all tidy and sweet in a box, wrapped up in brown paper and a jute bow. Unconditional love. I heard it in lovely vows at a recent wedding. An impossible ideal. And as I mature and stand witness to the world aging beneath my feet I keep looking and I keep trying but I keep finding myself empty-handed and a regular failure at this task that shouts at me and whispers to me through every movie and novel and relationship. Unconditional. I don’t even have a path to that height. And maybe, maybe,…
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night …
And then there are some nights. Nights so long you’re nearly certain the dawn will never come. (Your only assurance being the fact that, thus far in your experience, it always has.) Nights filled with sick kids offering a play by play of their stomach aching misery from the bathroom. Nights when you are only certain of one thing – there will not be adequate sleep gained for you to operate as The Responsible Human life is guaranteed to expect of you the next morning. Nights when the dreams that greet your restless soul are so violently vivid and unexpected that your brain is literally reeling with the images come…
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on fear and back roads and what once was scary but now is not
This past weekend I was driving in the dark down some Virginia backroads. The dark in rural Virginia feels way more dark than the dark in South Carolina. There aren’t street lights or lamps or houses very close to the road. Neighborhoods aren’t dotting the path and the night seems more dark somehow. Driving the rural roads this weekend reminded me of driving those same familiar roads twenty years earlier. And twenty-five years earlier. And I could remember with painful clarity a feeling I used to have when driving those roads home from work – alone – late at night – on my way back to the farm. Or driving…
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an education of sorts
I am learning to come to terms with the fact that my life is both beautiful and hard. I am learning to live content in the presence of both grief and joy. This is a tension not unfamiliar to me. When my mother passed away I received my first taste of the bitter and the beautiful in one life-altering mouthful. Season after season, the birth of two new children, life’s highs and lows, brought me face to face with both missing my mother and loving my life. Being grateful and being sad. Simultaneously. Constantly. A new steady. And now. After all that practice. I have new lessons to learn. A…
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just a tad too raw for comfort
When the encouraging words aren’t there, sometimes I just type all the bad ones. (and there are so many bad ones, you guys.) At the end of the day, when I am sitting under my yellow blanket and staring at the screen, there are times that I just see a lot of empty. And I write blog posts that will never ever see the light of day. And maybe I talk to myself. (Just a little.) There are days when I cry. And there are days when I can’t even remember what I would be crying for. Days of Numb and days of All The Feelings. It’s all so much…
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telling it again and again
Over the past few weeks I’ve seen this idea pop up many times. The idea that it is in the retelling of a painful story that some of the pain can be eased. The idea that with more and more tellings of one’s darkest stories that the distance between the experience deepens and the hurt lessens. On our last visit, Sherry reminded me that when you can tell your story without crying, you’ve made progress. It’s so important to have friends and people with whom to tell your story. It’s why sometimes you find yourself telling your story to complete strangers – like a practice round or something. It’s why…
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people. loving other people. (and a Grizzly Adams reference)
I think sometimes about disappearing. Moving away into the mountains and going all Grizzly Adams and Sign of the Beaver. Little House on the Prairie and back to the land. You know. And giant and huge parts of me think that sounds so fabulously incredible and dreamy and fantastic and all things wonderful. But goodness – we need community. (And by we I mean more than just my immediate family. I mean the collective we. You and me. Us. Everyone. We.) We were born for community. We were not made to be lone rangers and just me and Jesus kind of people. We need other people. God gave us people. Joys are…
