We sat in the student lounge where my husband teaches and had the lights dimmed down enough to invite candor and we shared more than just hot apple cider.

They asked questions that took me back to cross roads moments in my sophomore year so fresh in my mind I could still remember how the decision tasted – of cherry blossoms. I walked a mile of them when I chose Peter.

So I look at these beautiful women with so much of the future still gift wrapped before them and I tell them the truth.

I tell them that I was the girl who swore she would never marry. The girl who was so angry with the church who couldn’t translate the grief of a widowed husband or the loss of an 18-year-old daughter that she ran away.

I was the girl who ran away from every whisper of who she “should” be and determined she would write her own story.

It would not include children.

I tell them it’s ok if that’s your story. It’s ok for now and where you are and that the God who holds them gentle in His hands is not afraid of this twist in the plot. He is patient. He is kind. He believes all things. He bears all things. And He is gifted at surprise endings.

Mine came when I turned 30 and all I wanted for my birthday was a baby. I’d been married five years by then. And no one was more surprised than me.

I tell them when that baby boy was born in South Africa and they placed him on my chest as the sun was rising I’m certain I heard it – I’m certain I heard my patient God whisper to me, “See, I saved the best for last.”

And today when I sit surrounded by left overs and the dishes I should have wiped and loaded into the dishwasher hours ago I am at peace with where I am. But that the journey was a long one and I was usually in a rush throughout.

That there were broken nights of hacking sobs as I tried to figure out my place on the map of motherhood. That every minivan driving mom was a reflection of what I thought I should be, but wasn’t. I was certain they had it figured out and if only I could get in on the mystery of balancing it all, of having it all.  I didn’t even have the minivan, for goodness sakes.

I wanted to work and to mother and to have all my laundry actually put away on the same day I washed it.  And my failures felt amplified by everyone else’s seeming easy success.

But appearances are tricky imps and I let them run riot far too long in my un-perfect, day care-necessary, long-commuting, endless-laundry, upside down life until Pete put a stop to it. One night over our pock-marked kitchen table he just told it to me gently,

“But Lisa-Jo, no one’s got it all figured out. I don’t even think that’s possible. We live in a broken world. We bear the scars of sin. And this side of heaven I don’t think you’re ever going to find the perfect balance between every aspect of your life.”

I repeat that truth to 15 pairs of watching eyes. I hope they believe it. I hope they are freed by it. I hope they let go of desperately trying to arrive at a destination that’s not even on the map.

“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”
Madeleine L’Engle

So I sift through my stories and show them my dead ends and remember each and every step of the way that brought me to here – on this couch that travelled with me back from the Southern hemisphere.

Here where Jackson never remembers to put away his shoes and Micah’s snoring on the floor next to his radio.

Here where the baby will cry at 12am precisely.

Here where Peter will get up before the rest of us to catch the train and here where he will try to sneak home at noon for a lunch date with me if we’re both lucky.

Here.

Where being wide-awake to each moment of the desperately precious here turns out to be much harder and more wonderful than the dream of having it all.

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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. Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

For fun, for love of the sound of words, for play, for delight, for joy and celebration at the art of communication.

For only five short, bold, beautiful minutes. Unscripted and unedited. We just write without worrying if it’s just right 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. Most importantly: leave a comment for the person who linked up before you – encouraging them in their writing!

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

Grateful…

GO

Grateful for wild and unruly boys who won’t smile for photos. And baby girls who will.

For sun speckling through trees and weather that warms you on chilly days in ways and places you didn’t expect. Grateful for friends who make us at home in front of their table, their TV, their kitchen sink.

Grateful for sons who can scream real loud when stuck at the top of tree houses and dads who can run real fast in their socks to the rescue.

Grateful for a small house with big hospitality and dishes all done before bed.

For a heart that aches with the happy and children that sink into sofas at nap times and baby girls who curl fingers around their daddys at any time

Full of the full.

And grateful for it.

STOP

OK, show me what you’ve got.

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::

::

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

And it will be a little while longer.

Good things. Busy things. Work things. Family things.

So I’m taking a deep breath over here and some quiet time. Because even moms need a time out sometimes. Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

“I’m afraid the land of perfect is a myth. We might feel we are skirting the borders with our dream, but the reality is those borders don’t exist because perfect doesn’t.” ~Quitter, Jon Acuff.

There is no such thing as perfect.

Perfect doesn’t exist.

Perfect is not an attainable goal.

Perfect is merely a street sign at the intersection of impossible and frustration in Never Never land.

This realization is the only way I make sense of my days. Because there is no such thing as “doing it all.” And especially no such thing as “doing it all perfectly.” By my third child I am convinced of this.

The only way this family finds love and laughter in the midst of our days is by being willing to let perfect trickle through our fingers like so much sandpit sand. We don’t have perfectly nutritious meals or perfectly put away laundry. We don’t have a perfectly tidy living room or perfectly educational days. We don’t have perfect bedtimes or perfect play dates. And we certainly don’t have perfect obedience or perfect parenting.

Three children have taught me that a content household is rarely ever a perfect one.

We keep pace with one another and sometimes that pace is slow. Sometimes it requires leaving that load of dry laundry to fend for itself while parents take rowdy boys to the pool. Sometimes it requires compromising on the pasta sauce in order to get a boy’s tummy full of pasta.

For a work-at-home mom it often requires a certain degree of playroom chaos in order to have a happy work environment for kids and mom. And at the end of long days letting go of perfect means releasing my family from heavy sighs and irritable grunts at the state of the house. Instead, I’ve learned that if we created the chaos together it’s good for us to clean it up together. And that it may not be perfect if a six-year-old and three-year-old are my cleaning companions – but that the company’s willingness is worth more than a perfect end result.

Sometimes I still miss it – at least the illusion of perfect. And then a baby gurgles up at me, a boy blows me bedtime kisses from his bed stuffed full of a random collection of transformers that should have been in the play room, stuffed toys that should have been on his shelf, and snail shells that should have been outside, and my heart relaxes and I remember what I traded perfect for – a house full of real.

And perfect is rarely as interesting as real.

{Photos: From the trees above my dad’s driveway in South Africa.}
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.Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

My mom died a week after my 18^th birthday. She was sick from my 16^th. What surprised me was how embarrassing my grief was. I was already awkward in my own skin – tall and gangly with bones where there should have been curves. Add a sick mother to all of this and sometimes a 16-year-old burns with a shy shame she doesn’t know how to put into words.

Sympathy can be awkward because what teenager wants to be put on the spot? There are relatives and well-meaning ladies from church who come over and try to teach you how to cook and keep house when all you want is for the tall blonde boy on the 50cc motorcycle to notice you.

Teachers either try to make excuses for your tardy homework or tell you that your “home problems” are no excuse for your annoying behavior in class. And still the cool girls flip their hair just so and you are tired of hearing about cancer and watching a parade of wigs as your mom’s hair falls out.

How does a daughter feel beautiful when the world she lives in is dying?

When there’s no time for shopping malls, skinny jeans or knee high boots – how does a daughter grow into her own skin when her mother is slowly disappearing out of hers? When people expect tears but consider temper tantrums impolite. How does a daughter find a way to exorcise her pain when punching walls is not something teenage girls are expected to do?

It doesn’t help to point out to them that young girls should smell fresh and beautiful when they’re sweating away their nights and days in a desperate inner wrestling match of worry. The deodorant can’t mask the dying that’s going on inside.

Daughters will grieve whether you give them room to or not and it will likely be un-pretty. They need room to be un-feminine and desperate without being told their choice in clothes, shoes or make up is inappropriate or unfashionable.

Grief comes in strange get ups sometimes.

Give them room to breathe without expectation or added responsibility. Give them a safe place to be sad. And more importantly, give them a safe place to be angry. Give them a father who places his own grief in proper perspective to theirs and manages his pain in a context that doesn’t hurt her.

If you want to offer her counseling be serious about it and find a counselor she is comfortable with. Don’t give up after a first awkward attempt – she needs someone to talk to who’s not you. And when you do try to peel back the layers of what she’s feeling, you will find it much easier going if you leave your own baggage at the door.

She knows you’re sad. She needs to know you’re sad. But she can’t carry your sadness for you.

Don’t try to drown her sorrow in all the books she should read or the Bible verses that should cure her. She’s on her own timetable, not yours. And maybe she needs movie nights and not church sometimes to help her process the cataclysmic shift in her world.

And as time passes, she will need people who remember her mother and share the ins and outs of who she was. Not just the good parts. But the difficult or ugly parts too. She needs a full memory, painted with honesty and sometimes a sense of humor.

She needs you and she doesn’t need you and she mostly hopes you’ll be patient as she figures out the difference.

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to grief.

There is only your individual story. This, two countries, a patient husband, two integral brothers, three redemptive children and eighteen years in between has been part of mine.

OK, are you ready? Give me your best five minutes {or more if you need them this week} for the prompt:

Loss…

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You see, the more articles I read about how to plan for that “4 hour road trip” or that “3 hour time change” the more I felt the urge to whack myself in the forehead and blurt out, “but, that’s basically the amount of time it takes us just to get to the airport, clear customs and pre-board!”

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

And if you set it to music, threw in some awesome stop motion photography, and pictures of YOU it would look a lot like this:

This is (in)courage, this is YOU! Where you are always welcome, just as you are.
{Go ahead, invite a friend &  share the video; after watching this I promise you’ll want to!}

{subscribers, if you can’t see the video just click here}Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

But we are called to it. Mothers. We are called to tame lions. And while I don’t know much, I am learning that it is impossible to face this King of Beasts that fits neatly into a toddler-sized package and effectively soothe his soul when we haven’t first tamed our own hearts.

And my heart roars. It frightens me on occasion. It is wild and snarly and quick to bite off the head of a child.

Taming this heart of mine is my constant work. It’s my wake-up-in-the-morning and beg the Father God for help work. It’s my 5pm-daddy’s-running-late I don’t think I can do it challenge. It’s my drown-my-sorrows-in-chocolate-cake-after-the-kids are asleep calling that I will, nonetheless, keep chasing.

Because I am learning that the only sure thing I can control in this family is myself.

I can’t control if my son still has nighttime accidents or if his big brother sneaks into our bed at midnight. I can’t control our income, how long the passport application for travel home will take, or whether Micah will smile for a photo or not.

I can only control me.

I can control my frustration and how I express it. Only I can iron out my shouty face, my crossed arms, my wrinkled attitude. I can always choose to laugh. And when it’s a day for tears instead, I can share them honest and safe and not loud and vindictive.

The lion king in me needs to lay down beside the children I am raising and show them how emotion is safely wielded. That we can be the boss of our own feelings.

I can tame lions. Starting with my own stubborn heart.

Because this house, this sometime-circus, it echoes what comes out of me. When I am angry it ripples outward and is reflected in every word and action and reaction of my children and the man I love. But when I can remember to bite tongue, spill grace, fight back the snippy retorts, we are all more likely to keep it together.

At least for this afternoon.

{Congrats to Kristina for winning Don’t Make Me Come Up There – an excellent how-to for would-be lion tamers on those crazy, juggling, fire breathing, run-of-the-mill days}

Photo: Krakow, Poland.

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Or delivered to your reader of choice.Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

Oversee his diapering of your baby, double checking whether or not he applied enough Desitin.

Rattle off a list of to-do’s the minute he walks in the door from work. Repeat them again over dinner. Mutter them under your breath while you’re getting the kids ready for bed. Huff and puff them to yourself every time you walk past him. Then complain about how the chores are being done while he is in the process of doing them.

Compare how he gets things done to any other living being – including your father, your best friend, or Chuck Norris.

Request his help in the same tone of voice that your toddler uses when he can’t get his way. For those of you who don’t have toddlers, if only dogs can hear your request then that’s the tone I’m talking about.

Pout.

Start Saturday morning out with a list of chores before anyone’s had breakfast or any fun.

Re-stack the dishes he already put away into their “proper” places. Ditto for re-folding laundry, re-ordering the pantry, or re-making the bed. Basically all “re’s” fall into this category.

Live like roommates instead of lovers. Forget to laugh. Believe what the neighbors think of your yard is more important than what you think of your man. Compare.

Because, wrapping a man around your finger…

begins with wrapping yourself around him first.

With words and arms and actions. Embrace your man. And, in my experience, he will willingly, happily, delightfully embrace you back.

You {and sometimes even your chores.}

[Naturally, I have done, do and will probably do again all of the above. But a girl can try to change, right? So, what'd I leave off the list?]

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