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Receiving…
My strong friends, the ones who meet the needs around them are the first to offer what they have, and the last to ask for what they need. These women (and men) pour themselves out on behalf of others, and they sometimes forget that they need filling too.
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Puzzle pieces…
The grief of that reality has filled in a bit in the past few years. All my good intentions, my vows, and even my sacrifices could not protect them from life, or from me. My hopes slid down my face, as they began their own journeys into the unknown. They were raised with love and brokenness. I think that’s really all we have to give.
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Take responsibility for your one wild and precious life…
As I look at my calendar, I am thinking about what I want this fall to feel like. What pace do I want in my life? How do I want my days, weeks, and months to feel? I’ve made a list of this fall’s responsibilities. Keith and I have talked about our goals, and our hopes and made decisions about time off, travel, and our social life over the slow days of summer.
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Our vows, now…
We have faced many kinds of better and worse over the course of our long marriage. We learned to fight for understanding, and for one another. We don’t always agree. We have very different ways of seeing the world, but we’ve learned that being together has made our best days better, and our worse days much less daunting.
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Midlife threshold: Recommit
In that dark time, I realized that my faith had been built on a wide and deep foundation of need. My need. I had come into this relationship empty and broken by grief and loss. The need had seemed unending. And yet, here I was over twenty years later realizing that my need was no longer enough.
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What can be shaken...
This season of turbulence has shaken everything, but what is left is very strong. It feels like a strong wind moved through my life and took everything that was not entirely secure. What is left, feels tested and true.
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The faith of our youth…
When my kids were little, I had visions of our shared future. I imagined myself surrounded each Sunday morning with a throng of kids and grandkids filling a couple of pews in my local church. My hope was not without precedent. I had seen extended families gathered, maybe not every week, but often for holidays like Easter and Christmas. I looked longingly when I saw families of multiple generations gathering to worship together in the pews of our little church, and hoped someday we might fill our pew with a gang of worshippers in their Sunday best. Share this...FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedin
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This is the good stuff…
Maybe the most important thing I took from that season was a new awareness that my purpose doesn’t lie out there somewhere, but right here in the ordinary cadence of my days. Who am I to love and serve? Let me see, who I can see from here?
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Church lady 2.0…
In order to stay, I know I will have to manage my heart and my expectations. I will need to let the church off the hook. She can never fulfill my need, nor live up to my hope. She will continue to stumble and fall, just as I stumble and fall.
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A Central Organizing Principle…
On the other side of raising them, I feared I would never find another thing that would be as beautifully exasperating or as completely demanding as being Allie, Brian, and Stephanie’s mom. It wasn’t that I didn’t have things to do, but I seemed to have lost some central cord that helped me navigate life.