What God Gives

October 22, 2015October 23, 20152 Comments

Some may say, God gives you only what you can handle. But in my personal experience I have lived the exact opposite of the well known phrase.

What God gives has always been so much more than I can handle.

There was a time when I believed the old saying and in my times of heartache I pulled up my bootstraps, mustered up my strength and marched on like it was something I could handle.

But over time I have realized in all my handling and mustering God was not giving me what I could handle at all. Instead, God was bringing me to a place where I could find the end of myself. Where my strength, faith and hoped ended is where I found my need for others to come alongside me and hold me up when I couldn’t hold myself up any longer even with the sturdiest of bootstraps.

I found my need for something bigger than myself.

In pain and loss and suffering, God gives us more than we can handle, the weight is too big for us to bear alone.

But when God give us more, God also gives us Himself. In Him, God supplies more hope and more faith than we could ever muster up in our own strength and through His people God gives us so much more love than we could have ever even imagined for ourselves.

This week our family experienced a traumatic accident. My father-in-law, my husband’s best friend, was struck by a car at seven o’clock Tuesday morning.

What God has given us since that moment has been the end of everything we thought we could do in our own strength.

It is amazing for me to think of all the blessings I have personally experienced this week and I know my husband, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law can testify to so many more personal blessings as well.

God has given us the timing of this accident to happen when my husband was minutes away from where his father was when normally he would have been two or more hours away.

God has given us friends who are willing drop everything, loan their new car, their time and their energy to spend the night with my four young children so I could drive down and be close to my husband in his heavy moments of grief and uncertainty.

God has given us two people who held the elevator for us the same night as the accident as we were running to catch it. They asked us who we were visiting and as we shared our story they shared that their son was in the trauma ICU too from an accident which had occurred the day before.

God gave us them, complete strangers, to whisper the words, we will pray for Mack. We learned their son’s name was Tommy and we whispered we would pray for Tommy too.

I asked as the elevator was closing, because we had gotten off, where they were from and they said St. Louis, a beloved place to my husband and I as we spent our first three years of marriage there while he was in seminary. The couple held the door open to tell us they were saved by a Covenant Seminary student twenty years ago.

As we left them they told us their son was going to be okay, as was the other student from Asbury in the car who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. In that moment God gave both my husband and I hope.

God gave us that moment. He was the weaver of two completely different stories crossing paths at the same time to give the gift of hope for another day.

God has given me people to pick up tortillas for taco night, friends to sit with my kids while I gave my older child the regularity of volunteering in his classroom and friends to send pizza over because all I can do right now is throw pizza on a paper towel.

God has given us people who will pick up new guitar strings so my husband can play music for his father while he is laying in a hospital bed.

God has given so many visitors at the hospital. So many more than my husband can even count.

God has given us hundreds of people praying across the country for my father-in-law. So many texts, emails, phone calls and messages. More than any of us could keep up with even on our best days.

In these hard moments and in uncertainty, God has given us so much more than we can handle. The burdens and heartache have been too big to bear alone.

But God has also given us more prayer and more love than we can handle.

God has given us more love.

God has given Mack more love. And I believe it is the more love that keeps us going. More love than we can handle. Because love is bigger than burdens and hard places.

If you have prayed for Mack’s recovery, reached out, visited, brought groceries or have been a friend, I personally thank you for showing me how God can give me more burdens than I can bear alone but also more love than I could have ever imagined for myself.

If you are praying for Mack please also pray for Tommy and all the others in the Trauma ICU.

Thank you for praying and for giving more love than we can handle.

The Night Before…

August 17, 20152 Comments

Tomorrow I will go in for my first Breast MRI. This is a routine, preventative MRI purely for early detection purposes.

I received the order for this MRI in January but I have been putting the whole thing off.

Today I am a thirty-two year old woman. Wonderfully married with four beautiful children. My oldest son loose toothed in first grade and my youngest daughter almost two.

Holding onto fear in the unknowns, I have held onto my order for an MRI in hopes that I could freeze time.

Twenty-five years ago my mother was a thirty-two year old woman. Wonderfully married with three beautiful children. Her oldest in first grade and her youngest two years old.

She found the first lump in her breast when she was thirty-two.

As I go in for my MRI tomorrow I am mostly confident that I am perfectly cancer free. However there are parts of me that find myself seeing my life following down the same path as hers.

I fear her story will be my story too.

And as faith and fear collide for me here on the night before my first big step towards preventative screening I just ask for your prayers.

Living in the night befores and waiting on the unknown pieces of my story are not my favorite places.

Tangled up in fear and even sometimes clinging to the worst possible outcomes.

Please if you think of me tomorrow just pray for me as I navigate the unknown.

Even though I know a great God, who knows the number of hairs on my head, tonight I feel afraid of what tomorrow could bring for me.

And I feel weak in faith.

Please pray with me if you think of me tomorrow, it will be a very emotional day. I’m already so tired.

Thank you.

Thankful To Have Been Her Daughter

April 6, 2015January 2, 20161 Comment

Seventeen years ago on Tuesday night of my spring break freshman year, April 7, 1998, I lost my mother and I will never be the same.

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For a little while I was her daughter. She was the first one to hold me, she was the first one to kiss my boo-boos and the one to tuck me in at night.

She was my safe place when I had a bad dream in the darkest of nights and the one who knew all the places where I felt ticklish.

For a little while I had the privilege to be her daughter in this life.

For a little while I had the privilege to let my mother hold me.

To hear her laugh.

To see her smile.

To experience her love of life.

I never appreciated the role of being her daughter while I had the chance. I’m a stubborn one who always wanted to grow up too quick. But in time all things unravel and I can see now, seventeen years later, how sweet it was to be her daughter even if it only lasted a short fourteen years.

It was so sweet to be her daughter for a little while. Even though we battled one another in my teenage years I was never unsure of her love. I knew her love for me was unchanging no matter the circumstance.

She loved me at my best and she loved me at my worst.

I am thankful for the time I had to be her daughter and thankful how God has used that time with her to make me into the mother I am today.

I try to pass on the incredible woman she was, my own four children will never get to hear her laugh or see her smile. I can only try to pass on the incredible woman she was and the memories I have of her.

I could never be even close to the woman she was. Not even close. She was so much wiser, stronger and carefree. And cool. But I can pass on the good parts of her as best as I can.

I am learning to be more like her. To laugh more and complain less. And to love while I have the privilege of being a mother myself with a BIG love.

I am thankful for the privilege to be her daughter. Even if it was only for a little while.

I am better because of that time.

The impact of her life and the good of the woman she was will live on through me forever.

I am thankful to have been her daughter even if it was only for a little while.

You Are My Sunshine

February 20, 2015February 20, 20151 Comment

There was a time when I couldn’t sing the song, “You Are My Sunshine” without crying. Somewhere near the part about taking my sunshine away, the tears would begin to blanket my eyes, the tears wouldn’t fall but the blanketing tears were present, enough to blur my vision and remind me of grief.

With my oldest it as been difficult to sing the song so, for years, we have been exchanging phrases while I hoover over his bed…

you are my sunshine…

you are my daisy.

you are my warm summer day…

you are my giant ice cream cone.

For a long time, I haven’t been able to sing the words “you are my sunshine” to my oldest child. Too many blanketing tears would come to blur my vision.

Tonight was different, tonight, I made it through a whole diddy of you are my sunshine with my youngest son without the blanketing of tears. At the end I whispered to him, “you are my sunshine.” and I looked right at him with pure eyes and a happy heart. (In return my son half sleepily said, “you are my poopy butt diaper.” I giggle because in a strange way he is being affectionate and silly.)

But tonight, I made it though a whole diddy of “you are my sunshine.” That is progress for me and this is the moment where I can see the hope of moving on shining brighter than the dark nights of hovering phrases and blanketing tears. The time isn’t healing my wounds but Jesus is. He is binding them up ever so carefully and making me able to sing sweet songs to my kids over their beds in the darkness.

He is gentle with His love and He is patient with my grief.

“Love is patient, love is kind.”

I remember my mother singing that song to me. I can still hear her voice, her voice sounds just like the voice I have grown into as a woman and as a mother. It hurts my heart that she is not here and my kids can’t know her, but God is finally moving me to a different place in my grief. With Jesus binding the hurts and God renewing me, I can see that my kids knowing my mom simply comes from my kids knowing me.

My mom lives on in my songs.

My kids can know her through knowing me.

I am her sunshine, so my sun is beginning to shine bright in the darkness of grief.

Finding Shelley At Christmastime

December 17, 2014September 21, 20162 Comments

For years I have struggled to find her. For seventeen Christmases I have looked for her but I have been so overcome with grief that my eyes couldn’t see what was right in front of me.

Christmas is a hard time of year for anyone who has lost a family member.

As a fourteen year old girl I lost my mother and it has taken me almost two decades to recover.

For as long as I could remember I was waiting for others to bring her back. I put the expectations on others to do Christmas like she did and each year Christmas passed and my expectations were not met. I felt disappointment and loss in the belly of my soul and this made the cycle of grief start all over again.

Finally, this Christmas I have found hope. I have found the hope in honoring her, after sixteen other Christmases have passed. Sheesh, it feels like it took a lifetime. But today it was worth the wait.

Today, I found my mom in the simple words of a recipe for Christmas cookies. Just one taste of the uncooked batter brought me back to childhood in her kitchen years ago. I baked Christmas cookies with my kids today and I told stories about my mom at Christmas.

I found her in the handwriting of her recipe book. The large loops in her cursive and the perfection and consistency of each stroke.

While I iced the Christmas Tree shapes and added the red hots I told my sons this was something I looked forward to every Christmas as a child. I told them I would even sneak bites of the refrigerated batter and how my mom would catch me anyway.

There have been plenty of opportunities for me to choose bitterness and loss and grief at Christmastime. There are plenty of opportunities for me to stick in the cycle of grief and let the bitterness take root and grow.

If she was here it would be different. It would be better. I do miss her. My kids and my husband have never experienced her laughter. My kids have not been able to experience the blessing of involved maternal grandparents.

I could choose to celebrate Christmastime with emptiness each year.

But instead, I choose HOPE in the midst of loss and unmet expectations.

Hope falters the growth of bitterness. Choosing hope at Christmas is a choice.

I choose to find my mom in the traditions and the stories. This has not happened overnight. It has taken sixteen years of sadness and choosing grief and the plauging seed of bitterness over the fruitful seed of hope.

Hope is what would be honoring to my mom at Christmas anyway. She wouldn’t want it any other way. If she was here she would tell me to dry my tears and teach my children to find her at Christmas. Grandma Shelley is not here physically but she lives her in our traditions.

Finding Shelley in the traditions is a choice.

Finding hope in loss is a choice.

Finding Shelley at Christmas has taken me almost two decades but I am thankful I found her today. In the cookies. The simple cookies with the red hots.

And I hope to pass her on to my children. I hope to give them hope. And stories. I hope to teach them that God’s story is full of people who lost but these same people had their eyes fixed on something Greater.