November

Football games and dates with Dad

Cracker Barrel pancake night

Veteran's Day Tributes

Epic battles fought in the front yard

Teenagers

Girls' retreats

Doctors' visits

SCT rehearsals

 

Magnum Opus

Sometimes in autumn I wake my children early to look at the stars. We stand huddled together admiring the handiwork of the universe, and feeling comfortably small in the greatness around us.

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I have no great work to point to, myself - no book written, no stellar career, no large paycheck to my credit or marqueed accomplishments.

But, I can still be an agent of change in all the small places. I can find contentment in smallness, knowing that little acts of goodness also contribute to a life well-spent in this big universe of ours.

I can still offer the world gestures of attention and affection and be of service.

I can support a child in Ethiopia and write her letters dreaming along with her of her hopes of one day going to university.

I can visit my mom for coffee, and take a friend to lunch for her birthday, and listen to another whose loved one is recently diagnosed with cancer.

I can open my home for a Christmas party and lead a Biblestudy on Wednesdays.

I can invite family over to celebrate my mother-in-law's seventy wonderful years with a simple tea party.

 

 

 

 

I can concede to having my backyard overrun with whooping and hollering children who want nothing more than a raging Nerf battle.

I can drive the carpools and bring the snacks and oversee the management of our household and the five educations in progress.

I can get the groceries and ponder what to do with them and humbly ask advice from better moms who don't feed their kids chili dogs, spaghetti, and tacos.

I can be a soul open to wonder.

I can gaze at a sunrise and relish the cooler autumn temperatures and the way my bare feet feel on the cool pavement.

I can bask in the night sounds of crickets and marvel at the patterns found in flowers.

I can listen to the rain fall.

I can collect words in a journal and wonder if they will ever amount to anything, or if the joy is to be found in the simple act of noticing and savoring.

Sometimes when a magazine from my university shows up in the mail, I have a moment of smallness- not the good, content, all-is-right-with-the-world Anne of Green Gables kind, but the jealous kind. When I scan the list of awards and careers and causes I have a moment when I wonder if I am doing enough, or if the things I am doing count in the black hole of need in the universe. I have this same feeling as presidential debates blare and world concerns are argued. What on earth am I doing?

But when I am quiet and still and sit with this question, I am reassured that my magnum opus is to know God and follow Him however He leads, be it on a platform with a microphone, or hidden in thousands of small ways, and trust that if the assignments seem right to Him, then they are the best ones for me. He is the best judge of what a life well-lived should be. Of what my life should be.

I've recently finished a book by Lysa Terkeurst entitled The Best Yes. In the final chapter she talks about a legacy being built one choice at a time. This has given me perspective. I am not looking for one thing to give me identity, but a life filled with faithful and good choices, one moment at a time. He is my identity. My life will be well-spent for Him.

 

Flooded

We watched in a mixture of awe and horror as the flood waters following hurricane Joaquin approached our house for hours

 

Then we were amazed as the neighborhood dam was breached and the waters eventually flowed away.

The weeks that followed included bottled water, school delays, full responsibility for carpool, frantic searches for travel routes due to washed out roads, traffic jams, and asking The Lord how we could respond.

I found myself introspective and withdrawn in my house, safe and warm, and strangely guilty. I shut off the constant news reports which were making me anxious. I felt flooded with external stimulus and noise and my brain felt numb. I read a book upstairs for six hours during the rains while others in my city were escaping with their lives and children from rooftops. If I had a hole to hide my head in, I probably would have, baffled at my slow-motion reaction to stress.

In contrast, my "command man" was born for such a time as this and plunged into action for days helping his parents carry years of river-ruined possessions to the curb. The company was used as a site to receive cardboard boxes, and loading docks were utilized by the Red Cross.

 

 

Inside, at home, I had the girls bake pumpkin bread muffins for the Samaritan's Purse relief workers that poured into our church in response to the disaster. I bought diapers for the churchwide drive and cleaned out closets to donate sheets and clothes to the school drive. We sent in oatmeal when called for for emergency food packs. I arranged for the older kids to volunteer at their middle school sorting donations. I wrote checks and checked on people, and made calls to get someone help for a tarp on their roof, but it never seemed enough in the black hole of need and devastation around our city. I needed someone to tell me what to do. I needed to get my hands dirty and not just watch from afar.

Thankfully, organizations such as Samaritan's Purse and the Red Cross have organizing willing, yet unskilled volunteers down to a science. They are a well-oiled machine. They can direct people like me who care, but have no idea how to be of useful assistance. When I cry, "Here I am, send me", they can put unskilled labor to use.

 

Everyday life- for everything there is a season

Sharing an hour and splitting a milkshake with Mom

Sharing a lazy afternoon and homemade ice cream on a swing

 

Reading together for fun

Reading alone for a book report

Getting along

Not getting along

Winning and losing

Making connections between story lines

Making connections as lives intersect in high school

Orange and blue inside and out

 

Being the kid who whistles through life, even if no one else in the family wants to go swimming in a cold autumn pool

 

 

Celebrations and conundrums

Natalia's birthday falls on our anniversary. As an anniversary gift to us, we did NOT accompany Natalia to the Shawn Mendes concert last weekend at the fair. Thanks Aunt Nee Nee! (I hope your ears have recovered from screaming fan girls.)

Sleepovers and fall breaks...doughnuts and chocolate cakes

London Eye, meet the SC State Fair

Enter the era of "meet your mother at the rocket"

Meeting the complaints that four of us went to the fair and three did not with nonchalance.

Life is not fair.

 

Going to the friends of the library sale with the grandparents. Getting a funny look when all of us attempt to enter on one membership. Large family problems #42

Reading the Legend trilogy, the Lunar Chronicles, the Under the Never Sky books and the Fox Chronicles. Keeping up with my young adult book club reader kids and pondering Proverbs and Blue, Like Jazz while I drive four hours of carpool around our city

Applying words like miasma to family gas issues

Word girl humor

 

My huntsman

 

Enjoying dinner outside on the garden patio at Terra

Revisiting the autumnal problems of the long-married:

Yes, I understand and champion practicality, but I am also a romantic at heart.

Torn between conflicting ideals such as "Yes, I understand that you need downtime, a hobby, and friend-time too" and

"I still like to feel as exciting as deer season, football, or working out to you"

A do-over the next day and resolve

 

There are three things that amaze me- no, four that I don't understand:

How an eagles glides through the sky,

How a snake slithers on a rock,

How a ship navigates the ocean,

And the way of a man with a woman.

(Proverbs 30: 18-19)

 

Homework central

Somehow, on any given evening, our bedroom becomes homework central. It is a mysterious phenonenom seeing that there are plenty of other places kids could gather to do vocabulary words or algebra problems or read the biographies of presidential candidates. I think this is one of the things that annoys me now, but that I may someday miss. One child failed two tests while our tutoring services were otherwise engaged on the lounge chairs of Jamaica, so I will count this as one of the "back to reality" moments of 2015.

 

Better Together

We are thankful to share life with a great group of friends. Friends that are busy raising their own families and working their own jobs. Every five years, we defy the odds and go away to vacation together and celebrate our respective anniversaries.

Not a single SLR in sight this trip after the trouble I had with the humidity five years ago. Enter the era of the selfie-stick.

Which one of these girls wears the 50 SPF, sits under the umbrella, and still is developing crepe paper skin?

Girls night out at the French restaurant

Spa day after enduring a spirited time share presentation

 

 

First time I've ever tried the hot bath followed by an ice plunge. Brrr!

 

These are the friends that we cut up with. That we love to go to dinner with.

These are also the friends that prayed fervently when my mom went to MDAnderson the same week we were on vacation and got a great report. No cancer this time, just scar tissue!

While we were gone Amy's dad developed bacterial pneumonia and was flown to MDA when we returned.

We are recognizing more and more that there is a narrow circle of opportunity where travel is involved: when you have both the time, the money, and the health to get away. Perhaps five years is too long to wait for the next one?