My Mom's Here

Ambush.  Dread.  They’re coming. Are you waiting for the refuge? Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint; preserve my life from dread of the enemy. Psalm 64:1 My prayers are usually: preserve me, preserve my family, preserve my friends. It is a rare occasion that I pray: preserve me from dread. Preserve me from the enemy? P reserve me from dread of the enemy finding me.  Preserve me from my to-do list? Preserve me from dreading my to-do list. Preserve me through my upcoming surgery? P reserve me from dreading my upcoming surgery. Preserve me from failing this exam. Preserve me from dreading failing this exam. So often our minds and emotions can be led by dread,  and it is exciting to know that the Lord is able to preserve us from dreading something.  He is able to preserve us from fear. Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked, from the throng of evildoers,  who whet their tongues like swords, who aim bitter words like arrows,   shooting from ambush

I’m feeling compelled to identify a name of Jesus for each day until Christmas. Hopefully, this will give me more insight to the reality of Jesus as a person, taking on roles just as any of us would. So here it goes. When the same Psalm comes to you multiple times in a few days span,  it’s time to pay attention. Psalm 23 had this repetitive effect on me throughout the month of November. My friends would start texting me a song or tell me excerpts from Psalm 23, and my vivid recollections of being a short little woolly sheep, not able to see over a fence and trusting in a watchful Shepherd came flooding back. My favorite messenge about Psalm 23 was when one of my sweet aunts wrote it out, to me. Joanne, The Lord, your Papa, is your Shepherd, you shall not be in want! Your Papa makes you lie down in green pastures, your Papa leads you beside quiet waters. He WILL restore your soul!! Joanne, Your papa guides you in paths of righteousness for His name sake! Even thou

One of the most tricky places to be in is to think you are alone.  No one understands, no one knows.  No one cares. No one could possibly be going through this.  Just me.  Alone. Thankfully, this thinking is not true and I'd like to offer 4 pearls of wisdom you can speak to yourself. You can thrive in a community that comes along side you, suffers with you, and you can know that the universe is not complete without you, just as you are. I enjoyed teaching this "alone" feeling to high school actors who played the roles of Jojo and Horton in a production of Seussical the Musical.   I had the students write down names of great minds of the past--inventors, visionaries, and people who were famous for something great.  They then had to figure out how each person must have felt proposing his or her idea to others. Like Leonardo da Vinci,  Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell, how must have they felt when someone rejected their ideas or told them they would

The blog challenge , a contest to blog each day for the month of February, comes to a close tonight.  My capacity to accomplish work never ceases to amaze me, and I'm grateful for the push of the blog challenge to build my capacity of what I can achieve in the realm of blogging. We had a wonderful party at Sky Zone today, with many, many children; 47.  Thirty families, celebrating 7 years with our Naomi.  Several bubbles of our community came together: school friends, work friends, church friends, neighbor friends.  My sister and brother-in-law even came down with my nieces.   Nora is one of those brilliants who can pull creativity out of thin air, move an army, and whip party favors into shape.  She can do many more things, and is an amazing mother, to boot.    So, as my final post for the blog challenge, here is the poem that Nora and I wrote, with help from  the peanut gallery (our husbands).  The poem accompanied the favors for the party (which were clearly disjointed

Being on-call is like a pandemic in our house.  There is a heated moment when you get to the middle or near-end of a strategy game, especially a game we have, which is actually called Pandemic.  In this game, the world is simulated as having a pandemic outbreak of a disease, and the players are the health team trying to stop the pandemic and find cures.  We don't have an outbreak of disease in our actual household, thank goodness, we have an outbreak of the beeper going off throughout the night when Mike is on-call. Call days are clearly marked on our calendar.  "CALL" is exactly what I write on the top of each day Mike is on call; I dread it, he dreads it.  But it is a day set aside, part of the gig, and patients do not wait until the glossy hours of 9-5 to get sick, so someone has to be available.  We both know this full well, but this does not go without taking a toll on the household. As a wife, it is almost impossible to relax until the call has been taken, the

There should be a mandate that we speak with people with gray hair frequently, with depth, quality time, and purpose. Of course, I waited until I was 100 miles away from parents and grandparents to ponder what wisdom was said from our family members and friends who have gray hair, and now we are 200 miles away. Please know, I do not intend to say "gray hair" with any kind of degradation, but rather as a compliment, and a position of esteem, knowing that my baselines are:  Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life. Prov 16:31   The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair. Prov 20:29 In a culture where we try to cover up the gray hairs by getting our hair dyed, shaving heads,  putting in highlights, and ripping out the darn crooked coarse strands when they pop up during a quarter-life crisis, there has to be something said for the life learned and the wisdom of experience that comes through the grays.