Category: Thoughtful Thursday

Love. Love. Love.

The other night, as the girls scurried upstairs for bath time, me herding them upwards, focused on the end goal (glorious bedtime at last!) I was taken aback by Laura’s little hand reassuring Ellie as they crawled upwards.  It may not seem earth shattering to you, but in the context of a typical “I WANT TO BE THE LEADER!” ethos that often saturates that hour of the evening and this stage of development, it washed over me like the unexpected scent of lilacs.

Few things unleash the torrents of joy that can well up, all unexpected, in a mother’s heart as those glimmering moments when her children offer unsolicited, organic gestures of kindness towards each other: the gentle word spoken, the miniature hand extended, the simple solidarity of standing alongside.  The most precious of these, and the ones that move my heart most deeply, are the secret ones, the ones that carry no sense of pretense or praise-seeking: the off-camera, overheard, raw acts of love. (And, on the contrary, isn’t it the bickering, the rivalry, the never-ending he-said/she-said, the tattling and the sibling provoking that wearies a mother’s heart like little else? More than workloads and laundry loads, more than sticky floors and cheerio-laden car seats?)

And I wonder, tonight, if it warms the Father’s heart, the way it does mine, when His children live out the love that He is in simple, quiet acts of love, in unseen gestures of kindness towards each other.  What joy to offer these tangible acts of love as unseen worship to the One whose love frees and redeems and draws me in! And perhaps this is the fleshing out of the gratitude heart that is growing here?

In my everyday, though, I find I am brimming with excuses to limit the love He desires and commands – full of fear of perception or being taken advantage of, or apprehension that I might not stand on the right side on issues of importance in the changing tides of culture and time.  And what wavering ounce of good intention I have left after my barrage of excuses is buried beneath the heavy weights of comparison, competition, and a self-focused life that extinguish the embers of love.

Yet few things are clearer in Scripture.  The greatest commandment, in Jesus’ own words: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” In our little world, seasons change. All around us, it seems, lives collapse in cancer, and divorce, and financial ruin and the inconspicuous, quiet numbing of hearts. How do I respond to the pulsing world around me? At the same time, babies are born, and marriage vows mouthed, children chase fireflies and healing happens, and even brokenness and emptiness are fertile ground for repentance, good places to begin again. So how do I respond to the enormity of all the heartache and joy that is life?

Love. Love. Love. Love.

Is it possible that love is always the answer when it is the genuine article? Not cheap grace – thrown around loosely and without thought, but a deep working out of the love germinating in the heart of a Christ-follower. An overflowing of the love being poured into the believer during the knowing Him that is everything.  It is messy and anything but formulaic. It grates against my desire to control and strategize my approach towards people and situations, and requires a laying down of all my excuses and all my pride.  It seems so simple: to choose the way of love, and yet it’s costly.  It calls me to dependence on the One who is love Himself: after all, to bear genuine fruit requires a heart that’s been planted and watered, sunbathed and nurtured and pruned and pinched back.

And I have tasted that fruit, and I am here because of the Christ-lovers who’ve sown love in my life. I am longing for a life that smacks of that love – not just in words scrolling across screens but in the mundane and the close to home. I’m thankful tonight, for that little hand on that little back, and for the currents of love that bring me back broken to the place I belong. The place where Love poured out on a tree, the place where Love rose up again, unhindered and free.

“You cannot do great things in this world, only small things with Great Love.” Mother Theresa

Life Uprooted, Hope Planted.

March is ending, and in my mind’s eye, I see clods of grass and earth clinging to black heels: life uprooted, torn right out, my soles aerating the lawn stretching from the car to her graveside.

A year’s passed since we buried my sister, a year since the unexpected loss that came in the midst of all our calculated transitions.  And my heart has ached and I have come to the end of myself this year.  I have wept, shaken my fist at heaven, appalled at the lack of redemption, even while it germinated in my own faithless heart.

In her death, she gave me the gift of discovering the dark places of my heart; the shock and finality of her slipping into eternity – and my inability to cope – exposing all my people pleasing, judging, guilt-driven motives, and pulling me, driving me, compelling me towards home.  Home.

And, yes, I have moved back home this year, our calculated transition, despite all my life’s longing and pursuit of moving far and away.  I have come back. And I have said the submissive yes on the outside, and kicked and screamed silent within, fearing the death of dreams, all the while living the reality of disappointment – mostly with myself.  I have had to come home to learn again, always, again and again, that my home, my dwelling has little to do with location and much to do with belonging.

He is my home: to abide, to dwell, to know His very presence and be satisfied in Him. This is not a new idea to me.  These are revelations I have heard and believed, truths I have spoken and taught, planted in others’ lives. I can recall with clarity the day He whispered it straight to my heart: You were made to be the woman at the foot of the cross.

But as grief has exposed my deep disbelief, and stillness has brought light to brokenness, I am rediscovering a foundation firmer than my own fabrications, a stillness sweeter than my own striving. I’ve seen the dark, ugly of this heart, and am learning to breath easy, discovering I am loved, deeply loved, in spite of it (because, really, the only one I was ever hiding it from was myself). No hiding, no impressing necessary: my life, lost in Christ.

So March comes to a close, and as the seasons change, I mark a year gone by.  I prepare to prune and uproot, plant and wait in preparation for new growth outside, and inside I am quieted and grateful, humbled by the slow, steady redemption budding here. I am home.

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I’m grateful for Ann’s words, compelling me to write and to risk, and for the many women in my life (past, present and future), like those of SheSpeaks, connecting the hearts of women to the heart of our Father God, and urging me to do the same: a broken vessel, glory, I pray, spilling out. I count it joy to sojourn with you. Thank you.

The Hush.

It’s been quiet around here.  I’ve been steeping.  Soaking in moments.
Sorting through the last of boxes and sorting through memories and sorting through decisions.

Reading a book.  This one – the work of Ann Voskamp, whose writing has been
a life rope thrown out to me this last year. I’m reading her words slowly, underlining,
and soaking them in, and it’s challenging and I’m realizing my perspective is often skewed
and the Word is always true and the rhythms of God’s grace are pulsing around me
even when I inadvertently drone them out with my busy, selfish life.
And I’m hearing the sweet music again. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I am finding time to paint again, and remembering why I love it so much.

Spending a whole day on the floor playing with the almost toddler who constantly,
all day long and usually without results, pats the ground next to her, beckoning me to sit
with her, be with her and work the puzzle, read the story, pat the babydoll.
Savoring the days of endless “why, Mamma?” and uninhibited belly laughs.

And its not all pretty and serene and there are days of major frustration and more transition
on the horizon and some of us don’t deal well with these things,
but we know the One who does and we keep walking,
and discovering beauty in the journey, and I’m grateful.

Thanks for your grace as I step away from writing for a while to hear the still, quiet here.
May your year be full of the grace unfurling from the beauty that’s right around you,
and the grace that comes from brokenness, and a quiet heart to perceive it all.

{Special thanks to Nate Gehman for the use of his camera for the first four images,
and the photo credit for the last three images belongs to my dear friend, Jennifer Kathryn.}

Thanksgiving

I’m thankful for the warm afternoon sun, and the way it streams through streaky windows and mingles in the never-washed, dingy and cheap curtains we inherited with our house – effortlessly creating beauty in inconspicuous places. In a year wrought with many losses, I find it so natural to turn inward, to mull and to fret and to over-think. The act of thanksgiving turns my heart from my complaining and judging and self-loving and loathing.  The practice of thanksgiving – of actually offering thanks for the countless gifts He offers and gives – softens my heart and clears out the muck to make room for the Truth. And reminded of Him, I am quieted, stilled. Thanksgiving makes room for reflection, for repentance too.  It opens the windows of my heart to receive the Grace he longs to extend, moving me to praise. I begin with thanks for what He gives, and am hushed in praise for Who He is.

I’d love to hear how you practice thankfulness and especially how you teach your kids the art of gratitude.  Hoping your hearts (and mine) are postured in thanks and in praise as we celebrate this weekend. With thanks for you, dear reader!

If Grace Grew on Trees

It had been sitting there on the window sill for days, one of the many little apples she picked with her own little hands from the orchard just a short drive north. So she surprised me when her eyes got wide and she announced “Look, Mama!  That little apple has a leaf starting to grow out of it!”

I chuckled, and explained that the leaf was not sprouting out of the apple, but that the apple grew on the tree near that leaf, and when she picked the apple, she had picked the leaf too.  She looked at me as if I were clearly delusional – had  all together lost my marbles, and said, without missing a beat: “Mom, apples don’t grow on trees!”

We’ve done more apple picking this year than any other.  We’ve read Apple Farmer Annie and she learned about apples at preschool and we’ve driven by the orchard dozens of times, seen branches weighed down by clusters of ripe red apples.

But I’m thinking today that (forgive me) the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Something she had seen and touched and experienced and tasted had zero impact on her understanding of it. An apple growing on a tree: absurd! And how often do I live unaltered by the grace I’ve received, apathetic to the power of God’s Word, ignorant of the rest offered in repentance?  These costly treasures I’ve experienced are left forgotten – to be conjured up during quiet times and Sunday services and times of desperation, but dismissed in the everyday – where I need them most.

I forget that I’ve been given a new name, that I’ve been set free, and I live like  a slave to fear again- defaulting to pride and coasting into gossip and people-pleasing, hurting those around me and living ignorant of grace, until I’m dead in my tracks again, all of a sudden desperately aware of my need for it – reminded that there’s nothing I can do on my own, nothing I can even begin to change on my own – that it’s by grace alone that I can stand before Him, that I can be made new, that relationships can be restored.

And the grace that poured down from a tree centuries ago bears fruit in my heart as I give up my striving and quiet my soul and receive undeserved. I’m humbled that He loves me because He is love, regardless of my successes and failures. And I pray that this love would transform my being and thinking and doing into something beautiful in His eyes.

On Falling Leaves and Pressing On

I spent the day off the beaten trail with my little adventurers. It was spontaneous, unplanned, and absolutely what I needed.
Fall has always been my favorite season.  But this year has been different.  I will never cease to be amazed at the way things in the natural world around us are wired and created to give visual clues and methodology and language to the reality of our experience. In the last few weeks, as life has begun to settle down and routines have begun to form, I find I’m confronted with the grief that has lingered these last few months since the whirlwind of our spring: primarily the death of my sister and our moving away (albeit not far) from the community we’d established for most of our marriage back here to my hometown.

Seeing fall, experiencing the slow decent, the unabashed beauty that preceeds what will inevitably be cold and harsh and devoid of visible growth, has served as a little whisper in my ear, reminding me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep hope alive. In the change of seasons, the death of dreams, even the most searing losses, there is always hope. Winter always follows fall, but spring always follows winter. Summer lingers beyond that. And fall will come again.I once heard a man who had traveled a little farther down life’s journey say that if he could do one thing differently in his youth, he would have pushed into the pain and the trials and grief, rather than expend all his energy working to avoid it.  With the help of some amazing listeners, and the rich, deep grace that seeps in to my life again and again, even when I least expect it, and when, for sure, I am undeserving, I am pressing in.

I am holding out hope that Jesus, who came to bind up the brokenhearted, to give freedom and bring light to the darkest corners of our world and of my heart, to comfort and provide for those who grieve, will shape me into an oak of righteousness (Isaiah 61),  that His life will be more evident in me because of these losses.  That the fear and mistrust and control that the loss exposes in me would be changed by His love, and made into something beautiful. I am hoping.

Meditations From the Farmer’s Market

One of my favorite things about this summer has been our town’s farmer’s market.  It’s become part of the rhythm of our week, as we seek to establish some routine in our new home and community. Sundays: church.  Tuesdays: library class. Thursdays: Farmer’s Market.

Beginning to work in our gardens and buying local produce as it’s harvested is giving me a whole new perspective on time and seasons.   It’s resetting my heart’s gears to a slower pace, causing me to acknowledge that growth requires gestation, that weeds are quick to grow and even faster to choke the life out of beauty, and that the harvest happens at an appointed time. Appointed, that is, not by me.

I am learning to quiet my heart.  Yearning to keep in step with His timing, His seasons, rather than digging my heels in and insisting on dressing in bathing suits for a snowstorm or heavy rain gear for a starlit summer night.
The disciplines of thanksgiving and repentance (confession) are weeding out the contempt and bitterness and entitlement that so effortlessly shoot up like strangling vines around my heart.
And I find myself longing for more of His rhythm in my life.  And not just in the slowly passing seasons, but in the minutia. I want to create spaces for our family to gather & soak in His Word.

I’m learning to let the ordinary, normally dreaded tasks of every day serve as catalysts to interact with the Holy, just as Jesus took on such ordinariness when He came down and dwelt among us.
I hope you have time to work in your garden today, weeding or harvesting, sowing or reaping, or maybe just waiting. To quiet your busy heart and encounter the One who makes all things new, all thing beautiful, in His time.

Update: I thought it was worth mentioning… If blogs had bibliographies (blogliographies?!) these would be on my list of inspiring things I’ve been reading & listening to this week that were steeping in my mind as I wrote this:

• Kathleen Norris’ Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work
• This post by Ann Voskamp
• Ron Walborn’s lecture (available on itunes, but I can’t figure out the link!) on the Gardening Concept of Spiritual Formation. I cannot recommend the series highly enough.

The Bread of Idleness & the Spinach of Rest

Oh, those long gone days when my babies would fall asleep anywhere, anytime, all the time, and transfer without stirring from person to person, from carseat to crib and back again.  Such thick, deep sleep.  Such trusting rest.  Ironically, even as I’ve been mulling over thoughts of rest today, even as I rediscovered this sweet old photograph, these same dear children have joined forces to wage ultimate war against nap-time and bedtime. But I digress…

I got thinking about rest, and the concept, after reading this last night. (It’s good, check it out.) I know my blog has been a big cheer-leading camp for Ann Voskamp lately.  But there’s something about her writing that both surprises me and resonates with feelings I’ve yet to articulate.   So I was thinking about rest, real rest, and then I came across these words today, concerning a wife of noble character: She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. -Proverbs 31.27

And it occurred to me, how often, in need of rest -genuine restorative rest, I opt for idleness instead.  My heart longs for connection, for meaning, for purpose in the midst of the often mundane tasks of housekeeping and mothering, and instead of allowing myself to enter into the rest that would fill my heart with life and ease the burdens and shed the light of grace on those tasks, I take a break to check Facebook or (my newest addiction) Craigslist.  I make another cup of coffee or, if I’m lucky, like tonight, escape for some retail therapy to recharge.  Not bad, in and of themselves- coffee, shopping, social media- but not life-giving, burden-lifting, or grace-filled either. The bread of idleness. The carbohydrate of idleness – the most common source of energy, but no essential nutrients.

I’m weeding out these lesser loves. I am longing tonight for a heart that rests – with the trust of a newborn baby and the fierce intentionality of the Proverbs 31 woman.

Love is the Color Orange

Do you know what this is? Love.

“No, no,” you say, “this is a too-orange room, with cheap inexpensive vinyl flooring.”

Oh, no.  This room speaks of the kind of love I share with Ted.  The kind of love that loves my favorite color because he loves me. The kind that works side by side.  It’s a product of hours of labor, occurring almost exclusively between the hours of 9pm and 5am – which almost guarantees bickering, giddiness, and a less than perfect paint job!

We worked all last week on it.  Taking on this project together reminded me how much I love working with Ted.  I love the satisfaction of our very different personalities and approaches getting into a rhythm.  I love the small talk.  I love accomplishing together.  It reminds me how patient he is, and how much we have to talk about.  It makes me so glad he’s mine.  And I’m his.

Sometime in the middle of the week I read this and this, too (from what is quite possibly my most favorite blog to read) which only inspired my thinking on the gift & mystery of marriage further.  It’s not that we don’t have our problems and mis-communication at times, but this week reminded me of a few of the many reasons we choose in, and still are.  So this Fourth of July, I’m celebrating Valentine’s Day instead too.  And changing the color from red to orange. Happy holidays!

p.s. When we’re done with the laundry/mudroom (hopefully soon!) I’ll put up some before & after pictures – we just put the washer & dryer in and are waiting on the shelves & counter top to finish the project.

Easter & Life

In the wake of the heartache I’ve experienced these last few weeks, I’m finding such comfort in the gift of Spring – harsh, driving rain that pounds down with permission- even expectation- to grieve, followed by the first truly warm, jacket-free, flower-blooming days – an invitation to get out, be grateful, and keep living fully.  All this coincides with Easter, too:  my favorite holiday, an opportunity to stop and dwell on the person who matters most to me, and the gift of life He gives.

As you think about Easter, I want to share a two little gifts with you, both of which I came across through friends.

The first is a blog.  My friend Larissa introduced me to the idea of an Easter Garden, pictured above.  It was created by Ann Voskamp, and after reading her description of the process, I was quickly drawn in to her blog, A Holy Experience. I’ve been so comforted and re-centered by her writing.  Ann’s blog sets out to be “a still chapel” and it has been that for me this week.  Her writing has such a pure goodness to it. Take a minute, and read it when you have the time to soak it in, not in a frenzy of internet blitzing.  It’s good.  Also, check out her heartfelt and beautiful ideas for celebrating Easter, and more details on making your own Easter Garden- steeped with meaning and hands on learning for your family.

The second little gift is a song, that I discovered by way of one of my favorite blogs, b*spoke.  Bethany posted this just today, and it brought me to my knees.  The words tied my grief up into a tangible parcel and placed it right where it belonged, at the foot of the cross. It’s called Out of the Depths, by Sovereign Grace Music.  Here are some of the lyrics, or listen to it here.

The secret mysteries belong to You/ We only know what You reveal / And all my questions that are unresolved/ Don’t change the wisdom of Your will/ In every trial and loss / My hope is in the cross  / Where Your compassions never fail

As we embrace Good Friday and Easter this weekend, I hope your heart (and mine) is soft and open to the whispers of God – His mercy, His faithfulness, the gift of His life.