Jul 27 2022
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hopes & dreams

I had a birthday recently. Obviously, if you pay attention to the picture above, you know how old I am. I think I’m going to call this my triple-threat year.

One of my favorite birthday traditions with myself is to make some space for reflection over where I’ve seen God move and work in the days since my last birthday, and to dream dreams with Him about what we want to see happen between now and the next.

I’m not naturally prone to gratitude. If anything, I remind myself often of the lack – where I’ve missed the mark, where I could’ve done better, the gaps that I failed to fill. I threat forecast. I see where things have gone wrong, and I try to prevent those things from happening in the future. So, the practice of gratitude, well…needless to say, it can be life or death for me sometimes.

This past year has been the hardest.
Yet, the bravest.
The driest, yet, the most abundant.
The loneliest, yet, full of more love and community than I could have ever imagined.

It has felt…pivotal.

So many things were brought to the surface.
So many things took deep, deep root in the soil of my heart.

So as I entered in to my hopes and dreams for the coming year of my life, it was a tricky process.

How do I hope, when I’ve been hoping and nothing has changed?
How do I dream when my dreams seem foolish and unattainable?
How do I step into the unknown of year 33 with joy and gladness and faith and trust?

The short answer is – I don’t know.

I don’t know how to move forward on my own.
I don’t know how to navigate being a human in 2022 at the age of 33.

But what I do know is that God is present.
I’m not moving forward on my own, I’m moving forward with the Author and Perfecter of my faith.
I’m moving forward with a great cloud of witnesses surrounding me, sitting with me in my hopes and my dreams, in my losses and my letdowns.
I’m navigating being a human with other humans who know how hard it is to be human, but how infinitely full it is to be human together, and with Christ.

So, my hopes and dreams for 33 are basically this:
Remain with Jesus.
Remain with His people.
Trust the kindness of God to get me to 34.

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Jun 11 2022
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Relationships

the smallest grasp

My friend’s youngest is learning how to walk. TBH, if I were her, I’d keep letting suckers like me pick her up to snuggle until I’m 18, but apparently that’s not how developmental stages work.

Not long ago I was sitting on her kitchen floor, arms outstretched, coaxing her to take a step or two. She’d done it before, so we knew the feat could be mastered, but she was paralyzed in a tiny little 16 month old stance. Making eye contact with me, looking at my hands, my fingertips just out of reach of hers. I balled up my fist and offered her just my pinky – because we’re classy ladies. #pinkysout
She took the tiniest hold on the tip of my tiniest finger and immediately raced across the tiled floor into my arms.

I scooped her up, we yelled “YAY!!”, and tried again.

I’ve been thinking about that small, necessary grasp a lot since then.

Thinking about how often I am paralyzed, reaching out for the smallest point of connection in order to move forward. And once I have that connection, how easy it is to run with zero hesitation.

Thinking about how, often, Holy Spirit is just waiting for me to take a step on my own. How Jesus – my Savior and Example – is cheering me on, knowing that I’ve done it before and I can do it again and it is okay to trust myself.

How just the smallest grasp – the tiniest tip – of connection and safety can propel forward soul-shifting action.

Often all I’m looking for with Jesus is a point of connection. His pinky finger outstretched in front of me.

The thing I hope this little one knows is that my pinky will always be there to grab hold of.
The thing I hope I never forget is that Jesus is always there to grab hold of.

Movement forward doesn’t need gigantic signs of confirmation, perfection in the steps to be taken, or zero-risk on the road ahead.

It just needs the smallest grasp.

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Apr 27 2022
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Relationships

where are your sons?

It was a precious question from a curious boy that caught me totally off guard on a sunny afternoon.

“Like, children?”
“Yeah, where are they?”
“Well, I don’t have any yet…”

This sweet moment of curiosity that led to this miniBFF affirming that he would, in fact, be friends with my sons when I have them, but he would also be older than them so we would have to establish that once they could understand, but not when they were babies because babies can’t understand…(this is a runon sentence isn’t it…)

This moment led to a deeper moment about hope.

His mom and I got to talk with him about how I want to marry someone that loves God and wants to do what God says is right. That I want to marry someone who is kind to me and encourages me. And that if he knows of anyone, hook ya gurl up.

He also noted that I probably couldn’t marry his dad. Which is correct. That would be weird.

As he went back to chilling in the sunny April afternoon, his mom and I went in on hope.

How terrible and necessary and terribly necessary it is.
How we can’t live without it, but living with it means opening yourself up to the possibility of earth shattering heartbreak.

Yet.

The hope we have does not put us to shame.
The hope that we have can never be taken away.
The hope that we have is kept in heaven, unfading and undefiled for us.

As someone who walked close by as the thing I hoped for escaped me, she knows how tricky my relationship with hope is.

I don’t like that is necessary.
But I know it’s the only thing I have.
Hope that God is a God of redemption and restoration and resurrection.
Hope that all things will be made new.
Hope that someday I will have a husband and children, so that my miniBFF can have some younger friends to remind how old he is.

On a recent episode of Coffee with Kailey, Annie F. Downs says this about hope: “I’d rather die full of hope and the Lord and I have to look each other in the eyes and be like, ‘Who’s holding this one?’ I would rather be full of hope until the end – which you have to fight for and you have to choose – than to go, ‘You know what, forget it I’m not going to want anymore. Because when you stop wanting food is when you lose nutrition and nutrients and your body wastes away. When we stop our desires, we actually don’t get healthy, we get emaciated. And I can’t do that to my hope. So we’re going to keep feeding hope.”

And that’s it.

I don’t always want to hope. Because it hurts. Anyone who has actually hoped for something and not gotten it will tell you it capital H hurts.

But pretending that I don’t have hope.
Putting my desires in a box that I never intend to open while they gather dust and waste away.

That will kill me.

As Annie said, I’d rather die full of hope and deal with it for all of eternity in the presence of my redemptive Savior than spend my life wasting away.

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Mar 10 2022
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the light house

I like to name things. My first car, a 1996 Chevy Monte Carlo, was appropriately named Bernice by my high school friends and every car since has been blessed by a name that most certainly fits her personality. Yes, they’re all ladies. ‘Cause who run the world? Girls. Duh.

And I like to name the places I’ve lived that have not been owned by my parents or universities.

We’ve had 67 David, the Thrifty Apartment, and the House on Winona.

I’ve been in my current living space for over 3 years and have never been able to land on a name that felt right, until recently.

I give you, The Light House.

I took this picture one morning while sipping on my coffee. I’ve sat in this exact spot many times over the last 38 months, but it wasn’t until month 37 when someone else called out the light pouring in that I began to realize just how much light truly pours in.

If there’s one thing that’s not a secret about me, it’s that I deeply value my friendships. I don’t know how to live life alone. Which is a good thing, because I can often slip into the lie that I am, indeed, living life alone. It’s easy for the enemy to gently remind me that at the end of the day I fall asleep by myself. I make meals for myself. There isn’t a spouse/roommate/sibling/etc around to casually have eyes on me in the mundane space of life to make sure I’m okay. Taken at face value, it makes sense that I would feel alone. That things would feel dark, bleak, and well, sad.

But that’s where the Light shows up.

I got this image tattooed on my body – where one gets tattoos – at the end of a really weird and hard season:

It’s a form of prayer called visio divina – divine seeing. The artist, Scott Erickson, has this caption on his Instagram: “May I be gifted with loved ones who remember who I am when I forget; because I will forget.”

And that’s what the enemy forgets about. The father of lies forgets about the Father of Truth. He forgets about the people of God that come in with the Light of Christ to reignite my truer identity.

The identity of friend.
Of sister.
Of Beloved.

Month 37 in the previously unnamed Light House, my friend sat on my couch as I unleashed scenarios that were ripping at my core, trying their best to dim the Light. As she prayed, she said, “God, I’m just now noticing the light that is pouring into this place…”

And that’s when I began to realize that all these months, all these years, all these days spent confused and muddling around have actually been time spent of Light just pouring into this place.

God has been in the business of exposing darkness.
Of literally and figuratively pouring out His Light into the space that I inhabit.

It really hit me the next morning when I woke up and noticed His actual sunlight pouring over the list of prayers I had written out for 2022, hanging in my bedroom:

It’s not lost on me that a tattoo I got a year and a half ago is literally a bunch of candles re-lighting the center candle.
It’s not lost on me that no matter what time of day, rays of sunshine can be seen illuminating my home.
It’s not lost on me that the ones who remind me who I am when I forget are anchored into the true source of Light – Jesus – and are unwilling to let me forget that my anchor holds strong in Him as well.

John 8:12 says, “Jesus spoke to them again: ‘I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in the darkness but will have the light of life.'”

This is all I have.

Light.

Darkness has done it’s finest work to try to snuff it out, but no matter what, the sun rises and light pours in.

And also Light pours in.

So, this is The Light House.

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Jan 03 2022
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Word of the Year

2021 – the year of abundance

It’s time for a word-of-the-year recap! The only consistency this blog has offered in the last 3 years!

2021 saw me leave behind hope in an effort to move forward with abundance. 2021 was going to be the year that I watched God grow up out of the ground all of the things we had been planting together over the last few years. It was going to be the year that I asked, of every person/situation/choice/etc, “Is this life or death? Because if it’s death, I want nothing to do with it.”

The verse that I sat with for 365 days (2021 wasn’t a leap year, right?) was John 10:10 – “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I (Jesus) came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

I said to myself over-and-over again…

iykyk

“Is this trying to steal, kill, or destroy? Or is this bringing me life?”
One is from the thief.
One is from Jesus.

And if it’s from Jesus, abundance will follow.

The tricky thing for my heart in leaning in to that line of thinking was/is – does declaring something as God’s abundance mean that I think He is some kind of genie? That all along it’s just been up to me to ‘name it and claim it’? All God has been waiting for was for me to say some magical word and then He would open the floodgates of heaven?

Youth group worship song session, anyone?

I used to think that abundance would have to show up as grand, big, and uncontainable. But it doesn’t. Turns out, God’s abundance – the kind of life giving abundance that Jesus came to give to His people – found it’s way in to my life in really small, ordinary, what some might call mundane things.

His abundance was found in a condo with friends making homemade birthday potstickers.
His abundance was found in a new pair of cycling shoes.
His abundance was found in my nephew seeing himself as Iron Man on a poster for his third birthday and losing his mind in the best of ways.
His abundance was found in weeping on friends couches because I’d been delighting myself in the Lord for so long and yet He had not given me the desires of my heart and nothing makes sense anymore.
His abundance was found in a vacation in the mountains with my family.
His abundance was found in a thousand small ways that prior to this year I would have never given Him credit for.

The thing I learned from this year is that I need to keep asking, “Is this trying to steal, kill, or destroy? Or is this trying to give me life?”
Because if it’s life, it’s from Jesus.
And if it’s from Jesus, abundance will follow.

And if simple life from Jesus is all the abundance I ever get, I think I’ll be set.

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