Im not that techy and so I was trying to find where I post in the “about me” section…just in case you want to know more about the person behind the random thoughts and words…but I suspect it will take me quite a while to figure this thing out.  I hope to share other blogs, videos, books, etc…when I get rolling, God willing, but for now lets talk about 83 seconds from Walmart…

83 Seconds From Walmart

I am a 45 year-old stay-at-home wife and mom.  I am married to my best friend, my goose…or Eric, but mostly I will refer to him as my best friend, or the goose.  So, I was reading once about geese and how they mate for life, and things like when one dies, often the other one will lay down to die with it, or remain single the rest of its life…and so it is here in this earthly love we share and have committed ourselves to.  He is my goose and I am his.  We have now lived more years together than we have apart.  When you pass that mark, it somehow steadies you and you begin to believe what you’ve fought for all these years and realize its worth the fight, and that neither one is going anywhere…and only because Christ holds this union of two sinners together.  We have three grown children now.  I’ll write about them, too.  I wanted five kids and God gave me three.  Yep, He knew right when He wanted our nest to be empty and here we are.  I wanted to live on a hobby farm and instead I live 83 seconds from Walmart in small town suburbia.  Convenient, but I still want chickens.  I mean, 83 seconds from Walmart works when insidious chocolate cravings override reason.  I even have a picture of cookie dough on facebook to prove it.  What else?  My favorite place is early in the morning when Jesus beckons my heart to meet with Him.  There really isn’t anything better than this.  It is a place where I get low on this Holy ground in my home office.  A place He has invaded…heavy.  It is a place of weeping, rejoicing, groaning, singing, pouring out my heart and intimately conversing with my Savior who called me to life in Him.  Yup, my favorite place.  So He fills my heart and maybe the overflow will somehow make its way down to my fingertips and spill out on the screen of this blog.  Maybe.  If it makes you more curious about Him than me, I’ll write more…God willing. Oh yeah, then there’s floaters…. Sometimes I will write about “floaters” or I guess you could call them”wish-thoughts” but I just call them floaters because they are thoughts that randomly float in and out of my head….you know thoughts that start with “I wish…”  So back to the farm I always wanted…I call it the “floating farm” because that’s what it does…floats in….and out.  There is also a floating garden and I see me out there…me in a hat, barefoot in a long flowing dress standing on dirt.  Except I don’t own a long flowing dress.  And the goose reminds me that I’m not Carolyn Ingalls.  He’s right…Carolyn never owned an extra-wide pair of Asics so she could run 7 miles….or at least run to Walmart.  I do love to run. looooooong runs taking in as much of God’s handiwork as I can…its a beautiful time of worship and prayer for me.  If you drive by and see me with my hands doing a weird thing or one suspended in the air….well, now you know… yep, worship…plus its often where I write.  I wish for a lot of things…and when you look at the economic plane of our marriage, you will see that it is made up of two parts…one part saver, one part spender.  Guess whose, who?  Oh yeah, remind me to add the long flowing skirt to my list…..83 seconds from walmart is good for lists, too…especially when you forget your list….or when you forget items on your list…83 seconds is good when the walmart greeter has seen you three times in one day.  I also wished I named my middle daughter’s middle name, Rain….because I love rain. I love the smell of it and I love the sound of it…marching…out of sync….on my roof…..but my best friend said no, he said it sounded to hippie-ish.  Once I asked her if we could change it (her middle name) and I didn’t think she would ever forgive me….so serious that one…..she is our little bird.  Recently, I like to think of her as my rain-bird….and I’ll write more about that in another post.  Back to the floating farm…sometimes, it shows up and hovers a while….and I think, maybe one day it will actually land under my feet and I’ll feel its soft mud squish between bare toes…and then I hear the Voice without sound say, in a shiver-whisper…”you long for the floating farm, because you are really longing for heaven and to be fully in My presence…”  and I realize one day these bare toes will land in heaven….and the farm fades……I’m sure it will float back in again from time to time, but for now 83 seconds from walmart is close enough to heaven for me.

More posts to come:

“The rain-bird calls her mama,” once it rained for five months on my little bird, and once it stormed for a year…i’ll share if she lets me.

“Sometimes the goose honks”

“His heart is wild with color,”  (a lyric from the band Rend Collective). This will be on those beautifully colored spectrum kids…you know the ones….autism, aspergers, Sensory Processing Disorder kids…yep, I have one of those, too.

“Brain injury laughs,” So God gave us brain injury to live with in my oldest daughter….the posts could be titled, “brain injury cries, or dies, or shows you Jesus…yep….those God would wound much, he uses much…either Chandler or Piper said that, I think.

The post below is in celebration of the nine years I’ve truly been falling in love with Christ. I knew Him prior, but nine years ago today, He touched that deep, hidden place within me with the unbearable pain of my daughter Hannah’s accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury.  So today, I celebrate two things….she is alive and well, but more than that, I have fallen in love…

RAW LOVE

So there’s this love…you know, the kind that makes you want to dance in your kitchen twirling in delight…the kind that makes you gaze uninterrupted at the stars like you’ve never seen anything so glorious.

The stop and catch your breath kind of love…

the nothing in the world is wrong in this moment kind of love…at least that’s how it feels.

The searching for words, but silence makes it more beautiful kind of love.  If you’ve fallen in love, you know what I’m talking about.

Maybe that’s all.  Maybe there’s more.

Maybe there’s a a love that transcends feeling, time, joy, pain, grief, fear…the raw, knee-aching because they’ve been bent low too long, kind of love…

bleeding.

You feel it cry out from the deepest place inside of you.  You didn’t even know that place existed because you couldn’t feel it before. Before the pain came.  It was then you noticed it was there.

That place.  The pain made that place feel alive, and it was deep…so deep it scared you.  So deep, when you felt it, you knew you would never be the same.  It was that place where groanings replaced words and deep cried out to deep.  Because somewhere deep inside you, you needed to touch the deepest place of Christ and hear the Father’s heart.

It was the only way, really.

You prayed to know Him, really know Him, because over time your heart craved more, longed for more…

couldn’t breathe without more of Him.

But you didn’t know the door through which He would lead you meant loss.  I mean, you thought you could keep the things that made this world make sense…that made God make sense,

like happiness,

healthy babies,

strong and solid marriages,

loved ones here forever,

material comforts…

all good things, that He gave to you.

Those were such good things, some a memory now. They taught you to love…to love so hard.  But there was something different about that love, real as it was, as it is…that love didn’t come from that deep place, for it couldn’t.

He hadn’t yet touched it.

Oh, His prints were on everything.  You saw the work of His hands in your children’s round pudge, molded, cast and set perfectly on each side of their faces.  Their eyes that caught the sun at just the right moment or reflected the rain.

Their hair that smelled like…well, like them…

curly with sweat.

And you wished you could capture that scent in a bottle to remind you of small faces, nestled…. hiding in the crook of your neck…to remind you of the smell of love, because children are only for a moment in time.

All marks of God.

Skillfully wrought.

A tapestry of wild colors woven together in one child, and subtle, quiet tones in another.  Perfect.  You would breathe in life at its sweetest and it was well with your soul.

But your soul didn’t know there was a place that was left yearning, and so because He couldn’t leave that part of you untouched by His far-reaching love, He reached down into it…

and you thought you might die.

But it was there He taught you to love in a way that would never leave you wanting, except for more of Him.

Maybe some of you know what I am talking about.  Maybe some of you feel this craving, but haven’t been able to make sense of it…and something is stirring, something is whispering…”though you do not see Him, you love Him…with joy inexpressible.”

This love, this raw, bleeding love that cannot be shaken, or stolen, or broken, or forgotten, or provoked to anger or envy, or betrayed

or lost…

poured out like oil...

this infinite love you cannot see, yet wells up with inexpressible joy from that deepest part of your soul and says, “Welcome home, my Life, my Love…”because now it has entered there and betrothed itself to you…an unbreakable covenant love, and so begins the eternal dance that leaves you breathless with delight because His Name is Ishi (Husband), and He is faithfully leading you home.