We write because we want to, not because we have to. We write for fun, for joy, for discovery.

We just write without worrying if it’s just write or not.

Won’t you join us?

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. Go a little overboard encouraging the writer who linked up before you.

OK, are you ready? Give me your best five minutes on:

::

Tender…

GO

I love to watch him love her.

It’s a new twist in this parenting road and so sweet. So he gets up in the middle of the night and coos at her special. So unexpected. So different and also still the same.

We take turns making her laugh.

And when she peeks over the edge of the bathtub and giggles coy at him broken places in me heal. There is a whole book in that sentence. I read it in his eyes. She is never tired of him and he – even when tired – always has time for her.

Last night we all three lie in bed and there is her hand on his cheek and her other hand on mine. We are whole and beautiful and even in the dark I can see her two new teeth grin.

Sometimes cliches are no less true for being cliche.

We love because he first loved us. I watch this true with him and her. Bible truth takes deep breaths and sleeps in the crook of his arm.

STOP

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Starts the day out with a gold ribbon ceremony for showing honor, courage, responsibility at school and all he can think about is the reprimand that ended his school day.

All praise clouded out by a finger shaken in his direction. His breath fogs up the glasses that hide his eyes as we walk home. From the minute he shuffles down the school’s steps I feel the itch in him that something is out of place.

I try to hear him above the school buses and kids racing home toward the weekend. I bend and duck awkward toward his eye level to try and lip read his sadness.

“School is stupid. I always do everything wrong.”

The bright little golden ribbon stuck to his red shirt says otherwise, but it’s hidden beneath his thick coat now and the dread at having done something wrong is pasted across his face instead.

“But what happened?” and I try to get him to go back to the beginning and tell it to me step by step. How could a day that started with me taking his picture next to the principal end with him this defeated?

I feel the knot in my own stomach and the hairs of defensiveness rising on the back of my neck. I want to make it right, by pointing out how wrong everyone else must have been.

But the wind’s cutting off any words I try to get out and he’s so hunched against the cold and his sadness that I don’t think he can hear me anyway. My forehead is as scrunched up as his posture and I can hear the frustration mounting in my mind as I push the stroller, focusing on the puddle, the ice patch, the path with the too-close cars.

It’s the cold; it bites through my frustration and makes me notice other things. The minivan parked around the corner, the hill home, the Friday evening pizza and a movie night.

And then it hits me – I’m the grown up. I’m the grown up and Jackson’s just six and soon he’ll be seven, eight, nine, ten. I am not actually going to be able to barricade all disappointment or misunderstanding out of his life.

But I can help put it in perspective.

He gets in the car and slumps into his car seat- staring out the window. I pump the heat, look back over my shoulder and describe to him how the day started. We walk through the ceremony again; the ribbon, the hard work and 30 accumulated mini gold tickets it took to get him there.

And then, after I’ve heard the outline of what went wrong in the afternoon I tell him that’s ok. Even though it’s a bummer when a day starts out great and ends with a bump, that’s part of growing up. That I know how it feels because it doesn’t stop when you’re a kid.

Grown ups make mistakes too and wish they could have do-overs and feel frustrated when the one small thing they got wrong clouds out the big thing they got right. And it’s up to us to choose which thing ends up being the story of our day.

I suggest we make his Friday story about the gold ribbon. Hot chocolate at home helps the decision go down. As does an adoring baby sister, a little brother and a movie night with dad.

And somewhere in the middle there’s a moment – a moment when I get to look into the eyes that I know are mine and tell him that I don’t need a gold ribbon to know he’s special.

That I’ve known since a summer afternoon in Kyiv, Ukraine when I whispered to God what I wanted for my birthday. Since I walked Kreshatik street with Peter and met Heike and Cliff, Bob and Colleen, and all the Skinner kids for cake and ice cream at the Golden Gate restaurant. Since I looked up at the sun with squinted eyes and knew that God had saved the best till last.

Since I asked and God answered and the answer was Jackson.

::::

I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him.
~1 Samuel 1:27.

No gold ribbon and no mess up can add or subtract from that gift.

::

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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?

::

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I am a reluctant renter.

Have been for years.

Our house is small, it has faux bricks that constantly fall off the kitchen walls and carpets that, well, let’s just say we have three kids under the age of six and leave the rest up to your imagination.

For years my small house has stunted my hospitality.

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe this holiday season has you hyperventilating at the thought of your house being exposed for all to see how small or cramped or imperfect it is.

May I share what I recently learned about my small, small house and the ten people who slept over one night?

Because what if the size of your house, my friends, is in your hands?

Click here to keep reading over at (in)courage.

But the radio sings of winter. It plays song after song of worship that sounds knee deep in snow. And sometimes we stand in the living room with arms up to the sun and let the words of a small town in Bethlehem wash over us.

“Fall on your knees
oh hear the angel voices”

I can hear it. The echoes still ringing through the sky from over two thousand years ago.

And when I stand in church with the music echoing through me, with the memory of my short temper from last night and the two boys this morning who got into a fight over who would give the donation box they’d filled to Ms. Dee, the baby who suffered a hair tourniquet and an allergic reaction to eggs in one week, and the moments of beauty in the midst of all this chaos that make me cry, I know there is a God who was a baby and understands me from the inside out.

Literally.

The weather, the bickering kids, the moments of love so profound for this family my insides ache from it.

Immanuel.

The God who moved into the neighborhood.

It’s OK to be bring the whole of who I am to Him.

Because He came a long way – on purpose – to meet me.

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Joshua, I don’t know if you’ve ever been my little brother.

You’ve always been the rock, the hug, the guy that knows how to comfort his sister when her mom died, when her boyfriend broke up with her, when she was surviving her good-byes in a hundred different airport departure lounges.

The guy who has lived in both my South African and American worlds.

We have lived the life of the in between together.

And when I talk about being homesick, I know you can understand.

I am homesick for you today, Joshua.

But I am also the happiest I have ever been for you. Can you see me? Can you see me standing right there next to Luke grinning and hugging myself with the happiness of this moment? Because little brother who always felt like my big brother I have watched you do the hard work of growing up into the man you are today.

And it has been my deep honor to have been able to hold your hand a little bit on that journey.

I measure how long it’s been by the age of my second born son, Micah. Because when I sat in the yellow rocker in Michigan, holding that newborn to my heart I was also whispering prayers for you and Megan through the dark watches of the night.

She is the gift and I have loved her from those snowy nights in Michigan all the way to Washington DC when Micah was 2 and Megan came to visit us.

And Megan, I can still feel how my heart ached when you told me right there in front of the US Capitol, “But I just LOVE Josh, so much!”

And we kept praying and Micah turned three and Joshua drove to Cape Town and we all held our breath.

And God said that it was good and he redeemed and restored and sealed in love the happiness you all get to witness today. Take a photo for me will you? Take a deep heart photo and carry it in your memory because this is the hard love. This is the love that goes to the faithful.

This is the love that tastes the sweetest for being the the most hard won.

Marriage is an act of courage and commitment the likes of which the world cannot comprehend.

It is the upside down love that puts someone else first.

And it is the most rewarding.

“Many waters cannot quench love,

Nor will rivers overflow it;

If a man were to give all the riches of his house for love,

It would be utterly despised.” Song of Solomon 8:7

I don’t need to be there today to know what you both look like. Because I can see it all the way over here – how love is reflected in your faces, your vows, your first dance, the way he puts his hand on the small of her back and how she leans into him.

I love you.

I love you guys so much.

Megan, you are my sister.

And Joshua, you are the big brother I could not be more proud of.

::

{All photos by uber talented South African photographer Laura Jane.}

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How about you, friend?
What are you thankful for today?

{And have you discovered my friend Ann’s *free* App for counting each of the gifts we’re grateful for? Download the free app at iTunes and for android devices.}

One night that place rocks me hard as I rock my baby girl in one arm and cell phone cradled between cheek and ear with the other. I kick gently back and forth, back and forth between my quiet confession whispered into the listening ear of my mother-in-law and the loud ache in my gut at what I share with her.

Sometimes I am scared of my three-year-old son.

The one whose name means “gift from God.” The one named after the apostle who was Christ’s rock. I think of him as our bulldozer. Our passionate compassionate child of temper so fierce we catch echoes of his berserker ancestors on an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon in Virginia when I’m scared of what mood he’ll be in when I pick him up from preschool.

Scared how he’ll react if he gets the blue cereal bowl instead of the red one, scared what he’ll do if we can’t find the Woolworths Teddy Bear come bed time or nap time or car ride time or any old time when he needs it.

He can storm harder and longer than my temper can usually take.

I am tattered and frayed and frightened of how I am starting to feel about him. Worried that I can’t find the necessary reserves of love to remember to like him. I simply want to mute him.

So I rock and whisper my secrets into the phone over the baby’s whispy soft hair and the dark room cocoons both of us. My mother-in-law suggests we go back to the beginning. We trace family trees and genes and remember that blue eyes aren’t the only things children inherit by blood. I stop being mad at him and instead start to research him.

I study my son.

And God starts to show me how to see. Not with a magnifying glass, but a mirror.

I see my own temper. I see generations of temper before that. I see how lazy my prayers are and how haphazard my approach to helping him. How it’s mostly a mixture of embarrassment and frustration.

I see how long it’s been since I’ve enjoyed him.

I begin to exercise my motherhood again. I stretch and bend and pray. I fast and pay attention and listen. Instead of floundering in the stories everyone else tells me about him, I begin to draft his narrative. I write it down. How I want to see this son of mine. How I want to teach others to see him.

I send these words to his teacher,

We so appreciate your partnership. We value Micah and the work that Christ is doing in his heart. He is extremely sensitive to the stories of Jesus and understands that his name means, “Like unto God” and his second name means “the rock”.

We are encouraging him to be a man who lives in the blessing of his name and is a leader and encourager and protector of others.

I begin to sense Micah growing in my heart with flutters much like when I first felt him moving in my belly. I cradle this new story. It is a relief to be writing it again and not just turning the pages terrified of what comes next.

I pray for him more in one month than perhaps the rest of his months combined.

I pray and praying is writing and writing is realizing and realizing is seeing. I see the story God has for my Micah.

I speak it out loud over him.

Sometimes, in the beginning, when I am still finding the words, only when he’s asleep. And when he wakes up and asks me what I’m doing I’m too embarassed to tell him. I start to make something up, to say I was just checking on him. But then I catch myself and I give the truth to his sleep-grogged ears straight, “I am praying for you. I am praying you will be a great warrior for God’s Kingdom.”

He yawns, whispers, “OK,” rolls over.

As I stare at the back of his sleep matted hair. As I listen to him start to snore gently and count the seven, eight, nine stuffed animals surrounding him. As I wonder how he even fits into that bed with all the swords, pliers and puppies clamoring for space alongside I catch something unexpected. My stomach aches with a tender like for this son of mine.

I like that this is how he chooses to sleep.

I like how it so perfectly illustrates his compassion for all living things.

I like how his big, clumsy limbs that he is still growing into are draped diagonally across the bunk.

I like that the radio’s on because he was dancing for me just before going to bed.

I like how he sleeps in the same position as his dad and how he thrives on the same routine every night.

I like the glass of water he always asks for and keeps close to his bed just like me.

I like the discarded book on dinosaurs he was reading and the pen and note pad he always has under his pillow.

I like him so much I can hardly breathe. I just sit in that room between a toy tiger and Casting Crowns playing on the radio and stroke the sweaty forehead of a nearly four-year-old and let the like keep filling me up.

All the way up to overflowing.

::

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And I whisper to her in frustration, “It’s a good thing I love you so much.”

I love you at 4am when everyone’s asleep but us.

I love you when you projectile vomit all over me in public.

I love you when you pull out the fine hairs on the back of my neck out of sheer delight at the joy of the hug.

I love you when my arms are so tired of holding you because you won’t go to anyone else.

I love you when I have to change your everything in the dark before sunrise.

I love you in bowls of mashed banana and cereal that is harder to rinse out when dry than any other dishes.

I love you with crushed cheerios underfoot and power sockets I have to remember to stop up all over again.

I love you until I feel raggedy inside and out. Until I feel undone and unmade and with perpetual bed head and dark blotchy eyes.

And it surprises me. This raw love. Third time around it doesn’t fade. It simply ricochets back at me the harder I give it to you.

Daughter.

Hold me in your tiny arms, your Raggedy Ann mother, and never let me go.

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Hears his dad tip toeing quietly out at 5am so as not to wake the baby that finally fell back asleep at 4:30. The son I didn’t even realize was in the room. The son tucked into a blanket on the floor by the far side of the bed. By his dad’s side – the spot that he comes to claim at 2am when he’s trying to outrun bad dreams.

“I love you, daddy.”

He whispers it into the early morning air and I open my eyes in time to see his father framed by the window, a silhouette frozen by those words.

“I love you too, Micah. See you later.” And he’s gone. Gone to bus stops and transfers and metro rides and then the mile walk to his office.

Micah turns over and so does my heart.

This man of mine, I’ve known him since I was 21. I’ve known him since I still fitted into a dress size that seems inconceivable to me now. I’ve known him since that summer he spent all his savings on dating me.

He used to say his “I love yous” with flowers. With chocolate and river boat rides. With ice cream sundaes and Sunday lunches.

Now he says them in ways that the world tells me are boring but every wife recognizes as goose bump worthy.

The “I love yous” he says now cost him much more than flowers. And last much longer.

They come whispered with 5 am departures and two hour commutes so that I can have the car for the day. They come with an unloaded dishwasher and a desk and study tidied. They echo through two years spent living in South Africa and savings always poured back into plane tickets again. And again and again and again.

They sound like hours spent wrestling boys on the bedroom mattress when I know he’s still got hours of work waiting.

They are the willingness to get up at night and comfort sick kids right alongside me. No matter what time he went to bed or what time he has to get back out of it.

His “I love yous” now are the laugh that still spills out of him when I make up my own words to every other song, the ridiculous we both still find funny, and the books that line one wall of our house. The books that have made it through 3 international moves since we got married.

I hear it in the loud silence when we sink into the mattress that’s known us since we said our I dos and he manages to keep eyes open as I keep talking.

When he talks me down from mountains of my own making, when he rubs my forehead while he’s watching Sports Center, when he takes out the trash, orders Pizza delivery when he’ll be home late, or calls me out on my whiney-ness – I hear the “I love you.”

The longer we’re married the less we have to use words to say it.

I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.
~Song of Solomon 6:3.

The lilt and lisp and romantic inflection of love comes from the serving and not from the saying.

Twelve years married and I am surer now than I ever was then that I am beloved.

Because in between the every day moments when we get it all wrong, there’s a man determined to love me right.

I hear it.

I can hear it in everything he does.

::

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