Word Therapy

How Not to Be Selfish

 

Navel Gazing.

 

The first time I heard that term, I was baffled. I must have taken it really literally because I got this immediate visual of a bunch of people walking around looking at their bare midriffs. I guess it’s not that far off the mark from what it means. Turning your focus inward so much that you you can’t un-fix your gaze from your own fleshly consciousness, which I would assume, results in all kinds of disasters as you lose complete awareness of what is happening in the world around you as you perpetually gaze inward.

 

This term is used almost exclusively negatively, and for good reason. The kind of self-focus that renders us unable to look up and pay attention to any person or circumstance outside of ourselves, is inherently toxic. It’s toxic to us, and it’s toxic to the world. We are to be living in a very interconnected system that’s built on a foundation of each-other-ness, love, mercy, kindness, and shared experience.

 

I’ve been thinking lately about our current cultural trends of self-focus (which by the way, are not a novel idea. For all of history, humans have a track record of ruthlessly guarding and protecting our own little hunks of real estate in both body and land). Selfishness is not a new thing.

 

If you’ve known me for 5 minutes you probably have heard me talk about the Enneagram. It’s the latest personality tool dú jour, and it’s the one that I’ve spent the most time studying recently. Podcasts, books, conferences, team-training events, they are all abuzz with chatter about the enneagram and how it can help every human become more self aware, and in turn, become healthier, more empathetic people who make space for others who see the world differently.

 

I’ve talked with a few people who have little-to-no patience for this “nonsense”. It’s written off as a waste of time, an overindulgent venture into the land of self-reflection that only results in people spending too much time in self-examination, thereby resulting in increasing selfishness. 

 

I would like to propose that it results in the complete opposite effect, when kept in it’s proper place.

 

I believe that through increasing our levels of self-awareness, we can become more loving. When someone fails to show love, it usually comes from a place of fear, a wound, or a lack of understanding. 

Photo by Jordan Sanchez on Unsplash

Let me share a personal story to illustrate my point:

 

Once upon a time, I accused my husband of being lazy. Yes, lazy. Now, if you know Kevin, you know he is not lazy. The guy works a full time job, runs an orchard on the side, and is a great dad to 3 kids. He also just got his pilot’s license. He does other things too, but you don’t need his full resumé to see that I was WAY off when I accused him of being lazy. I imagine my accusation arose out of frustration on my end that he was not bending to my request that we make plans, commit to things, and get them on the calendar.  Perhaps because the poor guy was TIRED. And as I’ve come to now understand about him, because of the way he is wired, he does not think weeks into the future and look forward to having a full calendar of events. He just doesn’t. That doesn’t make him lazy, that makes him different than me in that regard. But not lazy.

 

On the flip side, he called out my FOMO wayyyyyy before that term was even officially coined, back when we were dating in High School. I have this deep need to fill our time with adventure and to maximize every opportunity. Being slow and still and feeling like we have possibly wasted an opportunity is terribly hard for me to accept. So, as it was, we spent the first decade of our marriage continuing to butt heads about this (and sometimes we still do), each thinking the other was “wrong” and not realizing that we just had very different fundamental wiring. 

 

Now that I understand that Kevin is not trying to be lazy or make me mad by his reticence to commit to a multitude of plans, I don’t take it personally. I just back off and sometimes do stuff without him. Or I just learn to live with the disappointment of not always doing what I want to do. 

 

That’s just one example of how coming to understand each other can go a long way toward avoiding or diverting conflict and disappointment. But you can’t do it if you’re unwilling to consider that maybe *you* are not the normal, and everyone else is weird. Incidentally it seems like many of us operate this way in the world. We believe that the way we think, live, and believe is the norm, and everyone else is a deviation from our norm, and when confronted with these deviations, we have no skills with which to come to a place of understanding; rather we continually try to convince the other person how wrong they are, how right we are, and how they need to be more like us.

 

I think this explains a lot about why we are so polarized as a society, why marriages and relationships suffer catastrophic irreconcilable differences, why churches split, and why racism, nationalism, ageism, classism, and every kind of “ism” continues to persist. We have a lack of understanding. 

At the end of the day though, the Enneagram, or any other way of better understanding your own personality and the personalities of those in your life, do not hold the trump card over God’s call to us to lay down our lives for each other. The highest aim of faith working itself out through love, is to love God and love people. 

 

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.-1 John 3:16

 

This means that we don’t get to use our personalities as a cop-out.  I don’t get to sign up my family for everything under the sun under the guise of “staying true to myself”. I don’t want to be true to myself, I want to be true to God. But I must know myself, because if I don’t, then I don’t know about those areas that are still offensive to God and people, and if I don’t know what those are, it’s very hard to offer them up in humility to His refining hands. 

 

In A.D. 400, St. Augustine wrote, “How can you draw close to God when you are far from your own self? Grant, Lord, that I may know myself, that I may know thee.”

 

So I believe that with the right spirit, increased self-awareness can actually be a really beautiful, useful discipline that leads us into greater selflessness, rather than a life lived perpetually staring at our own spiritual midsections.

 

 

 

 

 

A Letter to my Elders; Bring Back the Village!

“It takes a village to raise a child”

 

A proverb we’ve heard numerous times.  We nod our heads in agreement, or maybe we pull back from that mentality thinking “If I let the village raise my child, I’ll end up with the village idiot!” Depending on where you live, that’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility.

 

We aren’t just looking for any old group of people to help us rear our families, right? We know that perhaps one of our biggest prizes in this life could be to raise kids who become productive adults; blessings rather than burdens to society; emotionally healthy individuals who contribute to the world in unique ways of beauty, career, relationship, and influence.  But I don’t know if you’ve looked around lately and noticed what I’ve been noticing? Families are strained. Marriages are fracturing.  Kids are breaking on the inside and no one notices until the devastation of their souls is manifested in ways of suicide, addiction, anxiety, depression, or violence.

 

We are quick to point the finger as to what is causing this.  I’m in the midst of the generation trying to raise kids in what can feel like a scary, new day. I hear the commentary from those who have gone before, sometimes gracious but often full of condemnation: “Snowflakes! They are raising a bunch of snowflakes!” “When I was a kid we were taught to shut up and obey and that’s why we turned out so good!” “Kids these days get everything they want and they never learn the value of a hard day’s work!”

Now, is there any merit to any of these and other kinds of accusation that seek to assign blame to our current generation of parents? Probably.  We are not doing it right. But then again, neither did the generations before us. We can look around and see the divorce culture birthed out of the 80s’ and 90s. Or go back further and look at the Great World Wars. Or how about the sexual revolution that led to the destabilization of the family structure? How about the rampant pornography industry that grew and metastasized with the generations of our fathers and grandfathers hiding their playboys in the backyard shed, but now shows up in the pockets of our elementary school boys on their smartphones?  So, I would contend that YES our generation has it’s faults and blindspots, but we are not the first and nor will we be the last.

What I’m asking, no BEGGING, is that the generations that have been there and now feel spent and are looking forward to a relaxing retirement, would give up or at least modify the plan of coasting through the last few decades of life and instead, turn and look back at us who feel like we are being crushed, and give us a hand-up.

I don’t know if you are a Christian or not, but if you are I would encourage you to study the scriptures and see the many examples of the generations banding together to build up and strengthen both families, and the local church. One thing that jumped out to me recently was when Jesus’ parents LOST HIM on the way from Jerusalem. 

Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. When Jesus was twelve years old, they attended the festival as usual. After the celebration was over, they started home to Nazareth, but Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents didn’t miss him at first, because they assumed he was among the other travelers. But when he didn’t show up that evening, they started looking for him among their relatives and friends.

 

When they couldn’t find him, they went back to Jerusalem to search for him there. Three days later they finally discovered him in the Temple, sitting among the religious teachers, listening to them and asking questions. All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. Luke 2: 41b-47

 

Are you seeing what I’m seeing here? Their culture was such that they regularly did things with family and friends.  They don’t see their kid all day and assume everything is fine because he’s probably just with relatives or friends.

 

Contrast this with how we do it now. We rush in and out of church on sunday because we have other stuff we need to get done. We don’t linger and rest and hang out. We build our tiny kingdoms on our own property to insulate ourselves from the inconveniences of other people messing with our lives.

There is a multitude of reasons that our society is the way it is now. One that is obvious is that we’ve displaced the worship of God with the worship of money and the American dream.  The sacrifice that those gods require is our time.  More time to earn the money and build the things means less time in the presence of God and the people He loves and has given us to enjoy relationship with. 

 

It’s so sad. We have given up the best things, the eternal things, for a hollow shell of life that is focused on getting all that we can out of our brief 80 years here, if we are lucky to even get that long. Why not rather focus on the eternal things? The souls that inhabit this space with us will live forever, and you could have PROFOUND influence on they turn out.  The young mom who needs a sanity break, the young boy who won’t listen to his parents because he’s too smart for them, might listen to you. The marriage that has been battling to stay together through multiple rounds of betrayal and heartbreak might need the very practical gift of TIME just to keep going, and when there are babies and toddlers and school aged kids, time is very elusive.

 

Several of my friends and I have amazing support networks, but I also know some who don’t. We’ve basically made a pact with each other, that when we get older we will remember these hard years of raising a young family, and hold each other accountable to reach back and show up in the lives of the next generations.  

If we want to see the world change for the better, this is a very practical way that everyone can help. Be a mentor. Volunteer at school to listen to kids read. Babysit for a mom. Babysit for a couple so they can get a date night. Offer to take the kids for the whole weekend so they can get just a taste of what it’s like to be in love again without a million demands coming every second of the day! Instead of telling them what they are doing wrong, tell them what they are doing right, and then pray for an opportunity to offer some loving coaching on areas where you see weakness.  But do please step in and say something when you see us acting like fools. Sometimes we don’t know any better.  

 

We love you and we need you. If you’re 75 years old you still have incredible potential to change the world.  Maybe you’re already engaged in this hard work, and if you are, we thank you! Don’t quit because we need you! Maybe you’re not and you’ve been coasting, relaxing, enjoying doing what you want to do when you want to do it.  If that’s the case, today is a really good day to pick up a phone and possibly change a life!

 

Thanks for reading!

If Mama Ain't Happy...

Oops, I got busy and didn’t write for awhile.  Oh well, life happens.

 

Tonight…

I did it again. I inadvertently sabotaged what would have otherwise been a nice time with my family. Have you ever done that? Have you ever let stuff get to you so badly that you wreck the opportunity for connection and enjoyment that is right in front of you?

 

It seems to be a symptom of uptight-ness.  At least for me.  Tonight I was feeling frazzled because I spent the bulk of the day working on paperwork and business related stuff, leaving the house to fend for itself.  And as I’m sure most of you know, if you have any number of your kids in your house, it doesn’t take but a few hours for the wheels to completely come off and have it look like an F-5 tornado blew right out of Helen Hunt’s movie and into your living space.

(I have a hunch that when future generations talk about America in the 20th century, this movie will be hailed as the apex of cinematography. My husband may disagree )

Also, the last 2 days the boys have slept in way later than normal (and I’ve let them because they both seem to be fighting off various illnesses), which has meant that they don’t have time for orderliness in the mornings.  So we leave the house for school and it looks like a bomb went off.  And I’m still head-over-heels in LOVE with the crossfit gym so Leah and I head over there any mornings of the week when we don’t have to be somewhere else. And while I’m getting completely ripped and shredded (in a mom of 3, stretch marked and cellulited kind of way), all that working out is cutting into my home maintenance time.

 

So, as you can imagine, tonight looked like a sink full of dishes, a cluttered dining room table that had toys where we were supposed to be able to eat dinner, a floor with Nerf darts, crayons, shoes, leaves, and a random silver dollar, a living room with pillows thrown off the couch, newspapers on the floor, more toys, and 3 kids running through all of the aforementioned scene shooting Nerf guns at each other, screaming like banshees and causing me to have to don my earmuffs (not joking. They are the kind you wear at the gun range. Because this was obviously one of my life goals: have such unruly children that you have to wear ear protection made to withstand the noise of a chorus of SHOTGUNS).

(Photo by Asa Rodger on Unsplash)

As I sometimes do, I went into panic mode. Mom meltdown special. Freaker-outer of the week award right here.  “Milo, put your football gear IN YOUR ROOM!” “Nick, start walking around picking up all the darts!” “Leah, put these fake mustard and ketchup bottles back in your kitchen!” “I hope no one actually wanted to eat dinner tonight because there is too much clutter on this dining room table and I’m despairing trying to conjure up the organizational bandwidth it will take to put away 23 different kinds of things!” 

(Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash)

Meanwhile, my husband is looking at me lovingly, giving me a wink and saying “You’re nailing it, babe”. Actually he was super irritated with me, and rightfully so. I was acting like a crazy person, and a lesson I’ve learned but sometimes failed to heed is this: “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” (If I would have just LISTENED and believed the wisdom of the country songs of my youth, we wouldn’t be in this mess).

 

I absolutely can set the tone for our whole family with my words and attitude, and tonight I set a terrible tone.

 

I wish there was a do-over button.  Actually God kind of tells us that there is. We can’t have an exact re-do, but he does say that His mercies are new every morning.  We get a continual, reoccurring, no shame required, 2nd chance.

 

So tonight I’ll berate myself for a little while, about how I can lose perspective in about 5 seconds and morph into the mom that I don’t want to be.  And then I’ll let go of it because shame is a terrible bedfellow.  I don’t want to wake up with it shaping my attitude tomorrow.  I want to wake up with a clean slate, remembering that God CAN give me the best perspective if only I will listen.  If I will let go of the control, the desire for orderliness on my terms, and instead prioritize loving the people He has put me here with, then I know that I can possess a sort of happiness that will be contagious, and we can spend our time loving each other instead of yelling at each other.  We can claim the precious minutes and hours that we’ve been given and not waste them on worrying about eternally inconsequential STUFF.  The stuff will all fade, but these people we live with are ETERNAL.  Good grief, I need to get that painted onto a wall in every room of my house.  Maybe THEN I would keep my priorities straight. 

Until then, cheers to toys everywhere and the occasional set of earmuffs when times are tough.

Grandma, Freedom, & Pizza

So many things. It's impossible to go through a day, when you are really looking, and not find things to be grateful for.

Like this lady here. This is my mom, and once a week she takes my kids for the afternoon until bedtime.  She's done this since Milo was a baby.  Sometimes I think about my brushes with being seriously mentally and emotionally DONE in motherhood, and I realize that if I didn't have this weekly respite over the past near-decade, our whole family would have likely been worse for the wear.  A mom who doesn't completely lose herself in the role of motherhood, I believe, is a much healthier mom and just as importantly, a much healthier wife. So these hours over the past years, given to me by my mom have allowed me to have appointments, dates with my husband, time to write, time to sleep, time to connect with friends that I scarcely see, time to go to Costco without the whole posse, and time to just be alone in my head.

Thank you mom. You've literally saved our bacon in the parenting and marriage department around here. I hope I can be just like Grandma Heidi someday!

I'm thankful and abundantly confident that this is the LAST TIME Leah will put on these snow clothes to play in freshly fallen snow this winter season!

I'm thankful that "who the Son sets free is free indeed".  Last week we sang No Longer Slaves at church and I was undone.  I am AMAZED at the way God intervenes, rescues, and redeems even our darkest, most binding areas of brokenness.

I'm thankful for You-tube tutorials.  Nick had Wacky Wednesday for Dr. Seuss week, and so I had to learn how to tie on that neck-tie.  My husband is a lineman and an orchardist, and I grew up with a dad who was a commercial fisherman, then a logger, then a lineman.  Translation=my men have worn ties as many times as I can count on one hand.  So I needed to quickly figure out this tie for Nick and luckily some 10 year old genius on the internet made a video about it.  Milo thought Nick looked so fancy that he wanted to wear one too.  Kevin has exactly 2 ties in his closet that are probably a decade (ish?) old, so we were in business.  That's Milo's Donald Trump face.  I told him next time he makes that face he's going to his room....no I didn't. Almost.

I was feeling extraordinarily domestic the other day and made homemade pizza, with scratch dough and everything. I probably haven't done this since before Leah was born.  I got a screaming deal on some non-organic nitrate-loaded pepperoni from Grocery Outlet so I ditched my usual $10 Tuesday plan at Papa Murphy's and got to work.  I had help, as you can see below.  Leah had a heck of a time with the flour. Finally I stole it when she wasn't looking because I'm one of those moms that tries to be fun and sometimes I really do feel care-free about creative messes....until I don't. And then I panic at all the cleanup looming in front of me and start sweeping and wiping like a stark-raving lunatic. Not this day though because I ninja-swiped that flour canister. She came to find me a minute later and said "Where's the sugar?"

I'm thankful for the occasional slow day where we have time and space to make a meal from scratch, make a mess in the process, and take our time eating and hanging out.

Rolling

Story Break
 

Saucing

Cheesing

Slicing

What are you thankful for on this gray, rainy day?

Grantidotes Days 24 & 25

 

It has been a very festive few days!  I’m loving the Christmas season this year.  For several years when the boys were younger, Christmas was more of a stress than a blessing.  I feel like we are in a new season, with the boys being a bit older, more obedient, more helpful, and more perceptive about Advent and Christmas.  They appreciate the decorations and the festivities and that makes me all the more motivated to put some effort into everything.  

 

And, we are officially on Christmas break! I confess, I’ve grown to love the routine and regularity of our school schedule.  Both boys are doing well, and though I still struggle with mom-guilt to even type this, having the boys out of the house under the instruction of their teachers each day seems to be a benefit for everyone in our house. 

I often look into the lives of families that homeschool, and think we “should” be able to do that and have it work out so wonderfully, but in truth I don’t have the temperament for it as a mom.  At least not for our boys. They are both quite strong willed and need a lot of structure coupled with a kind, gentle personality (which they both have received in their amazing teachers this year!).  

All of that to say, I’ve come to realize that I enter any kind of extended break from school with mixed feelings. On one hand I am looking forward to more time together, the avoidance of the morning feat of getting two boys out the door in the morning, and more flexibility in the day.  On the other hand I get nervous that they will be at each others’ throats constantly, that I’ll have to field 50 million requests to “do something fun”, and that we will inevitable end up watching way too many movies.  

I’ve been trying to just let go of expectations and know that sibling fighting is normal, asking to “do something fun” does not mean I’ve created entitled, bored, non-creative monsters, it just means that 2 kids have suddenly gone from busy days full of activities to a whole lot of white space on their little calendars.  And the movies?  I’m temporarily setting aside the AAP recommendation that has legalistically hounded me in my own mind for so many years about “no more than 2 hours of TV a day” because when you all have pink-eye on your first day of break and your mom is trying her best not to lose her patience with anyone on this day of catching up with laundry, baking, food-prepping, and administering eye drops bilaterally to three kids, watching 2 full length movies plus 3 or 4 episodes of curious george in the span of 12 hours is completely acceptable.  I mean, that’s still over 50% of their waking hours NOT spent watching TV yes?

So, fellow moms, join me in taking a chill pill this break. Let go of expectations, other peoples’ rules, and all the triggers that will drive you right out of your own mind and just enjoy your kids and the special time of anticipating the birth of Christ and all the merriment that goes along with it.

 

Now, onto what I’m thankful for (there is more and more every day it seems!).  As I’ve said before, if you havent’ yet started the intentional practice of finding three things to be thankful for everyday I urge you to DO IT! The joy goes up and the internal (and external) bemoaning goes down.

 

1.

I’m thankful I get to be a stay at home mom.  Though I’m not wired to homeschool, I do get to volunteer in the  classroom with both of our boys. Tuesday I got to wear my pajamas to the Polar Express party in Kindergarten. One little boy said “this is the best party I’ve ever been to.” Their teacher is so awesome. She had hot chocolate, popcorn, and Polar Express playing on the big screen.  

Before I went down to the school that morning, I got a text from my friend who works with the Kindergarteners with this picture!

I’m just more thankful than you could even imagine that this boy is succeeding in school and sharing love and respect when he is there!

 

2.

I’m thankful we had warm temps for a day to compact the snow a little bit because the sledding conditions are now AH-mazing.  The boys watched a lot of TV yesterday, but they also made it outside a couple times for some speedy sledding on the hill!

 

3.

I’m thankful for a hilarious husband.  Once he’s home after work I can barely go five minutes without laughing.  He can reframe anything to be funny. He has a reputation for breaking awkward moments with humor.  He is such a gift!

 

4.

I’m thankful for my great-great-grandma’s cookie recipe.  How neat that it’s in her handwriting. I love that it says “Gold Medal” in place of flour because back when she wrote this there was probably only one kind of flour on the shelf! Now we have to pick between 50 kinds. I would love to go backward to a little more simplicity!

BTW, these cookies are delicious. Feel free to use the recipe!

5.

I’m thankful for a long slow day forced by illness to get out some things that we don’t usually play with.  Nick got his straws out and then discovered that they were dirty inside at which point I urged him to throw them away and wait until some new ones arrived that I ordered from Amazon.  Of course that was an unacceptable plan so he got a pumper of hand soap and carefully squirted soap down the straw and sucked water up and then blew it back down over and over until he felt like he had sufficiently washed the inside of his straws.  So gross.  At least he’ll have resilient guts.

6.

I’m thankful for this truth! Oh, how he loves us.  He totally didn’t have to enter into this space to rescue a bunch of rebellious kids, but He did.  How incredibly generous.  That’s some kind of incredible love.  I’m going to try to center myself on this truth for the rest of this week as we prepare our hearts to celebrate Christmas!

 

 

Happy Christmas week friends. I hope your day is full of hope and grace. I hope you get  a chance to love in unlikely and unexpected ways. I hope you find the individual gifts of grace given to us from our Father, smattered all over our lives if we will just open our eyes and look.

Grantidotes Days 12 & 13

Days 12 & 13 of my Advent Challenge of grabbing hold of the antidote of gratitude to combat complaining and thanklessness. 

I’m thankful for prayer. 

As believers we are instructed to pray without ceasing. Honestly I wish I could nail this but in reality, there are many days where prayer is not the overarching theme of my day.  Distraction, speculation, worry, strategizing, planning, stressing, those are more of my defaults.  But more and more as I follow Jesus I find myself talking to Him about all of life.  I’m also thankful for the power of prayer to invade dark or hopeless situations, or just times in day to day life where we are at the end of our rope and feel helpless.  Like tonight.  Our boys are going to bed yelling at each other, accusing each other of lying and it’s overwhelming sometimes trying to train kids into the right direction.  This is one of those times where I beg God to intervene, to quiet down raging hearts, to speak truth into our family, and to bring a peace that prevails in our home. I also pray for wisdom, patience, and steadfastness for us as parents because there are certainly times where I just want to throw in the towel and do the bare minimum of parenting required.  So, thank you Jesus for going to the cross, causing the veil to be torn, unleashing the Spirit of God to be here with us all the time. What a gift.

I’m thankful for friends who rally with you. 

Friends who lock arms and move forward together in different areas of our callings.  No competing or worrying about who’s doing what better, just cheering each other on as we do our different things in the ways God has called us to.  I think we hear so much about women competing and “mompetition” is sort of the de-facto culture of our day and age.  It’s amazing to have friends who love you well in the highs and lows of life.

I’m thankful for snowmobiles.

We bought (well Kevin did really) a snowmobile about 5 (ish?) years ago at the cycle repair store in Cashmere.  It’s from the 80s and it’s a total granny-mobile (backrest and windshield included!) but it had super low hours and he got it for a few hundred dollars I think.  The kids LOVE it.  It’s the perfect little sled to run around our orchard and it’s such a good kid hauler with that backrest and windshield! So much joy has been had on that thing. It’s such a great way to get everyone outside for a little fun in the winter time.

 

I’m thankful for my washer and dryer.

It’s so wonderful to have PILES of dirty laundry and be able to throw it all in a machine, run super hot water and detergent and of course, Oxi-clean or bleach because no one gets anything halfway dirty around here, and then, Voilà! Clean stuff.  The moms 100 years ago, or the moms today who don’t have laundry facilities, seriously have my respect. On top of everything else you deal with as a mom, isn’t it nice to have efficient laundering capabilities!?  Can you imagine hand washing everything?

 

I’m thankful for the way my husband and I have learned to forgive quickly. 

We go through spurts where we are grouchy at each other, and sooner or later it seems to become a pattern, and then we usually find ourselves apologizing to each other multiple times a day trying to drive ourselves out of the ruts we’ve gotten ourselves wedged in.  I’m slightly (?) opinionated, strong-willed, and outspoken so I thank God for my dear husband who gives me so much grace.  We are both working on becoming better communicators and I’m so glad we are on the same team and that he is such a committed, flexible, generous husband.

I’m thankful for pictures. 

I love that you can freeze time with a photo. Yesterday we got dressed up and I got our family staged and set the timer on my camera and then ran and hopped in the photo. Then we took a few of the kids and Milo actually took one of Kevin and I. I will be so glad we took the time to take pictures when our kids are grown and gone.  Today I got to take baptism pictures at our church, and as I put them on the computer to do some quick edits this afternoon, I started to cry a bit as I saw the faces on some of the individuals I had photographed.  The emotions on their faces, and on the faces of their family are freeze-framed, forever marking such a significant day.

There is so much grace all around us isn’t there! It’s so fun looking for it each day. If you haven’t yet started looking for three things each day to be thankful for, join in now! Tell me in the comments on the blog, or on Facebook or Instagram, what are you thankful for today?

 

 

Peace or Death

Peace or Death; Why I Don't Have a Pass to Be a Jerk Based on My Mood

(longest subtitle ever?)

 

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,  in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.  For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

Romans 8:3-6

"...but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace."

This is so liberating. The longer I follow Jesus, the more I hope that my cycles of life that I seem to swing through will land on these two things: Life & Peace.

It's obvious in scripture that I am to be filled with these things always, as a byproduct of His Spirit that has invaded my heart; and yet, I have days, sometimes weeks where my attitude, my words, my actions do not show that my heart has been taken over by the One who brings life and peace. 

 

I was in a "bad mood" yesterday, mad at my husband for something, and so took the opportunity to be a complete jerk to him. As I sometimes do, I felt entitled to my negativity, and ran with it. 

I went to bed knowing I was wrong and hoping and praying that this morning I would wake up more kind, patient, grace-filled.

And then I woke up and read this: "for to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace." Turns out I have some control over whether or not my mind--my mood--will bring life or death. 

Thank you Jesus that you give us a way out of the toxicity we build with our own selfish desires, & our perceived entitlement to let our feelings steer the ship.

Today we all get to choose where we will settle our minds. Will we choose our flesh? Our wants & desires? Someone has to pay the price for us to get those things, and even when we get them, they are laced with disappointment, relational pain, & strife. Or will we choose His Spirit? Will we choose life and peace? To do so requires denying ourselves and trusting that in doing so, we will actually experience far better, richer, more soul-satisfying abundance of all things good. 

It's only by His Spirit that we can experience true life and true peace.  Cheers to a life-giving, peace-filled Thanksgiving friends.

 

Perseverance and Rewards-18 years!

October 5, 2016

 

Every time I hear the date October 5th, something in the recesses of my high school brain lights up with the fireworks of young love.

EIGHTEEN YEARS ago today, I began dating my husband.  18 years feels like a lifetime.  I've now been with him for 3 years longer than I was without him.  We were this young pair, instantly, completely devoted to each other, and received about equal parts of speculation from our peers on whether or not we would stay the course forever, or if our optimistic young romance would soon fizzle as most do at that age.

Well, we showed them didn't we?

Brenna and Ryan...thanks for your patience :) 

In the above picture, Kevin and I went with different people to homecoming because we already had our dates, but then he and I started dating before the dance by a couple of weeks, so Brenna and Ryan were such good sports and agreed to double date.  

Sometimes I get the impression that people think that Kevin and I have ridden our dirt bikes together (oh how I miss those days) down a non-stop path of sunshine and daisies since leaving high school and getting married.

That really couldn't be further from the truth.

We, like most married couples, have experienced our share of trials, disagreements, major conflicts, drifting apart and growing back together.  Marriage has been the single most humbling thing I've done in my life, with parenting following as a close second.

There has not been a force in life that has driven me deeper into the space of completely trusting God.

You know how there's a saying that goes something like this: Women enter into marriage eager to get to work on changing their man; Men go into marriage confident that their woman will never change.  They are both going to be sorely disappointed.

That is the absolute TRUTH!  Kevin is awesome, but he and I would both be the first tell you that we both have issues.  I've only come to realize in the last year or two that Kevin is not my project. He's not my clay that I get to mold how I want to.  He is his own person, and any changing or re-shaping that will be done in Him will be done at the prompting of God, NOT me.  As it should be.  He has been nothing but gracious to me over the years as he has seen me through the growing pains of my teens and twenties. 

One of the biggest tests of our marriage is just that slow pull of life that drives people away from each other through GOOD  circumstances.  His employment is steady and thriving. Our kids are vibrant and busy.  We are immersed in family life, social life, church life.  All good things.  But if they crowd out the calendar to the point that we don't spend good time together regularly, pretty soon we are disconnected and then the smallest offense can turn into a colossal blowup.  

We haven't gotten to where we are without a fight.  We've hit this weird phase of life where the people we grew up with who went on to get married are now starting to divorce and it's heartbreaking.  My heart literally grieves for each one.  I'm also not unaware that without truckloads of God's grace, our humility, and our purposeful perseverance, we could be numbered among those who split.

That's why today, on the day that marks year 18 for us, I'm reflecting on the hard places we've been, the deeper connection it's forged between us, and the God who redeems everything for good for us.