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!

What I'm So Afraid Of

This week we've been getting up close and personal with the things that frighten us most over in the Velvet Ashes community. Today we take a real leap and take off the mask of being just fine.

We aren't the only one's doing it.

A few weeks ago Glennon Melton of Momastery asked a few well-known writers/faces to be real about what they fear the most. The result was a series entitled "Sacred Scared". We're doing something similar over in The Grove at Velvet Ashes and we invite you to do the same. So here is me make-up-less and as real as it gets.

"I'm afraid that I'll always fail at everything I do because I'm just not good enough."

There are a few things in my life that I am super proud of. Things that I worked hard at and accomplished with great effort. But for every one thing that I have accomplished there are a dozen things that I've avoided because I thought I wasn't good enough, smart enough, creative enough, {insert other adjective enough} and I was convinced that I shouldn't try for fear of failure.

I still do that. If it seems too hard you probably won't find Jess working at it because she's already counted herself out. If it seems impossible then I've probably already done everything to make that self-fulfilling prophesy come true. 

I am terrified of failure. 

This carries over into every area of my life.

Motherhood? Yeah, I'm constantly thinking that I am failing and that I don't have a clue what I'm doing. Most days I spend it pretty convinced of that fact.

Writing? I've convinced myself over and over again that anything I have to say can and will be said better by someone else. I shrink away from the challenge of writing things that are significant because I'm afraid that I am undeniably insignificant.

For some risk is a challenge met with hard work and determination. My only determination in life has been to avoid the risk of failure. If I don't try I can't fail.

I know all the Sunday School answers and all the bumper sticker parts of Scripture to slap on this struggle, but it is something I come back to again and again. It holds me back. It has paralyzed me in many ways and relationships.

I have a real problem with that voice in my head that tells me that I am not worthy of good things. The voice in my head likes to make me think that I am only worthy of failure and the broken bits of life. It makes me think that I will lose or fail at anything I put my hands too. 

I recognize this, but it continues to be a very real struggle.

I don't know if it ever won't be. I just know that I have to start trying and that I'm going to have to try scared if I am going to try at all.

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.

The Grove: Together

We live in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The hills that stun in autumn and leave you just enough removed from civilization to remember how small you are.

How very small we all are.

I go outside and lift my weary head to the sky. A million stars shine back at me and I drop my jaw in awe.

There are no city lights to drown out their beauty. There isn't even a street lamp to distract.

I gaze long and I feel small and held by a huge God all at once. 

The sparks of light dotting the sky seem clumped together from afar, but in reality there are millions of miles between. Yet somehow they sing in symphony to the onlooker with feet planted on our blue planet.

Miles apart, but working together.

We are the sisters scattered like stars in the night sky all over the globe. 

But one star, on it's own, isn't nearly as impressive as a whole sky full.

We are the small who are held by a huge God and even though thousands of miles lie between us all we are nevertheless a body.

The Body. His Body. Celestial bodies shining for our Maker with our two feet planted on every corner of the globe. Born to this world, broken and needy, but made for so much more.

"There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call"

 {Ephesians 4:4}

I'm linking up for the inaugural prompt over at "The Grove". This week we're writing on the prompt "Together". Weekly we'll gather as the Velvet Ashes Community to write our stories together. Share on your own blog or leave your thoughts in the comment section.