Life As We Know It

Thank you to all of you that emailed and sent Facebook Messages to encourage me. I love being able to have a place to document our life...my version of our memoirs I think. I am learning so much about life and myself in this season and have always shared what I am learning about myself. It isn't always pretty, but I so strongly believe that if you see the ugly and bad you will also eventually see the good. The process with me is raw and vulnerable, but it somehow is doable with people. I guess it is my belief and deep need to not do life alone. I LOVE community and simultaneously HATE community. It is hard and taxing and hurtful, but it is also refreshing and rewarding and safe. Community has looked so different for me in the past 2 or 3 years. It no longer just the people in my immediate circle of life, but has broadened to those that choose to be in my life via the internet and text messages and phone calls to far away places. I have loved this year and have loved becoming a wife and a momma. It has been challenging, hard, confusing and frustrating, but I love that I get to experience another part of life and see more of who God created me to be. I also love sharing life with those around me via the blog. Thanks for hanging out with me in all the ups and downs! It really is fun to picture people reading these posts and to even hope that God is using them to make people laugh, reflect on their own life and be ministered to in deep secret places by my words.

Who knows what this year holds for us. As I write this Sam is at work, but at the same time chomping at the bit to get to Christchurch where the massive Earthquake just took place. I, too, am doing some chomping of my own. I have watched people taking blankets, baking and hope into the welfare centers (shelters where people are staying that have no homes/power/water) and I have desperately wanted to be the one down there delivering those things. Sam is working on getting down there next week to document this national/international event. I hope that he will be able to go and use his talents to tell the story that is unfolding and even do what he does best: tell the untold stories that are hidden within the tragedy. I will not be able to go. The irony of that is unbelievable. I longed for years to be a wife and a momma. Now being a momma means I miss the "action." Don't get me wrong I LOVE being a momma and am SO thankful for Maximillian, but life is different now. Adjustment. Not bad, not horrible, just adjustment. One day we want to take Max with us into situations like this to allow him to discover his gifts and grow in his compassion, but right now his little body is a bit to small to go.

There will be more disasters in our world unfortunately and more chances to bring hope. Today I bring Max hope. Creating safety and consistency in our home. My prayer since the day we brought him home has been, "Lord helps us to live in a place where who Max is created to be can fully thrive. Help us to parent his strength and develop who you have created him to be." Funny how my prayers so instantly changed. They no longer were for jobs and money and things for us, but for Max to live in a family and place where his gifts can thrive no matter where that moved us or didn't move us. My little tribe is growing and changing and I am thankful that I have a husband desperate to tell the world's stories and that I have a little boy's story I am watching unfold albeit in the form of not napping consistently and being so strong willed at 3 months, it is his story nonetheless.

Max and I taking a little break at the beach. We both love and are at peace there.

Sound asleep next to the waves