Mommyhood Unrefined

"God is far more interested in who we are becoming than what we are doing." -Alicia Bruxvoort The relationship between us and the Lord is beautifully demonstrated through the very complex parent/child relationship. In Psalms it says a man with many children is blessed and respected by his opponents. Not only are we blessed to be parents, but in Proverbs we are also assigned the tremendous task of training up our children in the way they should go. Children are then commanded to honor the parents, their teachers here on earth. When we are teaching our children to trust that the guardrails we set for their behavior and their safety are for their good and, ultimately, God's glory, there is a huge lesson in that for the parent as well. To set guardrails for our children and know how to raise them up in God's ways, we as parents must constantly submit to God's authority over us. The phrase "mother knows best" has always sounded absurd to me. As a par

There are days my world stops spinning. Everything that is wrong hits me at once and, despite my struggle to weave my thoughts through to a solution, I end up stumped, frustrated, exhausted, and in the exact same place I started: stuck. Grief has frozen me more times than I can count and I end those days with weights of guilt. Somewhere along the way I realized that, even in what seems like nothingness, there is still something whether my hands and feet are moving or not. There is still a God who has not surrendered His authority. His hands and feet have not stopped moving. His goodness has not stopped overflowing. His love has not stopped giving. His power has not been defeated by the circumstances that defeat us. Those frozen, mind-numbing days are still preparation for the next ascent. As dark and as draining as those days are, they still serve a great purpose. This gives my soul such rest. I don't have to go fight for something I can't change or foresee. The battle has

A dear family friend, Dan, passed away two weeks ago from cancer. He was diagnosed two weeks after Ryan at the end of 2013. Dan and Ryan went through chemotherapy treatments at the same time and we never felt alone in our journey with these dear friends by our side. This was a struggle we all wanted to walk with real faith, abundant hope, and integrity. This was a journey we rarely needed words for to know what we should be praying for one another. To be partners in this great suffering was a privilege. While Dan was still in a stable enough physical state to attend church, he approached me alone in the pew every Sunday and pointedly asked me, "Are you finding joy?" Every time he asked me this I was caught off guard. There were times I wanted to melt into a puddle and times I wanted to blurt out, "Of course not! Not today, not even this week." As I looked at the grand scheme of our life, everything that was broken, all the dreams that were lost, and all the p

"But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. ... Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against God." 1 Corinthians 8:9,12 Paul was writing this to the Corinthian church addressing and confronting food offered to idols. If you think about it and really let those words sink in, you'll find that the passage above applies to many more facets of life besides just food. One of the hardest and most overwhelming moments when we discovered Ryan's tumor began growing again two years ago was when regular seizures became an ongoing side effect. Our day to day routine of living life was now plagued with restrictions. Restrictions people of Ryan's age rarely have. Those were a hazy few months and it took so much energy and thought to sort through what was safe, what suddenly wasn't, what had to be eliminated, and what still had some free reign. The question we fou