Hi.
I'm so glad you found your way to my little corner of the neighborhood! Pull up a chair and stay, and let's chat about life on the margins and loving Jesus and, obviously, where to find the best cheese dip and most life-changing books.
I'm so glad you found your way to my little corner of the neighborhood! Pull up a chair and stay, and let's chat about life on the margins and loving Jesus and, obviously, where to find the best cheese dip and most life-changing books.
Yesterday was a sick day. Jayci and Isaiah had their throats swabbed, which tested positive for strep throat.
But today I also read these words: you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. I am startled to realize this isn't actually what I hope for. I want my enemies far from me. Behind careful borders and appropriate boundaries. But that's not what God promises
But we will miss the sparkling adventure in the forest of the mundane. Life ebbs and flows, stretches and retracts. It throbs, a wide space between my clavicles beating with the racing cadence of a life. I want to circle up, but sense a pull to open instead.
Adam recently put up a bird feeder, which isn’t my favorite, because bird make me jumpy. But Isaiah likes to chase them, and Jayci notices the different varieties and colors. Caden, meanwhile grins his newly toothless grin and begs me to play a sport, any sport, with him.
“I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.”
― Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent
I have been this mom, multiple times, in this very library. Isaiah’s spirit refuses to be tamed by spaces intended for quiet, and our library trips end much more successfully when we leave him at home.
We confess that we have closed our door when you have called us to swing it wide. We have left when you asked us to stay, and stayed when you bid us to go.
What am I holding under my skin? What worries have found a home in my body? The body keeps the score, and mine stubbornly refuses to let go of whatever it is gripping so tightly. Perhaps, this is the kind that will only come out with prayer. Or maybe, I just need another massage.
People and food always seem to show up just when we need it, and I’ve become a firm believer in this gospel that is somehow always more than enough.
In theory, I suppose, we have some idea of balancing this pouring out with a certain level of circling up. Of ensuring our kids know we prioritize their needs and love them first. In reality, this looks less like a perfect balance and more like a pendulum swing.
My goal is to read 75 books this year, so far I’ve read 11. What are your reading goals this year? What are your favorite books? I want to know everything.
Forgive us Lord for turning back to our chains. For believing the enemy’s lies and for allowing ourselves to be more shaped by the ways of the world than we are by your grace.
Mostly, depression just lingers like sweet melancholy. Bent into my voice and days, but never twisting them completely off course.
Open-minded will never be enough. Open-hearted is the end-game, but it’s scary as hell. Vulnerable, unprotected, no guarantees my bones will knit back together to protect me from pain.
This is only a small portion of the several-dumpster-fulls of stuff, of history, we already cleaned out from this space.
We are building on what has gone before us.
