Feeling convicted

     My mom became a Christian in her 30's.  She was (and still is) an avid reader and an early riser.  I remember waking up in the mornings and finding her drinking her coffee and reading the Bible.  She was always able to quote scripture to encourage people and it wasn't because she had memorized it in Sunday School.  She knew it because she read the Word regularly.

     This is something I really struggle with.  I go through spells where I am diligent reading scripture and then spells where I go weeks or even months without opening my Bible other than for church.  I am totally ashamed writing that.

     I want to be the kind of mom where my kids see me reading the Bible, where I can encourage them with God's words and not my own, where I can be an example for them to follow.  I also know that I am usually in a better place mentally and definitely in a better place spiritually when I am regularly reading my Bible.
This is something God has put on my heart recently.  I need to get back into the Word.  I know that if I obey Him in this, my life will feel less stressful, I will handle things better, yell at my kids less, be kinder to my husband....I know this.  But I have been struggling with just getting started.   I thought about making this my September goal but realized I need to make this a life changing goal, not just something I do for a month.
    
     As I was praying about this last week, I realized that the only thing I have been faithful in over the last few years is praying.  And the reason I have been faithful in it is that I have accountability with my prayer partner (if you don't have a prayer partner, I greatly encourage you to get one.  It is an amazing thing knowing someone is praying for you on a regular basis and keeps you praying regularly as well).

     What better way to get back into the Word than to have some accountability.  So I emailed my prayer partner and asked if she wanted to venture into this with me.  Today she agreed and I cannot tell you how excited I am for this.  We are going to set a simple weekly goal and then email each other at the end of the week and say what we felt we learned from the portion of scripture we read. 

     What I love about this is that it's a weekly goal.  I wish I was faithful to read every day but right now it is hard on some days to fit it in.  Getting up early is not always an option when I already get up at 5 for work. So a weekly goal will work well for me.  I will keep you posted on how it's going.    

August

Today is August 15th.  August....August.   Yes, I am repeating that to myself because I can hardly believe this month is half over.  Half over.  School starts in 3 weeks (I think, I am actually avoiding looking at the calender and figuring it out exactly b/c I can hardly believe it).
So I am halfway through the month and have no real goals.  At this point, I am just hoping to survive the month, enjoy the last moments of summer, and get the kids ready for school. 
Maybe in September I will have something better for you.
As for July, I think it was to get as much fresh fruit as possible. We didn't get any blackberries.  Still hoping to get some of those but we picked lots of raspberries and blueberries.  We will be getting about 50 pounds of peaches next week to deal with and I would still love to get a bunch of green beans.  
This summer has just been too crazy.  I like to tell myself it will be a little less chaotic once school starts but then I start thinking about soccer practice and homework and carting kids to and from school and really, who am I kidding? So let's just enjoy a little bit more of summer while we can!

Loss

I sit at my dining room table in the very crazy hours of the morning looking at a picture of my friend Gloria.  Those who know me well, know she was my best girlfriend.  And she died.  And it was awful.  Almost 9 years later, I still miss her all the time.  I dream about her.  I think about what it would have been like to be 80 years old with her sitting on a porch, talking about our lives.
Loss.
My father leaving us.
My pastor's son dying of leukemia when I was little.
My grandfather dying of a heart attack when I was a teenager.
A boy from my school committing suicide when he went away to college.
My other grandfather and an uncle dying within weeks of each other.  One expected, one not.
Gloria. 
I haven't had a personal loss in a few years.  However, in the last few weeks, a friend lost a sister to cancer,  another friend lost a grandmother, another friend received papers of divorce, some people from church lost their house in a fire.
My heart breaks for all of them.  As Christians, we often try to find the positive.  They are in a better place, they are no longer suffering, don't store your treasures on earth, God can turn anything into His good. 
These are all extremely true. You cannot deny any of them.
But what I am reminded of is this verse "Jesus wept."
He wept.  Why?  He knew where Lazarus was going.  He knew all of those positive things.  He knew the joys of heaven yet He wept for life lost on earth.  So why did He weep? 
Was it for Himself?  Was it because He didn't get there in time? Was it for Mary? For Martha?
Why?  Why did He weep when He knew so much more?
Here is what I have decided in the midst of all this.  And I haven't studied it or read up on what scholars might think.  I am absolutely not knowledgable about what the root of the word was, etc, you get the point.  But what I have come to believe is that yes He knew.  He knew what you and I would need.  He knew it was okay to grieve.  To be sad.  To mourn.  Jesus showed us every emotion.  So we would know it is okay.  It is normal.  It is essential.  We need to mourn so that we can accept it.  So that we can continue living.  Continue being the people He called us to be.
But what if you aren't the person experiencing the loss directly?  What if it is a friend who is suffering?  What if they are far away and you can't go to them? Can't hold them and cry with them and take them to coffee and let them talk or not talk?  Just to be there for them?  It's such a helpless feeling. 
The only thing I can do is pray.  Or should I say the best thing I can do is pray. And listen to God.  Listen to His nudgings when He tells me in the wee hours of the morning to write words that have been swimming in my head for a couple of weeks.  And not doing it eloquently at all.
But I have learned to listen.  To know that someone needs to hear the words God is having me write.  That someone I know and love is struggling right this very moment. In the middle of the night.  When things always seem  worse because we are alone in our thoughts.  When there is nothing to distract us from our hurts.
But I want you to know that you are not so alone in your thoughts.  That God does hear you. 
As I have been struggling to write, the beginning lyrics to Chris Tomlin's song "I Lift My Hands" comes to mind..."Be still, there is a healer"
He knows your loss.  He knows your ache.  He knows the storm that rages in your heart.  He knows. 
And as a mother who just took her son to the doctor today who was bleeding outwardly.  I get it.  All I wanted to do was take my son's pain away.  To put it on myself.  To hold him in my arms and let him know he was safe.  God put that feeling in me as a parent.  And I am only human. Bound by human limitations.  But God is not bound at all.  How much more did He want to hold my son? How much more did He want to comfort him?  To take his pain away?  How much more does He love my son than I do? It is hard to fathom.  Because my heart aches with love for him.  But God loves him more.
So, if you have had loss and an emotional storm is raging inside of you, know that God is there.  Every second.  He hears your heart.  Day and night.  He hears you.
   

July

How is it possible that it is July 7th already?  This summer has been so flaky weather wise that it hasn't even felt like summer and now it's July.
I am going to keep my July goal to something that already keeps me pretty busy this month every year but I always strive to do more.  And that is gathering and preserving as much fresh produce as I can.  By preserving I am limited to freezing b/c I don't know how to can, but that is a goal for another time.
So far we have gather strawberries, some peas, and spinach.  Hoping to do more peas, green beans, all sorts of berries, peaches, cabbage. 
We did this last year and we try to keep track of how much we did so that we know whether we need to do more of less for the next year. 
So that's my goal for the month.  Do yo have any goals this month?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Camping, I love it.  It's a lot of work.  But I love being outdoors with no other obligations but doing camping things.  It tooks us until our youngest was 1 to attempt camping again and we started with yurts.  I love yurts.  They have heat and light and are dry when it rains.  And our girls haven't been ready for tent camping because of the darkness in the middle of the night.  But we have been working on it and our next trip is all in a tent.
But back to this camping trip.  This is one of the hardest trips we have ever done.  For lots of reasons.
Including: Who was coming/who wasn't coming.  The numbers changed almost daily and even while we were there, kept changing.
My son woke up the night before we were leaving with an earache.  Add trip to Urgent Care and pharmacy on my list of things to do before heading out. 
I forgot tons of stuff.  Clearly it was stuff we could do without but a little bit of an inconvenience at times.
It rained.  For almost an entire day.  It was very wet.
A short easy hike turned into a 6 mile difficult hike with our 3 young kids, me wearing shoes that were too small (although at least they were hiking shoes) and no snacks.  Yep, 4 hours of hard walking with no snacks for the kiddos. 
Accidents at the beach.  You really would think I would know better than to go anywhere without changes of clothing, but apparently I have not learned that lesson after being a parent for 8 years.
Did I mention it rained?  And yes we had 2 canopies, one of which leaked.
Oh and someone taking our meat?  Or a raccoon.  We can't decide which but it was creepy either way having something go through our cooler in the middle of the night.
My husband at one point described this trip as "a character building trip".  Yep,  character building for sure.
Fortunately, that is only half the story.  Remember all that rain I talked about?  At one point my kids were sitting around the fire in the rain, chatting happily like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And the hike?  Oh there was plenty of complaining throughout but there was also teamwork, and lots of walking without complaining, and no one sat down and cried when we realized after 3 miles that we had to turn around and go back 3 miles, back through the mud and the prickly bushes that overhung the path, and the logs to climb over and no food.  They just did it.  And maybe even enjoyed parts of it.
And we played games in our nicely warm yurt while the rain fell.
And my kids had fun.  Throughout it all, there was very little arguing.  They picked flowers and walked the dog and ran on the beach and roasted hot dogs and got dirty.  And it was great!
And our friend left to get baptized with her nephew.  And when my 4 year old had me explain what being baptized was.  And how you have to accept Jesus into your heart.  She said "I want to do that".  And so in the pouring down rain, with just me and my 2 girls sitting in a yurt, my baby accepted Jesus as her Saviour.  And I understood why this trip was so hard.  For there was a battle going on.  A battle for her soul.

And it turns out, it really was the best of times.

June

Wow, I cannot believe it is June.  It sure doesn't feel like June.  It feels like February.  Really.  It was 56 degrees today.  I had my heat on.  Brr.
May flew by and I enjoyed it.  I really did.  It was a carefree sort of month in a lot of ways.  My house is a mess to prove it but that is okay.  Sometimes you just need downtime.  I even read a couple of books.  Yep.  2 days this month I read.  2 books.  You can probably figure out that nothing else got done that day but reading.  Oh well,  reading makes me happy and relaxed.
I am rambling I know.  So it is June and back to my goals.  I skipped May and that was nice.  But I need to get back on track.  Summer can be lots of fun but also stressful with 3 kids at home whining that they are bored.  Yes, my kids have now picked up on that lovely word.  I have a plan though for that.  I am going to make a list of things they can do when they are "bored" and I hope it puts an end to that word fairly quickly.  I am sure there will be more fun things they can figure out to do than pick up dog poop for instance. 
But my goal for June is to declutter.  Oh how I need to declutter.  I have too much stuff everywhere.  In my closet, in the kids' rooms, it's even staring at me on my desk as I type this.  Too much stuff!
And I want to have a garage sale so what better time to declutter than right before a garage sale.
That's it, that's my goal.  Something simple and hopefully doable. 
That might mean no more reading for me for a couple of weeks though:-)

16 years

     When I was a sophomore in college, I was struggling with a lot of things one of which was being single.  I had no idea what I wanted in a man or how to get it or the patience to wait for God to show me.  I just knew I was alone and had a poor relationship with my father and no hope that I would ever be in a place mentally where anyone would want me.
     On a particularly bad day, I sat in my room and cried.  It was a rainy icky day.  My roommate was gone and I had a rare moment of quiet time to just sit there and let it all out.  Because sometimes, as women, we just really need that. 
     Then a rainbow appeared outside my window.  I love rainbows.  They always seem so full of hope.  Then I felt God's hand just filling my heart with peace.  Filling my heart with the promise of someone who would love me, faults and all.  In fact, He promised that this man was at George Fox and that He was shaping and molding him while doing the same to me.  We weren't ready for each other yet.  And I felt calm.  And I wrote a list.  A list of all the attributes I wanted in the man I would spend my life with.
     When God brought Adam back into my life my senior year and we started dating, I looked at the list and he fit every single thing on there.  Every one.  I didn't have to take any of the attributes and try to make him fit into it, because he already did.  And I knew he was the love of my life. 
     Today we have been married for 16 years.  Sometimes I feel I know less about marriage today than I did back then.  We have been in a holding pattern for the past few years.  By that, I mean no major life changes has happened recently.  And that is weird.  For the first 12 years we were either moving, changing jobs, moving, getting into graduate school, moving, graduating, moving, finding jobs, moving, having kids, buying a house and moving, having more kids.  I almost don't know what to do not having some major life changing thing.  And I totally realize that by saying that, I am dooming myself to some big change coming up.  I am not complaining about there being no big things, it is nice to just live life.  And believe me, I keep busy.  I am not inviting God to shake things up in my life.  Really, I am not.
     What I am realizing is, we are in the down and dirty part of our marriage.  The part where we can't blame things on being up all night from studying or taking care of baby or the stress of a new job or moving.  We are living in the here and now.  And in the here and now, I have not been the best wife.  He often gets the end of me.  The end of the day.  The end of my energy.  The end of my patience.  When the kids have been tugging on me all day or I have had to deal with people in pain all day, or I have worked all day trying to get caught up on my normal household duties, or the dog has driven me crazy with her herding obsession, my husband comes home and I honestly have nothing left for him.  And that really isn't fair. 
     My husband is truly amazing and I am so grateful for him everyday.  Looking forward to our next 16+ years together!