I tell her that it will snow, that there’s plenty of winter left, and that it always snows here. And thirty years of winters vouch for me, and probably it will, but really, I have no idea.  And there are places in my life that I feel like that sometimes, too: What if this is it?

It creeps up, this fear-filled discontent, when my eyes are fixed firm on the temporary and all the very real places that ache and frustrate.  But it’s hard to live in hope when my eyes are fixed on frustration, when my heart is asleep to the promises written in an ancient scripture, that could, even today, breathe fresh life into dry bones.

But it is hope that calls me from the kitchen with fresh brewed coffee and I come with my pillow hair and eyes still groggy to find that waking up requires letting go of the warm-wrapped comforters and the dreams, both idyllic and nightmarish, that fill my sleeping hours.  And the hope that’s offered as I sink into the Word, and stumble through learning, again and always, to pray, it is real and concrete, and I feel it as I push past awkwardness and offer to pray with a friend, and when defenses crumble and I see the face of my best friend in the husband I’ve been pushing away all week.  And this morning, I as I look out the kitchen window, I see glimpses of snowflakes dancing in the icy wind.

Yes, linking up this Friday with Lisa-Jo and the community over at the Gypsy Mama, who invites me & you to write for five unedited minutes:
“For fun, for love of the sound of words, for play, for delight, for joy and celebration at the art of communication. For only five short, bold, beautiful minutes. Unscripted and unedited. We just write without worrying if it’s just right or not.” -Lisa-Jo
This week’s word was AWAKE.

And I hear too, out here in this wild wilderness, the roar of the grace givers, crying out for the sick, they themselves experiencing, even, now, the deep works of healing binding up the broken places in their sin-sick hearts.

And these roars, they need to be heard, but without the wisdom of humility, of grace that requires the kind of unconditional love that we simply are not capable of mustering up or putting on, they create chaos.  The roars that could create melodies – beautiful harmonies and chords that speak to deepest part of our broken lives – they sometimes loose sight of the music maker, who orchestrates silence and establishes rhythms.  And we all have a voice, and we all need silence, and I hear beautiful music emerging out of this cacophony.

Oh, give me ears to hear, wisdom to roar and embrace stillness in turn.

Linking up {a day late} with Lisa-Jo and so many more over at Five Minute Friday, where we just write for just five minutes.  A lazy Saturday, all piled on the couch, scrolling through old pictures on the computer, found these images of once wild beasts from a little adventure last summer.  Perfect for this week’s prompt: ROAR.  Join us?

And after the bells fall silent, I sip tea and sit long.  In quiet.  It’s a miracle that could be a rhythm of my days and weeks, and I am learning that even this extroverted, spontaneity-craving woman needs stillness and rhythm as much as I need roaring laughter and mystery.

And I come back to the words that grip my heart again and again.  The words written as epilogue in my favorite childhood book, and the ones whispered during college crisis of faith, and tucked in corners of my life at crucial junctures all along the way:

And as a new year dawns, I am aware that there are plenty of places in my life that need strong resolution: my lateness and my laziness, my lack of routine and propensity to live self-focused; the list is long, and, yes, I will seek by grace to grow in these.  But these are not my resolutions. Just this one thing is the foundation that I will build my life upon, and all else must come from this place: to abide in the love of God.

And I pull out the Greek Dictionary of the New Testament, and the word for abide is defined as this: To stay (in a given place, state, relation or expectancy) abide, continue, dwell, endure, be present, remain, stand, tarry (for)… Oh to stay in His love, to remain in the center of that relationship, to keep this heart vulnerable and wide open in expectancy.  To continue and endure in this love, to be present in it.  To stand in it and tarry for it, all at the same time.  To abide. To dwell.  These are the words I painted and hung in our dining room, the ones that I long to define this day, here in the attic, and this new year closing in, and the whole of this small life.

Abide. I think it is truly the most beautiful word I have ever heard.  This is the word I come back to, again and again, when my heart yearns for a life bigger than the one I’ve been given, and also when I long to shrink back from dreams too big for me to understand. And it is here, abiding in perfect love, that He becomes more and I become less. The lies of not good enough, not doing enough, all the enoughs and shoulds, they loose their grip – because when I remain in His love, I am reminded that my value has little to do with my performance, and much to do with grace, and I see you in that brilliant light too. And it is Love that nurtures the branch to bear fruit, and He is a faithful vine-dresser, so it is here, I resolve, by grace alone, to abide.

I’m thankful for Emily’s words, and the way they really do cause me to pause, to stop and let this soul breathe.  And today, I needed to heed her advice.  To step outside, away from the doing and not done and into the quiet of the frigid air here.

And sometimes I can rest easy and just be, relying on the hope that I am fully known and loved, and in the just being, the being with the Creator in His creation, I am renewed and refreshed.  But today I find it difficult to just be.  I read these words before I wrap up in vest and scarf, an attempt to mute the incessant ramblings of my mind with something strong and still:

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the LORD—
and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.    He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears…” Isaiah 11

And I go out with pruning sheers, because I’m afraid if I go with nothing, just the stillness and the Word alone, that I might waste my time.  And this way, I’ll at least hold holly pruned to prove the worth of my time.  It’s holly over the Holy, I value today, productivity over presence.

And I find, in the quiet I hoped for – now disrupted by the steady hammering and clamoring of builders next door, I find the source of the nuisance we could not discover in the lush green of summer. And I hack off a pile of unwieldy branches so large that it almost dwarfs the holly bush itself.

And the largest branch is the hardest to prune, this one that grew ridiculously long all summer, ignored by previously owners and left to grow long till this, its dormant season, when pruning harms least and promises future growth, when the cold air is forgotten and snow not yet seen is a melted memory.

And the living fibers I find inside the cut branch remind me of a vine and its branches, and the desperate need I have to be connected with the source of life.  And out here in the unwieldy beauty and the air that toes the line between unbearably cold and deeply refreshing, I pray for a heart that’s not afraid to be still, that needs not pruning sheers and distraction to shelter me from the mixed cup of wild beauty and heartbreak this life offers.  And I offer thanks to the author of my faith, who meets me in  the still centered times, and also in the dailiness and in my failures and in the dormant beauty here.

Unwrapping Tuesday here with the community at Chatting at the Sky.  Join us?

Gratitude.

The discovering and the diving into the rhythms of gratitude walked into my life in a dark hour, and, you might say, provided a life line – reshaped my thinking and pointed me back to the giver of life when a life had been taken and my heart unraveled.  And learning to offer thanks in those moments of desperation was a necessity, just as learning to turn in gratitude in the abundance – hushed by the goodness of new babies or fireflies, wells up, with intention, yes, but mostly because it can’t be suppressed.

But in the daily, the litanies, there is nothing glorious or tragic to turn this heart from it’s normal course of gaze: namely, myself.  The little things that bristle me, the exhaustion of motherhood and daily routines – they usually lead this heart to self-pity, venting, gossip.  I have learned, and am learning the hard gratitude, and I have sung praises on mountaintops, but here, now, I am learning to give thanks for the mundane, to let the nothings and somethings sing of His goodness. Slowly, slowly, learning.

Yes, linking up this Friday with Lisa-Jo and the community over at the Gypsy Mama, who invites me & you to write for five unedited minutes:
“For fun, for love of the sound of words, for play, for delight, for joy and celebration at the art of communication. For only five short, bold, beautiful minutes. Unscripted and unedited. We just write without worrying if it’s just right or not.” -Lisa-Jo 

This week’s word was gratitude.  Tell me, what does the word gratitude stir up in your heart?

It’s a word woven throughout the Israelites long journey through the desert, the thing I find hardest in weeks like this.  When I long to take all the scattered pieces and unknowns, and collect them all into little packages, tied up with grossgrain ribbon -neat and tame. I am remembering that I am not  in control.

It’s in the forgetting, be it with busyness or distraction, that leaves me empty.  It’s in the forgetting who I am, and forgetting who you are, really, and at the core of it forgetting who He is.

But the remembering, it takes my eyes off of me, off of the circumstances around me, off the unknowns that I desparately try to piece together, and back on the One Who knows, Who remembers.  Remembers always Himself. Remembers always His promises. Remembers always who I am, and who I am becoming.

Lord, give me grace to remember, and live in that sweet spot.

I’m linking up with the Gypsy Mama for Five Minute Friday, an invitation to write, unscripted & unedited, for five minutes flat.

Relevant…

I am learning that all of this mess is relevant.  That our stories are worth sharing, and they’re usually not neat little packages, tied up with bows.  And that is beautiful.  The broken, the ugly, the messy: there is grace here in the dirt and the grime, and I need it, and I need to know that you need it. I am thankful to be, this weekend, in amongst a gathering of women, here to share these stories, thankful that they’re relevant to me, full of grace.

I’m linking up with Lisa-Jo, from the Gypsy Mama, for 5 Minute Friday, an exercise in uninhibited, unedited creative writing.  Thanks for the encouragement to do so, Jacque and Lindsey!

I love our new library, which is my old library, which is now diamonds. (Hmmm…apparently one should not attempt creative writing while her husband watches Old Spice commercials on youtube in the background.) But really, back to the library (which really was my library when I was a little girl): My love for the library could be a whole post in and of itself.  And we’ve been spending a lot of time there lately, seeing as it’s free (I know, Dad, it’s not actually free…) and air-conditioned and such a piece-of-cake walking distance.

I love the way Laura chooses books from the library.  I’ll give you a  hint at her method: It has mostly to do with the amount of rainbow colors on the spines of books that are approximately 36 inches off the ground.  Last week, she recognized an old friend, as we meandered around the corner of the room that houses the picture books into the R-E-Y section.  That’s right.  Good old Curious George. She chose a few of Houghton Mifflin’s “Margret & H.A. Rey’s Curious George” books, and I prodded her to choose one of the seven original Curious George titles, actually created by Margret & H.A. Rey.

While Houghton Mifflin’s done well to preserve the style and look of the Curious George books (and Laura does love them), the educator in me was stunned at the quality of the writing in the original books.  Just the sheer quantity of reading comprehension skills and complex grammar lessons packed into each page of the original books, tucked into such a happy little story, makes the process of learning to read seem so effortless.  Literally, (oh, a pun, how I love a pun… even a bad one!) I spotted fourteen different language arts lessons on one page spread.  Funny that after reading so many basic, blasé stories, an eighty page children’s book would be so refreshing!

So head to the library, whether you have little people or not, and revisit those old favorites.  I’d love to know, what are your favorite classic children’s books?

Is this normal summer behavior, or could the heat be affecting their brains?  Hmmm….

Do you remember the little series of poems by Molly O’Connor D’Antonio that I was publishing each month?  I missed a few during the crazy spring, but yesterday, after carrying two sleeping beauties up the stairs after a long walk (stroller ride) on a hot day, I found her latest musings, shared above.  The more times I read it, the more beautiful it seems. Enjoy!