Five-Minute Friday: Grit

She welcomes me to her turquoise waters, the place she prayed to land and live life when she was just a small thing. 

An answered prayer, spoken by trusting lips.

Our feet press against grains of sand as five pairs of little boy legs bound out before us across the stretch of beach, all gravitating to where the waves kiss the shore.

We settle into beach chairs for moments at a time to talk, to try and finish conversations began in the sun-set darkness of the night while my little ones slept.

But with little boys awake, sentences are fragments.

I've only known her through words for about a year, her face for day, a night, but I know her heart from the life details she spoke into the night about how beauty has spread out bright and vibrant across the grittiness of where her feet have tread sand and rocks, fragments of shells along the journey.

She runs after my smallest when I sink into a chair, a bee stings throbbing across the bottom of my now smoothed-by-sand feet.

I breathe in the brilliant blues of water in a moment of solitude while waves break apart at the shore, sun beats down onto water and skin, sand presses into skin.



Beauty doesn't always come gentle and easy.

And I see it clearly now.




{Written this morning in a very, very, very fragmented span of five minutes. How can five minutes be so hard to come by with a two year old?}

Everyday Life: Little Reminders

In the predawn darkness of 6 a.m. the kitchen lights leave the lillies he bought me for Valentine's Day aglow.



A week later, they've blossomed, bloomed and stretched wide open as we've gone about our everyday life, likely, from the tender care my grandparents have suggested and put forth in cutting the stems and replacing the water and clearing the decaying leaves.

As I wipe sleep from my eyes, the flowers whisper of love that transcends time zones and continents and the oceans that are in between my physical heart and my husband's.

And, too,  they remind me that love in all of it's flourishing beauty, like the lillies, doesn't always just blossom and glow; it's result of the tender care I sometimes brush to the wayside in favor of the immediate demands of life.

Today, I decide in the early morning hours of the day, I'll favor the delicate care.

Everyday Life: The Things You Love

I've been picking up the pieces of so much of what I really love, trying to put it all back into the spaces everything normally fits so easily.

But the thing is -- spaces in the heart sometimes move and morph when we've been growing and changing and transforming.

So sometimes things that fit before don't quite fit in the new stretched and altered skin of the same beating heart.

Because life is different now.

The pregnancy losses, the anxiety, the GI isssues, a forever-feeling sinus infection - each has taken a lot out of me.

Energy out.

That energy out had left little time for anything other than simply healing, simply existing, simply caring for the day-to-day needs of a family for most of December.

And yet a new day, a new year dawns and suddenly in that stretched out heart skin, those spaces beg to filled with beauty.

I pick up my camera for the first time in weeks, and I find in the swift finger click shuttercloseopen that the effort to capture is worthwhile because the warmth in the moments frozen in time reenergizes me.

I press-bleed bright colors onto creamy paper, giving story to the blankness freely with nothing and everything and I feel the pinks and purples and oranges flush through my veins in a burst of life.

I push my body into the setting sunlight and cold air of December and words begin writing themselves on my mind before they ever find pages while my feet pound the pavement; and the energy out actually replaces twofold with energy in.

I'm left in these moments of beauty with more that's come in than what's gone out.

Though none of the pieces fit quite like they once did, they come into the new-stretched spaces and begin to swell and fill the openness.

And I call this, too, healing.

Five-Minute Friday: Ordinary

The tightness that wound itself grippingly around my chest, like yarn being bound snuggly into a ball, has finally loosened.

I can breathe again, deeply, without labor or gasping; I can exhale.

There is a calm emerging in my heart, slowly stretching across my tensed body. In my unraveling and then raveling and then the even-and-perfect-tension hold of my heart strings and my body being knit back together by prayer and Promise, words and the Word, sister sojourners and rest and tears and laughter, I've a renewed appreciation of the ordinary, the everydayness of life has emerged.

the simplicity of two boys scooping soil with fingers, hands acting as shovels, beneath the brilliant sun of lingering Indian Summer 

the thumpthumpthumpthump of a heart rapidly beating as my feet pound the pavement in pursuit of a bicycling preschooler and running toddler 

the pre-dinner dance spent wrapped in my husband's arms beside simmering primavera sauce hovering over stove-top flames 

the glow of yellow and orange leaves rustling in the soft October breeze and the rebirth of daisies springing to life in the over-grown flower gardens outside our patio door

All the beauty that is overlooked when simply breathing and moving and healing takes precedence ... all the ordinary that is that I simply forget while simply trying to function is being gently weaved back into the well-tread spaces I walk my mind, my feet, my heart in the everyday.

{All of this --this is what being lovingly knit back together by ordinary moments and Extraordinary Love looks like.}