...moved...

I moved! I'm over at coffeecrazie.wordpress.com :) Visit me there!

Calling all parents to just say no...

...& 'yes' to judgement-free parenting!

Parenthood is not always easy and it is even more challenging when comparison and confusion whisper doubts regarding all the choices we make. I understand the impact our decisions can have on our children and that a certain level of concern is out of love for our kids!  But it can become immobilizing to live in shame and fear of the future. It keeps us from experiencing the goodness and beauty that also live in this season!

Whenever I wrestle with feelings of 'bad mom' guilt, I am ever so grateful to a God who reminds me of so many things...so many times. He often replaces the lies of failure with truth: "I made you and I made your child. I gave this child to you, and trust me, I would do it all over again." It is this gift He offers to me: to surrender and leave the decisions I make - in life and with my children - to Him!

So sometimes we will live in survival mode and sometimes we will enjoy the kodak moments. Sometimes we will hit bumps in the road and we will fall but I encourage you to not stay there. Let's get back up again and learn and figure this out together. I am ever so grateful to my grace filled community, for the encouragement they give and for the honest and open conversations we've had. Grateful for the freedom to choose and love on our families!

Here's to doing the best we can and asking God to make up the rest.

http://ctworkingmoms.com/campaign-for-judgement-free-motherhood/
Posted by CT Working Moms on Friday, October 30, 2015

where light and shadow join hands

There is a special hour in the autumn morning where the sun finds it's place to rest in it's celestial sphere. Light and shadow join hands, falling long and warm on the floor while the sounds of leaves and trees and birds and bees dance in the midst of them. All is calm.  I feel the eagerness of the inviting scene embrace every inch of my being as I deliberately and gently walk throughout each room, allowing the tender whimsy of the morning to weave and wrap about. My soul finds rest and relief in the warm embrace sooner than the eruption of life that inhabit these walls can come to existence. It offers but a few moments to capture my breath, to stand in awe of the silence and to wholly appreciate that each morning brings the beauty of life and the man of my dreams and children to love.  

These quiet moments are rare and they are short lived. They last but for a moment as each day is new.  Yet, I am grateful for them. I do not feel bitter for their passing because it awakens memories and brings to mind that though this day may bring fights and falls and cries and hurts we will also laugh and dance and sing and heal.  In our home we will create a world where we can bring our differences and experience wholeness, where we can bring our hurts and experience healing, where we can bring our shame and experience honor, and where we can bring our failures and experience acceptance, one that is certain and true.  I want to teach and live and believe that where there is hate and injustice and destruction, there can be celebration and reconciliation and restoration. It is there that hope has set its anchor. Trustworthy and sure.  This hope that we will experience together and extend to our family and our friends and our neighbors. Where light and shadow join hands. A place of belonging and of value and of joy and of love.

Where I met God

I recall a time when I was a different sort of woman, sitting alongside an abandoned part of a rocky beach, watching the quiet scene; a broken sort. Angry and confused and hurt. It was one of those moments where you know He exists but the weariness in your soul pulls you away from belief. I did not know what to do with Him. I refused to speak. It was hard to listen. I remember digging my toes under the sand and dust and gravel and dirt, feeling myself fall beneath the surface, immersing myself into pain, watching the chaos of the scene envelop my own.  The rippling waves crashing into rocks, bathing the coastline, splattering on shells. The only distractions were the occasional small stones I would flick out into the great expanse. Yet it was here in the quiet moments, in the darkness and brokenness, that I was able to once again hear God speak. I wouldn't open my Bible but He would penetrate through with words I had buried deep from our initial relationship. From the books of the Bible that displayed stories of broken relationships and of darkness, of healing and forgiveness. Words about the heavy hurts and insecurities I was carrying and how God was longing for me to allow Him to carry them for me. Truths about who He is, about my being someone He made and about the why and about how I was somehow special to Him. Loved even. About what He did to show me. Despite all the crazy I have seen and done, can one even imagine? It was there that hope began to sprout, where it glimmered and glowed in the darkness, where something inside became new. Sometimes I look back on that time in my life with mixed feelings; although it was truly low and difficult, it was still a turning point in my life. It was a change that I could not have done without. We must experience those moments of humility and I am eternally grateful for it. It was there that I met God.

unraveling reverie

I made a visit to the local bookstore few nights back, gathering quiet moments and hot sips of coffee between the click-clacking of keys from spilling thoughts hitting the screen and sacred spaces found with strangers. The sounds of middle-aged women with their game pieces hitting a table and of teenage giggles flittering on about a boy offered an amusing soundtrack. Without looking up, we shared a bond between these unadulterated moments, and minus the eye contact or corresponding nod, we acknowledged the worlds we were from, are in and will soon return to as foreign and yet suspiciously familial.

I smiled as I looked down at my journal and laptop and coffee and books and though I had spread them out with such abandon, they appeared interlaced with a inexplicable united friendship. I felt light and grateful and secure and whole and all those things I long to feel more often than not and I found my thoughts were unraveling themselves to mirror the gloriously messy display placed so wittingly before me. 

I picked up my pen and felt warm. I was eager to write again.

morning muse

The sounds of chaos meet the maddening silence in a clumsy reunion. There is a chill in the air. Breathing out a sigh that goes deeper than the bond between mother and child, the resulting steam swirls up, it's tendrils groping the air with freedom and wanderlust. The kitchen is the birthplace of this morning religion and the comfort that fills my warm cup will soon find its way to my heart, burrowing beneath the layers of chill and bone, circling outward until it has met its purpose. The sun looks down with a familiar grin, winking at the lazy routine. Every morning starts off with the same hesitation, the same timidity as though meeting a lover for the first time, uncertain of what is to come. Seeking the comfort of what was known and yet drawn forward all the same. It is accepting the madness that will transform the shy child inside, as if you know the world will only continue to revolve if you move forward with it. If you accept that what the day brings will inevitably become part of the story. So you choose to oblige with eyes closed and full acceptance until the morning smiles a new chapter to existence and you whisper grateful words to the one who anchors your soul. 

...and you are ready to start the day.

Taking a Time Out

 - - From 2013 - -


So October has started and it is well on it's way, and we are still in the middle of renovations. Rooms are coming together and they look fab, but it's just exhausting not really being "at home" in your own home.

Sooo. Here we are.

As you may have noticed, I have been offline for a while already. It just hasn't been very easy to find a few moments to write in between the kids and managing our home with contractors and workers parading in and around the house.  Although there are thoughts upon thoughts coupled with the eclectic musings dancing within the confines of my ruminating head.

So here I am officially letting you know that I just going to take a brief "time out" from my blog until further notice. Perhaps until the time my home is back in order, or perhaps even a bit sooner - but at least when I feel like I am able (and willing) to do so again.

Hopefully not for too long. I love writing on here.

Like Notes on a Page of Music

There is something beautiful about a billion stars

held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.

They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page

of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the

blue like jazz.

And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there

somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was,

but this time I felt it. I realized it.

The way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty.

The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain

and into my heart.

I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry

because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him,

had committed adultery, and yet

hopelessly in love with her, drunk with

love for her."

- Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz.