My Mess, His Mosaic

I'm so very late to the Five Minute Friday party this week. Late. Here I am to say "Yes" to five minutes of brave writing.

This week we're celebrating the release of Kristen Welch's book Rhinestone Jesus: Saying Yes to God When Sparkly Safe Faith Is No Longer Enough. She has a crazy {amazing} belief that we can say "yes" to God even if our life isn't neat and tidy and she dares us to believe that with her.

On Monday I'll have a "Yes" in my mess post and a giveaway of a copy of the book, but for now I'm joining with Lisa-Jo and the rest of the gang for 5 minutes on "Mess"

We're about to move twice in a month. My whole week has revolved around moving boxes and I'm bone tired from it all. It's a mess. A catastrophe of life exploded between two houses.

This is a juggling act of storage units and a temporary house and a million other questions about purpose and place.  And while everyone else is doing the day to day I feel like I am struggling to get from one day to the next with my sanity intact.

I feel buried under boxes and to-dos and should-dos. The load weighs heavy but I've not shouldered it alone. There has been this community of courageous Jesus lovers that have shown up around me. They have watched the wee-girl and walked a lap or two in around the park and this spinning wheel of life just to remind me that God is here with me in my mess.

It's here in the mess that I know my need most.

I know that in no area of my life can I go it alone. 

So on a Friday morning when the Millie has woken up at the crack of dawn because of the light peaking through the windows of her new {for now} room I can cup my coffee and rest. It will all get done. The boxes will stay packed for now and we'll move again in a month.

These questions will be answered and we'll drop pebbles behind us to point to God's faithfulness. It isn't really a mess to God. It's a mosaic. A mosaic He is piecing it together in the most beautiful way.

There isn't a magic eraser big enough, but there is a God bigger than.

It's messy and it might not ever be, but we'll clear the brush from the path as we go so that we can look back and see where He led us from no matter where we're headed. 

"Farther along we'll know all about it. Farther along we'll understand why. So cheer up my brothers live in the sunshine. We'll understand this all by and by."

~Josh Garrels "Farther Along" from Love & War & The Sea In Between

Five Minute Friday: Paint and Hope

I'd almost decided to pass on today's five minutes and the words floating around over in The Grove at Velvet Ashes, but then I got the urge to write.

My 5 minutes on "Hope" and "Paint"

I walked out of the room for 2 minutes. What amounts to a small lifetime for a toddler. Enough time to paint the world, her world, a half dozen shades.

She's painted my world and on a Friday morning we lay nose to nose and she scrunches her's into a toothy grin and I feel that lurch in my stomach. The one that tells me that I have to hold onto these days. These days are fleeting and they are the hardest thing that I've ever done and some days I wish they would all be over and other days I feel like I am trying to catch the wind, to capture it and keep it forever right here.

I meet with a friend on a rare day wee person free and she is expecting her first any day. We walk and we talk and I want to tell her all the real honest things about motherhood.

I want to let her know that she isn't alone and that motherhood is really hard but it is also so so so good. In a world that takes offense at motherhood I wanted to fill her with real hope that it is a good thing. I want to tell her not to miss what God is doing in her. That motherhood is God's means of caring for little people, but it is also God's way of making us like Jesus.

It's the kind of good that burrows it's way into your soul and let's you know that somehow in all the constant chaos you will find your way. It is the hope that pulls you along when you are wrung dry from a day with the needs of a little person on the front burner and your own not even on the radar.

Motherhood is at it's best the most optimistic of endeavors, full of hope, and ever reaching forward.

The Wonder of It All {Five Minute Friday + Some}

I'm all kinds of behind in blogging and life. All kinds. But I couldn't miss the opportunity to combine two of my favorite words "Mighty" and "Ordinary" for a bit of writing. There is so much amazingness going on in my two favorite online communities right now! Let me tell you a smidge of it!

First, Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom officially launches on Tuesday. Lisa-Jo our fearless Five Minute Friday leader just happens to be the author. Her words are a gift to all of us who have ever mama-ed. She is a cheerleader and champion and believes that we are all on the same team mothering our hearts out in the everyday wonder-filled ordinary. In short I adore her.

This is our chance to cheer her on. Let's show Amazon what we already know, "there is no such thing as just a mom". If you haven't already pre-ordered Surprised by Motherhood then go do it! Now!

Now for the other amazingness! Velvet Ashes is a place for women serving overseas to connect. Today we're opening up registration for our first ever Connection Groups. These groups are meant to provide a way for women serving on the field to find weekly face to face connection with others living their callings in similar areas. Read more and register! 

It's time to write. Finally. Thanks for sticking that out. But really? The amazingness? Here goes...

There is a sound that rises. A chorus of the broken. The sisters who can't carry a tune in a bucket carrying one another toward the Cross.

I told him last night as the evening dwindled that I knew I was weak- maybe the weakest I'd ever felt. He looked at me out of those brown eyes that have held me tight for nearly a decade and he told me the weakness was making me strong.

And I'm trying to get through each day's ordinary right now because our faith isn't giving us long range answers. It's only mounting and mounting with questions about place and calling and where the heck are we going to live in a month? Where? WHERE? Just someone tell me...please.

Tell me that all this ordinary faith that looks like so much weakness to me is leading us somewhere.

I sing it long and clear. That chorus, Paul's words, my mama always wanted to do in a round when we were riding in the car. "Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say, REJOICE!" Because weakness is mighty in the upside down Kingdom of joy choosing and hope clinging.

The song rises and rises and I sing it over my sister who is battling a body broken by cancer. I sing it over my sister who just doesn't know where they're headed either. I sing it in my ordinary as the spin cycle of life tosses me.


Because the greatest thing we can tell each other in our ordinary is that we are not forgotten. Our ordinary which seems so forgettable is beauty to behold. Grace soaked, dripping, and getting us all sloppy wet with the wonder of it all.

5 Minute Friday: Joy and Valley

It's been awhile. I'm here to string together words in this space. Five minutes of pure bravery and heart and two words- yes, I'm still tackling The Grove prompt from Velvet Ashes and joining with the 5 minute Friday community to write without thinking too much about whether it is right or not.

Join the Velvet Ashes community and the 5 Minute Friday crew for five minutes of brave.

I'm writing on "Joy" and "Valley"

Here it goes...

The two can go hand in hand. A broken busted world will tell you different. It will say you can't walk the depths and scale the heights at the same time, but God beckons us to come with Him and walk the tightrope of the impossible.

I know a few folks that are doing it. This mama, and this mama are amazing clingers to hope.

Dare I say that only in the valley do we find ourselves truly looking up?

I've always loved the layered color of field, trees and sky. The golden, green, purest blue palette is a masterpiece. You don't get the same affect from the mountain top. You don't get to see the artistry in the same way as you do from down below.

Sure the mountaintop offers stunning views, but it doesn't draw your eye up the way trudging through the mud and muck of the valley can.

We're all so afraid of walking in the valley. We're afraid of the hurt and the dark shadows and rightfully so. We were never made for lonesome walks in the dark. God made us to walk hand in hand with Himself in the brightest Spring sun.

I live between hills. The Blue Ridge rises on either side and I'm an adopted daughter of these hills. The mountains rise around me and I gaze up to their heights and thank God that He formed with His fingertips their stunning beauty. I'm grateful for the mountain tops that decorate my landscape, but it is in the valley where I find myself living.

The valley between is where real life is lived most of the time. Homes have surer foundations when built in the valley. Life paints a richer portrait when our perspective is from the valley.

There is joy to be found in the valley. God is found in the valley. He has never stopped looking for us since our silence to His call in the garden. He sent Jesus to the valley and it is there that He walks from tree to tree and cave to cave searching for His beloved.

STOP!

5 Minute Friday: Small and Purpose

It's Friday! That means it is time for me to join up with my two favorite online communities to write. I love the challenge and even more I love the folks that brave the world of words to share their words with me.

You can find out more over at Lisa-Jo's place and in The Grove over at Velvet Ashes. Go check it out!

Here goes my 5 minutes on "Small" and "Purpose"

You don't always know the "why" of something until after the fact. There are roads that we start down with purposes and intent that turn into a thing totally other than the plan we had in our head. Because God is anything, but predictable.

I know my tendency to limit God. There is a part of me that wants to govern the way He works in my life. There are limits that I put on His hand, His ability.

There are a couple of miracle needing situations going on around here. They are the  kind of situations that make the soul feel on edge.They are places that God will have to show-off for the outcome to be what we hope for. 

And then there is the thought we have to swallow that He might not "show-off" in the way that we want or think we need. It is hard for me to worry that God will play it small when we are needing Him so big.

But that is my own misgivings and not the truth about a God who doesn't change. He is the God who voiced truth from the flames of a bush, parted a sea effortlessly and has moved mountains to be with us.

He has never nor will He ever be a God that plays it small. 

Maybe it isn't God that is small, but my faith that is so microscopic in comparison. It takes big faith to admit that what I think I need, demand that I need, might actually be something that I want because it makes me comfortable instead of faithful.

Perhaps our purpose isn't to accomplish things, or be things, or do things, but to be found faithful in His purposes. That is no small thing. 

5 Minute Friday: Garden and Love

Sometimes we just don't have words. This week I've found myself speechless a few times. I'm so thankful that I can come to this space and pour out words. On Fridays I join with the Five Minute Friday community to spread my wings and words.

This week is extra special and I want you to first go and read about the amazing thing that the wonderful Lisa-Jo Baker is doing with her voice and her platform. Scared is the new brave and I love how she is shamelessly using her words to do something God-sized. Please consider how you might take part! 

Lately I've been combining my two favorite online communities on Friday by also writing for The Grove Meetup over at Velvet Ashes. In case you missed it one of the 10 things I learned in January was that I one of my life's joys is helping women connect who are serving around the globe. Velvet Ashes is a place that makes that very thing happen.

First watch this video to find out more about the community that is taking flight over at Velvet Ashes. 


So here goes nothing on the prompts "Garden" and "Love".

There is an over grown garden plot down hill from our house. A neighbor has tilled it over with his tractor a couple of times this year, but the weeds come back and since we're just passing through we've not cared. This house, trailer, whatever it is, is a gift for now. A place that we've called home while we've searched for a more permanent place to plant roots.

We've lived here for nearly a year and I came ready and willing to be a new kind of brave in search of community. I was tired of being the rootless one and since we'd come here with the hopes of staying awhile I didn't waste any time in finding a friend or two to share a cup of tea with.

It is the very love of God that grows a community. 

This has been a heavy couple of weeks. A tragedy one week and awful news of the most heartbreaking kind the next- all right here in this new community. All of it happening among women I had no knowledge of ten months ago.

It's made me realize that gardens can grow quickly when they are kept diligently, when they are tended with vision and heart. 

Tonight the untended garden lies buried under a half foot of snow and the moon stares wide-eyed down on the red roof of this borrowed house. I type out words and I feel the ache of living in community, but that ache is so full of love.

I am full of the knowledge that I need the women that I've found here. I need them to show me how to keep tending my plot of life when my arms get tired and the ground seems hard. This week has shown me that they need me too.

If we are to have any hope that our children will learn to farm and grow love of their own then we have to figure out how to spread our roots to reach each other.

5 Minute Friday: Hero and Home

I've really been enjoying the dual prompts from Five Minute Friday and The Grove over at Velvet Ashes. I'm gonna give it another go this week. Are you up for joining me? Just set the timer and see what comes out of your pen or keyboard in five minutes!

Here is my 5 minutes on "Hero" and "Home"

She wings her way across the ocean and wonders every second if this is the right thing to do. She wrestles through the night and through her daydreams with the notion that she is irrevocably, undeniably ruining her children's lives.

On the one hand she's excited to see how they'll grow. She's excited to see how their lives will be shaped by this living untethered. But then there is the not fitting in and the invisible sign on their heads when they come home to the States that gives them away as "Third Culture Kids".

She was the girl five generations deep on the same country road. She broke the mold and took flight moving across the country and then clear to the other side of the world. But she still loves to come home and see Ms. Rosa's house and the junk shop on the corner and that place is still home, the place that she feels her roots stretch deeper as the years pass and neighbors pass on.

Her kids won't have those ties. They'll survive off of months at a time with their grandparents followed by years without. If they come back to the States for college where will they spend holidays or long weekends? The questions mount and the fear makes her feel like slipping past the air marshall and risking a cockpit takeover to reverse the situation.

She resists. She white-knuckle grips the armrests. She takes a deep breath. She whispers prayers of peace. She whispers prayers to the God who goes before her in all things. He is making a way. A way home for all of us- even our children.

Heroes aren't always noticed, but sometimes they dot the sky above us. Mamas brave to mother and to risk it all for a world in desperate need.

5 Minute Friday and The Grove: Visit and Status

Words have tremendous power. Power to heal. Power to hurt. Power to open our eyes to truth. I love words and their power and the places that flinging my words far on a screen have taken me and the people that I have met in the process.

Evey Friday I link up with with Five Minute Friday community to write free and fearless for 5 minutes. Lately I've been making the task a bit more challenging by joining with the Velvet Ashes community over in The Grove to take on the prompt for the week.

This is a tough combo prompt this week. Here goes nuttin'. 

My 5 minutes on "Visit" and "Status":

In our eight years of marriage we have always lived one foot in and one foot out of every community that we've been a par of. Always waiting for God to move and take us far. At times it has made us hold those around us at arm's length.

When we moved home from overseas we lived in an area that was not first on our list of places to live. The neighborhood was older and there was a lot of porch sittin' that went on when the temperature peeked above 60 degrees. I was a few months pregnant when we moved there, but wouldn't be held back from pruning the hedges or really doing much of anything.

I thought that the neighbors should be the ones to come over and introduce themselves, but instead they sat and stared from across the street as I waddled my big bellied self around the yard. I felt like a visitor. The new girl in town on display.

Often we expect others to reach out and abide by rules of politeness and welcome us. And, yes, we do need to be those that welcome as Jesus did. Sometimes I think we're waiting for someone to come along and make community a nice and neat affair, but in reality we are the ones best suited to speak, lead, organize and create spaces, places and things that feed and free souls right where we are.

Sometimes it is easier to hold community at arm's length and just pretend to be a visitor. It is easy to point fingers and say well if this would just happen then I could fully invest and be invested in. Or we decide that what we are isn't really what is needed.

What you are, right where you are is what is needed in your community and if you don't offer it up then there will be something missing. 

We moved nearly a year ago and are attempting to put down roots. We're done being visitors in our own home.

{That was a tough one!}

5 Minute Friday and The Grove: Encouragement and Voice

Long time no writing, eh? Oh how I have missed the Five Minute Friday community! It's a long story, but here I am and so happy to be! Before my hiatus I was making a bit of a challenge out of joining with the FMF crew and the new Velvet Ashes community in The Grove on Fridays. Well, I'm back at it.

Curious about what I'm up too? Click on over to read all about it and then consider linking up. Also, are you a woman serving overseas? Are you craving community with women who get it? Velvet Ashes is the place! 

Here we go! My take on Encouragement (FMF) and Voice (The Grove)

That voice in my head can get awfully loud sometimes. The way it knows just where my weaknesses are and never fails to find me at my lowest. And I wonder sometimes why I feel more insecure as a thirty year old then my self confident, self assured eighteen year old self ever did.

We hear it from all sides as teen girls, "Be independent", "Follow your dreams", "Don't let anyone tell you that you can't!" and many of us take it to heart and we'll not be held back or down or up in the going places.

But then life happens and all that independence can have us feeling isolated and alone as mamas and then the voice starts. The voice telling us that we're failing on every front.

Our own voices can be silenced in the process. We think we don't have anything to offer another woman. No words of wisdom or pieces of hope to share. So we look the other way on the playground and we keep the other women at church at arm's length and we don't tell the un-fine stories.

We block the encouragement of others with trite sayings that make us look far more fine than we really are. Advice becomes the barrier to real heart healing encouragement and we talk about diapers, bottles and breastfeeding, but never move past to the real stuff.

Because that voice in our head tells us that they don't matter, we don't matter and it holds us back and down and up from all the places that we could go. All the women that could feel a little lighter and freer if we just used our own voice to silence the one in their heads.

Don't underestimate what the power of your own voice can do to encourage a heart. 

The only way to silence the voice in your head is to out talk it. Speak of God's goodness. Tell the truth about all the hard places. Make your life a safe place for others to silence the voices in their head.

5 Minute Friday: Reflect and Story

I really enjoyed the challenge from a few weeks ago of combining the prompt from The Grove and the 5 minute Friday prompt. I'm back to do it again this week! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and that you're enjoying a bit of calm even in the aftermath of dirty dishes.

This week's prompt at The Grove is "Story". Check out this gorgeous graphic made by none other than my dear friend Amy Davis of Amy Davis Art Design.

Here are my thoughts on "Story" and the 5 Minute Friday prompt "Reflect".

Some days it is like looking into a mirror. The way she curls her nose and squints her deep brown eyes narrow. The way that she bounces like a Mexican jumping bean and all the subtleties that only I notice as her mama.

And there have been many women that have been mirrors in my life. Women who have written on my life parts of their story and who leave me grateful for the way that they reflect Jesus. Grateful for the mirrors of grace that they have put around me when life skews the view.

I've only been left with pictures of my own mama and they are beginning to crinkle and dry with the passing of time. I delicately hold the worn edges of one photo and stare hard into her eyes. Mine are brown. Her's were blue.

Connection isn't always obvious in DNA. Sometimes it is more subtle.

She was the woman who delivered bags of groceries unannounced and swung wide her door when their was need. She slipped notes full of brave words into struggling sister's hands. She was a mirror of grace.

And I've wondered long and hard where she learned to do that. How she learned to love with abandon in a world that has long abandoned sacrificial love. In her life where she was abandoned on more than one occasion.

I've plumbed the depths of my own heart and I know that I learned it from her. That her life, her story was a grace story and a crystal clear reflection of how to take your little and give it away so that it can multiply.

Her story is our story. It is the little Mexican jumping bean's story. It is my legacy reflected in more than double helixes.

5 Minute Friday and The Grove: Fly and Grateful

I'm getting a bit ambitious on Fridays these days. I'm a committed member of the Five Minute Friday crowd but I'm also part of the amazing new Velvet Ashes community. Velvet Ashes has a weekly link-up as a part of "The Grove" meet-up on Fridays that includes a word prompt.

 

For a few weeks I'm going to combine my 5 minutes on Lisa-Jo's prompt and my post for "The Grove". 

Enjoy the results!

My 5 minutes on "Fly' and this week's prompt from The Grove on "Grateful"

I'm counting down the minutes until he boards a plane and starts his way back to us. I've heard his voice four times in three weeks which is far too little for this girl.

I've enjoyed not having to fight over the remote and eating all veggies {read as "chocolate"} since I don't have to worry about my meat and potato's man, but it all just wears a bit thin and I'd rather have him then anything else, anyone else.

He sends pictures and I can see the joy in his face. I live vicariously through him because I have not ever failed to see the light on the Dark continent.

If you ask him you'll quickly see that he thinks very little of what he does, of his own skills and giftings. He'll shrug and say that it is what he knows and loves and so why not share it by the cup fulls?

I know that the members of the Gospel Springs church are grateful for him. They are grateful that he came and trained them and helped them, but it is myself that I find humbled with thanks.

Grateful that of a million things I could be doing or places I could be on this spinning blue planet that God chose me to cheer him on across the miles. Grateful that he is the brave kind of man who goes where he is unsure to do the hard work of the Gospel. God chose me to be his wife and to post prayers to facebook and to our sad little blog and then to step into my closet and pray the big stuff for my husband, the ministry, our family, our friends in Africa and the world over.

He'll be home on Monday. He'll fly across three continents just to get here and then he'll scoop his girls in his arms and we'll all finally be home.

5 Minute Friday: Grace

A week ago I braved the voices and read my post in front of a group of amazing writing cheerleaders. My computer, the one with the less than reliable battery, decided to go stone cold dead in the middle of the reading.

Yup, story of my life.

Thanks Julie for handing over the i-Pad to help a sister out.

I just love this community. It was a privilege and joy to gather and write and read and hug and eat chocolate in real life. Truly.

Ok, this week's five minutes!

My five minutes on "Grace"

We share a middle name, but it is her first name that I want to be called of me when all is said and done. My dad's oldest sister, the one whose name is as beautiful as she is. They call her "Grace" and she has been that to anyone that has known her. She has been that to anyone that has been touched with compassion by her tender soul.

I've always favored my dad's side. The angular face, small frame and big, deep eyes. They are markers of the women on his side that bared down and brought into life children and breathed life into the everyday struggles of their families. Hard times cotton mill gals who weren't afraid to give their families every inch of themselves until their souls hung threadbare.

Grace comes in a small unassuming package. These women who struggled along the road of life left a path for me to walk on rutted out from Depression era wherewithal and bootstrap pulling determination.

The woman whose name is Grace? She is a small slip of a woman who grows more and more gaunt taking on a new likeness to her own mother, my grandmother, who was always sour faced with her hair in a tight black bun sitting frail in her upholstered rocker.

Somehow her eyes never fail to shine grace and I wonder what was the difference between her and her mother?

How do we take all that was left behind us and live a better story? 
How do we shine through the ugly until we make the ugly beautiful?

Age has stooped her and she shrinks smaller and smaller with the days. Her ability to remember, recall and recognize growing ever dimmer. Her mind isn't well. Memories are slipping away, time is slipping away and I feel the time growing short.

This woman that has been called "Grace" since she was newly birthed pink flesh is a living grace to me and I can't begin to tell what her life has meant to me, what her life means for my daughter.

When I say "Hand me down grace" I'm talking about the ability to look forward and back simultaneously and see it all as an infinite gift from an infinite God. 

Because of my aunt, the one with the beautiful soul and heart that doesn't forget, I can look both directions and see grace. Grace behind and grace ahead.

5 Minute Friday: Together

I'm LIVE from Allume with a few of my favorite wild and wonderful, bold and brave bloggers.

So here we go...

My 5 minutes on "Together"

Because He said that where two or more gather there He is and I can feel Him here. I can feel Him here in the midst of women who let their hair down and let their hearts hold heavy the joy of being together.

We are all together seeking peace and joy and the river that flows free and full from His Spirit.

A friend of mine said not long ago that in this world of media madness that we claim that we are so much more isolated. We spin like planets around each other. We're silent to the sister on the playground with the toddler or the other mama in the grocery store. We claim that we don't have community when maybe, just maybe, that lack is because of our lack of reach.

I don't mean blog reach. I mean arms empty to be filled with real life reach. 

We're afraid if we reach out that we won't find a heart and hand open extended to us.

But two arms were laid open, broken and bare on a cross and He beckons us arms wide open. And those arms are big enough for all.

We are better together. We are planets circling the sun and it is the Son, Jesus that is our gravity holding us in orbit. All together spinning to the rhythm of grace.

5 Minute Friday: Laundry

I can hardly believe it! In one week I will be live partying with the Five Minute Friday crew! But before that we've got some writing to do!

{Join us on Thursday evenings on twitter before the prompt goes live to talk all things chocolate, life and randomness. #fmfparty}

In case you don't know what this is...Hop on over to Lisa-Jo's and read more, but the basics are write for five minutes while throwing caution to the wind. No overthinking. No massive backspacing. Just write and forget about trying to make it just right.

My 5 minutes on "Laundry"

I believe that our laundry tells a story. A story of the extraordinary seemingly ordinary that is life for most of us.

Some of us feel buried underneath loads of laundry and the same routine spinning like a top week after week.  We're buried under laundry and we bury our feelings. Feelings of loneliness and and this-isn't-what-I-signed-up-for-ness can intensify the pressure.

You are not your laundry pile. Your life is more than dirty unmentionables.

We're always equating our worth and worthiness to our performance, but the stop keeps spinning doesn't it and all this perfect life chasing gets us no where.

What if we aired our unmentionables to each other? What if we felt that our insecurities and frailties were worth mentioning because they might just free us to live full and side by side?

What if we said the truth about motherhood?

That motherhood is glorious in the moments, but an unbelievably hard story arc to live with joy and grace every day. 

The laundry will be there and there is no need to shove it in the closet or load it unsorted into the drier so that I don't see it. Some days I need your laundry piles and your dishes precariously balanced in the sink to be as tall as my own.

5 Minute Friday: Ordinary

Some weeks Friday can't get here soon enough. I'll let you decide what kind of week this was for you, but for me it was somewhere in between with moments of pure joy and moments of pure get-me-out-of-here. Probably your week was something like that too. That is why one of my favorite parts is to come to this space for 5 minutes each Friday and write it all out.

Join the gang and write your own free and fearless 5 minutes!

Would you believe that the prompt is "Ordinary". No escaping this 31 Days for me, is there?

My 5 minutes on "Ordinary"

Every week until the end of the year feels mapped out. I look at the calendar and it feels like it is swallowing us whole for the next 2 1/2 months. One more week of classes, a conference here, a conference there, 3 weeks in Kenya and the holidays all stretched over October, November and December.

I don't believe in busy and truth is that these months are not busy in the sense of appointments or day to day fullness, but they are busy with the work God has called us too.

My husband will be winging his way across the ocean to bring hope in the form of water and more important hope in the truth of Jesus. He's already spent weeks up to his elbows in mud teaching others how to dig down deep to find the treasures of Jesus and the water under our feet.

He knows that physical thirst is nothing compared to the Jesus parched soul. 

He was made for this kind of thing and me and the wee girl will guard the homefront and cheer him on with hopes we can go next time.

It still feels like transition. A time of realizing again and again that our "normal" is anything but ordinary. We've chosen to follow the path of most resistance and we can call it hard, we can call it more than we bargained for, but we can't call it ordinary.


You can read more about our journey as a family in a unique ministry on our family blog!

5 Minute Friday: Write

Friday! Yes! Taking a moment to exhale and write a few minutes of brave! Join me and my fellow 5 minuters and write your own!

My 5 minutes on "Write"

I remember being asked non-chalantly by a friend years ago if I was a writer. She was. She penned songs that ached beauty. I shook my head when she asked because compared to her lines strummed out I wasn't.

I scrawled lines in a leather bound book that I would shudder to read to anyone.

I hid journal after journal in nightstands and under mattresses and between books on a shelf, but I never wanted them exposed to the light of day.

All the fear of what people would think was closed up between those pages. The honest words penned late at night or in the wee smalls of the morning. I remembered being told in high school that the words that I strung together were beauty, but somehow the girl with the graceful words didn't connect with the woman with the graceless life until years later.

Finding the writer inside of me has been a grace filling experience.

It has been a journey toward who God made me to be. I'm staring down the barrel at thirty and I feel more like me than any other version of myself ever. I am a wife. I am a mama. I am a writer. I am a grace lover because of the way that God has poured life into me by the Word and through words.

I have no idea where these words flung far will land, but I know that they are my words to write and give.

5 Minute Friday: True

It's the last Friday in September, and boy what a September it has been. I'm sad to see September go, but October is my favorite month and I have about a million reasons to be excited...and one of those reasons is that we're gonna Five Minute Friday party LIVE at Allume! YEOW!

But first, let's get our 5 minutes on one more time in the month of September!

My 5 minutes on "True"

It seems only fair that I would tell you the truth.

The truth being that I have struggled through the last two weeks and blamed it on hormones and the change in season and a cloud drifting over my bright and sunny personality.

The truth is sometimes the thing we don't want to look at.

The way a broken mirror can multiply and magnify all the ugly. I feel like I've been looking in a broken mirror at myself lately and that mirror has only served to show me one person grappling with a dichotomy, my self and my selfishness.

These are the long days of mothering. I write it on the wall of our group, and I say it out loud. I say how selfish I've been and how I just want to run and run and be myself for just five minutes apart from the demands and as I write it I see my selfishness and other women rush to wrap arms around and pass the chocolate over.

These are the days when I have to submit self to the only one that can rip self away and and give us Himself.

On the days you want to escape find the strength to hide in Him.

He is the strength we need to hide away and allow Him to take away all the ugly pride and stinking selfishness. The heart hidden in Him is incomparably braver than the selfish soul that runs away from His good gifts.




 A few months back words of beauty popped out of a 5 Minute Friday post of mine. These words stuck with me and with many of you. My friend Amy Davis was sweet enough to create a piece of art for all of us to enjoy and it is now my gift to you! Go ahead and print it out!

5 Minute Friday: She

A wonderful thing happens each Friday over at Lisa Jo's and here on my lil' blog. A gaggle of writers let their hair down and their words run wild for five glorious minutes. Read. Join us. Enjoy every word flung free.

My 5 Minutes on "She"

She's learning the art of manipulation. She wails for half an hour- a fit of rage against sleep. I finally sneak in to soothe and the crying immediately ceases and her arms fling skyward with a cry of "Daaaaddddyyyy!" It is sweet and frustrating and I suppress laughter and a bit of anger over the whole mess.

The way a girl can bat lashes and coo sweet to get what she wants. I nod knowing, but I cringe. These are the things that travel with us from when we are little girls until we are grown women. The way that we learn to live and pseudo-love and use people for our own benefit.

It can seem innocent, but it doesn't grow roots of Godliness.

I had an older woman once give a group of my girlfriends from high school a lecture on manipulation. She said that it was a gift that we could use as women to make the world, our husbands really, do what we wanted. I remember shifting in my seat uncomfortably with a knot in my stomach that told me something just wasn't quite right with that thinking.

I still shift in my seat uncomfortably because I know that I've used it to my benefit and that it is a godless tool or rather a tool in which the only god is me.

I want more for my daughter. She is made,by God, for so much more. 




Would you join me again today? You could win some real beauty. Every Friday in September I'm writing on what it means to be "Stitched Together in Love" as a Christ follower and each post comes with a chance to win a piece of handmade goodness. My friend Joanna is giving something away today!

5 Minute Friday: Mercy

Can it be Friday and September already?! No, really, can it be?

Well around these parts on Friday I stretch my writing muscles even farther and write fast and furious for 5 whole minutes! You can too! I believe we all have a story to tell so why not take 5 minutes to write a piece of your story along with an amazing crew of writers?

You can also join a gaggle of us around the proverbial water cooler on Thursday nights for a chat about anything and everything on twitter. Just add #fmfparty to your tweets to find us!

Ok, here goes, my 5 minutes on "Mercy"

When you are queen of the old open-mouth-insert-foot act you can head down a path of fear and loathing that is dark and ugly. I've been struggling with this lately as some big events and opportunities line my horizon.

I feel the lurch in my stomach every time I send an email or stop to analyze a conversation that I just had. Did they hear my heart? Do they even care? Did I only embarrass myself? And the list goes on.

It is this frailty of the human heart, the soul, that I feel in the everyday that keeps me running to the cross. It feels like a hyper awareness of my need for His mercy and grace in the everyday and makes me want to hide.

We've been fooled to think that the way we extend mercy is from the top down. The way that we hand out heaping handfuls of "Come to Jesus" is by reaching down from a lofty place, but the truth is that the gifting of mercy comes from the digging down deep to mine it from the ugly, dark places of our life.

I can give His riches only when I know the poverty of my own soul.

The way I stumble over words and my own two feet is a magnifier of my need of Him and that is the place that I find the rubies hidden. The place that He can mine from the depths of me to touch those in their deepest point of need.

5 Minute Friday: Red

A short week means that 5 minute Friday gets here even quicker! I love taking 5 minutes out of my week to just let my fingers loose on the keyboard. No wondering about if it says it just write. Only 5 minutes and then PUBLISH! Lisa-Jo provides the prompt and we just take off with it. Join us! 

Oh and another reason to join? On Thursday nights the 5 minute Friday folks all jibber jabber away on twitter about nutella, 90s music {don't make me rap again}, 80s movies, and the highs and lows of life. Add #fmfparty to your tweets to find us hanging out round about 10:00pm EST on until the prompt goes live at midnight. {I'm rarely there past 11:00pm- confessedly not a night owl}

My 5 minutes on "Red"

The snapdragons peak through the weeds and a little red wagon wears the dust of too many summer days abused. I've snapped a million pictures between phone and the way-nicer-than-I-need camera. I've tried to capture the fleeting all through the wild and free months of the year.

Her cheeks are rosy red and her eyes dance and dart from the neighbor dog to her daddy. We the three musketeers living beneath a red tin roof not our own. This summer, this season, it has been a hot pressure cooker of faith.

Some days I swear the sun beating down on that tin roof of ours was setting my soul aflame with fear.

But God gave the same Spirit to me as He did to the Acts church with tongues red-hot afire.

It is the same Spirit I pray comes to dwell full and free in my daughter. One that washes away fear and replaces it with grace to love and boldness to speak. A Spirit that sets feet free to run through Indian Summer and to the ends of the earth for the weak, the poor, the Good News hungry.

Sunlight fades earlier and earlier and I can already feel the darkness of winter pressing on my chest. It is in the last of the summer light that I store up faith. Faith that no darkness is too dark that God can't see and He sees me by the Light of Jesus.