February Favorites
Almost everything I like quickly becomes a favorite. And because there is always a story, I’ll tell you a little of the background behind a few of my favorite things (this month:)):
Favorite Story of Persevering With a Heart Wide-Open to God This woman and her family have loved Him well. Though I have not met her in person, she and her husband were some of the first to meet our Hope, and they’ve been in Uganda ever since. Yep, that’s almost one year. Some might call the twists and turns of their road nightmarish, but they have chosen to see it as beauty and they haven’t stopped praising Him — while they fought for to one to whom He called them. This heart-stance has continued to keep me wrapped into their story. We all can learn from another who worships when they are pressed and pulled on every side. (And this family is coming home soon … finally!)
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Favorite Backdrop for my Writing Every Thursday afternoon, I tuck away in a coffee shop, after my stint in the prayer room, to write. The time is a little gift from my husband, manning the fort at home. I’ve found some new tunes to be my background … continue reading ‘February Favorites’…
Latest Morning Chai Devotion
Learning a New Language
The flower didn’t matter much to her, until she lost it.
We had been home from Uganda for a few weeks, stewardship was something slightly foreign to my five year-old’s experience. She didn’t have much to steward on the streets. What I perceived as an opportunity to train little hands to keep carefully the things entrusted to them, was something for which He had planned even more.
After searching high and low for this accessory to her headband, to no avail, my little girl unraveled. She didn’t need to hear that it was her responsibility to have kept watch over it, her posture wore the understanding that her focus on play had trumped stewardship. Shame flooded her countenance. I spoke ..read more
Joy in the midst of waiting. Beauty from ashes. Seeing Jesus’ thread throughout every frame of life. That's what we've been exploring this past decade ... and along the way, we've added to our family -- former orphans, now a son and three daughters.
And in the midst of it all ... I am learning to look up.
Link back here …
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February Favorites
Almost everything I like quickly becomes a favorite. And because there is always a story, I’ll tell you a little of the background behind a few of my favorite things (this month:)):
Favorite Story of Persevering With a Heart Wide-Open to God This woman and her family have loved Him well. Though I have not met her in person, she and her husband were some of the first to meet our Hope, and they’ve been in Uganda ever since. Yep, that’s almost one year. Some might call the twists and turns of their road nightmarish, but they have chosen to see it as beauty and they haven’t stopped praising Him — while they fought for to one to whom He ..read more
Learning a New Language
The flower didn’t matter much to her, until she lost it.
We had been home from Uganda for a few weeks, stewardship was something slightly foreign to my five year-old’s experience. She didn’t have much to steward on the streets. What I perceived as an opportunity to train little hands to keep carefully the things entrusted to them, was something for which He had planned even more.
After searching high and low for this accessory to her headband, to no avail, my little girl unraveled. She didn’t need to hear that it was her responsibility to have kept watch over it, her posture wore the understanding that her focus on play had trumped stewardship. Shame flooded her countenance. I spoke ..read more
Bare
“I’m embarrassed mommy.”
She was five when she said it.
“When I looked in the mirror just now, satan told me I was ugly,” she replied when I pressed.
This was not a conversation we’d had before and it came way too early, in my book. I wasn’t sure whether to feel relief that she was able to identify this vileness as being from a source other than herself, and other than God, or to mourn over the fact that my sweet little one had fallen prey to femininity’s curse … at five.
We get stopped on the street, often, with comments about her beauty. It’s not something we emphasize, and it’s hard to avoid when strangers spill words before I ..read more
The Love Project
We found each other when life felt carefree, untainted, and we forged a sisterhood over late-night daydreams of changing the world — and sugar. A decade-plus spanned the distance between those high school nights and when we were later reacquainted. As we caught up over phone calls, and, eventually, in-person visits, time revealed that we also shared scars.
I didn’t pray by her bedside when she lost her first baby and she wasn’t there to cry with me when we hit our first year of expectation, childless.
It didn’t take long through the reacquainting to realize that we understood the other’s road, intimately. The parallels during our time apart were uncanny. We both were adopting from Ethiopia. ..read more
I Am Because He Is
I need to get over the feeling of “I can’t” [and move to] “I am.”
What? I read it again. And again.
Her confession cracked open my day. It was His phrase, through her, over what He is doing in my life. I’ve lived a lifetime of “I can’t”, inhaling lies of the enemy spoken over me as if they would one day be declarations on my tombstone.
I had just unknowingly spent more than our budget, spoken unfiltered words to him, and now had a child unraveling at my bedroom door. Failure — it seeped under the doorframe of my heart. A small crack in the wall, untouched by the Father, and before I know it, I’m ..read more
Showing Up
I live in this weird tension of soaking up spills, matching socks and slicing onions (again), all while remaining acutely aware of a hunger inside of me for adventure which I can’t cap. Some days, I’m still in slippers and sweatpants at four o’clock — yet I feel like I spent the day back at the Amalfi coast when the waves crashed just a few feet below our window, carved out of the rocks.
I was made for more than the mundane.
At every stage of life, I’ve been haunted by a desire for something more, something bigger, something that would fulfill empty places within me. It’s made me feel unsettled, this discomfort festering under the surface. ..read more
Her Fireplace
She was widowed young — a mom with a houseful of little ones and no companion with whom to kiss their ouchies and tie their shoes. Her life was shackled with loss. Back then, when I heard about it, I was in college with no understanding of what all of that meant — still, it pained me. What does God do with such life-altering affliction?
I didn’t know her well, but He meant for me to hear her story. I had an unrelenting curiosity about her coping. It touched on a nagging question deep within. That kind of tragedy set against whom, I had been told, was a good God. How? It had to be too much pain for ..read more
Taking Her From The Streets
[Continuing my train of thought from yesterday ...]
Moments of insecurity reveal my street-raised daughter to have a bark louder than her bite. As we learn Him, He teaches us about her and it’s here that we’re finding her gentleness.
Months ago, we started praying into her the opposite of what we were perceiving from her behavior. We weren’t looking to directly oppose what we saw, but as we asked Him for understanding into her heart, we realized that much of the whirlwind around her was borne from inertia. She had a dormant beauty which never had reason to surface.
And I’ve had too many years taking gulps of worst-case scenario expectations, lived-out. This time, I would try ..read more
Losing the Streets
The slum streets were her childhood playground.
Her lungs took their first swallow of earth’s air in the poor African’s version of a waiting room, while her mama held her place in line for a “free-clinic” bed — one that she never saw. Hope was welcomed by this world into the dirt, and it would indoctrinate her first five years of life.
And from what I can tell, she did street life well.
The skill set required to scavenge for food and beg (simply to get by) is quite different, even, than the one needed to slide into the masses of an orphanage food line. To move from streets to shanty-like slums and back again, over and over, ..read more
Never Too Old for Treasure Hunts
“You just wait.”
Eventually, we stopped counting the number of times we were forewarned about our lives “coming to an end” once the little ones entered our home.
Four children later, though, I now understand a little bit better the pain which might cause (what felt like) a curse to come out of the lips of others over our long-awaited family.
Life is all about surrender, at every pass. And whichever ones of life’s props we hold closest to our chest are the ones which cause us the most pain to relinquish. But the myth is that this pain is the final word over surrender. Though my greatest (felt) surrender may not be parenting, all day long I’m tempted ..read more
Adopting Outside the Birth Order
“Sometimes what we call ‘wisdom’ is actually fear,” she said, casually, but carefully in response to the story I’d just told her.
Searing truth.
We’d been parents for under two years. We’d just begun to hit a stride with Eden and Caleb when we felt the nudge to say ‘yes’ to yet another paper pregnancy. We suspected it would be two, but felt for sure it would be children who were the same age or younger as our two now. “The paint is still too fresh on the walls,” Nate said when I told him about the older girl lingering around the orphan babies with new stories emerging, often overlooked. She haunted my waking hours. “Later, we’ll ..read more
The Hope of Glory
There is only one today.
And as I stand just inside the foyer of 2012 with my fingers wrapped around His ageless hands, hoping I can somehow scoot near enough to know Him as Counselor, He whispers one phrase.
From a group of women gathering to discuss, to my own personal study, and off the lips of the man giving the message up-front came the same phrase. His Words are alive. Spoken then, reverberating now, they are the best thing around.
Christ in you. (Colossions 1:27)
Not Christ-in-me when my circumstantial strains let up, not Christ-in-me when my seven year-old prayer is answered, not Christ-in-me when I’ve had my very best day putting forth my very-best me. Christ in me, now.
This ..read more
When God Hides You
We swapped talents. I rolled up my sleeves, moved furniture, created files and made labels. She pulled out her stopwatch, recorded splits and weekly re-calibrated my plan to match my goal. I organized and she coached. She needed simplicity and I wanted to win a race.
That summer training pushed my physical limits to capacity. Each day I was more tired than the last. Muscles I didn’t know I had found themselves tested, and torn. In the afternoon hours, I ached and creaked only to get up the next day and do it all over again. And again. My body learned the rhythm of reach and rest.
My now-season of motherhood parallels that summer time. Four kids in two ..read more
The Great Lie of Motherhood
Motherhood has a subtle lie attached to it.
These years are not about me, they are about them. Sounds good, right?
I scurry to fill tummies and enrich minds and foster hunger for Jesus. I teach fingers to tie shoes, lips to say “will you forgive me?”, and minds to memorize scripture. All good things, necessary things, but with a faint emptiness if fueled by this lie, cloaked as truth.
It’s this lie which leaves me feeling anorexic after even their best days, and it’s this lie which leaves me frantic to turn up the treadmill after their worst. Like a hamster wheel there is no way out of this notion, which is maybe only ten degrees off-center in appearance — ..read more
Because There is Always a Story
2011 was filled with my favorites (because — shhh — when I decide I like something it’s pretty hard for me not to give it favorite status). I have a hard time not sharing what I love and most times my enthusiasm is so buoyant it’s indiscriminate. Like when I tell the gas station attendant about my new food-dehydrator or send my new favorite book to the girl who, weeks before, told me about a stigmatism in her eye which prevents her from reading.
Such is my life.
But finally, I have a place to bleed excitement for the things I love and the stories behind them.
(Because there is always a story.)
Here are just a few of my very-favorite favorites from 2011:
Favorite ..read more
2012: My Year to Know Him as Counselor
I sat in her office, rigid. She asked questions and I gave hollow answers. I tried to steal glances around her office when she looked down to scribble notes. I scanned her bookshelf for familiar titles or authors I trusted. When I spotted her credentials listed on the wall I wondered, again, why the perspective of an outsider, no matter how credentialed, could be of any more benefit than those in my inner circle. Counselors were for the messy and, up until now, I hadn’t categorized myself as messy. Nothing about this felt comfortable or easy.
But I was desperate. And as was true for most of my life in those years, when you are desperate ..read more
Simple Adoration
When life bulges — pushes, prods and stretches — simple adoration is my safe place. He has made for me a quiet alcove, in the loud years of raising littles, to remind me of all that is good.
(Each Monday, the column of adoration to the right-side of my blog moves front-and-center, here, and I invite others who are doing the same — stretching their heart to lift God’s Word up and back to Him, despite every obstacle the day presents – to add their link below in the comments section. You can link people back here from your post by grabbing the code on the right side of my blog. If you don’t have a blog but are, yourself, a lover ..read more
Even This Moment
I was half distracted with the next item on my list and half preoccupied by the events of the morning. I didn’t even notice the tutorial happening a few paces away. The woman stocking the produce held out two different pears to demonstrate the difference between ripe and not-yet-ripe to my children huddled around our cart.
“May I give them a taste?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said and they let out little squeals. They weren’t burdened like I was.
There are days when I get allured by a lie which cloaks itself different enough from the last that I get hooked. Today was one of them. Their heart issues were surfacing and I was sinking.When my focus shifts ..read more
A Year In Review
He did it.
I asked for a closer look and He released a yes over both the big and the small of my life.
With two days away from a natural page-break, I am preparing for another ask for this, another year.
And this one is only gaining momentum as I look back on what the past 360-something days have held.
2011 was my Year to Learn the Lines on His Face. I wanted familiarity with this God-Man. I wanted to grow in the knowledge and understanding of His ways, to move from the curb to the front porch or maybe even the foyer. I wanted to scooch close.
And, wouldn’t you know, that was exactly what this year was ..read more
Beauty is a Birthday Party
Line by line I prayed through these verses, and over my children: heal their broken hearts, open prison doors that bind them, comfort them when they mourn, replace their ashes with beauty (Isaiah 61). One, in particular, was in more obvious need of bandaging.
As my mind lingered on her and all her years of ashes which seemed to be surfacing just around her first-ever birthday, His Word jumped off the page and into my spirit.
Beauty is a birthday party was His phrase.
And I knew my plans had been foiled.
This mama, schedule, full and to-do list, never-ending, was going to be de-railing yet another well thought-through strategy. This was not the year for birthday parties. We’d ..read more
The Conversation Continues