Healing Tears

Crazy long weekend!  I sat down all ready to compose my Multitudes on Mondays post and just now realized that it is Tuesday.  So I'm a day late in publicly sharing my gratitude for the week, but then I stopped to think about how even this is a gift of grace.

Last night I spoke with a friend in an all too familiar situation.  Newly pregnant and experiencing symptoms that spark fears of impending loss.  Oh how I ache and hope for her!  I've walked those halls to have blood work drawn again and again.  I've scrambled hard and seen string of unfamiliar doctors, seeking hope in their care. 

Hope.  There is still so much reason to hope.

Has it really  been five and half years since hope was torn out like a rug from underneath me?  How has so much time passed already, and when in that sprinting time did my heart heal?  When we heard Angalina's heartbeat? When we saw her tiny body and heard her forceful cry? When we uprooted our lives and prepared for our future?  When Juniper came like a textbook? When we decided to expand again on a path requiring so much more perseverance, hope, and ardor than any pregnancy demanded of me?

The memories hope dashed no longer sear right through me.  Drops of grace have bled through.

Last night I sat on my bed and cried rivers of tears as I remembered, perhaps for the first time with thanksgiving, while looking through the box that was given to me to carry all the memories of our baby that never came to be.  My heart swelled with eucharisteo for the drops of grace held in that box: 

Words of compassion scrawled by those who had walked in the same river of heartache - especially the words of Grandpa Waylon, now reunited with his unborn child in the presence of Jesus.  Words of our own hope and devastation mingled in a journal illuminating the change in our lives from children to parents.  Tiny clothes given to and saved for the tiny one who never wore them speaking of the excitement and enduring love of a faithful friend. 

This box thought to contain the most painful of memories was opened at long last and found to be overflowing with grace. 

Open my heart today, Heavenly Father, to see and savor your grace in each moment.

From gifts 132-172
Emerson's 27th Birthday
Heart to heart with a dear friend
Happy baby news
Family #34!
Hubby's safety during tornado
Lying down to a chorus of thanksgiving.
Family devotions
Juniper's first haircut
the glimmering dance of hot coals
grace that covers my filthy brokeness
Ane's feet pounding down the hallway to find Baba & Papa
Seeing a friend at Wal-Mart
The Holy Spirit bags during the children's message
Seeing the baby rhino at the zoo
Remembering and grieving
Readiness in my heart to pass on my "box"

Taking Time to be Thankful for a Friend

This week I feel like I hit my first milestone in my list of 1000 Gifts as on Friday morning I recorded gift #100.  The past two weeks of recording, pausing, reflecting, filling with the wonder and fullness of each moment has begun to clear the gunk out of the eyes of my heart.  The discipline is training my heart.  Even in the mild annoyances of my life when I feel the frustration and anger begin to bubble up, I feel my heart reaching out for a place to hang thanksgiving, a place to pierce that which is seen and temporal so that that which is unseen and eternal might shine through the pinprick.  I don't think the hard eucharisteo ever become easy, but rather we feast our hearts on thanksgiving daily so that in the moment of crisis we have trained ourselves to know that no other response will satisfy our famished souls.

My dear friend, Sarah, my 100th gift was bittersweet to write in the morning as I headed to her "official" good-bye celebration at our Friday Bible Study.  I wouldn't even be a part of that sacred sisterhood had it not been for God's grace poured upon my lonely life one late summer evening at the park nearly four years ago.  That a spontaneous conversation pushing our babies on the swings would lead to such a friendship speaks to me of God's love for relationship that happens down on the nitty-gritty life on life level.  My sweet friend walked with me through my first years of motherhood and it's hard for me to even think about her moving away in just over two weeks without tears coming to my eyes.

Her leaving doesn't lessen the gift of her friendship.  In fact, finding the words to say good-bye has only deepened my affection for her as I took the time to consider all the ways she has touched my life.  My only regret is not feeling fully the weight of this precious gift until the moment of its leaving.  And so I will continue to endeavor to mark each moment with gratitude in hope that I might begin to feel the fullness of each moment swell together into a full life - being fully alive.

Here are some of the gifts from #70-128
Moving up at least three spots on the waiting families list
Spontaneous morning sermon to hubby who willingly listened
Hurried Hubby pausing to take out the garbage on his way to work
Books that can dry up tears
Break Machine
finding the words to say good-bye to a dear friend
Book Club
3 loads of laundry on the line before lunch
Diverse beauty and ability at yoga
Absent minded baking mistake
remembering the hard eucharisteo
sharing with hubby the grace in what I impulsively called an inconvenience 
a finished cake
Angalina performing her preschool program
The innumerable ways she has grown this year
Sarah, my first friend in this town
sacred circle of sisterhood in Christ
Fluffy balls of batter plopping into mini cups
Stranger's heart touched by our adoption story
Grace to cover every endeavor
Backyard plunder for dinner
Juniper playing in the pew for the whole service
Having to purchase more cake supplies
Hand and foot rubs after a long day of decorating
Baking bagels with Ane
her pink drawing of our whole family

Multitude Mondays

A few months ago I came across a blog that I thought was so simply, and beautifully written.  Somehow I noticed that the blog's author was soon releasing a book about living fully right where you're at.  It sounded intriguing, but mostly because a friend had recently written a book review of a book that for some reason I connected to this one soon to be released.  So I sent her a link and completely moved on. 

Fast forward to a week or two before Easter and I follow a link and arrive once again at the beautifully written blog that I had all but forgotten about.  This time I stay and browse through the archives.  I'm captivated by her life and her faith, and I find myself daily reading her words to refresh and inspire my heart.  It takes about a week before I drop the very un-subtle hint that for Mother's Day I would like her book.  And then my sweet husband, aware of both our limited gift buying resources as well as my desire spends extra time at work completing a teacher survey in order to receive an Amazon gift card so that he could purchase my gift.

And what a gift it has been!  I wrote a few days ago that I would wait until today to share a bit of what God is cultivating in my heart this spring, and here's why: I wanted to join in the chorus of thanksgiving that rises up and swirls together every Monday at Ann's Blog.  Her book is about living fully right where you are by doing this one profound thing - giving thanks.  Giving thanks for the grand and the everything, but also giving thanks for the minute, the skimmed over, the infinitesimals that make each moment.  And so I have begun my list of 1000 and more gifts.  Here are a few highlights from this past week of giving thanks:

1. Waking up in Hubby's arms.
2. Praying for our children (both in our home and waiting in Ethiopia)
7. Ane's hair iridescent in the sunlight under the apricot tree.
8. Mysteriously hot wind at dawn
9. finishing a book
12. tiny clothes on the line
13. planting brightly colored flowers
14. Seeing the garden take shape and begin to grow
19. Laughing on pillows in the dark
20. Encouraging a soon to be mom
24. Working as a family at the farm
25. Juniper talking to the horses
27. The scent of thunderstorms
30. Continuous indwelling of the Holy Spirit
31. Marked and sealed for eternity
35. Sister snuggles
37. Juniper saying "Yee Haw"
38. Homemade ice cream in the middle of the day
41. One orange iris
46. Tiny hands between mine at the sink
47. Words of truth sung out from child's lips
48. Teaching sisters to share
51. Shaping dough and shaping a heart
54. Passing on grandma's dumpling to my girls
60. Healthy kids
61. Warm, running water.
66. The quiet that only happens at naptime.
69. The way thankfulness molds the heart.

Breakfast Epiphany

Lately, oh let's say for the past 3 weeks, I've been working really hard at bringing some self-discipline into my life.  This has primarily taken the form of waking up earlier than what had been my usual for the past 3+ years and starting my day with the Word and prayer.  I'll not lie and say the first few attempts were easy.  In fact, they were brutal, but by God's grace I've been able to stick with it, and it has been such a blessing.  I get to spend a few minutes with my hubby before he leaves for work, and sometimes we even get to pray together.  I sip the coffee he expertly prepared for us, read, pray, write, just think and let my soul expand a little before the day starts chipping away at me.  The first few days the girls would wake up the moment my butt hit the couch, but I think even their circadian rhythms are now respecting this much needed time in my life.  I want to share it bit about what God has been speaking to my heart in these days of increasing my intentionality, but I'm going to wait til Monday, and hopefully it will be clear why.  Until then, I'll just discuss my "breakfast epiphany".

Now I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with cereal.  I distinctly remember a phase in adolescence when I ate wheat chex with a banana everyday for breakfast up until the moment I could think of nothing more vile, and went for months without eating a bowl of cereal.  I've been back to loving cereal for a while now.  I cannot think of a more perfect bedtime snack than a bowl of slightly sweet, but still nutritious cereal and ice cold milk (which, by they way I only drink out of a glass maybe once a month, and then only with cookies).  No matter how late I've eaten dinner by 8:45 my body is screaming for a bowl of cereal.  However, cereal in the mornings has become less and less appealing.  Maybe it has something to do with what I suddenly perceive as the ridiculous price, or the fact that the seemingly infinite number of choices at the store is reduced by 7/8ths when I take a glance at the ingredient list.  Seriously, BHT in every box. 

And so after looking through a brunch cookbook last night I smirk to myself, "I could make a decent breakfast for my family cheaper than the cost of buying cereal."  And while this might sound far fetched, I know it to be true because we have 3 dozen eggs from our chickens currently waiting to be used in my refrigerator and computing the cost of goods for my cakes I've realized just how cheap it can be to make something from scratch.

Then this morning after Ane insists on cold cereal and as we all sit down to the breakfast table I begin flipping through another cookbook and this thought hits me: "Not only can I make breakfast from scratch for roughly the same price as cereal, but I can make food that is way healthier."  Back to the BHT.  Is there anything harmful from daily ingesting a preservative meant to deter warehouse rats?  And what about the other preservatives, even just sodium?  What about all of the ingredients that have been modified for whatever reason?  I could make something so much healthier.  The only reason cereal (and other foods) are fortified with so many vitamins and minerals is because we've processed all the good stuff out of the whole foods to make them packageable and marketable.  So there.  This is my new goal - to make a healthy breakfast from whole foods to nourish my family from the beginning of the day. 

Now I just need to figure out what to do for my bedtime snack.