I learn my biggest lessons from being married.  Which, as it happens, are also the hardest lessons.  But this last one was just a favorite lesson.

A couple months ago, Troy and I were having a pretty deep discussion.  It started with me telling Troy how awesome he'd been towards me and it rapidly declined into me crying and rambling about What if he couldn't sustain his feelings for me and What if I trusted - really trusted - that he would love me forever no matter what, only to be crushed if he were to change his mind?

(I know myself.  I can be really difficult.  I am not the most selfless person.  I am actually very selfish.  Troy is not selfish and is always putting his family and others ahead of himself.  I mean, how long can a selfish person really expect a selfless person to hang in there??)

He said something then that has had a lasting impact on me.  In fact, whenever I think about it, I realize that I'm learning more and more deeply about God's grace because of that one thing he said.

When I asked him how I could be sure that this time wouldn't end like the other times, when we'd struggled, patched things up, only to slowly fade into a silent bitterness towards each other.  He said,

"The other times, I made a promise to myself to be the husband I knew I should be to you, but when things didn't go the way I thought they should, I gave up.  This time, it's different.  I didn't make the promise to myself.  I'm not even making the promise to you.  This time, the promise is between me and God.  I'm committing to do the right thing by you and before God, no matter how you respond".

Last week, while performing one of the thousand mundane and routine tasks that so frequently beset a wife and mom, I started to talk with God.  I confessed to Him that I'd been selfish and distant from Him (boy had I ever been).  I thanked Him for His grace, which truly is amazing and thankfully, unending.

You know how you can know something forever, yet you can keep learning it?  That happened to me as I prayed.  I realized I was imagining God looking at me at that moment and, yes, covering my sin, but ... covering it because I'd prayed and confessed.  I made it about me and my contrition.  My words.  Thinking of it this way keeps me in the delusion that God's promises for me have ANYthing to do with what I have done.  Am doing.  Could ever do.  But I was suddenly so very aware that He doesn't love me, pardon me, provide for me because of my obedience (as dodgy as it is) to Him, but because of Christ's obedience at the cross.  It's not about what I do, it's about what He did.

(I have at least 3 caveats and addenda to this, but that's asking too much from this fresh-back-to-journaling girl)

Which brings me back to what Troy said that night.  He wasn't basing his promise on my performance, but had made it between him and God.  There's a lot of freedom in that. 

And in both relationships - with Troy and with God - this understanding has not made me think I can slack off all I want because they will HAVE to love me, it has made me want to serve them more and to get to know them more.  I love them more than I did before.  And, as I heard said recently, "Obedience to God for any other reason than a love for God, is merely penance".

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags. Isaiah 64:6 

But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, 1 Cor 1:30

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Cor 5:21

Lastly, I can't remember about cut tags and stuff.

Please Livejournal, don't delete my account. 

About six months ago, I attended my first baptism service at my new church.  It was so beautiful.  I cried more than I do at weddings. 

Before the person gets baptized, they have the opportunity to say why they are choosing baptism or to share a little about their faith.  This one guy got up there and through tears (maybe everyone was crying) shared a little of his story, then said something about his mom and how she was probably so relieved that he was living a different life, now.  She was in the audience and someone asked her to stand up and she was crying.  Tears of joy.  I really do think we all were crying.

I probably got a little more teary than I had been up to that point, because I felt so much joy for that mom.  A little later, I tried to imagine me being that mom, and how I'd feel if Cedric ever came back and chose to get baptized.  If I was sitting in the audience listening to my oldest boy profess his faith in Christ after the last two years of heartache, what would I do?  How would it feel?  I know that as I even just pondered the possibility, I started sobbing in the way that makes your heart feel like it really may collapse on itself. 

Now that it's happening, I still don't really know what I will do when I stand with the others and listen to the words my heart has been too afraid to hope for.  But I know how I'm going to feel, because I feel a fraction of it now.  Relief. Joy.  Thankfulness.  Gladness.  My heart is glad. 

He told me on Friday night that he had decided he wanted to get baptized today.  This wasn't when I learned that he had come to the Lord - I think for the first time - but it feels like the culmination of all my hopes and prayers.  All the time I spent with God when I couldn't even form any words to Him.  The nights I would stay up wondering where he was or what might happen to him.  It took a long time to get to the place where I could place him in God's hands and really, really mean it, but the heartache never, ever, ever relented. 

It has now.  I am so ... I don't even know what.  But I am.  A lot.

When working with kids, it's best to deflect the Full-Body Hug with the Side Hug; The full-body hug's more chaste cousin. Even better, you can follow the lead of one of the youth pastors at my church and avoid this awkward exchange altogether by offering up a preemptive High Five to each person you greet.

Continuing on this path, I believe it's best to limit all hugs to exclude embracing other men. I really like to hug my husband, but I would go so far as to say that hugging another man - especially a married man - would not become more uncomfortable for me with the addition of a leg-wrap, because the level of cringing discomfort inherent in the plain old hug is enough to ring the bell at the top of the tower.

With this in mind, let me tell you why I may have to change churches.

This one time, the pastor of my new church approached Troy and I and said a few words of greeting and sometime within the first few moments of small talk, he extended his arms slightly forward - elbows bent and palms turned slightly inward, as if holding a giant, invisible beach ball. I took this as the universal sign for, "Give us a hug, would ya?"

Not wanting to be rude, I obliged the silent request. Awkwardly and reluctantly, but I obliged.

This happens twice more during the last years that I've been attending this otherwise perfect church. But the only thing more awkward than actually HUGGING my pastor would be to leave him hanging with his arms extended, forcing him to pretend instead that he was merely reaching up to brush the hair out of his face. Especially since he has no hair.

Now imagine this: Good Friday. Standing outside taking my first turn at being a Greeter at church. Side-by-side with my foxy husband. The pastor approaches Troy and lets fly with the now-familiar Hug Me Stance. Which is really something, because Troy is even less of a hugger than I am. Stab you in the face, sure. Hug you? That's just weird.

I am cringing as I watch Troy just leave Pastor Ross hanging there - arms extended in a would-be-yet-thwarted attempt at an embrace. They finish up their 25-30 words and the pastor walks away. I tell Troy, "How could you not hug him back! How horrifying to just leave him twisting in the wind like that!"

I almost can't even repeat this next part, because it's still very fresh and it's hard to type while cringing. Troy said in his matter-of-fact way, "He wasn't asking for a hug. That's just the way he stands when he greets people."

I immediately tally how many times I've gone in for the full embrace and honestly, I may be in denial when I claim only three instances of rampant hugging. I just have to believe there were only three. I have to.

Fast-Forward to the following Sunday. I'm walking through the lobby and heading toward the door to take my family home. I smile at a friendly face or two. I see my pastor standing in the lobby and I see him look at me, smile and...

...raise his hand up for a preemptive high-five.

I'm That Girl, now. The girl you have to high-five before she hugs you. I am dying inside and stifling a silent laugh.

I raise my hand for the drive-by high-five and cross the remaining length of the lobby with that old, very familiar feeling I get when something is hilariously embarrassing. Ol' Trusty.

So now I wrestle with the decision to either find a new church - and possibly a new city - or stay with this church and boldly and without apology wear the Scarlet H.

I'm 40!  I feel like I've joined an exclusive club.  And saying, "I'm 40" for the first time was nearly as strange as saying, "I'm a grandma". 

My friend, Reina, threw me a birthday party.  It was the first party I've had, aside from the family gatherings we had when my grandma was still alive and living in her home.  My party was tremendous.  I found out about it when I received my invitation.  So it was a surprise party, but I was surprised by the invite and not by the the house full of people.  This was far superior!
( Read more... )

I was reading back in my journal(s).  Sometimes, it's like reading someone else's stuff.  It's a byproduct of the way I learn, I think.  I learn a lot by observing, but the kind of observing that is done from the inside out.  Like I am in the middle of the beast and peeking out from the guts.  It feels like I literally try it on.  How else can I know all about something? 

After reading and thinking, I've discovered my pattern.  It starts when I see something that I don't understand or is new to me.  I read about it.  Then I ask questions.  Then, sometimes, I dive in.  Then I talk about it, which baffles Troy.  He says, "Why don't you wait until you know more before you go on about it?  People are going to think you're schizophrenic."  He doesn't say these exact words, but this is the idea.  He is probably right, but old dogs, tricks, etc.

I usually hit either extreme before I feel like I have enough information to decide where I will land.  There was a time when I thought I should probably stop doing that, but I don't really want to.  I learn so much by seeing the east and the west of a thing.  It's also how I have become a sort of Cliff Claven of Little Known Facts.

I think this is one of the best things about studying God.  Theology.  I can't ever find the east or the west.  Well, I have found some extremes here, too.  Like, when I used to think that God was just love, Love, LOVE!  Only love, all the time.  Just a big bowlful of syrupy love.  Then I learned that He was holy, and that his Love was a holy love.  Well THAT changed everything about me, from the guts on out, and for a while, thoughts of His love stopped being the lens I saw through.  I think after all those years, I had to sit with his sovereignty and his righteousness just a little while longer.  

And now I see that you can't have one without the other and that the east only makes the west more amazing and the west just makes the east more unfathomable.  

I don't really care about finding the ends of anything else, anymore.  I mean, I love to learn about things still.  And I still love to research until the ends of the internet when I am trying to find the best set of sheets, but if I'm going to be peeking out from inside of anything ever again, I want it to be from inside the words of God.

I am so cold. 

I am sitting upstairs in my room, reading If God Is Good... (Wow, everyone read this.  It's one of the few non-bible books that I would force everyone to read if I could) and it is so cold, I thought that one or more windows was open. 

The problem is that the heater is turned off, because we have a fire going.  But I had to close my door (and thereby keeping the heat on the other side of it) because there was an ... incident earlier that has led to our house looking like a bar that still allows smoking indoors.  Minus the drunk guys hitting on the leathered women in tube tops.

I think it may only be marginally warmer in here than it is in my front yard.  But if I was in my front yard, I couldn't be wearing my ridiculous get-up, with a blanket on my lap with my fingers-like-frozen-sausages missing every other key on my laptop.

Today started like this:

I got up with 10 minutes to spare before having to take my kids to school.  This could have been much worse, had it not been for the fact that Troy was home today and he got them all up, fed and ready to go.  Still, I have to do *something* with myself, especially since I was going straight from dropping off the kids to my friends house to work out, and at the very least, I need to brush my teeth.

I get them in the car and I get myself in the car.  I leave the house, but I break one of my cardinal rules:  Put on some shoes and real pants.  You'd think that by now, I would have learned, but apparently that isn't the case.

I get about a quarter mile from home when my windshield wipers stop working.  And it's POURING out.  It doesn't rain here as often as it did in the northwest, but when it rains it's on.  Walking from my front door to the car door makes me as wet as I would be had I just gone for a dip in the pool.  If I were to have a pool.

So I can't see.  I try the trick where if you let the windshield get wet enough, then you can sort of see through it.  No dice.  I have to turn around and come back so I can take Troy's truck and on my way back home, I nearly hit two pedestrians (who really should look where they're going).

Problem:  Frank had a field trip today and they leave very soon after the bell rings and I am now going to be late.  I left my house super early (I always leave early JUST IN CASE) but I am going to be super late*. 

I get home and tell Troy that I have to take his truck, but the problem with that is this:  His truck is JAM-PACKED full of stuff.  I mean it, you guys.  Jam-packed as in you can't see out of the back window.  It's a stunning display. 

At this point, I become an absolute beast.  I'm so pissy that it has become despicable.  Poor Troy.  That man is a saint if only for the fact that he didn't push me down our front steps when he had the chance. 

Ultimately, we get enough stuff out of the truck so that I can get the kids in there (I thought I was going to have to take the kids in waves when none of them went for the "who wants to stay home from school!" offer) and we leave again for school. 

At the time, I don't even think about the fact that I'll have to walk the kids to the school office so that I can fill out a tardy slip for them (this is the first time my kids have been tardy.  For the record).  By the time I am halfway to school, I realize with terrifying clarity that I will have to make the trek through the school in what was really my pajamas, and that I'd be making the trek among all the other mommies who are wearing D&G and flipping their clean, bouncy hair over their shoulders as they talk and laugh with the other mommies over their portable coffee cups.

Also, I'm hauling up Frank's carseat to his class for his field trip (that I learned moments later was cancelled due to the rain) so in addition to being at my white-trashiest, I am also a Beast of Burden.

And this probably tops it all off:  Like I was saying - I've been working out with a friend of mine.  So my legs (my "quads", Troy says) are super sore.  So I'm walking sort of funny.  But I'm also walking funny because my slippers don't fit and, as is suggested by their name, they want to slip off my feet whenever I take a step.  So I have to walk in a way that keeps them from being flung from my feet immediately previous to each footfall.  

So here is me, walking in the rain wearing sweatpants with a crotch almost down to my knees, a white t-shirt and slippers.  Walking like I am in physical therapy for a car wreck that should have claimed my life and carrying a carseat that resembles a blue velour turtle shell.  I try to keep my head up and smile at the mom's as I  passthem, though I can't help but  notice that just before they pass out of view, they look a little too long at my feet.

I choose to look on the bright side and dwell in thankfulness for the fact that - while I wasn't pretty - I wasn't filthy.  I took a shower yesterday afternoon and so I escaped adding "hair so greasy, that the rain just beads up and rolls off" to my list of woes.

I then arrived almost half an hour late to my friend's house, who I couldn't call because I didn't bring my cell phone with me.  We worked out to one of the Biggest Loser DVDs which I felt was appropriate for the day.

*Well, just a little late.  But if I'm not 5 minutes early, I feel late. So being a little late is almost as awful to me as not showing up.  

its_nin and I have finally done what we've been threatening to do for years:  We've opened an Etsy shop.  

Juliette Green

(Named after our grandmother)

We have so many things we want to make and even so many other things that we have made, but we decided that instead of waiting until we have completed every project that we ever wanted to make, we would just pick a place to start and then actually start.

My current favorite hymn is Before The Throne. I think I have a new favorite every six months. In all probability, I will eventually come back around to the first and make my rounds through them all again.


Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea
A great high Priest who’s name is Love
Who ever lives and pleads for me

My name is graven on His hand
My name is written on His heart
I know that while in heaven He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart

When satan tempts me to despair
and tells me of the guilt within
upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end of all my sin

Because a sinless Savior died
my sinful soul is counted free
For God the just is satisfied
to look on Him and pardon me

Behold Him there, the risen Lamb
My perfect spotless righteousness
The great unchangeable I AM
The King of Glory and of grace

One in Himself, I cannot die
My soul is purchased by His blood
My life is hid with Christ on high
With Christ my Savior and my God

What is your favorite hymn?