All was not calm...but all was bright

It may be the New Year, but I tell you, I can't move on until I post about our Christmas.  I just can't.  I'm stuck in last year until I hit publish on this post.  It just doesn't seem right to rush through my favorite season and close the lid on it and walk away with it tidily tucked away somewhere where I can't see it.  Why does it feel so taboo to post anything remotely Christmasy after New Year's anyway? Why not celebrate it all year long?  The message is the same, whether it's December or July, Jesus came  into our deepest darkness to shine the light of redemption on all our heartaches and failures and He became our flame of hope.  And that's something I need to hear every day of the year.

"All was not calm, but all was bright" has been the overwhelming theme of Christmas this year.  If there's anything these last two years have taught me, it's been that expectations kill joy.  It's not going to be exactly as I imagine in my mushy day-dreamy heart.  And that's not a bad thing.  It's an ok thing.  Daddy had to work long hours and weekends the months leading up to the season of the holy days.  And I said many prayers for single moms out there.  We got into a minor car accident after a trip to see Christmas in the Oaks, and no one was hurt but our van was beyond repair.  So the race to find a replacement vehicle began and the stress of it was enough to make me want to run for the hills and only drive a horse and buggy. All was not calm, but all was bright....

And there, in between the rush, the worry, the messiness of life, there was that warmth that the Spirit brings, the comfort only the Comforter knows how to give, and I love that my Savior isn't fazed by all my frenzy.  He is Peace.  And He invites me into His rest.  He fills my heart with good things.  He surrounds me with His love.  I see Him in the faces of my children and the man who loves me most.  I hear him in the voice of my mother on the other end of the phone, my heart catches when I wish my dad and brother a merry Christmas a thousand miles away.  I feel him in Mimi and Papa D's full house, in the goodness of family, and I know that...

all is not calm but all is bright.

 

What gingerbread, neighborhood kids, and a messy house taught me this Christmas

I answered the door with my hands still dripping soap suds from sink water.   Who would be out on a day like this?  It was damp and gray and only ten days till Christmas.  I had been elbow deep in my things to do list, all while trying to keep my five kids plus a visiting neighbor's son out of trouble on yet another weekend daddy was working.  Two more kids on my doorstep.  Asking if they could play?  I hesitated just the slightest bit.  Wiped my hands on the back of my shirt.  Kids ran through the back door, tears in their eyes, the puppy was nipping them again and more training, more consistency, more time is needed of me from puppies and kids.  It's not that I'm not accustomed to a full and crazy house.  We have neighborhood kids here most days of the week.   But this was only a week and a half till Christmas.  And my house was a wreck, and our clothes needed folding, and my list was probably a mile long.  

I glanced back at the girls.  I hadn't seen them in a couple months.  They live a few blocks or so away, in a part of my neighborhood where drug deals go down, gunshots go off, and there are regular police chases.  I can't tell them I'm too busy, that I have things to do, a house to clean and I finally got my baby down for a nap so I have to work fast.  Instead, I tell them they are welcome to play in the backyard.  And I figure if I can get all my kids outside in the yard, then maybe I can get something done.  Our yard is small and I can supervise from our kitchen windows.

I plunge my hands back into soapy water, and I feel that stirring in my heart that I've come to recognize.  That still small voice, "Show them My Love.  You never know when you will get another chance to."  I give a resigned sigh and I give up.  I give up on my expectations.  On trying to have everything just so.  And I feel the value of these souls in my home.  I step out on the back porch and I know exactly what we'll do.  "Would you all like to make gingerbread cookies with us?  I was just going to make some gingerbread dough."  There's a chorus of yeses and their eyes are all aglow.  And it feels so very right  to be sharing this, today, with all of them.

I prayed for God to use me and my family to bless someone else this Christmas.  And He brought such an opportunity right to my doorstep.  And I almost missed it.  I almost chose the good over the better, the necessary over the real needs.  My ideas of giving can often become too ritual, too neat and tidy and they don't interrupt my heart and can't possibly  leave a mess.  

I stumbled upon a wonderful message once that I will likely never forget.  It was given about a half century ago by a little old British woman and missionary named Gladys Aylward.  (You can listen to it  here.  The first ten minutes are life changing.) Gladys left the comforts of her home and moved to China to be a missionary when she was a young woman and young women weren't allowed to do anything alone in those days.  But she did.  She paid her own way to China and lived there among the people, facing loneliness and rejection, but eventually earning their respect and taking many into her home.  In her message, she shares a verse from her Chinese Bible, using the Chinese dialect and meaning to breathe new life into a verse we have all heard many times.  "If you will bring into my storehouse the completed tithe..."  So the tenth verse in the third chapter of Malachi begins.  And Gladys challenges us right down through the decades that we are the completed tithe.

Me.  You.  Holding nothing back.  Giving ourselves completely to God.

In that cackney accent of hers, still strong and soul stirring, she says these words,  "Your completed tithe and mine is THIS.  THIS is Gladys Aylward, the completed tithe, Master.  All I posses, all I have, my head, my heart, my feet, my hands.  All that is me.  My complete tithe.  And when God asks us to do something, he doesn't ask for one hand, or one foot, or even one day.  He asks for the complete...You."

That kind of giving takes all we have.  We feel it.  It's getting our hands dirty and our hearts involved.  Every day.  Every minute.

His to live through, love through, break through.



Oh Lord, I'm so far from this kind of living.  But here I am, Lord.  Use me as you will.

the advent adventure

Life truly is an adventure.

And it's found in the season of advent.  The beginning of the greatest adventure our world would ever embark on.

You can't have an adventure without an element of risk.  The very definition of the word is "an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks."   The stakes are high.  We hold our breath.  We dare to hope.  And we wait.  We wait for that part of the word that assures our safe passage through one adventure to the next.  The advent.  The coming into being.  The glorious part of anything worth risking anything for.

Everyday leading up to that morning we remember Who came for the first time and Who is still coming again.  We remember the One Who Risks His All For Us.  The One who counted the high cost and said we were worth it.  We eagerly unwrap an unknown package...the gift of today...and we count down the days remaining until that miraculous first arrival of the One Who Saves Us. 

Counting the gifts.  Anticipating the coming.

This is Advent.

We never stop the counting.  Never stop the hoping.  Never stop the waiting.

Because Christmas is only the first Advent.

The second is coming...

merry and bright and blogging

It's that time of year again when anything's possible...

So naturally I decided to break my six month blogging fast.  Six months!!  My fingers are itching to click and clatter out all my cobwebs.  It's been too long, friends.  Life got heavy and a bit too cumbersome...have you all had seasons like that?  I had prayers pressing hard on me and more than anything else and most importantly instead of anything else--I needed to seek God.  I wish I could say that's how I spent all the time I could have been blogging...but...there's always instagram :)  There will always be distractions.   Always something to steal the best and replace it with the mediocre.  Always a temporal joy to curb my appetite for the eternal.  But God is not so easily distracted (thankfully!) and He's been focusing those immensely loving and intensely merciful eyes of His on the attitudes of my heart.  

He's stirring things up inside me.  Placing his fingers on what's got to go, and breathing new life into old dreams.

I've struggled with joy.  And I've found it's all wrapped up in hope.  

When I can't see past the mountains I'm facing, when I feel like I'm stuck on a dead end road and the realist in me keeps telling the dreamer to take a back seat--joy pretty much flies out the window.

But hope is a thing that has to be resurrected.  And I have a Savior who knows a thing or two about that. 

He's doing more than I could ever ask or imagine...

He's giving me hope.  He's given me himself.

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>>---> I'm loving my new blog design by the beautiful and talented Danielle Burkleo!!  It's just the sort of inspiration I needed to jump right back into blogging.  Love that girl!

>>--->  I can't wait to share our advent calendar and our favorite Christmas traditions this week and the next!

revel in this

Mother's Day, 2013.

Thankfulness seeps into my soul, like the slow drip of a hidden spring.

It's thirst that led me to it's Source.  Isn't it always?  I've found a river beneath all the weight of life's topsoil--clean, clear, life-giving water that's fed by tears and purified a thousand times over.  Gratefulness bubbles up from the hard ground, and proves that it's stronger.

Always stronger.

My husband told me a story about the sea, how he walked along the beach in Haiti.  Picking his way through trash and debris on the shores that should be beautiful.  And that's when he saw them.  Thousands of green and blue and aquamarine pieces of glass, smoothed into stones by a pounding surf.  Sea glass.  He brought bags of them home and we couldn't tell they were once cast away bottles, smoothing our hands over their surface, enamored by their muted colors of jade and sky and sea.

Gratefulness.

Like rushing water, it smooths sharp corners and rough patches, wearing a path through walls of stubborn rock.  It's gratefulness that polishes the dullness right out of life.  Because there's the ordinary day in and day out that a dreamer like me never really learned how to navigate.  The everyday ebb and flow of an ancient tide.  But there's treasure, always treasure to be unearthed by another wave.  

So, I lay back on another mother's quilt made decades ago, head in the clouds, hands in the sand, my baby flinging her arms at the sky beside me.  I hear the voices of my children and their daddy catching crabs amid the sound of a gently lapping surf.  And I want to bottle this immense gratefulness and bring it home to the ordinary.  To spill it out on all those days I need it most.  Making shiny and new all these treasures I hold.

P.S.  Thank you, Joel, and Thaddeus, Boston, Astair, Legend, and Story.  Thank you for filling my days with adventure and my heart with overwhelming gratitude.  Thank you for making me a mother, and thank you, Lord, for teaching me everyday how to be one.

an honest letter to the mom who is weary

Dear you, you Wonderful Mom, you,

Just in case you ever read this blog and thought it looked like I had it all together (which if you know me in real life you certainly don't have any such illusions!) I want to be real with you.  I have wanted to change the name of this blog so many times.  I mean "The Joyeful Journey" is a worthy ambition, it's true, but MOST days I am struggling to find the joy in a house full of messy and loud and demanding and downright draining to-dos.  And while I'm airing out all my closets for you here, you might as well know that I'm often overwhelmed, and sometimes downright depressed.

I have in my mind all these perfect ideals and lofty ambitions for motherhood:  Of dancing through the kitchen with my five children, baby on hip, spatula in hand, whipping up amazing, healthy, to die for meals, all while singing songs of Alleluia and twirling in a blue gingham dress, hair curled fetchingly with ruby lipstick on, children busy doing chores and humming hymns, then feasting with daddy on a lace covered tablecloth and afterward all piling up together in one big snug hug while reading family devotions. 

But it was just last week I served macaroni and cheese four times, ate hot dogs, stayed in clothes wet with baby spit up, barely combed my hair, did devotions with my kids only twice, cried over spilled milk, and contemplated checking into a looney bin for a mini vacation.  It was just this weekend I found out my husband's crazy work hours just got crazier and now he'll be working seven long days a week until God opens another desperately prayed for door.  I feared and fretted and worried myself sick.  I let despair eat away at me.  

And this is what I named The Joyeful Journey?  It is.  And I'll keep it this way for now.  Because it's what I need to be reminded of the most.  There is joy in this.  In their eyes when you whisper secrets in their ears.  In big hugs and the sweetest "I love you"s.  In growing and loving and laughing together.  In feeling God's grace when it covers our weakness.  In giving thanks through the tears, and leaning in close to Jesus when the ground is giving way beneath you.  There is joy.  And it doesn't look like a forced "happy".  It looks more like peace.  I just have to choose it.  Everyday, grab hold of it.  I miss it sometimes.  I fall short of singing.  I fall short of seeing the gifts and thanking the Giver in the midst of the struggle.  But this is a journey, after all.  And it's one I'm learning is full of grace and the goodness of my God.

If you are reading this and you've ever felt like you don't measure up, if you've ever felt like you're drowning in mommy guilt, like you're missing something or should be doing more of something, or wish there was something more, please know you're not alone.  It plagues me, too.  But God is bigger than our feelings and it's the truth that sets us free.  The truth that Jesus is enough.  He covers us.  Pick us up when we've been looking down for too long.  He infuses what we do as wives and moms with kingdom importance, with eternal worth.  

He values your heart, dear mom.  And He is gentle with you, never berating you or demanding more than you can give.

"He tends his flock like a shepherd:  He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young." (Isaiah 40:11)

That verse has been like balm to my soul for so many years.  The gentleness of my God rescuing and redeeming all my failures.

So, hang in there, sweet mama.  God is right here with us.

p.s.  If you've ever left a comment on this blog, I appreciate them so much and I like to reply when I can through e-mail.  If you have a blogger account, you can enable it to receive replies to your comments, otherwise it doesn't allow return correspondence.  (LoveWins, this post is for you, dear!)