I sometimes complain that life is rushed.And then I rush you.I complain everything is fast, and busy,And then I busy the life out of you.You do it so very well. Living slow.The toothpick falls.
Slowly, you get of your chair. You crawl under the table and find not only the toothpick, but also a ball and a spoon. This delights you.
Your mouth curls into a mischievous, satisfied smile. Your cheeks deliciously go along, not wanting to miss out.
The cheese is lost.You check your t-shirt. Your pants. Your chair. And find it under the table a few minutes later.
Slowly, you push the chair away and I restrain myself from bending down to just do it for you. Your little fingers rub the cheese, relishing the texture. To me, it looks unappetizing. To you, it is a piece of gold.
I tell you to hurry up and finish eating.
You twist around on your chair in an everlasting dance, bumping your plate and your milk. All I can see is the possibility of spilled milk and all you see is the crumbs in the shape of an airplane.
Staring at the ceiling, you contemplate…something? You can’t and won’t […]
I’ve wanted to read through the Bible since I was 10 or so.
My dad encouraged us to come to him with any questions about our Bible reading, so when I came to Leviticus I went to ask him something.
It resulted in a series of sermons of Leviticus.
I was immensely proud that I was the, um, founder of the series. I do have to say that I thought them exceptionally boring and very long. (Since then, my opinion has been revised and my unbiased opinion happens to be that my dad is the very best preacher in the entire world. But that was not my opinion when I was 10.)
I tried reading through the Bible 4 more times, and the furthest I ever got was Chronicles. Or was it Kings? In any case, it was about kings and battles.
Last year I followed Breeze’s Bible reading plan.
And this time at long last, it worked!
Some days I only read in order to check of the day. Some days I was completely inspired and other days not at all.
At the end of the year, I found that I had grown closer to God. Or […]
To me, sometimes. To you, right now or then.I wish I could wrap you tight in a circle of safety. I wish I could give you my certainty, that everything will be all right even when everything is too hard.
Would that steal your own soul adventures?
I wish I could show you the hope that burns bright, even when you can’t feel it. It’s always there, like the sun, but it might not be visible in your today. It might be just around the bend, waiting for morning.
I wish I could make you understand that you don’t need to feel it.
That you don’t need to feel okay.
That someday, this darkness will recede and you will step out hesitantly, finding out you are so very victorious. Then you will smile and square your shoulders and take the next step confidently.
I wish I could show you the height and depth and width of His love for you… I wish I could always have the right attitude and speak the right words so that you’d be convinced.
I wish I could fast forward. I might be tempted to do it, but would it rush you through something […]
I’m a list-maker. I just love making lists.
I love that feeling of putting a check beside a line, of crossing out a line. It gives me a thrill.
When it comes to dealing with the though stuff of life, I want to put it in a list too. I want to deal with it and get it over with so that I can put a check beside that line.
But it just so happens to be that you can’t deal with everything by throwing it in a list and checking it of. A pity.
I started writing baby names in my journal when I was 13.
99% of them girl names.
I made it my mission to repeat my favorite names to my husband before we were even married, to get him used to the ones he didn’t like.
It worked (yay me), but we didn’t need the girl name for the first, the second or the third baby.
And I had the hardest time with that.
I brought it to God and tried to leave it there, I read this wonderful book about how God redeems our pain, and wrote down in my journal that I was […]
A myth persists that as a child we grow up and develop a character, as a teenager we discover who we truly are so that by the time we are adults we are ready to step out into the world with self-confidence, ready to be who we are out there.
And then we don’t find out who we are and we don’t feel very grownup and we think our life has started of without us.
What we don’t realize fully, what flutters evasively just out of reach? Is that we are who we are and have been all along. We change and we keep changing.Discovering that you enjoy something when you are 30 doesn’t mean that you didn’t fully know yourself up until then. Or maybe it means exactly that, and that’s just it: God made us in such a beautifully complex and changing way that we need a lifetime and more to figure out ourselves.
As something new enters the story, it doesn’t say that who you were up until then was a lie. It was just a different chapter of your story, but the last chapter is just as much a part of the book as the […]
In the evening I sit on the steps that go from the kitchen down to the living room, and I want to take a picture.
For Instagram, you know. This moment is perfect, and I want to remember it. If perfect food goes on Instagram, shouldn’t perfect moments?
Because there is Mike, with Caleb on his feet, dancing to Billy Joel’s Piano Man.
Gabriel jumps from couch to couch to coffee table.
Abel dances around his daddy and two brothers, running and skipping.
But Caleb’s worn out sweatpants are sagging down. His t-shirt is dirty. Then there’s Gabriel who still has a considerable amount of food on his face, with a generous helping of snot wiped over and around it.
Abel’s one sock is falling off and the other one is pulled up high over his pants.
I don’t have a white wall, and they always do so well on Instagram.
So I sit here, looking as hard as I can. Sitting in the 3-D picture and it’s going viral in my heart.
To this perfect moment that looks so incredibly imperfect.
I send a laugh to Gabriel, who is telling me about the dragon he will kill. Dancing and […]
After 10 years of Christmas Trees being forbidden, they were welcome in our house again. In 17-year-old enthusiasm I attacked the tree.
It would be gorgeous. And perfect. And totally awesome.
My 8-year-old sister agreed but dear me, did she ever have different ideas of gorgeous then I did!
For some reason, someone thought it was a good idea to give her a gigantic, flashy pink and yellow heart and my sister believed it to be an ornament for the tree no matter how many times I told her it wasn’t.
In a frantic pursuit of perfection I bossed everybody around and tried to limit the damage my 4 siblings aged 3 to 8 could do to a perfect Christmas tree. In the end I let them hang things wherever they wanted because they did anyway, and planned to redo the tree after they were in bed.
With a cup of tea and a critical eye I stood before the tree and rehung most of the things. I relegated the Pink-Heart-Ornament-Wannabe to the back of the tree and went to bed satisfied with a job well done.
The next morning I got up, later than my siblings because […]
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