“The journey is not linear or formulaic…” – Ruth Chou Simons
This is a truth I have lived and learned well. Grief is not linear and joy is not formulaic. We can count on God’s goodness and the rhythm of seasons, but we are not the Author.
I am loving the words of Ruth Chou Simon’s seasonal devotions in her soon to be released Grace Laced book. The hardbound book and accompanying journal are gorgeous! They are filled with her beautiful, whimsical illustrations that create a quite, rich space to meditate and find inspiration from winter to summer and every season in between.
A few truths that have jumped out at me are the ideas of dwelling, abiding, coming and becoming. Through a season of coming to the end of myself as I am now a mother of four who has been married for fifteen years and is still trying to figure out how to walk this journey of faith, motherhood and love, I have recently felt an invitation into a space of abiding more deeply and simply in the Lord.
It feels natural to come to my heavenly Father on a quiet morning with a cup of tea in hand, but this homeschool year it will be much more difficult to come to Him when I am in the thick of things, fighting shame and feelings of failure and frustration.
It is my prayer that not only would I seek Him in stillness, but that I would lead my children boldly to His throne to receive the mercy and grace we all so desperately long for … and that I would do it most of all in our time of need. Hebrews 4:16. I am finding that writing out scripture in my journal is a way to take pause, remember and come to Him so that He can lead me forward into the becoming that He wills for me.
In Him we live and move and have our being. Acts 17:28 In Him all things hold together. Colossians 1:17
He is our essence, He is our home. And still my heart wanders and hides. Still I am pulled to fill my time with everything other than relationship and Creator.
But when I stop and come, I am found. I am made new.
Still I falter in this becoming. I fall back into shame and distrust His promised work in me because my failures loom so large some days. I love how Ruth addresses this…
“He declare us a new creation from the moment we cross from slaves to sin to free in Christ even when the into His likeness happens over time.”
We are living in the right now and the not yet, the “it is finished” and the becoming a new creature. This book of devotions has been rooting me in this truth and walking with me as a friend through these seasons.
My day may feel rushed but the visuals in this book create space for my mind and soul to dwell upon the Lord, being reminded of truths I know, and falling even deeper into His love. Thank you Ruth for creating this treasure and including me in your book launch team! This will be my go-to gift for encouraging other mama hearts.
You can order GraceLaced: Discovering Timeless Truths through Seasons of the Heart before August 31st to access all the fun pre-order goodies!
And check out the GraceLaced book trailer – it’s lovely!
We were children and we were full of wonder.
We were seeking more than just ourselves and we were hurting.
It has been fifteen years. I do not know my life without him.
It has been fifteen lengthy years, and like any grey head will tell you, this all goes by so fast.
The aisle was long. I had knelt the night before in that country church and placed flowers cut from my mother’s garden into my grandmother’s white milk-glass vases. I was determined we would be different. We would not have expensive flower arrangements crowding us and we would live life more free than anyone I knew. I was determined we would remake all the beauty I remembered from my childhood, and we would surpass it because we would be us.
Then came fifteen years of the dailies… waking up and working hard, falling into bed for love and exhaustion. A decade and a half of pure beauty – scrambled eggs in the morning and how we can read each other’s thoughts. We had plunged naive into life that would reward us and rip from us. We count them now… seven children, one whose face we saw cold and blue, two we never held and four running and crawling circles around us, full of life.
The aisle was long and at the end of it his face was fighting tears. I saw his eyes, I knew he loved me.
I have wondered since then. Wondered if we two broken people even know how to love. And instead of being different I became happy just to hear, “us too.” To hear that we are not the only ones falling into bed ragged tired, we are not the only ones for whom marriage is a heavy, holy work, we are not the only ones who lose our words, our way, our hearts.
This is love. Enduring all. I did not know it before.
That aisle and the white dress was dreaming, and hope. Now this is love. This is deep and true.
I read once that there are never two whole people joined, there are only two broken, healing people growing together. When you have lived fifteen years with each other, it becomes less frightening to speak of the broken places.
I shattered several of my grandmother’s milk-glass vases that once held our wedding flowers, and I have lost most of the rest. I am not good at keeping track of what matters. I break so many things.
One night, lost in emotions, I told him that if I could have seen the whole picture I would not have walked the aisle, would not have made those vows before eager faces.
That was the worst un-truth, the most broken words. I would promise myself to him a million times more. I would and will wake every day saying “I do.”
Every day there is a question, “Will you Jesse? Will you Sharon? To have and to hold, to love and honor.”
We do, we will.
If there was only one of these days holding him my heart would not so easily lose its way. I would truly see this love for the miracle it is if our time was measured in hours instead of years.
Every night he writes me a note and stamps a tree at the top. He says we are this oak growing, roots down deep weathering storms, soaking up sunshine, limbs and leaves spreading shade and a place to rest for those who gather near. This is my lover, this my friend.
We have moved often, and the last time we did I took our framed vows off the wall and tucked them away for safekeeping. Of course I can’t find them now. I try to rehearse the words. I know I said it is “my joy to honor you.” I know he promised to cherish me. The phrases grow foggy, but they are only language.
We gave ourselves to each other, for all this life. That is what matters.
That is why we get to taste this deep love that comes of dark days and expected rhythms. Beautiful becoming.
The aisle was long, and we are walking it still.
Happy Anniversary my love.
We are so very thankful to Sidney Morgan for these precious images she created of our family! Please take a minute to check out her stunning site. If you live in SoCal she is your lady for family sessions, and she travels for weddings!
I help him pack his lunch, lay out his new uniform and tie his cap on tight. It is the first day for him to follow in what has been a six year tradition for our family.
One minute I am drowning in children and the next they are rushing off from me. I joke to my husband that this life of motherhood is “Mayhem, mayhem, mayhem, then you’re lonely. ” We laugh, but I am not joking.
The older I grow the more I know how little we truly need, but the more my days are filled with things. I used to be able to step out of the house and wander wherever I like. Now I purchase and plan, pack and prepare. I worry that I may not have sent them forth with everything they need, and when they return I am here with snacks and shampoo.
The cap must be tied on tight and the sunscreen put in the bag, but as soon as they step from this house they begin to discard, to unravel and lay themselves open to the wide world. To sun and wind and all the Creator’s glory. I am at home, praying they meet Him in their journeys and aren’t lost amidst the ugly things of earth.
They return with unruly hair, eyes full of the sun and sea, backs bare and souls full. I wonder – if they soak up all this beauty away from me – am I really necessary? What is it I am doing in this homemaking?
So I pick up pages that can comfort these questions. My sons go into the wild to escape the ordinariness of things, I step into words and books. These are friends, counselors and freedom amidst the dirty dishes and daily schedules.
The book, Keeping Place, tells of a homemaking, housekeeping God, and I am encouraged that my existence is an echo of His very essence. There is meaning not just for my current role, but in every small action that fills my days.
In this book Jen Pollock Michel references Kathleen Norris… “The liturgies of housework and practices like daily prayer ground us in a proper estimation of ourselves – we are creatures, not the Creator. Our quotidian routines return us to our bodies of dust, forging humility on the anvil of repetitive motion. We can’t abandon the housekeeping, either the laundry or the liturgy, because it is one constraining element for human flourishing.”
The laundry and the prayers I whisper for my boys’ souls and bodies as I wash their shirts… These are one element of the precious life we are given, just like their sand filled hair and days drinking up the sea are another.
It is a dance – orderly and wild. I am grateful to learn the steps with them.
Images taken on July 21, 2017. Head over to www.childhoodunplugged.com for more summer images…
I held my newborn daughter, long awaited and hoped for after losing three precious babies and after growing three healthy sons.
She was perfection. It was everything, and still it was not enough.
My soul is ravenous, hungry, ever greedy.
I traced her perfect lips as I nursed midnight feedings, flipping through my phone to keep me awake until she was full.
She is all gift, but insecurity grew as I realized I forgot to take day-old photos of her swaddled just so. Did I buy the right swaddling blankets? And then I jumped to wondering if I could even mother her. What will she think of me thirty years from now?
It is a sad realization that this gnawing ache lives right down at the deep of me. She cannot fulfill me. Nothing in this world can. She is gift, but even a newborn daughter born after losing three little ones is not enough to satiate the worrying, wanting center of my heart.
I was reborn the day she was, and ten thousand times before. How many days have I Iived? My life thus far—thirteen thousand five hundred days, give or take a few. And when did I first kneel and ask for forgiveness, offering my self up to Saving Grace? Seven years old sounds about right. I’ve had more than ten thousand days of rebirth and remaking since trusting Jesus.
The old has gone the new has come and is coming still.
And still I am not enough, she is not enough. Nothing, nothing will ever be enough. Not the four children I hold, my husband’s arms wrapped around me, our home built strong and comfortable, material goods offered to satisfy, images ever scrolling past our eyes. Even the best of it can’t be enough.
We live amidst gift, blessing upon blessing, and still we want. We long for home and perfect days, for arms full and worry laid down. I hoped to see myself transform the day I birthed her. I wanted to think only on the lovely, speak only kindness, and stand in a quiet rooted strength from that day on. I wanted to be a heroine for my daughter. But my temper still flares, my heart wanders, and I falter.
I am not enough.
Could I even whisper this modern day heresy? There are others saying so, and I will join them. I echo.
Only the Son is enough. Only Christ.
“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.” *
Could this be?
I held this newborn babe each night, dimming the light on my phone, setting the alarm early to wake and read the Word of Life, and burying my face in her soft hair, better than anything that can be bought or planned or purchased. Only a few weeks old she lay abandoned to sweet dreams. She doesn’t know the hungry race yet.
It will take silence and space. It will take a rehearsal, a constant rebirth of prayer if I am to help her grow up confident in the One who is enough.
It will take resting in Christ who holds us. That is all I know.
This post is part of my Past Tense Thursday series. Images taken on 11-16-2016
*from St. Patrick’s prayer
I had high hopes.
I cleaned off my laptop and organized my photo catalogs. I was going to blog this baby right, soaking her in, capturing time with my lens and sharing those images with words from the depths of my heart. I was going to have something beautiful for you all now and for her when she grew up.
Those first few months I snapped some pictures, but I didn’t touch my computer any more than I had to for work. I just held her and held her. Then I began to blog in some stops and starts between homeschooling, much baby snuggling, a few speaking engagements to share the miracle God had done in my life, and finishing up the book proposal for my memoir manuscript about our story of pregnancy loss and hope.
I know how you blink and your first wiggly bundle of joy is a teenager and your infant daughter is grown almost nine months. After four children and almost forty years, I know this well and wrote about the swift current of time we are all over-swept by.
But here I am again, feeling not enough and unable to keep up or birth the vision I hold. What am I to do?
Before I have given up, but now I have a daughter. A daughter who I aim to show the way – how to be who you are made to be, how to accept smallness and welcome stillness while keeping the fire of dreams alight.
At the beginning of the summer I sent my boys off for five weeks to Junior Lifeguards. I thought four days a week to myself would result in a flurry of creativity. Instead there was baking for their camp food-contests, meal planning and shopping for the best sunscreen. There was driving them to events and spending long, sunny hours on the beach watching them compete. There were naps with baby girl and sticky popsicles by the pool as soon as my boys ran in the door. There was the biggest fourth of July party ever and campfire after campfire with friends gathered close. This past week there was packing for big-boy trips to rivers and mountains, and dinners to say goodbye. There is nothing I would trade for what this summer has been, and now this morning is a bit of quiet amidst the long and noisy, sunlit days.
So as her head rests on my chest, curled inside the wrap that has held her every day of her little life, with the sweet companions that tea, music and writing have been for us… Now I am trying to find a space to stand in that allows me to share imperfectly.
I wanted to give you her story day by day, a chronology of Joy. But life is a whirling, swirling, beautiful mess of time, and this blog is a place where I can honor that. This is not one of the articles I write for publication with a word count, theme, tone and deadline. This is not my manuscript, where I crafted story arc chapter by chapter. This is the place I can speak truest. Thank you for listening.
Today (and hopefully most Tuesdays) I will write of where I am this very minute. I will write Present Tense Tuesdays so you can see the beauty right before my eyes and share struggles before I have sorted them out safe and sound. It’s ingratitude to leave all that gift on a hard-drive just because I can’t really do it justice.
Then on (hopefully) most Thursdays I will share Past Tense Thursdays (yes in homage to #throwbackthursdays) where I will share bits from my journey already traveled. Most for now will be of this first year of baby girl’s life, but I aim to seek treasure way back when my others were little or even further.
And then on the weekends I find myself writing to her, so as many weekends as I can I will share Letter Writing Weekends with you – my heart for my daughter, post by post.
I don’t know exactly what to do when we realize we can’t keep up… But for me, this is what I walk in for now. I would love to have you join me – your support and sharing in this journey means more than I can possibly say. It really does. And I would love to hear if there are areas where you feel defeated because of feeling you can’t “keep up” with your vision or other’s expectations. Have you found any strategies that give you courage? Any ways to let go of the feeling you have to “keep up?” Let’s all make small steps in freedom together. If it brings us joy, let’s not let doing it perfectly keep us from the beauty.
– This post is part of my Present Tense Tuesday series. Images taken by Jesse on July 4, 2017 . Joy in vintage romper handed down by my Mom, me in dress I had maternity pictures taken in for Joshua and Joy, bonnet from Briar Handmade
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Jesse McKeeman - My favorite post yet!
sharon - awww that makes me happy 🙂
Kia McKeeman Albano - This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
sharon - Thanks so much! xo
Laura Thomas - Thanks so much for sharing this… marriage is quite the journey, isn’t it? We’ll be celebrating 30 years next May (WHAT?!) and I am learning still never to take a single day with my man for granted. God is good and gracious! Also, can I say how stunning these pics are? 🙂 Stopping by from Hope*Writers
sharon - Yes, quite the journey! Congrats, so true and THANK YOU for your sweet words 🙂 xoxo