Tucked between the layers of sand, dirt, mud, and sweat.

Hidden deep down where he might forget, but you never would.

Stashed in the corners of a conversation dominated by a whole lot of “no.”

Jammed into his gym bag, under sweaty T-shirts and knee pads.

Cluttered into the corner next to the cleats.

Hunched on the sofa in the midnight-should-have-been-home-by-now hour.

Resting in the rhythm of his safe-in-bed breathing.

Are these moments.

I’m over at the MOB Society for Mothers of Boys (and really anyone else who juggles the occasional crazy). Join me?

There have been days lately when I’ve felt like a crazy person at the center of a three ring circus of my own making. What I can’t figure out is if I am called to be at the center of the big top right now or if I stumbled in by accident. Either way I find myself juggling what seem to be purple poodles leaping through flaming hoops while dangling 30 ft up, suspended by only a thread, which a small but persistent caterpillar is nibbling through. I look down and see row after row of blurred faces cheering me on. Clapping and laughing they tilt heads way, way back and wave hands at me, smiling and certain that I won’t fall.

To the left and the right clowns are being shot from cannons and cotton candy sellers promise that everything will turn out sweet. Ponies prance and dance in endless circles and the music blares a marching anthem over it all. Left, right, left, right deadlines bear down to the beat of their own drummer.

I swing and spin and catch and release flying dogs and elusive peace – I am ring master and servant and my dry mouth feels the sweetness dissolves into vapor.

So I close my eyes. I close my eyes and let go and know I will fall a long way down amid a shower of poodles, hoops, and failure to prove myself worthy of all this trust and pomp and circumstance.

I let go and I don’t fall. I let go and I am held.

Strong, calloused hands of a Carpenter have been wrapped safety net tight around me. I lean my head way back and let Him support my weary head. I curl up into the tiny child I feel like on the inside and wriggle into the crook between His fingers.

It is such a relief to remember how big He is. It gives me permission to embrace my smallness. We are a perfect fit.

God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. – 1 Corinthians 1:27.

Me and the purple poodles.

He made me buzz off all his locks yesterday.

I thought I would be heart broken.

But instead I discovered my brother. Underneath all those curls, there was Luke staring back at me. All the strong, sturdy lines of a face I’ve known since 1981. There it was today, grinning up at me and making my heart clench fist tight in that old familiar way.

It’s been two and a half years since you two first met and last saw each other.

Beautiful Luke of the blue eyes and blonde hair. The little brother who calls me Lisssa-Jo in just the same way that Micah does too. Luke of the passionate heart and tender spirit; Luke who I’ve mothered in all the ways he probably wished I hadn’t since we were both just into our double digits; Luke of the nights spent on the green couch in our loft when he oh-so-sincerely wasn’t falling in love with Carine; and Luke of the wedding, and the wife, and the growing up into Carine’s husband.

I remember how our Auntie Lies once described my lanky little brother as a chunky, stocky toddler who ran headfirst at life. And today, an ocean away, there he was grinning great gusto right up and into my eyes while hanging over the foot of the bed.

I pray Micah inherits more than your features, my little brother. I pray he inherits your compassion. I pray he follows your determination to grab faith by both hands and wrestle it off the pages of Scripture and into real life. I pray he harbors a deep well of creativity like yours, and draws from it to tell the only story that matters. The story that lives in every character you paint with words, no matter how battered or broken they are.

And I hope he gets to spend many a summer with you. Teach him about jacaranda trees and movie sets and send him home to me with more than just your looks.

Send him home with your story.

Lovingly linked to Emily’s place – where a group of star gazers find beauty in the everyday extraordinary.

{Did you know you can get my posts delivered for free via email or in a reader?}

I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life in airports.

And I still contend there is something magical about them.

They sweep us up and out of ourselves; a moment of complete suspension, between one reality and another. And we see more reflected in the windows than the neon lights dangling above the sunrise. We see snapshots of life played out in the full spectrum of human emotions. Shades of love, sorrow, and reunion that sinew around the heart and squeeze the breath out of lungs no matter how many times the scenes have played out before. Every time they unfold it’s like the first time. Because for someone it is. And for someone else it still feels as vivid as the first time, even when it’s the hundredth.

I spent 36 hours in three different airports this weekend. And aside from the multiple delays and missed flights, the experience did not disappoint.

There was the dad-chaperone travelling with a crew of four teenage girls en route to a missions trip. Watching him shepherd them while trying to balance their independence was a delight. They walked the same tightrope of hope as the rest of us stand-by travellers, but there’s was louder and more rewarding to watch. Two flights came and went without them. Every time names were read they clutched each other with bright green fingernails, sighed and wished and groaned when they were passed by.

But when their father-figure fist pumped and announced he had got them on the second to last flight of the night their joy was delicious. They whooped and leaped and hugged and high fived. I was almost glad they had taken the five remaining seats standing between me and home. Almost.

There was the mom travelling home to Baltimore after a week in Jamaica. Not for vacation, but for a funeral. And her husband would be driving out at midnight with their two daughters in the back seat to pick her up. So when tired mothers came traipsing by with their kids wrapped close in tow, I looked at her and knew her arms felt as lonely as mine.

There were the proud parents of a deeply asleep 21-month old boy who whispered to me in the dark confines of the aircraft about their weary journey from Venezuela. The dad’s red-rimmed eyes warmed into mine and I recognized what I saw there. The look of deep love for a child. The look of a parent who expects everyone else to realize the miracle that exists in his child. So I did. I whispered back how beautiful the boy was and how well he had travelled. And the dad grinned quietly in the dark.

There were other moments too. The sleeping on the floor, the recognition that my bones have aged since they were last stranded like that, and the pure, gut-wrenching frustration of hour after hour of lonely delays. But those were an aside, rather than the main story.

And the main story is always about relationships. The good, the bad, and the desperately beautiful. So, I chose to read those. And I love that you read along. Thank you for being a part of my story. Thank you for making me laugh, providing geography lessons, and encouragement. In all my years of travel, you were a first for me this time, twitter. I love that you walked me all the way home to my happy ending, which, through tired eyes, might have looked a bit like this.

…my children show me so.

…my husband proves it so.

…the tulips sing it so.

…my journey shouts it so.

OK, your turn. Subscribers – wanna click over to play along?

Can I ask you a hard question?

Does blogging grow your joy? Not just does it bring you occasional joy, but does it grow your joy?

Does it give or take away your peace, your sense of contentment and your view of yourself?

Does it remind you that you are part of a community larger than yourself?

Does it inspire you to greater action, greater love, greater contemplation?

Or does it make you feel small?

I’m worried about your answer. And I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. Because sometimes this world of blogging can become just one more opportunity for the biggest liar of them all to tell you that you don’t measure up.

Wanna know my idea of the antidote? And yes, it does include s’mores! Come and keep reading with me over at (in) courage today.

Unattended two-and-a-half year olds will climb couches in the church foyer when your back is turned and grab onto the fire alarm for leverage. The alarm will ring a long, loud time. The Pastor you were shaking hands with minutes before will flee to get the “off” key. The key will not turn up, the entire congregation will. Everyone except you will laugh.

Consider yourselves warned.

Hey Mom,

Has it really been 17 years? You won’t believe all the things that have happened the last decade and a half. Dad’s the biggest change. I was talking to him today and he and Wanda have taken in another baby. A little girl this time.  She’s only 1 month older than my Micah; but while Micah is a great, big, bruiser of a boy, running all over the place as fast as his fat legs can carry him, she hasn’t learned/isn’t able to walk yet.

Wanda has a mother’s heart as deep as the ocean. Many of the things I didn’t have the time to learn from you I have watched in her. She is a doer, seemingly indefatigable. She and dad are re-learning parenting together. And while they adopted (Jack’s hero) Karabo a few years ago, I know she has been having dreams about a little baby girl named Thandi.

Who would have thought that in his sixties dad would be back to changing diapers and middle of the night wake up calls? God must have a quirky sense of humor. Because for all dad’s years of study, degrees and theological aspirations it’s kids, kids and more kids that God keeps putting in his path. There’s us three of course. Then Wanda has two. And they adopted Karabo together. Karabo’s three siblings are a constant part of the traffic that passes through their train station of a house and now that also includes a 21-month-old.

Futhermore, while I think dad would much rather be preaching to the adults, he was first asked to teach a kid’s Sunday school class. He is constantly being inundated with these members that our society often considers snot-nosed, second-class citizens.

Surely it’s not by accident. Because, I tell you what mom, on days when I think that everything I believe might be pure hokey the one thing I can’t get around is the change in dad. And the children he is so unexpectedly surrounded by.

We underestimate children, don’t we? We see them as a means to an end rather than an end in and of themselves. We fail to learn from them about ourselves. And as part of that process, I have found that people radically mischaraterize motherhood.

Do you know that after you died and left me without a guide on my journey into womanhood several (male) elders from our church took it upon themselves to lecture me on a woman’s responsibility to bear children. I was 18 and recently abandoned by my mother. I told them I didn’t want to have kids. They told me that made me a sinner. So, naturally, I swore off marriage and children.

I was 18 after all.

But here I am, one husband and two baby boys later. Apparently God was more gracious than those who purported to speak on His behalf. Because He gently, patiently showed me time and again that He loved me for me. Not because of what I did, the kids I could have, the job I got or the country where I lived. He just loved me for me. Plain and simple.

I can’t tell you what a relief it was. It freed me to want to be a wife and ultimately to want to be a mother. Not because I was supposed to. But because I loved to.

Oh, mom, I love it so. Some days I fear my heart will burst and spill out all that delicious emotion that my family evokes in it.

How did you bear it? How did you bear the leaving? Because, I am 35 this year and for the first time realize how achingly young 42 really is.

I wish I could have known you mom to mom. There’s lots I would have liked to ask. Instead, I will simply tell you a few things. Jackson’s middle name is yours. I named him after the long line of strong women that preceded me and that I am also named for. He has our gift of the gab and flair for the dramatic. But, in looks, he is Pete’s all the way.

Micah might be Pete’s namesake but his resemblance to the cousins on your side is striking. His passionate temperement, however, is pure dad.

Like you, I had one on each of the two continents we call home. Unlike you, my husband did not deliver either of them. Jackson has inherited the love for movies that I got from you. Micah might be our family’s first chance at excelling at sports. My Peter is very different from yours but loves me just as fully.

It is strange to realize that who I am now is because of your absence. But I am well, mom. More than that, it is well with my soul.

And I know that was what you wanted to hear most of all,

Lisa-Jo

{A repost from last year, as I prepare my heart for the date fast approaching when my mom will have been gone for the exact same number of years of my life she was alive.}

So, I just love that you hang out here on Fridays.

I love that you kick off your shoes, put your feet up on the coffee table, and make yourself comfortable. I love that we gab about our likes and dislikes, our quirks, quibbles, and quaint qualities.

It’s delish to swap stories with you.

Today I thought it might be fun to share more than just a sentence or two. I thought it might be fun to exchange snapshots of who we are – using pictures and words. Why don’t we link up our “About Me” pages and visit a little longer than usual.

It’s easy peasy. Just enter the web address of your “About Me” page into the form below. Link to a photo of yourself when prompted and ta-da – we’re hanging out face-to-face. And if you want to get even chattier, you’re welcome to write up a whole “Hiya, this is me and I’m glad to meet ya” post. But, I’ll just be linking to my About Me page, so don’t sweat it.

One more thing: Once you’ve entered your link – go visit the person before you on the list, say “hi,” and let’s all get to know each other a little better. Drop a comment on their About page or their most recent post. Consider it like signing their guest book. {Gosh, but I used to love those as a kid!}

Are you with me? Good, here’s the form. I’ll go first.

OK, your turn. Subscribers, come on over so we can see your pretty faces and offer you some tea.

Ecclesiastes 3: A Time for Everything

¹ There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven …
7…a time to be silent and a time to speak.

My mouth was doing a mile a minute. It was sprinting ’cause time was short, my baby was whining, and I thought the empty space of silence in our Bible studying needed filling up. On auto pilot I felt it in my periphery – the stop sign: urgent warning to zip it or miss something. Something that was too cautious to try and outrun my sentences. Several paragraphs later I tried to gracefully putter to a stop.

But she was already looking down. She had retreated behind her worried brown eyes. Suddenly it was my heart that was racing chasing with the realization that all my heedless chatter might have cost the group a moment of truth. I tried to back pedal. And stumbled into graceless silence.

I have spent time at her house, cheered on World Cup teams together, watched her kids in the nursery at church and let my mouth ramble on and on into those “making conversation” moments. Today I realized she had more than polite conversation to share. And I finally shut up and listened.

Her sharing shamed my long stream of words.

Her story was raw and beautiful and made nonsense of all I thought I knew about her. The more she talked, softly, but with big courage, the further the goose flesh spread on my body. I listened. I couldn’t help but listen with my whole face and my salty eyes. I heard who she was when I was finally quiet. And was overwhelmed with regret at how much I had missed.

How much I might still have missed if I hadn’t felt someone yanking at the breaks.

But He did and I’m glad. Because when I was finally quiet He up and spoke volumes through her words and into that room today. Right there between the plastic zoo animals, the baby activity station, and the spinach dip I’d been eating five minutes before. I discovered living proof of all I claim to believe.

And I almost hadn’t let it get a word in.