five things I’m frightened at the thought of
For Friday the 13th.
1. hot air ballooning
2. my boys’ bathroom
3. caves
4. unexpected spiders
5. loving unconditionally
The Experts Who Tell Bloggers What to Do say you should never apologize for being absent from your blog: it makes you appear inconsistent and unprofessional. But I have been inconsistent and unprofessional; I see no point in denying it. Besides, I think you’ve already figured that out for yourself, right? You’re smarter than you look.
These blog advisors say you shouldn’t make excuses for being absent either. But I’ve already ignored them once, so I’ll do it again to say that I’ve spent the last four weeks both preparing to go on a vacation and actually going on said vacation. That’s about a month of no writing — one-twelfth of a whole year —just in case you’re keeping track of exactly how long I’ve been inconsistent and unprofessional. (If, by the way, you are doing such a thing, I have boxes of journals dating from 1984 that should help build an ironclad case.)
This vacation/excuse was epic: Mike and I towed our three kids more than 4,000 miles through seven states and five different resting places to make one Big Fat Summer Memory. It was marginally crazy, totally exhausting and completely worth it.
Vacations are an odd thing, a sort of out-of-body experience that lets you look down on your normal routine with a shifting, clarifying light. You see things that matter. You see things that don’t. You feel time pass, the minutes slipping by like pearls off a string. Your life moves too slowly and too quickly all at once.
My heart ached a lot on this trip. It ached in good ways. I spent precious time with family I rarely see. I murmured prayers under a million diamond pinholes in a dark Carolina sky, marveling that a vast God is mindful of me.
It ached in hard ways, too. I grasped vainly at the joy my children leave behind as they slip through my fingers. I visited old places and ancient ways in the houses and haunts of my childhood, meeting memories of the little me — the girl me. She was lonelier and smaller than I remembered.
But mostly my heart ached with love. Vacation reminded me that a God who is infinitely great is also infinitely little. He traces paths for the planets and for winding creeks, He breathes the names of the stars and the songbirds. He knows me full well. And the everlasting love that moved Him from heaven to earth is the same reason my story reads Big God saves small girl, again and again and again.
I had a bad day last week. I had a good day yesterday. I don’t know if I would describe either one in the way I just did if I didn’t have the other for comparison.
It is the same throughout the Great Story — doubt reveals faith, sorrow reveals joy, darkness reveals light, lies reveal truth. And it is the same with my salvation: God did not write rules so I could keep them well and point to my own greatness. He gave me rules I could never keep in the first place, pointing me to my great need of Him.
My failure reveals the success of my Savior.
It’s taken me 14 years to realize why I don’t feel like a good mother:
Nothing Is Ever Finished.
I never get to say “Whew! I’ll never hunt for another missing shoe,” or “Well, look at you, honey! You’ll never talk back to me again!” For a person who thrives on accomplishment, parenting is madness. It’s the file folder than never closes, an endless term paper that never earns a grade.
It’s the same reason I don’t feel like a very good Christian sometimes. My soul keeps dirtying the dishes. When I finish letting God clean out one closet, He lovingly points out another one, lurking down a hallway I didn’t even know I had.
But God said “It is finished” before I even started. He is free to rejoice over me in each moment — celebrating my first steps, my graduations, my minor miracles of transformation.
He can completely love my incompleteness, knowing His great work here is done, and it is good.
“…I had to let go of the past and the future — because I finally saw it, crystal clear: That’s where the suffering lies. The past and the future don’t exist, yet I’d let them rule my life — always trying to get to somewhere or away from somewhere. All I really had was the present moment. And therein was freedom, a place without time or expectation. Freedom to write. To mother. To love. To live.”
– Laura Munson
but I can’t.
an extra day each week
the patience of Job
a kitty cat
the house next door
a world free of crap like this*
*pray for Ava, please. she’s only 5.
I am at the first part
of my psalm,
tested in a cave
of how and why
soon
(I promise)
I will get to that part
where I sing
only You can save
but for now
I am
writing lines of fear
filling in the blanks
with my own solutions
and crying when You
mark my answers
wrong
Summer is almost half over. The 12 weeks of breezy promise that seemed so long in the beginning are slipping away, and I am looking ahead to the lists that get longer as the days get shorter. Already, I am thinking too much. Already, I am letting the superficial crowd out the significant.
A good portion of stress — and all of procrastination — come from granting urgency to perfectly good ideas at perfectly bad times. It’s so easy to convince myself that things which hold no eternity in them actually do. When I allow everything to carry the same weight on the scale of my spirit, the Life in me is crushed out, and I can no longer rise for what matters.
May God grant me wisdom and clarity and focus. I must stop selling my soul to what is seen more than what is unseen. I must stop letting what is visible triumph over what is invisible.
Birmingham, Alabama
Selmer, Tennessee
Dayton, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Hiawassee, Georgia
Where are you headed?
Sometimes I don’t like worship at all.
This week, I didn’t like worship when Katy Claire drew on the floor with a Sharpie, or when the dishwasher started leaking, or when a design I was working on crashed and was lost forever.
Worship didn’t seem convenient when I heard that Death was slowly claiming someone else I loved. Praise didn’t come easily when a year-long prayer went unanswered again, or when a friend left true faith for feelings and lies.
But God calls us to bring a sacrifice of praise — the obedient acknowledgment that He is in all and over all and through all. I spent years in the church, my hymnbook open, wondering why no one around me seemed to feel like singing. Now I am often walking in their shoes, sitting in their pew.
A sacrifice of praise is like any other sacrifice. It hurts to lay it down, but we offer it anyway. The songs that are sung when you don’t feel like singing burn hottest and brightest on the altar of self. They are the sweetest worship of all.
