He is Greater.....John 3:30 says He must become greater, I must become less"

I stood near the break room of my office today and gulped down tepid coffee, to cool my caffeine headache a bit.  I was waiting for someone to go on a walk and do something....brave.  My headache mellowed and we set out on our walk and did something in one of those sacred spaces in time.....and it was very, very brave.  My Wednesdays are like that sometimes.  I think goodness connected and healing began.....and the power of friendship showed up. I took Precious Maryn today to her dress rehearsal for the 2017 dance recital this weekend.  She smiled through her jazz routine even though the little purple feather tickled her neck and had to be adjusted.  She managed to cope through her tap routine when her top hat kept falling off because it is too big now that we took her hair extensions out and she is all natural for the summer....and having her hat fall off made the teachers upset and made her uncomfortable.  Apparently I need to find an elastic stra...

Matthew 5:5 says Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.  The meek......not the leaders, or the politicians, or the mothers or the teachers or the doctors.  The meek.  Blessed are the meek.....Webster's Dictionary says meek is:  having or showing a quiet and gentle nature; not wanting to fight or argue with other people.  Blessed are the meek. I want to be meek.  I want to be quiet and gentle.......I don't want to feel easily offended, or prone to argue.  I don't want to feel proud, like I always know what is right, because I don't.  I want to be meek. Children are born quiet and gentle and are only taught to fight and argue.......and isn't it so much easier to teach them to fight and argue, than to be quiet and gentle?  I am sitting here now, thinking about the day we have had so far and there has been so much more fighting and arguing than quiet and gentleness. Lord Jesus, please empower me with the skill to be gentle a...

You know those days?  The ones where you think things will go a certain way, and you plan accordingly, and then everything changes with one phone call, or chance encounter or something.  Sometimes the plan changes to a horrible nightmare....sometimes to a surprise blessing.....but change is  always stressful.  Research tells us that we need some stress in our lives to be healthy.  Change is good for us as well.  Maybe the point of my thoughts today is what direction that change and stress take us. If the level of stress remains too high, health suffers.  Relationships suffer.  We suffer.  If change happens over and over and over without some pause and sense of routine and predictability, we feel unsafe and chaotic.  There needs to be time and space to balance all of it.  I took that time last week, thank goodness, before the craziness of this week started.  It is the last week of school for most of my kids and that is both a...

I am on vacation this week.....well, sort of.  I took a week of paid vacation from my job as a nurse to mostly do my work as a mom and homemaker......and I have to tell you that after 2 days of doing what most at-home moms probably do......I LOVE IT!  That said, I will be happy to return to my calling as a community health nurse and go visit my mommies and babies again next week. Today, I was pulling weeds and cleaning up the back yard, in a full on sweat.  I watched my sun tea steep in the mason jar.  I wiped my face over and over again and I was dirty from head to toe.  I planted some flowers.   I did 2 loads of laundry.  I emptied the dishwasher.  I did some thinking.  I added up the hours I would have to myself this week, and it came to about 24 hours of a 4 day work week.  You see, there are track meets for Jeremiah at noon on Monday and Wednesday and Josiah had a haircut at 2pm Tuesday.....but whatever.  For 4 nights I ge...

A week from today will be Mother's day.  This week there will be talk about buying flowers and gifts for the moms, of planning Sunday brunch or dinner as a treat to us mamas..... I still get to celebrate my mom, my step mom and my mom in law.  I have all 3.  I am beyond grateful for each of them.....so today, with Mother's day a week a way, I am praising God for them, praying protection and health and goodness for each one. My children here, that call me mom......they know.  They are grateful too.  Grateful in a way that says they can ask me to help them do their laundry, or review for a quiz, or snuggle on the couch in the morning and I will say yes.  They are grateful in that they know children who have lost their mom, like the kids next door, and they understand it could just have easily been this mom who died 2 years ago, leaving a dad to raise his children. I am keenly aware of mamas who placed their children for adoption, and especially for o...

For the past five or six days, things have been rather hard with Precious.  She has been having a hard time which makes me have a hard time.  This is a part of our life here, and I write about it, not to shame her or embarras her, but to tell a much bigger story of how important she is to me and to the world. Precious struggles with sensory processing issues and the effects of stress.....and that can look like a child who is crabby and upset and petulant.  For the past several days things have just been wrong.  I've tried all of my tricks and tools to make things right again......and they have failed.  Last night I told her I just needed her to find the way to "flip her switch" back again because I couldn't take very many more of these hard days for awhile. If you have a child like this, who has frequent meltdowns and struggles with food, with clothes, with chores, with obedience, with kindness at home....then you get it.  I have prayed and prayed and ...