An Unexpected Journey

My fingers run gently along the top.   Feeling the smoothness of the wood grain.   The smell of sawdust fills the dimly lit garage.   Back and forth the sand paper rubs across the old dresser.   Sweat beads form on my forehead, but I love the work.   I see potential in this old, ugly dresser that was practically worthless.   I picked it up from a consignment store for $20, but it is solid wood and the right size.   Good bones.   It just needs a little TLC.  Well, maybe alot of TLC! And I am almost giddy with excitement.  I want to finish it tonight!  But I know that’s impossible. Transformation takes time.  I remove the back so no dirt can hide away from my careful cleaning.  Now for the sanding.  I am struck by a thought…  Jesus invested a considerable amount of his life doing this very thing!  God could have sent Jesus to be the son of anyone, but he choose to send him to a carpenter.  In those d...

“Mama, watch meeee!”  Muddy water splashes every where as little bodies slide down the glistening piece of bright orange plastic that drapes over the grassy hill in my back yard.  Squeals of delight drift across the yard and a warm breeze seems to blow them right up into the sky maybe through the clouds and into the heavens.  My heart is smiling.  The girls and I are all off for the summer, and we are having Fun!   FIve summers ago I called it the “Summer of Makiah.”  I felt in my heart that our family would be expanding soon even though we had battled secondary infertility since Makiah was a baby… so I determined that this summer would be all about her.  It was 2010, and it was just me and my little buddy all day every day.  We played barbies and mermaids and swam and visited grandparents and played with friends.  The news that I was pregnant came in June and a few weeks later we had the ultrasound with the fantastic surprise that it wa...

Every time I have a baby, which seems to be a pretty regular event around here, my whole schedule seems to be dumped upside down and in some ways my life is turned on its head. I have read a ton of books on making your baby sleep all night and live on a perfect schedule, but it seems the problem is my baby hasn't read a single one of those books!   So it is easy to feel that my time alone with God and my spiritual life regresses with every child! I feel such a struggle here. Even when I get up early it seems the little people wake up even earlier,  and I am often frustrated because I can't get much time alone with the Lord.   Doesn't it to seem like there should be a bargain here? That if I get up early to spend time with God surely he would make all those little people sleep just a little while longer? But it doesn't work that way! At least not on this earth…  I'm sitting on my porch this morning watch the pink ribbon of sunrise ripple across the clouds in the sk...

Sweet Makiah, It’s your birthday, Baby.  I hope you are still four up there in heaven, but you would have been nine here today.  Alena wanted to make you a chocolate cake, and I happened to have a Dora butterfly topper so it just seemed all perfect.  I can still see your blonde hair sticking up around that headband, your little legs in purple striped leggings, standing in the kitchen chair and licking your first beater. You would have loved the mess of chocolate mustaches your sisters made today!   Mommy and Makiah baking While your cake was baking, we sat on the  back porch and painted our toes pink for you... even little Eliana Bree!              Abby traced her feet with chalk and drew you a butterfly.  Mommy turned on the sprinkler and told the girls how much you loved to laugh and have fun.  It didn’t take two seconds for the littles to strip down to, well, not much and fill the yard...

Sometimes it's hidden away in a children's book.  The truth I mean.   We hunt for it like the littles hunt for eggs.  And sometimes it's right there underneath our noses.  Staring at us from the colorful pages as our fingers skim across. The picture shows that hill where Jesus died.  Three shadowy crosses are silhouetted against a dark sky.  And I read about the exchange between the three dying men; the one in the middle is the God-man.  How odd, I thought, that Jesus would share his crucifixion with these strangers.  That God would orchestrate the other men's crosses being forever remembered in books about the resurrection even 2000 years later. What a curious conversation as they hung there with life ebbing away.  The final breaths struggling in and out while voices cracked and blood dripped. One spending the last of himself to ridicule the God-man hanging between them.  The other asking for mercy even as the sun was setting on him...

I have been dreading this day for weeks.  Not just because it's my birthday. Not because of the getting older thing.  No.  It's one of those things that only a mother would think of.  Who else counts the days in their subconscious?  Well, God.  And me.  A few weeks ago I looked at the ticker on the top of my blog, and I knew it was getting close.  This year is full of landmarks again.  Then I did a quick guess at the time and had a terrible thought.  It was impossible.  No, too horrible.  It was late at night and I was up alone so I scrambled for a calendar and frantically started counting.  I counted how many days she was alive... again.  Yes, it was four years, four months, and four weeks.  Makiah lived in my house and snuggled in my bed and stole all of my kisses and my heart for four years, four months, and 28 days exactly.  Then she went home.  October 8th, 2010.   I started calculating how lo...

I am sitting here in our office (we use that term pretty generously in our house) sipping chamomile tea with honey because that’s what Peter Rabbit’s mom gives him when he is sick.  I am trying to win the match against a second round of the cold that has given half my house bronchitis and one a diagnosis of asthma over the last few weeks.  I am staring at a pile of little girl’s coats- leopord print, silver vests with pink hoods, hounds tooth with a fluffy collar, a coat that could be little red riding hood’s- piled high on the old wooden box that serves as our filing cabinet of sorts.  They aren’t in their usual place hanging on the little, wooden hooks that line the walls of our closet under the stairs because a certain two year old decided to climb the shelves in there while I was at work.  And the shelves collapsed.  And all of our games, puzzles, arts and crafts, and speech therapy stuff came crashing down.  It really was organized so nicely.  Bu...