Five Minute Friday: On Going and Growing

I miss you around here.  Sorry I've been a bit absent, lately.

The days have been frantic in a mess of boxes, last minute to-do’s, and hugs and tears and the like.  I’m carving out a quick five minutes, though, for my favorite five-minutes of the week…the ones where I pour my heart out without concern for perfection and invite you to join us.  Linking up with the Gypsy Mama.

Today’s topic, as usual, is quite timely.  It’s about growing.

GO

This has been a year of growing.  Stretching, twisting, bending over backwards to stretch my influence just a teensy bit more… reaching higher that I might internalize every single second of this journey.

I’m a tall girl, and wrought with decades of midnight aching, legs being stretched internally with agony.  I know that the act of growing produces pain.

And, that pain produces growing.

I’ve burnt that candle at both ends around here… hurt to learn, learn to grow, learn to heal, hurt to heal, heal to learn, grow to learn.  And I’m ever amazed by just what the Lord is up to in the midst of all this, the majestic sort of unknown that requires such faith to stand in the midst of the pain it takes to grow.

Today for some and in previous days for others, I have said goodbye to the boys we’ve cared for here… the boys not of my body but of my heart… the boys that have called me Mom anyway, and meant it… the boys that don’t have to love us, but do and they love better than I’ll ever know how.  Pain is at its tipping point, today.  Would you offer up a prayer for us, if you think of it?  A prayer for them, for their too-often-hurt-already hearts that shouldn’t have to bear another leaver?  And for me, for the lump in my throat and the shards in my heart as we take one more step, out of one kind of pain and into another, for the sake of growing.  For the anguish Husband and I will put ourselves through for being more ‘leavers’ to come and go from this place?  For transparent love, for traveling mercies, for healed hearts, and mostly, for grace.

STOP

Thank you friends.  I’ll be back around this place again soon.  We’re jaunting all through the desert landscape of this country through the next week, but my fingers will find their way back to this keyboard once the evergreens outnumber the cactuses.

‘Til then…

Ready. Set. Go.

Sometimes when God moves, He does it slowly.  And we frantic people run around anxiously, buzzing here and there, spitting out hasty prayers and all the while saying hurryuphurryuphurryuphurryuphurryupGodpleasewon’tyouhurryup?!

And sometimes, even after we’ve lingered awhile in that fretful pace of waiting, He moves with such gusto and solidarity that we’re about knocked clean over while we sit there with our jaws hanging open, silenced in awe at the way love and power and grace and wisdom can manifest in tangible reminders that God is who He says He is.

Last time I posted here, I said I was in a waiting place.

I had been there awhile, and I was getting restless.

And boy… was I bowled over this week when He swept me right out of that waiting place and into a moving place, a go ahead place, a tie-on-your-tennis-shoes-and-let’s-do-this-thing place.  And I struggled to get in gear because I’d sat on my laurels awhile already and stuttered and stumbled a bit when my feet hit the pavement.  My legs are a little wobbly yet, proverbially speaking.  

This is also a goodbye place, and it will be crushingly hard.  And it will be good.

For awhile now, my identity has been a little wrapped up in my one-word job description.  I am a houseparent.  I do residential child care for abused and neglected teenagers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and I wear a fat bracelet to cover over the other one-word identity that is branded across my wrist…the word in black under-skin ink, the reminder, directive, and command to my heart and hands:  “write”.  

I wear the bracelet because covering tattoos is a dress code policy and I wear the bracelet because covering and quieting my fervor for writing is the way I’ve managed to fill my time with anything else.

It is scary to call yourself a writer, isn’t it? 

This will be my last month as a housemom.  This will also be my last month as a Texan.  Come October, I’ll be back in Oregon – back in the land of pine trees and evergreens, lakes and rivers and cold northwestern air, and I will drink apple cider and wear a scarf again this fall while the leaves change before my eyes and the icy wintering air sucks the breath right out of my body. 

God willing.

And the life that is before me now will have less sweet tea and less southern phraseology and less laundry and (much) less high school football and hopefully less tears, but more of our families and more of the church I love and more camping and more laughing and maybe a glass of wine every now and then.  And more writing.  Much more writing.

I happened to stumble across this yesterday, and let my heart dance a bit with possibility while my stomach flip-flopped in all the possibility already before me on this new journey.  The High Calling is giving away one spot to the Laity Lodge Writer’s Retreat this fall.  I have been drooling unceremoniously over the creative non-fiction workshop by Gregory Wolfe for weeks already, but just haven't been able to make the dollars materialize so I could attend the retreat.  Laity Lodge happens to be a short drive from here, in my favorite part of Texas, and the retreat also happens to be during the last weekend I’ll live in this state.  It falls smack-dab on the days I’ll make my maybe-only-mental transition from Fumbling Southern Housemom to Fumbling Northwestern Writer, and… well… I really can’t imagine a better way to end my Texas journey to begin another one.  Consider me, High Calling, would you?  Would it help if I begged?  

And so, while I wait for the retreat winner to be announced and I wait for the pieces of my new stage of life to come together, and I pack up a house while thirteen people still live in it, I’ll have my hands full a bit these next few weeks.  Thanks in advance, readers and friends, for your grace if my presence around this place is a little spotty over the next few weeks.  Thank you, too, if you should happen to offer up a prayer on behalf of my family, especially the children of my body and the children of my heart as we all make a big transition this October, with many tears and many hopes and many sweet memories of the time we've had in this place.  May God be glorified, despite the fumbling.  

A Day Bittersweet

Beautiful Mother's Day Cards from Dayspring.com

Today is a weird day… a lot of up.  A lot of down. 

It’s Caleb’s third birthday.  My last baby… a bit of an end to all things baby.  Bittersweet.

And of course, it’s Mother’s Day.  And I now live 2500 miles away from my mom.  Bittersweet.

But beyond that, I’m a mom and I have little ones that celebrate and love on me and rejoice in this day beside me.  But I’m also a housemom, and there are nine kids alongside me today, some of whom can’t bear to say the words “Happy Mother’s Day”… some that whisper it behind the pain of what ‘mom’ means.  There are hearts in this house today that are broken, hearts that are angry.  Hearts that miss mom and hearts that rage and hearts that grieve over death and would really rather I not be standing here in the mom spot of their daily life.  But there are hugs and there are construction paper cards and Sunday School handicrafts and hard-swallowed mom greetings that I accept with a hug and hopefully a humble remembrance that it took a lot of heart-pain for me to be in their lives at all.

I’ve been praying for a broken heart – to break over the hearts of these boys that I may sew stronger stitches to them, that I may understand where they’re coming from.  And this morning as the church honored moms with flowers and the pastor thanked God for moms who love us and support us and put their needs last and it was all very happy and beautiful, He gave me the eyes to see through child-colored glasses… to notice the duality in the smiles of the boys whose mothers were not the kind of mothers they were supposed to be, and those whose mothers did the best thing they could have by letting them go.  And I was broken, indeed.

Bittersweet.  And beautiful.  And I’m grateful, today, for a Perfect Parent that’s hand slowly heals earthly parent wounds, where mommies and daddies fail, who covers our mess with a blanket of love-salve, and settles into hurt places even when we don’t see Him there.  So I continue to pray for brokenness, to see behind the eyes of the broken ones, and to connect the dots between my cracks and theirs, to remember that we aren’t so different and I ought not celebrate too triumphantly the rocky road they’ve had to walk, even while blessing whatever it took that I can pour love over them, love that flows through Father’s words and mother’s arms and gives me any time with these boys at all.

But I will savor these construction paper cards with fervor, for the difficulty it took to present them, for the names scribbled upon them, for what they represent.  And I will thank Him for the title… Mom… that makes up a one-word description that motivates everything I do, in work and in life and in prayer, and remind myself to do whatever I can to make it a happy mother’s day, whatever that may mean, for them, too. 

The Badge I Wear ... Guest Post at The M.O.B. Society

Mom.

It’s a badge of honor, that moniker, that tells the world of all the wounds I’ve kissed, the hugs I’ve given (and those I’ve received), and the battlefields I’ve lived upon.

But there are other words, so much harder to hear.
 
 ...   For the rest of the story, go check out my guest post at The M.O.B. Society today!  For those of you that aren't familiar, this is a wonderful, encouraging resource for Mothers of Boys.