I sat across from the man I love on the bed we’ve loved in since we were first married ten years before. I sat and smacked fist into palm and said it again and again and again, “But this can’t be what I’m supposed to do with my life.”

And there it was – the old frustration that stuck in the back of my throat and that I hadn’t been able to swallow down for two long years. Two years of two-hour commutes and long hours at the office and away from my kids. Away doing work that didn’t fit the me that lived inside my frustration; long hours aching with the wanting to be doing something else.

But I didn’t know what it was.

I just knew that there was something else. And it started with wanting to be able to encourage women.

So I sat across from the man who’s known me and loved me since that night we played baseball on the national mall and then walked the long way home back to 8^th street. He was as patient with me then as he is now.

He spoke to me of callings. He reminded me that every ounce of frustration I felt was part of what helped me translate my story into one that other women could relate to. And he told me that it was these broken, hard parts I was living that would feed my words.

I watched him in the glow of the two yellow bedside lamps and saw that he heard me. He got what it felt like to not be doing the something I thought I was made to do. But he showed me that without this struggle I wouldn’t be able to encourage women the way I felt called to. Without fighting the balance of motherhood and work and self and calling and commutes I wouldn’t understand where many other women need encouragement.

I spent a long time thinking about this. And months later I wrote about it to my friend, Holley:

So, I have been thinking about you today because I am at a conference discussing some groundbreaking work to bring justice to the poor and afflicted. For many years that is the kind of work I have been involved in also. But, I have consistently felt this call on my heart to speak into the lives of women. Young mothers and wives who feel that what they do isn’t important.

I don’t know many who would consider that a needy population group. But I sure do. I am them.

So, I blog. I write my heart out to this beautiful audience who need to be encouraged as I wish someone had done for me. Because young mothers and struggling women have great needs too. And while it’s not my job, it is my delight to be used by God to be part of the plan for meeting them.

I wrote it at 1am and I found that putting those words down filled me up – with joy, with purpose, but mostly with relief. My story is useful to others because of the frustration I’ve juggled. My story can encourage because I know how it feels to feel unimportant. My story translates the stories of many other women because it is so seemingly ordinary.

This thing – this something else – that I had been waiting for? Turned out it had been unfolding in my life all along. Right there in the commuter lane, in between making school snack packs and tucking kids into bed I’d been finding my voice.

And when I write about my every day ordinary mess, I am connected to the women I so desperately want to encourage. The women I want to wrap arms around and laugh with and say, “You’re doing far more than just OK, sister.”

God has made a way for me through the frustration and into the nooks and crannies of other people’s stories.  It has grown from my passion into my job. I can lay myself down right where I am, word by word, plank by plank, and build a bridge that connects us.

There is a Carpenter who shows me how.

And you? You who fume and flail and question the now that you’re living? Maybe we have this frustratingly perfect route in common.

Perhaps what is hardest about where you are right now will end up being the wood and nails and words that connect us.

Write it down. Build the bridge.

That many might walk across.

::

Tomorrow I will share more about what my bridge looks like, but today – what about yours? What are the hard wood and nails you have to work with? It’s OK to be frustrated with them.

::

While you’re here, wanna sign up for my posts by email?
It’s quick, painless and free! {just enter email address}

Delivered by

We might worry that our words unfurl and flutter away from our small corner of the night into the vast cosmos of the Internet. We might tilt our heads and look way, way back at the stars twinkling from so high and think, “I will never burn as bright or share as powerful, or tell a truth that sears the collective mind the way they do.”

And then we look down at our scuffed carpets and feet and hear the voice that mutters, “Why even bother?”

May I sit down next to you? May I sit crisscross apple sauce on that pock marked carpet and whisper into your ear?

Small, my friend is exactly the right size.

Small is understanding ourselves in true relation to the God who made us.

Small is being able to write fearless, without worry about big criticism.

Small is fitting into our own shoes.

Small is how the Savior fit into our skin.

…but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness. ~Philipians 2:7.

Small is the size of every new beginning. Create without a measuring stick. And after a while you might forget the size of your voice.

–you’re so caught up in the scope of what you ache to say.

::

Want to keep up with this here blog? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook or Google Friend Connect.

Her brother yells, “Wa-hoo!” with accompanying right-hand fist pump when a surprise unfolds, there’s ice cream in a cone for dessert, or we agree to let him watch Pingu.

His brother at the age of six still hugs like a baby monkey – face scrunched up behind his glasses; arms and legs wrapped vice-like around the middle. He hugs and it’s the best kind of Heimlich for dislodging worry.

I am working on the discipline of seeing my children.

Not how cute they are, or how badly behaved, or how snazzily dressed. But to see them with attention to personality detail.

“To love a [child] well, we must become a student of him. To see him, we must observe him, consider him, perceive him, and learn him. This involves lots of listening, patience, and attentiveness.

The nature of seeing combines three elements:

1. a curiosity about who he is
2. an appreciation for who he is
3. a vision for who he will become”

~ Wild Things, The Art of Nurturing Boys

I squint one eye and tilt the kaleidoscope of their lives up to the light.

There are quirks more significant than the freckle at the base of Jackson’s neck worth noticing. Now that I’m looking for them, I see. How he is quick to defend me, quick to notice someone who is hurt on their insides. He is Jesus introspective and sees heaven in the simplest answers. This boy who is six and seems like he’s going on twelve – how hard I have to work to catch up and listen to all that he doesn’t say.

Micah – my warrior with the aching heart – I am learning to see him through the prism of how much I like him. Because understanding him is a braille like experience that takes tender fingers reaching out to read him. I must hug him and hold him and stroke his forehead in order to see his heart. Tender wrapped in layers of short temperedness. I need to peel back ever so gently to expose the mass of feelings that beat in him.

To give these boys weight in the world I must show that I am interested in the gravity that pulls them to me. That I don’t take it for granted. That I will study it with the white heat of interest that any scientist brings to his research.

I tell myself this on the nights when I’ve been anything but interested. On the nights when I’ve been tired and irritable and unwilling to coax meaning out of their own short tempers. When we’ve barked at one another and gone to bed blind. I lie and replay the film strip of everything I did wrong and was too stubborn to do right.

Some bedtimes are like that.

But then morning comes with grace and we all try again.

Even when I forget I must still remember over and over again that my tone will set the beat and the background and the melody for their day. Because as much as I want to see them first, they will always echo me. They see how I live more than they hear what I say.

So on my busy days – on the days when laptop and phone and Skype and IM all scream for my attention – I will make moments for mute. I will notice though the chaos that spins around me. I will notice the things my boys don’t say. And I will work hard to put it into words for them.

The mother-gift – interpreting for our children. And promising them we understand.

No. Maybe it’s just promising that we will do the hard work of understanding.

Want to keep up with this here blog? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook or Google Friend Connect.

This week I’m traveling for work. Alone. And I laughed out loud in a dark Arkansas parking lot when I saw the rental car I’d been given – a mini van.

Motherhood isn’t a sweater we can shrug out of when we feel like it. It’s a change in our DNA.

It’s what makes us want to comfort the mom with the crying toddler at 3,000 feet, what makes us smile at the dad wearing a baby through airport security, what makes us tingle all over at the anticipation of 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I open my white mini van on a dark and rainy night in Razorback country and I’m smiling so hard to myself at this secret the mini van and I are sharing. There’s the seat where Zoe’s chair would normally go and Jackson would be over my right shoulder and Micah all the way in back yelling directions, questions and instructions I can barely hear from way up front.

But tonight the car is crazy quiet. And I get to choose what’s on the radio and no one will ask me, “are we there yet?” I’ve already slept three hours on the plane, unhindered by embarrassment – another fringe benefit of motherhood – sprawled across three seats with my cheek resting on my computer bag. The deep exhausted sleep is totally worth the strange imprint I’m sure I woke up with.

I miss my kids. But I find there’s something inside of me that’s been lacking oxygen and suddenly I can breathe and I take deep gulps of being alone in that big, beautiful mini van.

It’s dark and raining and there’s nothing ideal about the driving conditions except my heart that is looking around with fresh eyes, remembering the me that lives inside this mother’s DNA.

There is a good man stewarding those kids we made so I am not afraid to say my tight, monkey hug good byes to them and drive an Arkansas mini van down this rainy road with prayers of gratitude for stolen moments alone.

I don’t know a mother who isn’t better for time alone.

Time without a hundred hands all held out waiting, asking, holding, poking, clinging. Time without someone constantly in your me-space. Time where you get to cut only your own food and don’t have to be strategic about planning bathroom breaks and outings aren’t scheduled around someone else’s nap schedule.

Some days you don’t realize how over-stimulated you are until you’re in a car alone listening to the rhythmic thud of wipers across the wind screen and you can almost cry from the beauty of it.

Alone is essential to a tired mom because it’s really time to spend listening to herself – her own thoughts and prayers and desperate ideas for creativity and plans and a future longer than next week’s school recitation of “Chicken Soup and Rice.”

I may be driving toward Siloam Springs, AR for work, but I am headed toward time spent apart from my everyday crush of the urgent, the predictable and the routine.

Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, [Jesus] said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

I turn off the freeway and find a drive through chicken place. There’s a hotel room waiting for me and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep ahead. A shower without someone knocking on the bathroom door and a bed that won’t have two extra people in it when I wake up.

I am not running away from this mothering DNA of mine, I am simply remembering what it needs to keep running.

And you?

When last did you have time to remember yourself- what do you need to keep running?

::

Want to keep up with this here blog? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook or Google Friend Connect.

Close your eyes and let go of what others wrote last year. Let go of the beautiful, sparkly words that weren’t yours and that you wish you could’ve produced.

Close your eyes and let the wishing and itching at what your house isn’t, seep out your pores.

Close your eyes and stop seeing the behavior of your kids reflected through the frustrated eyes of others.

Close your eyes and give up all the would-have, could-have, should-haves.

Just close your eyes and stop looking at the reflection of how you wish your life looked. Through someone else’s mirror.

When the shiny, shimmery image looks so perfect, so flawless, so pretty that you just wish you could step through the surface and live it, be certain instead that it’s a mirage. That from the inside it looks nothing like it appears in the reflection.

Be careful whom or what you use as a mirror.

When we lose ourselves in the reflections of other people’s lives, we lose ourselves.

Close your eyes so you can see yourself as you are and not as you compare to others. Because you have been artfully, carefully, and wonderfully woven together.  You are a unique. Nothing about you is facsimile. So stop looking for the copy.

Your flaws ache, yes. And what you don’t have is sometimes made worse by the perception of what you think she has. But she aches just as you do. I promise. We are all cracked in places though it may be hard to see with the eye.

So close them.

Stop reading what makes you itch with dissatisfaction. Stop watching what makes you wonder if better lives next door. Stop carrying a ruler around.

Sometimes we see much better with eyes closed.

Open your tired hands; let your fingers braille these thoughts into your new year:

God’s blessing makes life rich; nothing we do can improve on God.
Proverbs 10 verse 22: (The Message)

For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD.
“They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”
Jeremiah 29 verse 11: (New International version)

Open your eyes.

This is your true reflection.

Prompted by the inestimably comforting words of Madeline L’Engle. If you haven’t read “A Circle of Quiet,” I assure you, you should.

Want to keep up with this here blog? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook.

::

::

It’s grand, really. The ability to interact with anyone, no matter what their job, their celebrity status, or their following. Social media gives everyone a seat at the table to join the global, cross-cultural, happening-in real-time, world changing conversation.

The question is, what do you say when you pull up a chair?

Here are my tips for making the most of your online interactions.

1. Talk to me, don’t pitch to me

The beauty of social media {twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogs, Websites, you name it} is that it gives us new ways to connect. New ways to communicate. But the age old rules of good conversation still apply – be a good listener. Don’t dominate the conversation. Enjoy the person you’re connecting with for more than what they can do for you.

It’s not about how many retweets, likes, or comments you can rack up in a day. Try to resist the temptation to keep score.

Sure, I enjoy the ripple effects of conversations online that can be multiplied across twitter streams and countries, but I try not to let that be my end game. May what I share be more than a cleverly crafted pitch to solicit feedback. May it be intended to bless. May it be a reflection of the bigger story being written in my life. May I talk to you, listen to you, and respond to you as you – and not as a statistic.

The most effective pitches start out as genuine conversations anyway.

2. Find your online voice

You don’t need to sound like me or Michael Hyatt or Seth Godin or the (in)courage writers or my funny, brilliant friend, the Nester. Bring who you are offline into your online conversations. Be you – with your unique story and message and sense of humor. And if your blog has a specific topic/niche/angle/audience, well then, let your online voice speak to those conversations.

Be great and comfortable at being you.

3. Understand your gifts

What you talk about online will naturally emerge from what you’re interested in – what you’re gifted at. So it’s always worth spending some time exploring your gifts. Are you a natural encourager, a champion of the poor, a mama, a homeschooler, an artist, a designer, a writer?

Find what you love, what you know, and what you’re innately good at. Focus your conversation around those topics and you’ll already be that much more comfortable in your online skin.

4. Beware your “inner” voice

If we’re not careful, twitter, Facebook, Instagram and a whole host of social media can become a running stream of our own internal monologues. How there’s nothing like a crawling baby to show you the state of your carpets, there’s nothing like social media to show you the state of your thoughts.

Be careful; guard your online conversation from deteriorating into a grocery list of all the things that annoy you.

This shouldn’t just apply to our online voices. But social media magnifies what was once a whine to a single friend into a megaphone for all the petty annoyances of our day multiplied to the hundreds who are following us on line.

Keep tabs on your twitter stream and Facebook updates. Go back and read a full day’s worth. If they play like a bad country song then consider editing your internal voice.

Be deliberate about what you share. Make it count. If you wouldn’t stand behind a microphone and announce it to an auditorium of strangers in real life, perhaps it’s not the best use of your online voice either.

5. Beware your motivation

Are you tweeting for attention? Are you blogging for comments? Are you Facebooking for likes? Because none of these things can fill the hungry, desperate need for attention we all have.

Only when we understand ourselves in the context of the God who made us, rejoices in us and celebrates us will we feel satisfied.

I am convinced of it.

6. Be generous

For every few things you put out there about yourself, consider sharing something about someone else. Passing on a link, recommending a book, commenting on a blog post.

Just ask Klout – not only is this good advice for building community, friendships, and real relationship, apparently it’s also good for building social media score.

7. Don’t talk just to talk

Great conversation has a beginning a middle and an end. If you’re me, it also has hot chocolate and muffins thrown into the mix. The madness about social media conversations is that they can continue indefinitely.

But here’s the thing – you will stop enjoying the online conversations if you let social media dictate when they end. It’s up to you to close your laptop and rest. Rest from the swirling, whirling world of engaging with a thousand strangers. Rest and be present with your family and the friends who come over for coffee.

Rest and talk to the God who created our need for companionship.

Rest and find words worth contributing to the conversation when you’re online again.

This will look different for each of us. But it’s no less essential for all of us. I work in social media so from 9 to 5 you’ll find me on twitter or Facebook or blogging for (in)courage. But on the weekends all online conversations are on hold for me. This twitter-free space is sacred to me. It fills me up. And makes me me miss the social media conversation rather than resent it.

I promise, you don’t have to be on line all the time to join the conversation.

And when you start to feel stretched, when you’re updating your status simply because you’re worried you haven’t said anything recently, that’s time probably better spent reading a good book, going to the park or picking up the phone and calling a friend.

Because the best conversations come face-to-face and rarely require the enter key.

Sometimes they don’t even require words.

Related Post: What I learned from almost two months almost unplugged

Want to follow this social media series? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook.
Photos thanks to Emily Dawn Deidra and Ann.

I like to build things.

My son, he builds with wood and hammer and nails so rusted they speak of being long forgotten in the yard. He drags his dad’s yellow and gray tool box outside and uses its contents so lovingly that it’s hard to complain when he forgets to bring it back inside.

I like to build things too.

I build with words. I build with a keyboard. I build with thin strands of friendship strung across the globe.

You can call it social media. I call it conversation. And I think it’s one of the most powerful tools we have to date to live out that greatest of commands:

The world tell us social media is about building our platform, our brand, our followers, our name. To get while the getting’s good. That it’s a land grab and grabbing requires a finger in every network, a post every day, a PhD in SEO, and  herculean competition for attention.

Exhausting. The worrying that wherever one woman succeeds there’s that much less land for the women coming up behind.

What if instead social media was a way to build a bridge?

To lay ourselves down, plank by plank, word by word, and offer a way for women to walk out of their fears, their loneliness, their desperate belief that they are the only ones to have failed at parenting or marriage or decorating or educating their children and discover that they are not alone.

I’ve made four international moves in the last decade and they’ve taught me three things: 1. that every city is full of people who will cry over my boxes by the time I leave, 2. that the metro makes sense in any language, and 3. that people are people are people no matter which side of the road they drive on.

My dad is a doctor and he tells anyone considering medicine, “If you don’t like people, it’s not for you.”

Social media is the same. It runs on relationships. And if you’re in it for you more than you’re in it for them, it will never pay off.

I find this applies across the board – no matter our zip code, our faith, our niche, or our culture.

We have to be willing to hammer out our stories and share them for free. And I’m not talking about ads vs. no ads on our sites. I’m talking about what we expect in return from our readers. Are we in it for what we have to give them or what we hope to get from them?

What if we cared less about our stats and more about the wonder of encouraging someone who lives half a world away from us but is comforted by what we’re going through?

What if we served ourselves as love offering to those starving for encouragement.

What if the best translation of the Gospel is your life?

How are you spending your social media currency?

What if it looked like this?

Want to follow this social media series? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook.

My friends over at Write It, Girl, asked me that this week.

I’ll share my answer if you’ll think about it and then come back and share yours too. I’m super curious.

When was the moment you first believed you were a writer?

I never thought I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. And then one day at the end of a conference the only female presenter in a sea of men asked me if I had kids. She kept hearing from others that she couldn’t manage kids with the cross-continental work she was doing. And surrounded by people who wanted to talk to her about human rights I got to encourage her about how I balance the calling of motherhood with my other work.

That night I emailed my friend Holley Gerth:

‘So, I have been thinking about you today because I am at a conference discussing some groundbreaking work to bring justice to the poor and afflicted. For many years that is the kind of work I have been involved in also. But, I have consistently felt this call on my heart to speak into the lives of women. Young mothers and wives who feel that what they do isn’t important.

I don’t know many who would consider that a needy population group. But I sure do. I am them.

So, I blog. I write my heart out to this beautiful audience who need to be encouraged as I wish someone had done for me. Because young mothers and struggling women have great needs too. And while it’s not my job, it is my delight to be used by God to be part of the plan for meeting them.’

That was three years ago this coming New Year and the first time I truly believed I was a writer. Being able to encourage women at The Gypsy Mama and now also as my full time job at (in)courage – to share the good, the bad, the sacred, and the beautiful about womanhood – it’s been the most fulfilling writing experience of my life.

OK, your turn.

When did you start to believe you were a writer?

Want to keep up with this here blog – sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here
Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook.

She’s wearing hers like a perfect fit and I can’t help but say what I’m really thinking, “Man, you look great. You just look so good. How’d you do that? How’d you get back to the pre-baby shape so quick?”

And I don’t know what I’m expecting. But I’m not expecting her to say what she’s really thinking. I’m not expecting that at all.

“Stress. A lot of stress. I was running and then I got too busy and now I eat once a day and grab a chocolate bar. It’s not good. But it is what it is.”

I’m floored right there in the back of church before we head out to Fudruckers together. I’m so used to hearing the polite answer I think I’ve forgotten how comforting the real one is.

It’s powerful when a friend steps out from behind fine and looks you in the eyes.

Christy gives me friendship instead of fine.

She gives me freedom to share my washer-packed-up, toilet-backed-up, kids-all-been-sick-all-week, sometimes-I-think-I’m-losing-my-mind, opposite-of-fine answers too.

It’s like remembering how to exhale. When you’re reminded that it actually doesn’t come easy all the time to everyone.

That fine is usually an awkward diminishing of the truth.

Grown up camouflage.

Karine emails me encouragement and I’m getting ready to email her back when I pick up the phone instead. It takes me a while to find it. I’m always losing it under books and Kindergarten reading assignments that somehow get left to the last moment.

But when I do, it’s worth it.

Because her voice is laced with warmth and understanding when I tell her how my “study” is fighting the onslaught of miniature 18-wheelers, stuffed dogs and legos. I sit in an island of sunshine adrift in a Tuesday afternoon of upheaval and she doesn’t flinch when I tell her I don’t feel fine.

Instead she tells me about her own day of doctor’s tests and home schooling and undone dishes.

We come out of hiding together.

The baby sleeps while I listen to Karine’s stories and laugh so hard that I start to feel normal again. And when we’re done talking. When I’ve started dinner and fought with Jackson over whether he will eat brats or not and told Micah to take off his shoes, I open my inbox and find she’s sent me a post script to our conversation.

She’s sent pictures of her every day chaos. Kitchen, living room and hall way. I’m smiling or maybe I’m crying.

Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
~ John 8:31-32.

I go back to the brats and the son who insists on trying to feed Zoe and my chest isn’t quite so tight.

And when we go out to dinner on Sunday night. When we re-arrange schedules and ask good men to watch many kids. When we plan times and which mall we’ll meet at.

When me and her and Connie and Dana sit down for two hours over Chinese food and conversation - no one wastes time being fine.

::

{Related posts}
Is there life after no?
The best ways not to help a new mom.

Want to keep up with this here blog – sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here
Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook. Oh and if you’re a fan of Google’s Friend Connect? I finally got that up in the side bar too.

I am not one of them.

I wasn’t brave enough to commit to 31 days of posts in a row.

But today I’m psyched to be participating at least a wee bit because Beth from Red and Honey asked to interview as part of her 31 days of Real Housewife Confessions.

It should be interesting considering I’m an odd breed of housewife.

Here’s what she asked me:

1.     How long have you been a housewife? How many kids do you have?

2.     If I walked in to your house unannounced right now, what would I see?

3.     What do you think is at the heart of why so many women feel that they aren’t doing a good enough job of the housework?

4.     What kind of memories do you hope your children have of you while growing up?

5.     What do you do really well in your homemaking?

6.     What do you want to build on and learn to do better?

7.     How was your marriage affected from having kids?

8.     What might people be surprised to know about you as a housewife?

9.     If you could have coffee with any mother in history, who would it be?

If you’re curious about my answers, feel free to come on over to Beth’s place And if there are any other questions you’re interested in hearing answers to – feel free to leave them in the comments. I’m in the question answering zone.

OK, come meet me at Beth’s – you know it’s worth reading when toilets are in the title, right?
::

{Photo by Ann} Want to keep up with this here blog? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook.