Imagine sticking your fingers on your pulse
and thanking God every time
He gave you another blood-driving, brain-powering thump.
We should.
And we shouldn’t,
because if we did,
we would never do anything else with our living;
we wouldn’t have the time to look at or savor
any of the other of our impossibillions of gifts.
~N.D. Wilson, Death by Living, p108~
I have been sitting here by the fire, by the tree, one toddler napping, two young boys creating desserts with playdough… and I have been contemplating many things. Including how different it would be if I had a little newborn here resting on my chest. Fidelis would have been born this week, presumably, and to continue moving forward through time continues to reopen so many hard corners. Yet at a Classical Christian school’s Christmas concert last night (we wanted to go fellowship with friends, and let the kids cheer on some of their friends on stage!), rather than sitting there wistfully thinking about how hard it is to have a small family when I have a big-family-heart (which is SO true in my life every single day), the Lord mercifully granted me the thought instead ~ how marvelous that our laps are full of these three amazing miracles and that God is giving all five of us SUCH JOY in this music and this night and this place and this fellowship! So God’s faithfulness continues to show up in many facets, with many nuances, in many different circumstances. My joys AND my sorrows are beautiful because they have been given to me by my Father.
Of course that doesn’t mean that my sorrows don’t make me cry just like my joys make me laugh.
It just means that I occasionally have the grace to recognize that my life is a masterpiece created by The Artist with skills that utilize both light and shadows for His glory. And sometimes He even gives me the eyes to see beauty from His perspective.
The right kind of hard man is hard for his wife. Soft men are hard on their wives. In the same way, hard men are hard for their people; soft men are hard on their people. As we deal with these perilous times, we need hard pastors — pastors who are hard for their congregations, not hard on their congregations.
We need Christian leadership, in short, that is meek and gentle in its responsiveness to the Word of God, and that absolutely refuses to budge whenever the world demands it. And that is something that I am afraid we do not currently have.
~Douglas Wilson, blog~
And it was downright delicious.
We were created to eat!
The eating experience is as much a part of living as breathing.
The natural cycle is to eat, become satisfied, take a break—then eat to get satisfied again.
There’s no getting past it.
We are wired to get satisfied from food…
~Trim Healthy Mama, p37~
I love to eat.
And in my very honest moments, I have to admit that giving up food and wine felt like more than I could manage.
What I eat and what I drink are little moments of joy throughout the day—the things I think about, plan around, daydream about.
… No one changes their life until the pain level is unmanageable, and in all sorts of ways for me, the pain level had reached the unmanageable point. …
I felt like I wasn’t living in the same world everyone else was living in.
It was like choosing to live with the volume turned all the way down, or going to the beach but not being able to put my feet in the ocean.
My senses were starving. …
There has to be a way to live with health and maturity and intention while still honoring the part of me that loves to eat, that sees food as a way to nurture and nourish both my body and my spirit.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p137~
Three years ago today, we left our first home and moved to our own home ~ one we designed ourselves, had built by a friend, and which was not complete when we moved in. But we have spent the last three years nurturing, training, and fellowshipping with one another in this home, and we have worked to finish some things in the house along the way. But the best part? That this house is a place we have made our home, by God’s grace and provision. We designed this house to be a place of hospitality ~ primarily for our family, specifically for our children ~ but also for friends, brethren, neighbors. Just last month we had thirty people from our new church over to eat and sing with us, and we’ve had four different families over for meals and a few playdates too. Just in the last month. Because the Lord is good! And because we have a home which we want to use for His service, blessing His people, and nurturing the people He has put in our care.
Home.
A place of rest while we are on this earth.
A safe place for our children.
A place to love and be loved.
A place that is beautiful.
A haven.
With enough money, anyone can create a pretty house.
But it takes intention to create a home.
~Myquillyn Smith, The Nesting Place, p181
THEN (2011):
NOW (2014):
One of my top priorities for my home is for it to be a place of beauty. Notice I didn’t say I want my home to be perfect. Also, I really don’t care for it to be expensive. Beauty is something altogether different. I’ve yet to meet a woman who wants her home to be ugly. Enjoying beautiful things is part of being human. It is how God made us.
~Myquillyn Smith, The Nesting Place, p68
Proverbs 14:1
The wisest of women builds her house,
but folly with her own hands tears it down.
If you stay anywhere long enough, it will start to accumulate some shadows.
And those shadows make it no less beautiful. It makes it something like home.
It anchors you there in ways that a steady diet of pleasantness never will.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p235
Proverbs 24:3-4
By wisdom a house is built,
and by understanding it is established;
by knowledge the rooms are filled
with all precious and pleasant riches.
I realized with clarity that this—this pausing when the whole world keeps on going—is living.
~Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Mama, p23~
There was no contest: looking into my children’s eyes beat staring at the screen of my smartphone. Hearing my loved ones’ laughter won hands down over the incessant ding of incoming emails. Seeing empty space in my calendar for laughing, playing, and relaxing soothed my depleted soul.
~Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Mama, p37~
Do not sigh while you are washing the dishes. Do not have a pity party, and do not teach your children to act this way, because they will learn from your example. If you work cheerfully and use the time well, you will teach them to enjoy their work too!
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg215~
Some find the idea of working with children impossible. This is a wrong perspective to have. Children do not need constant entertainment and play. They need to be learning from you. Even on big project days, they can and should be learning from you. With the right attitude from you, they will learn that work is satisfying and fun. You just need to plan carefully to make the process conducive to learning and fun.
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg291~
Managing the kitchen well makes everyone’s time in the kitchen more productive and enjoyable. When the kitchen is well-kept, creativity flourishes.
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg282~
Lower your expectations and realize that as long as we all choose to walk around clothed, the laundry will never really be finished. If we live fully in a home, there will be messes. Why does that surprise us and make us feel guilty? As long as we eat, walk, and need places to sit down, the kitchen sink will have a few dirty dishes in it and the living room will never be clutter-free for long.
~Myquillyn Smith, The Nesting Place, p50~
I know that most of us are longing for something. I know that longing is part of the deal, part of living in the not-yet-heaven. I know people who are longing to marry, who are longing to be healed from disease, longing for their children to come home, longing for the financial pressure to release. I get that longing is part of how we live. But today I feel angry and boxed in, like the system is rigged against me and everywhere I turn, someone else’s body is blooming with new life, while mine still, again, is not. …That’s why it’s hard, I think, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I love that line from the Bible, but it’s so incredibly difficult sometimes, because when you’ve got reason to rejoice, you forget what it’s like to mourn, even if you swear you never will. And because when you’re mourning, the fact that someone close to you is rejoicing seems like a personal affront.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p127~
I’m still hoping for a happy ending, but if there is one for us, it will be a little off-kilter and not nearly as tidy and poetic as I’d hoped. It will carry inside it a whole lot of tears and longing, and a few good lessons learned watching the lake one Saturday afternoon. I’ll keep celebrating the good news with each friend and each new baby, until maybe I’m the only one left in that dwindling circle. And I’ll ask for help and tenderness every time I find myself crying in the bathroom. And most important, I’ll choose to believe that sometimes the happiest ending isn’t the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p129~
We mothers, like everyone else who struggles under the weight of sin, tend to forget the gospel, and our ignorance of the hope we have in Christ spawns rotten fruit such as identity crises and discontent. We need to remember that God is no less good to us when we find ourselves in a battle of wills with a preschooler in the checkout line at the grocery store than He was as His Son dragged a cross up a hill that Friday two thousand years ago. God mercifully intercedes in those moments and shows me that His ways are above my ways. By God’s grace I can resist the temptation to treat my children as interruptions to my will for my life. Instead, God enables me to treat my children as precious gifts He is using to shape me into His image according to His will for my life.
~Gloria Furman, Treasuring Christ When Your Hands are Full, p55~
We need Christ. And never more have I needed to feel His embrace than when I have given up one of my children into His arms. Through the years, through the deaths of nine children, I have felt His presence in various ways. Sometimes it is through reading Scripture or a Christian book on suffering ~ Job, Psalms, the epistles of Paul; Nancy Guthrie, Elisabeth Elliot, and Shauna Niequist touch the tip of that iceberg for me. Sometimes it is lovemaking with my husband or handholding with my children. Sometimes it is dessert left on my front porch. Sometimes it is a candlelight vigil on our front lawn. Sometimes it is a baby oak tree, sacrificially planted by a dear brother in Christ. Sometimes it is crying, other times it is laughing.
But the ultimate point is this: I feel Christ’s presence perhaps most tangibly when someone else, another person who is knitted into Christ’s body like I am, is with me. Whether it’s an author, a meal-maker, a note-writer, someone to sit next to me on the couch, someone who wants to look at pictures of my babies or their memorial items… when someone else enters into these moments with me and touches both the joys and the griefs alongside me, it shows an aspect of Christ to me.
I have felt Christ in hugs. I’ve tasted Him in chocolate chip cookies. His compassion has knit its way tangibly into my soul through letters and cards. His empathy has decorated my home with flowers.
When I am in grief, what do I need? I need the arms of Christ!!
I am so thankful for how He has used His people to wrap His arms tangibly around me through the years.
Thank you for the flower bouquets, the notecards, the Pizza Hut gift cards, the food left on my porch, the homemade bookmarks (a tatted one, a scrapbooked one), the emails, the poetry, the rose bushes, the oak tree…
Thank you for the prayers. I know that I don’t always feel them in quite the same tangible way, but I know truly & deeply that the prayers of the saints around the world who have held my family up through prayers during our grief have been life-giving and life-sustaining.
…When I read it, I put my head down and sobbed, in sadness, but also in gratitude, for a woman who knows me well enough, even after all these years, to know what words will stitch me back together when my heart is broken.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p114 ~
When you’re mourning, when something terrible has happened, it’s on your mind and right at the top of your heart all the time. It’s genuinely shocking to you that the sun is still shining and that people are still chattering away on Good Morning America. Your world has changed, utterly, and it feels so incomprehensible that the bus still comes and the people in the cars next to you on the highway just drive along as if nothing’s happened.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p119 ~
We don’t learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p132
So when you are faced with an opportunity to bless someone in their grief, do not be afraid to go the tangible route. I’m not saying not to pray for them, of course! But I am saying that one of the greatest ways to minister to a hurting person is through the tangible. Through food, the written word, your physical presence (even if you are holding a candlelight vigil in the front yard while the person is passed out in their bed inside the house), flowers arriving on the doorstep. Be the arms of Christ. Not just through prayer, but through physical acts of mercy.
Tomorrow, on October 15th, I will be sharing some of the things I remember about each of my nine babies specifically. But for today, I wanted to share that some of the things I remember most about my seasons of grief are the various ways Christ’s arms have enveloped me through His people. Tangibly.
When you feel the Lord prodding you to embrace someone in His name, be His arms. It is one of the most beautiful privileges and responsibilities of belonging to Him, of bearing His name as a Christian. To be His arms to someone else. To be His instruments as He heals the brokenhearted and binds up wounds (Psalm 147:3).
