Hey Sweet Friends!
I pray you are ready for the weekend and diving in to it in all the best ways. That means different things for each of us, but I am praying that your weekend holds a bit of fun and adventure, as well as a little peace and quiet, too! (And some reading time, because of course! That is why I love to hook you up with a Gathering of Awesome!)
Featured today are posts by Emily Freeman, Sarah Bessey, Laura Boggess, Ann Voskamp, Alia Joy, Lisa Jo Baker, Amber Haines, a post from right here, and - of course - a video to wrap it all up!
I pray you are ready for the weekend and diving in to it in all the best ways. That means different things for each of us, but I am praying that your weekend holds a bit of fun and adventure, as well as a little peace and quiet, too! (And some reading time, because of course! That is why I love to hook you up with a Gathering of Awesome!)
Happy Reading! (Ya'll know to click on the authors' names below to read the entire post, yes?)
* This one by Emily Freeman over at Incourage with What to Do When You Don’t Have an Answer...
“Several years ago I took part in a training on spiritual direction.
One of our assignments was to sit with two other people in our class and practice listening. One person was to talk about whatever she wanted to, and the job of the other two people was to listen.
We could not advise, quote Scripture, offer answers, or pray out loud. For a group of Christians, this was not an easy assignment.
Our only job was to listen, and our only words were to be questions with the sole purpose of learning something we didn’t know about this person and their experience. If the words we were about to say had a period at the end, we were not to say them.
We were only allowed to be curious.
We sat in our triad and someone else went first. As she spoke, I recognized within myself the desire to tell her things, to add my own perspective, to relate somehow with her experience by telling a story. But I followed the directions and asked questions instead.
It went on that way for about twenty minutes or so, and afterward I noticed I felt less pressure at the end of our conversation than I had at the beginning. I also noticed our storyteller looked relaxed and relieved.
Then it was my turn. I don’t remember exactly what I shared, but I do remember how I felt as they listened and started to ask questions about my experience, about the people in the story I was telling, about how I felt about it all.
The tears came unexpectedly and the feeling of relief and connection followed soon after.”
* This post by Sarah Bessey with Waking Up Together...
"This might be my favourite moment of the day. If she wakes first, she never cries, she lays there quietly watching my face and then she begins to paw at me with her not-yet-coordinated hands, reaching for me in her own way. Her firm little body is chubby and warm, zipped into her little sleeper. I feel the light scratches and pushes but when my eyes blearily open and I look right at her, she breaks into the wide open smile of a happy baby, all baby gums and delight and squeals.
It’s a good way to start the day, to make someone so happy just by being awake and paying attention.
I want to laugh out loud at the sight of her grinning up at me. It almost makes up for the 5:30 a.m. wake-up call. (Almost.)
Our life is pretty full here. Throughout the day, Maggie Love is just along for the ride and that’s as it should be. The big kids adore her but they are busy and loud and demanding, too. She is woken up from naps more than I would like, the doors are slamming as everyone is in-and-out-and-in-and-out with the summertime ease. I work from home and so often she sits in her swing or plays on her little baby-mat while I cram in a few minutes of work here and there.
But at night, we sleep together and then we wake up together."
* This post from Laura Boggess with Sabbath Slowing...
"Don’t I know that each moment is not absolutely equal? Haven’t I felt the way the kairos time—the holy time—slips into the regular ticking away of the chronos time? When the sun falls just so over the meadow, or my son looks into my eyes and sees me for once, or my husband reaches unthinkingly for my hand … these are the moments when the ticking of time becomes the steady dripping of a top on stone, the moments when time stands still.
What works for you in this way?"
* This post by Ann Voskamp with 3 words to arrest that comparison thief that’s robbing you of joy...
"I went and listened to the kid with the kid sister who had this birthday coming up. She was brave and honest and said out loud that she knew she was going to feel her tummy tighten into knots when everyone handed her sister all the presents, when her sister got the stage and the candles and the cake.
So she showed me what her and her mom had written on a piece of paper for her, for her to carry in her pocket, hold in her hand.
Just three words, scrawled on a scrap of paper:
I get enough.
I get enough.
The kid’s eyes dance:
“So I remember: I get enough cake, I get enough pretty gifts, I get enough people celebrating me too.”
That little girl holds that paper up: “I am not ever losing this. Because I can’t forget it — or that’ll ruin everything: I get enough.”
That’s right, girl — because a girl can forget. And that ruins everything.
A woman can forget that her life is enough. That her road is enough. That her calling, her story, her singleness, her chastity, her marriage, her husband, her vocation, her apartment, her house, her childlessness, her kids, her body, her health, her work is enough.
A woman can look in the mirror and find it impossible to say: I get enough.
One can forget how to believe: I get enough.
There’s enough scraps of paper in the world, that we could all tear up that myth of scarcity and write it down for ourselves, the certainty of abundance: I get enough."
* This post by Alia Joy with When Enough Isn’t Enough...
“I wrote last night, typing words with midnight behind me. Scattering memories into sentences doesn’t just give my experiences meaning, it gives them a second chance at redemption and beauty. It lets me see things pieced together, the seams of my life, where all the margins meet and even the worn and torn scraps are woven in. It makes sense of secondhand things. It invites community.
My tongue lingers on words, rolling them soft and pliable until they go down smooth, without the fire and burn of so many things. Maybe they are prayers, maybe they are lament or even praise. But these are not sweet things, not precious or tidy. Maybe I’ve held them close for too long and some have bittered. I’m startled that they scare me as I never thought myself a coward.
I wrote of a God of lost things, the god I’ve struggled to know when enough just doesn’t seem enough. I’m leaking words these days, and now that I’m cracked open I can’t seem to arrange me to fit back together. Maybe we’re never meant to be contained that way. God is a fissure breaking new ground and I can’t promise what’s coming.
I am herded towards a call to stretch my fingers to tapping keys and scratch my slanted pen baptizing with the blackest ink. It is the heaviest instrument I know, the weight of my soul in it’s tip, leaking out stories and place, demanding to be heard and spoken from.”
* This post by Lisa Jo Baker with How I Found My Lost Wedding Ring Eight Months After It Went Missing...
“There are some things that are true whether we believe them or not.
There are some things that are true whether we have proof of them or not. I don’t need a tan line on my left hand, ring finger to tell me that.
Baby girls who whisper their, “I love you’s” over and over again through lisped teeth and wide, blue eyes. Whose snores seem to be ripples of that love that carry on late into the night. Boys who fist bump the air when the rain stops and they get their desperate wish to run out onto the beach.
And Pete and I smile in quiet relief that we didn’t need to remember sippy cups or diapers for this trip. No one needs a pacifier. It’s a major milestone.
We hold hands quietly while our kids shriek in delight. Wave after wave of salty joy crashing up to their ankles. We walk in their footsteps and this is what fifteen years of commitment looks like.
The man who carries the buckets and the shovels and the bags and stops to photograph his nearly-ten-year old’s desperately proud abs.
These moments ring around us and the ocean stretches out in front and this is married.”
* This post by Amber Haines with HOMESICKNESS: AN INTRODUCTION AND AN INVITATION...
"All the striving to regain such feelings of home, even as I create home now as a wife and mother, I know none of it will do to give me peace. Home here really is a mere metaphor, but it’s one that anchors me. How wild and free we were when we were too small to care for ourselves in that hollow at the mountain base. The way I remember home is the same way the prodigal son remembered his when he found himself eating scraps. It’s the place we know we can go, where we’ll be received and fed. It’s where we know we have a name.
I’m not so naïve to think that most people have lovely child- hood memories of home like I do. I think we were the only people on the planet to have a ginormous swimming pool slide in our yard without the actual pool at the bottom. Even still, I wonder if you feel it too—the homesickness for a people and a place to belong, the desire for the freedom and safety you might find there, the thrill and the comfort. Maybe it’s what draws you toward the things you hold dear. We often hold on to memories, places, people, and things because there’s something of home in them. There’s a sense of freedom, the belonging that happens with real friends that makes you feel at home. So many of us are working out a homesickness, and I believe the homesickness is what all our wanderings are all about. We’re searching for home—a place of acceptance, a place of fulfillment, and a place of identity. At the basest level, we suspect that home is the place where we’ll find our fit, where we’ll finally be free."
* This one from right HERE (Well, from over at Incourage actually! My first Guest Post there!) with The Beautiful Partnership of Letting Him Make Us...
"Sitting beneath a canopy of branches, under the Nebraskan skies, I slowed to ask Him, “What do You have for me here, besides a bit of retreat –besides a bit of impartation and deeper connections?”
Immediately I felt Him whisper:
I have rest that you can take with you.
I have sunshine and breezes and white-rocking-chairs-on-front-porch-talks that will slowly linger, sink in, take root.
I have surprises that you won’t yet discover for months, maybe longer. But you will be able to count back to now.
I have quiet and yet not silence."
One of our assignments was to sit with two other people in our class and practice listening. One person was to talk about whatever she wanted to, and the job of the other two people was to listen.
We could not advise, quote Scripture, offer answers, or pray out loud. For a group of Christians, this was not an easy assignment.
Our only job was to listen, and our only words were to be questions with the sole purpose of learning something we didn’t know about this person and their experience. If the words we were about to say had a period at the end, we were not to say them.
We were only allowed to be curious.
We sat in our triad and someone else went first. As she spoke, I recognized within myself the desire to tell her things, to add my own perspective, to relate somehow with her experience by telling a story. But I followed the directions and asked questions instead.
It went on that way for about twenty minutes or so, and afterward I noticed I felt less pressure at the end of our conversation than I had at the beginning. I also noticed our storyteller looked relaxed and relieved.
Then it was my turn. I don’t remember exactly what I shared, but I do remember how I felt as they listened and started to ask questions about my experience, about the people in the story I was telling, about how I felt about it all.
The tears came unexpectedly and the feeling of relief and connection followed soon after.”
* This post by Sarah Bessey with Waking Up Together...
"This might be my favourite moment of the day. If she wakes first, she never cries, she lays there quietly watching my face and then she begins to paw at me with her not-yet-coordinated hands, reaching for me in her own way. Her firm little body is chubby and warm, zipped into her little sleeper. I feel the light scratches and pushes but when my eyes blearily open and I look right at her, she breaks into the wide open smile of a happy baby, all baby gums and delight and squeals.
It’s a good way to start the day, to make someone so happy just by being awake and paying attention.
I want to laugh out loud at the sight of her grinning up at me. It almost makes up for the 5:30 a.m. wake-up call. (Almost.)
Our life is pretty full here. Throughout the day, Maggie Love is just along for the ride and that’s as it should be. The big kids adore her but they are busy and loud and demanding, too. She is woken up from naps more than I would like, the doors are slamming as everyone is in-and-out-and-in-and-out with the summertime ease. I work from home and so often she sits in her swing or plays on her little baby-mat while I cram in a few minutes of work here and there.
But at night, we sleep together and then we wake up together."
* This post from Laura Boggess with Sabbath Slowing...
"Don’t I know that each moment is not absolutely equal? Haven’t I felt the way the kairos time—the holy time—slips into the regular ticking away of the chronos time? When the sun falls just so over the meadow, or my son looks into my eyes and sees me for once, or my husband reaches unthinkingly for my hand … these are the moments when the ticking of time becomes the steady dripping of a top on stone, the moments when time stands still.
According to Greek mythology, Kairos was the youngest son of the god Zeus. He is often portrayed as having wings on his feet, showing how quickly he rushes by. Ancient artwork also gives Kairos hair on his face but not on his head. This symbolizes that he must be grasped as he is approaching, because once he has passed, the opportunity is gone.”~Laura Boggess (that’s me!) in Playdates with GodThe only way to grab the kairos moments is to always be open to them. Walking does this for me. As does running. And reading. These are ways to turn my entire being toward God, to listen with my whole self. Sabbath moments.
What works for you in this way?"
"I went and listened to the kid with the kid sister who had this birthday coming up. She was brave and honest and said out loud that she knew she was going to feel her tummy tighten into knots when everyone handed her sister all the presents, when her sister got the stage and the candles and the cake.
So she showed me what her and her mom had written on a piece of paper for her, for her to carry in her pocket, hold in her hand.
Just three words, scrawled on a scrap of paper:
I get enough.
I get enough.
The kid’s eyes dance:
“So I remember: I get enough cake, I get enough pretty gifts, I get enough people celebrating me too.”
That little girl holds that paper up: “I am not ever losing this. Because I can’t forget it — or that’ll ruin everything: I get enough.”
That’s right, girl — because a girl can forget. And that ruins everything.
A woman can forget that her life is enough. That her road is enough. That her calling, her story, her singleness, her chastity, her marriage, her husband, her vocation, her apartment, her house, her childlessness, her kids, her body, her health, her work is enough.
A woman can look in the mirror and find it impossible to say: I get enough.
One can forget how to believe: I get enough.
There’s enough scraps of paper in the world, that we could all tear up that myth of scarcity and write it down for ourselves, the certainty of abundance: I get enough."
* This post by Alia Joy with When Enough Isn’t Enough...
“I wrote last night, typing words with midnight behind me. Scattering memories into sentences doesn’t just give my experiences meaning, it gives them a second chance at redemption and beauty. It lets me see things pieced together, the seams of my life, where all the margins meet and even the worn and torn scraps are woven in. It makes sense of secondhand things. It invites community.
My tongue lingers on words, rolling them soft and pliable until they go down smooth, without the fire and burn of so many things. Maybe they are prayers, maybe they are lament or even praise. But these are not sweet things, not precious or tidy. Maybe I’ve held them close for too long and some have bittered. I’m startled that they scare me as I never thought myself a coward.
I wrote of a God of lost things, the god I’ve struggled to know when enough just doesn’t seem enough. I’m leaking words these days, and now that I’m cracked open I can’t seem to arrange me to fit back together. Maybe we’re never meant to be contained that way. God is a fissure breaking new ground and I can’t promise what’s coming.
I am herded towards a call to stretch my fingers to tapping keys and scratch my slanted pen baptizing with the blackest ink. It is the heaviest instrument I know, the weight of my soul in it’s tip, leaking out stories and place, demanding to be heard and spoken from.”
* This post by Lisa Jo Baker with How I Found My Lost Wedding Ring Eight Months After It Went Missing...
“There are some things that are true whether we believe them or not.
There are some things that are true whether we have proof of them or not. I don’t need a tan line on my left hand, ring finger to tell me that.
Baby girls who whisper their, “I love you’s” over and over again through lisped teeth and wide, blue eyes. Whose snores seem to be ripples of that love that carry on late into the night. Boys who fist bump the air when the rain stops and they get their desperate wish to run out onto the beach.
And Pete and I smile in quiet relief that we didn’t need to remember sippy cups or diapers for this trip. No one needs a pacifier. It’s a major milestone.
We hold hands quietly while our kids shriek in delight. Wave after wave of salty joy crashing up to their ankles. We walk in their footsteps and this is what fifteen years of commitment looks like.
The man who carries the buckets and the shovels and the bags and stops to photograph his nearly-ten-year old’s desperately proud abs.
These moments ring around us and the ocean stretches out in front and this is married.”
* This post by Amber Haines with HOMESICKNESS: AN INTRODUCTION AND AN INVITATION...
"All the striving to regain such feelings of home, even as I create home now as a wife and mother, I know none of it will do to give me peace. Home here really is a mere metaphor, but it’s one that anchors me. How wild and free we were when we were too small to care for ourselves in that hollow at the mountain base. The way I remember home is the same way the prodigal son remembered his when he found himself eating scraps. It’s the place we know we can go, where we’ll be received and fed. It’s where we know we have a name.
I’m not so naïve to think that most people have lovely child- hood memories of home like I do. I think we were the only people on the planet to have a ginormous swimming pool slide in our yard without the actual pool at the bottom. Even still, I wonder if you feel it too—the homesickness for a people and a place to belong, the desire for the freedom and safety you might find there, the thrill and the comfort. Maybe it’s what draws you toward the things you hold dear. We often hold on to memories, places, people, and things because there’s something of home in them. There’s a sense of freedom, the belonging that happens with real friends that makes you feel at home. So many of us are working out a homesickness, and I believe the homesickness is what all our wanderings are all about. We’re searching for home—a place of acceptance, a place of fulfillment, and a place of identity. At the basest level, we suspect that home is the place where we’ll find our fit, where we’ll finally be free."
* This one from right HERE (Well, from over at Incourage actually! My first Guest Post there!) with The Beautiful Partnership of Letting Him Make Us...
"Sitting beneath a canopy of branches, under the Nebraskan skies, I slowed to ask Him, “What do You have for me here, besides a bit of retreat –besides a bit of impartation and deeper connections?”
Immediately I felt Him whisper:
I have rest that you can take with you.
I have sunshine and breezes and white-rocking-chairs-on-front-porch-talks that will slowly linger, sink in, take root.
I have surprises that you won’t yet discover for months, maybe longer. But you will be able to count back to now.
I have quiet and yet not silence."
Lastly, we close This Thing up with a video each week and sometimes it is funny and sometimes it is worship... this time, well - what could be better than Tina Fey and Amy Poehler with Jimmy Fallon? Enjoy!
Happy Weekend!
Thanks for the reading recommendations! And, I watched that episode of Jimmy Fallon - and you're right, it was really funny! The gift of laughter, one of God's great blessings. Can't wait to hear the sound of Jesus laughing!!
ReplyDeleteGOD BLESS!
Amen! I think Laughing is one of His favorite sounds! xoxo
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