Yelling is a choice …. Yelling is a choice.
I am struggling. This is my ongoing battle as a mother. I am impatient, I want my girl to hurry up.
I am learning that being on time is never more important than speaking kindly to her.
Getting schoolwork done is never more important than living and breathing patience.
Obedience is not effective when enforced by fear, by volume.
When my frustration wells up in my throat and swells my voice and she hasn’t stopped moving, but never in the direction I want her to go, when I send her for shoes and she comes back barefoot with pen and paper …
….
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“In Christ alone, who took on flesh,
Fulness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones he came to save:
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied –
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.
There in the ground His body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain:
Then bursting forth in glorious Day
Up from the grave he rose again!
And as He stands in victory
Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me,
For I am His and He is mine –
Bought with the precious blood of Christ.”
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My daughter and I have some favorite bedtime books. You Are My I Love You is at the top of the list.
In this sweet story, a loving parent tells her babe . . .
“I am your favorite book. You are my new lines.”
We are a military family, and slogging through this Army life, we get a practical re-write every two to four years. A new story, fresh plot lines . . .
But between the scrawling lines of new heart friends and the terse scribbles of unfinished chapters and sometimes unhappy endings . . . there is a deeper re-write in my soul.
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It’s February today – thirty two days into the New Year. High time I shared my resolutions.
Except I don’t have any.
This year, this day and for all the days after, I have a slow and steady fierce determination in my soul. Just one.
Be more like Jesus.
Wake up in the morning and take one step closer the life and work of Jesus Christ.
There are sixty-six books that tell His story, the whole Story about the gospel and a Sheperd who came to serve and save. Sixty-six books that start me one foot forward.
That’s it. Because when I turn my life upside down to be upside down before Him, when I make more of Him than I do myself, when I set my soul upon the Word of Truth … oh friends.
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For at least half of the Christmas seasons I have spent as married woman, I’ve been newly pregnant or fresh-grieving the loss of a babe.
I identify with Mary very closely. I keep thinking of her physical feelings, her emotions at being an (unmarried) first time mother. (By the way – how do you think that conversation with the parents went?) Closing my eyes and thinking of her in labor. In a cave/stable/animal dwelling. The smell, the temperature, the dust, the pain. Cleaning, or trying to clean him. Nursing him for the first time. How sweet that moment is. Or scary, or frustrating, or overwhelming.
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Oh friends … tell me I am not alone today.
I struggle so much with my purpose here. With why I do what I do all day long … elbow deep in diapers and dishwater, I am overwhelmed.
And then-I read things like this.
Daniel 12:13.
As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.
The knowledge of, the security of where we are headed should utterly transform how we live while we are waiting.
How do we “go our way?”
Every thought, breath, word, and deed … every dirty dish, massive laundry load, floor mopping, toddler wrestling match, slow count to ten before I engage, should be tempered by the truth of the gospel.
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My sister lives at the end of a long and winding road.
There isn’t much at the fork in the road to indicate safe harbor. In fact, the jarring yellow “Dead End” triangle warns you away.
Oh, but there is nothing dead at the end of this road when you venture past the strongly worded warnings and come through the curve of trees dripping with ivy. The gray-green glow at the bottom of the hill hovers over you with a living light.
There is a squat brick box of a house, square in the middle yard, with an incongrous bamboo forest towering over the back of it.
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It was Mother’s Day last Sunday. A celebration for so many, myself included, but also a day of great sorrow for others – for the mother who longs for children her body cannot carry. For mothers who have lost babies in the womb and long after. For the mothers of prodigal children. For single mothers who are parenting for two.
I am {temporarily} in the last category … my husband is currently serving in Afghanistan. I’ve written before on single parenting three small children – it’s the hardest thing I’ve done yet, and I’ve been deployed myself!
You find yourself in these moments, in the trenches of motherhood.
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