Moment of Grace

I was sitting on the deck stairs, the early evening autumn light trickling across the backyard through the neighbors' trees. The baby was in my arms, watching his brothers laugh and play with their father alongside them. And I felt a sudden quickening of my heart, an inexplicable intake of breath.

It was a moment of grace.

One moment in a constant day of feeding and changing and discipline and hurry.

But in that moment, that light coming through the trees was like a shaft of light to my heart.

"You made it. Look around you. Smiles, laughter, health, bounty. You made it."

Sometimes you are in something painful or challenging or dark for so long that you almost don't notice when the darkness shifts. And it might only shift by millimeters, but it starts to recede. Little by little, moment by moment. And then that light streaks in and you can see. See what God has done, see the scars and the hope, see the good even in the midst of the everyday challenges.

A moment of grace.

I will always be marked by our miscarriage. Our years of infertility have left their scars. The ups and downs of waiting on our boys changed who I am. This past year of tantrums and battles and fatigue and the completely overwhelming nature of being a mom to two children under two has challenged me to love deeper and more unconditionally than I thought possible.

And in that moment of grace, I could see.

See my laughing toddler and realize with a shock that he hadn't had any meltdowns that day. Not one. See my eight-year-old who went from being an only child in a calm, quiet house to the oldest of three boys in nonstop chaos in just a year and a half's time. And to see him loving it, embracing it. To see it changing him for good. To see this baby who is emerging from the newborn phase laughing and sleeping and staring us down when we eat in front of him and remembering that we didn't even know about him five months ago. To see this man with whom I've chosen to walk life, a true partner, encourager, the hardest-working and most generous man I know, who loves his family with unwavering fierceness.

A moment of grace.

To drink it in, give thanks, take stock and look forward in hope to what our family is becoming. To know these moments will come and go, that some days will still be long and hard, but that God is faithful. That he gives grace and strength. That he gifts us with these moments where we can suddenly see and know that He is good.

This morning, as I reflect on that moment I am reminded of the words of one of my favorite songs:

"Let hope rise and darkness tremble
In your Holy light
That every eye will see
Jesus, Our God
Great and mighty to be praised "  (From "With Everything" by Hillsong United )

Even sitting among the dirty dishes and the long lists for the day ahead, I am asking hope to continue to rise. To see the darkness continue to fade. To move boldly forward in ways that draw myself and others to know God better.

To see more moments of grace and light and make them as much a part of who I am as the scars have been. I don't need the scars to fade - but they are so much more beautiful in the light.

The Years of Yeses

This is going to be short and sweet because, well, everything is these days.

These days we are chasing a non-stop 18-month-old, sometimes with a 3 week old bouncing along in our arms, praying we aren't doing him irrevocable damage by subjecting him to all the chaos of our lives.

These days a lot of people look at us in public and say "How old are they? Woah, you've got your hands full, don't you?"

These days, as is necessary in this particular phase, our life revolves around making sure our oldest gets to school and soccer practice and gets that daily snuggle he still needs even while we balance keeping the toddler from drinking from oily street puddles and making sure the newborn stays fed and dry and has no one poking him in the eye.

But twelve years ago, these types of days were a distant dream. Something we could pretend to imagine but really have no idea of how all-encompassing, how overwhelming, how fulfilling and exhausting they would would feel all at the same time.

June 7, 2003, Leaving our wedding reception

But twelve years ago we knew one thing: We were saying yes to each other forever and yes to whatever would happen for us and to us in the meantime.

That meant we said yes to becoming parents and then crashing our way through the "two working parents" childhood of Josh and all of the "ships passing in the night" that that meant for us at the time.

November 3, 2006, Josh is born

That meant we said yes to a hard year of struggling to communicate and having to remember why we said yes in the first place when he had a tough spell around the five year mark.

That meant we said yes to struggling through the loss of our second child, through the ensuing fertility treatments and years of infertility and eventual death of that dream.

June 14, 2013, Leaving NC for WI

That meant we said yes to years of training and home studies and invasive questions about our sex lives and parenting and family relationships to pursue adoption.

That meant we said yes to my husband starting a new career and moving from friends and family and starting over twice with new schools and churches and relationships and rhythms to our lives.

That meant we said yes to putting my own career on hold when we brought our second son home from foster care last year and to continuing to stay home for a bit longer now that his younger brother is here, too.

January 9, 2014, Nate joins the family

It means we will say yes again to whatever comes when this post-doc is finished in Wisconsin, we will say it together, we will move again (most likely) and we will start up life again somewhere new, hopefully for the long haul.

May 13, 2015, Jayce joins the family

It has meant saying yes over and over again to each other. To remembering the "I wills" of our wedding day. To remembering that before the dog and the boys and the guinea pigs and all the moves and changes, we said yes, first and foremost, to each other. To a covenant of life together no matter what. To putting our marriage before our children so that our children will be parented by parents who unashamedly love and honor each other and are, therefore, better at loving them.

So today, as we celebrate 12 years, we do it with puffy eyes and exhausted bodies. We do it with full hearts as we watch our sons run around the backyard, playing soccer, laughing and crying after worshiping with our church family this morning. We do it as we look at each other knowing that there will not be a big fancy dinner out this year. There might just be a quiet, miraculous hour tonight when all 3 are asleep at the same time.

I suspect that we will just sit together and soak it in. Maybe with a glass of wine or a margarita. Maybe we'll hold hands and just sit and remember the yeses. And maybe we'll just fall asleep on each other's shoulders.

I hope we do.

Because as much as marriage is the hardest work in the world, it is worth every second. And the thing I want my three boys to know most of all as they grow up, besides the fact that God loves them more deeply and truly than we ever could, is that their parents made a promise to love each other and to love them, even on the days where love doesn't feel good. That our yeses as husband and wife put each other first in a way that will hopefully trickle down to their own understanding of what it means to have a true partner some day.

So, I'm just going to say it at the end here because it needs to be said outright and boldly.

I love my kids. And I will give them everything I have.

But they are not the center of my universe.

God is.

And it was before Him and many witnesses that I promised all the yeses to my husband, including giving him all of me. Before, during and after our kids are long gone from our home.

May God always grant us the energy to remember that and not let the chaos of the daily or the tyranny of the urgent (read, toddler) distract us from that fundamental promise that formed our family in the first place.

Happy 12 years to us. I look forward to the next yes, the next adventure with the most generous, patient husband a woman could ever hope for.

The Stillness and the Knowing

I sit this morning watching an amazing view- huge, breathtaking mountains, blue and white, shadowed and light, all stillness and calm from a distance but teeming underneath with activity. The scent of pine fills the air. There is no sound of cars or human chatter...just birds and a light hum from far off in the distance.

I sit on the cold stone steps of an amphitheatre set in the side of a mountain. Inside the buildings around me people are hard at work - thinking, creating, dreaming.

My view of the Rockies as I write this morning. 

Those are all things I really like to do.

Today, though, I am just being. Just soaking.

The air is chilled but the sun is bright and I know that in a few hours I will no longer need my coat. I am grateful for an early spring here.

The words of Psalm 9 spring to mind:

I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; 
I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you; 
I will sing praise to your name O Most High. 

Those are the only words I can really find surrounded by such beauty.

This week, the world is still for me. I am still mother, still wife, still friend and daughter and sister, still new business launcher. But primarily this week, I am just me. Whatever that means these days. It is easy not to see myself in the day-to-day rush. To cook and love and listen and sing and to be found fully in those most pressing roles I fill in this season of life.

But this week I get the privilege and gift of stepping back. Slowing down. Walking, not rushing. Sleeping. Eating slowly, savoring food.

And friends? It is good.

I had a pastor a long time ago who would preach a sermon and then, after offering practical ways to implement his message, would offer grace as an aside to parents of young children. Draw near to God in new and different ways, forgive yourself, know that old habits might not work well with sleepless nights and unpredictable wake times and cranky, teething toddlers. Find ways to continue to know your God, but know those ways might look different than they used to.

For someone like me, who likes consistency, habit and predictability, that aside was a gift and a challenge, both of which I've been learning to accept even more so this second time around the young child phase. Grace, flexibility, stolen moments of peace in the midst of the good chaos.

This week I get to take my time, though. My prayers won't be during my showers or at red lights. My reading won't happen just in those ten minutes of pre-bed stupor. It will be quiet enough and still enough to listen.

I will slow. And revel. And fill up for the next round of joyful adventures that parenting and life brings.

So as I gaze this morning at a creation so beautiful there are no words, I claim this week for joy and rest. For connection with my God and my husband. For the finding of the current me, the seeing of the good work that God has done in me even when I've been too tired this last year to see it.

I breathe in and out, I rejoice, I hope. I gratefully receive this most precious of gifts.

This week I will be still and know that He is God.

Never Going Back

Recently a friend asked me if I could send him some of my earlier blogs that dealt with infertility and loss. As I began to look through my posts, it occurred to me that I have been at this for over 5 years now. 5 years! I couldn't believe it. What started out as an experiment during my (reluctant) sabbatical when my oldest son was just 2 years old has turned into a very real, very necessary part of how I process life. You could never have told me that would happen.

As I looked back through what I had written, I began to see how much had changed. The secrets, the shame, the frustrations and guilt. So much of that starts to strip away as I read through the posts. I can SEE the work of the Lord happening. The work that I've learned can only happen when I refuse to buy into the lie that keeping it to myself, that plodding through it all in stoic silence, makes me a strong person. The change that occurs when secrets are exposed, when struggles are spoken of before there is victory.

And what I really didn't anticipate was how many people out there would read this, how many would relate to the infertility and the miscarriage and the life transitions and the hard family relationships and the chaos of being a working parent and a stay at home parent and adoption and waiting and weight issues and well, everything I've ended up sharing. Sometimes I think I'm crazy putting it all out there and I haven't always had positive responses.

But mostly?

Mostly what I've seen is that people are longing for vulnerability. For honesty. For someone to voice their own confusion, their own fears, their own failures, successes, hopes and, yes, victories. In a culture that mostly feeds us things that have already been packaged up in lovely boxes or tells us who to be on the surface, we are longing for more. Deeper friendships, healthy living, life abundant.

Possibly the neatest thing for me has been that people who may not agree with my belief system still feel the freedom to read and chime in. That good conversations have come from this. That we can agree to disagree in civility on some things and still find commonality and joyful agreement in others. I love that.

So, as I've read through some of what I've written, I've been truly humbled. Someone told me to take a risk and try this at a point in my life where, as I wrote in my very first post,

"I'm faced with the true situation of my soul. Fatigued, sad, confused, unsure of what's next...my blog is, in a sense, my own personal bomb crater. The place where I will sit, waiting to hear the voice of the Lord, wondering what will next come in this uncertain life and hoping to hear from the "Command" about what next move will advance the grand campaign."  

I thought at that time that the blog was just for me and just for a few months. But it has been so much more. The freedom I have gained from speaking what is hard and hidden cannot be described in adequate words.

So, more than five years later, I want to declare that I won't go back. Tempted sometimes to hide again, to stop, to keep quiet, to recoil in the face of critical feedback, I will keep writing and rejoicing in the changes I see. Changes that are so small I may have missed many of them until asked to reflect this past week. So, to the supervisor who first suggested I try this and to the friend who asked me to look back through and send him some post,s I say "thank you." 

I had no idea how much had changed, how much good had been done in the dark and quiet places. I am so truly overwhelmed and grateful to see the bigger picture of who I am becoming, how God uses truth and community so powerfully and how relentlessly and lovingly God is in pursuit of all of us.