My youngest leaned over to me during worship last week, cupped her hand around my ear, and whispered, “Mom, what do you actually do? Like every day. Who are you and what do you DO?” Oh, brother. I could tell that in the moments before she leaned over, her mind was pondering. She sat…
Category: BLOG
Don’t Do, Just Be
Written for enCourage My youngest has many words, and my husband and I are the primary receiver of these words throughout the day. Every-little-once-in-a-while, the amount of words brings us close to lunacy. Here is a text I received from my husband a few weeks ago regarding my youngest and her verbal processing: So many…
Missing the Magnificence
I married my husband seventeen years ago during a blizzard. It was beautiful and warm in the church where we were married, but outside, there was a blizzard. I remember telling one of my bridesmaids that it didn’t matter to me how awful the weather was because in just a few hours, my husband and…
Phone Booths and Friendships
I recently listened to a podcast about a man from Japan who keeps a phone booth in his back yard. It doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for years, and yet thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake use it all year round. They use the phone booth to talk…
Compel My Heart to SING
I’m grateful beyond what I can adequately express for the gift of music. The melodies and harmonies included in all different genres have been an important part of little moments throughout my journey. I’ve listened many times to pop music blasting over the blue tooth speaker while my younger two jump on the trampoline. “Because…
New Beginnings
Life is full of new beginnings. They’re around every corner. A new school year, new family dynamics with a child sent off to college, a new job, new house, and there’s even a sense of newness to daily life after saying good-bye to a loved one. With each rising sun, there is the promise of…
Cheering On and Building Up
I completed a sprint triathlon a week ago. I’m a runner, not a biker or a swimmer…for real. I’d barely been on a bike for the last ten years, but with some encouragement from a friend, I pulled out my old bike that I bought back when my husband and I were first married, and…
To Him Who Is Able
There are certain responsibilities in my adult life that I have discovered are more difficult than I imagined them as a child. Cooking is an example of one of those duties. Early on there was a real struggle when it came to cooking, and mostly because, well, I didn’t know how. Our first night at…
He Restores My Soul
We renovated. We moved. It’s so easy to write those words, but really. Really. Moving is a pain. Renovating is a pain. Like it’s literally a pain. My back, legs, arms, and eyeballs were sore for days. I wondered, while moving boxes of books from the basement to the upstairs, if there are humans who…
Mugs, Penguins, and Other Inherited Treasures
When I first began the process of cleaning out my childhood home, I had grand plans to organize, plans to put each item in the house into a box or bin to be passed down to others in the family. With the loss of my dad, and the nearness of heaven for my mom, the…