For the easy price of some Facebook marketplace furniture, we’ve been soaking up this Spring weather every day. It’s always the simplest things – second year plantings showing progress, the bossiest chicken, herbal bouquets, all the weeding and tidying that has me tired at bedtime. Knowing the peace that comes with doing your part and leaving it all for God to bless.
These simple, spring-time days, just one step at a time.
Christmas marks the natural end of a year, and holding true to themes of this particular 12 months, its surface is strange. A little off kilter, unpredictable, an exercise in showing up while holding plans loosely.
It’s easy to feel exhausted as we limp across the finish line of 2020, but in every sense the good news of God-with-us is the good news for right now. What better season to feel His covering of grace and peace over our chaos and uncertainties. What more certain place to seek joy than in Jesus alone.
I’ve had to take time to remember these truths in all the lightening speed of December. As beautiful as the lights shine, and as sweet the smells at our Christmas feasts, the truest and most lasting gift is Himself. Fully Lord and fully man, here to reconcile sinners with a Holy God.
Merry Christmas. xo
In warm climates, you make what you will of the seasons. Humidity hand in hand with pumpkins become their own kind of tradition.
Among other unexpected joys – – –
indoor s’mores over chafing fuel flame
wearing soft sweaters in the morning
leftover flowers from a plant loving neighbour, long since moved
garlic & parmesan dipping oil for focaccia bread
spicy mochas on a Sunday afternoon in our favourite spot at the coffee shop
As people with both feet firmly planted in the ground, it was a pleasant wildness to take to the hills for a weekend.
As a planner, it was chaotic free-falling to find hotels as we went, decide a route as we drove and end up further from home than we anticipated.
Snacks packed, full batteries and the mystery of another unexplored corner of Alabama, then Tennessee…then Georgia.
After every trip there is the pleasant fatigue of things you wished you had time for, and the gladness at having gone. This trip shared that, but also gratitude for cooling temperatures and a friendship no matter how scrappy, built to last.
2. Our new-to-us piano.
(If I had know how much entertainment and joy it would bring, I’d have insisted on moving it in months ago!)
3. Snacks at the drive-in movie theater.
4. Catching “smocking fever” and completing other cute projects.
5. This curious little alligator coming to say hello on a country road.
6. Feeling better after a nasty bout of Covid-19.
(And thankful for breath, energy and the many family and friends who checked in on us daily.)
~What have you been loving lately?
Wesley jumped out of bed on Sunday thinking he was late for work until we consulted the calendar. And this week I switched from baking therapy to quilting, and that’s basically how I’m marking memory sign posts these days.
Otherwise, life can be a confusing stretch of days full of nothing and simultaneously the possibility of everything.
In a time when we’re thinking about numbered days – of both life and isolation – the time is also the most tremendous gift. A spotlight onto the abundance we truly have under our roof.
Warm clothes or air conditioning as the climate dictates, books, ideas, White Lily flour, a milk frothing whisk. Watching Lord of the Rings in bed or learning to make homemade yogurt.
What a colourful and inventive world God has given us to exercise dominion over, no matter how small that sphere may currently be.
So happy quarantining, friends! There is value in all kinds of small days.
Grading papers, conserving eggs, rearranging furniture. Planting some seeds, rereading books, baking, praying, worrying, calling home, lather rinse repeat.
Yet in good times and bad there are so many reasons to give thanks. Full cupboards, Sunday afternoon drives, summer weather that’s come to stay.
It isn’t naive to hope, or expect contentment in all things. Paul’s secret itself is not reliant on circumstances, but in doing all things through “Him who gives me strength.”
Peace of heart and mind rooted in who He is, not the rise or fall of a bell curve. Looking carefully to His promises of care, provision and mercy above any other human promise.
We ask for daily bread because we know who our Father is, and because we know He alone can certainly give it.
Sometimes there is the blessing of no-before. The kind amnesia of not remembering a time without love. No time when food wasn’t steaming from a pot on the stove.
No time before dressing up cats in the barn and running barefoot without fear of thistles.
Where there has always been rugs and curtains and comfort meeting beauty overhead.
Never a time outside of His careful watch, guiding even in the stubborn, bangs across my forehead days.
No time before hope, crystallizing on the windows along with a winter morning’s frost. Nose to the cold, icicle in hand, just knowing because I know, because I know- that my future is safe in His hands.
Our life can be defined by before and afters, but sometimes, I’m simply thankful for the linear nature of being His child.
Faithful father yesterday, today and tomorrow .
Scribbles 