I stand on the platformed high dive. What is probably only a 12 foot drop, seems to me, at the age of seven, the length of a cliff face.

To move from Goldfish to Porpoises jumping off the high dive is a requirement. In 1982 they call it a rite of passage. I call it cruel and unusual.

I already feel stupid because my same-aged best friend is already swimming laps with the swim team and I’m stuck on the side of the pool during lessons blowing bubbles under the water.

I see my father treading water below. He’s only in his mid-thirties, still really strong with a back that is tanned from the summer. He’s waiting patiently for me, squinting up in the sun. He’s gonna catch me, or close to it. At the very least he’ll be there to mop up the pieces of me that smack the water.

I can’t do it. The high dive is a magnet that is stopping me feet where they are. I gently peer over the edge.

My father still waits for me.

I jump, my face already wet with tears as I hit the water. The bright afternoon disappears instantly and I’m lost in the black WHOOSH thunder of the water. It’s in my ears, in my eyes. And it’s very, very dark.

I go much deeper than I had ever expected. Than I think even my father had expected.

For a split second I forget what to do. Do I kick? Swim with my arms? Which way is up?

I begin to kick and my father somehow has me in his arms. I don’t know if he’s swam below to get me, if he’s simply reached out to grab me or if I’ve swam up to the surface. It doesn’t matter because now I’m safe.

I’m safe. And I’m a Porpoise.

My Father asks me all the time to take jumps that require faith. Lately He’s been asking me to deplete all of my faith. And when I think I’ve given it all up, he asks me to give a little more. And then just a pinch more. And then, Sarah, how much MORE faith do you have?

Because I’m here, He says. I’m treading water and I’m waiting patiently for you. Yes, I know the water is dark. But I’m here in the middle of it. And you will do deep. Deeper than you ever thought you could go and you will be disoriented, you won’t know which way is up. But then I will catch you in My arms and you will be safer than you’ve ever known. And you won’t have to tread water in the middle of the deep end because I will be doing it for you.

But you have to jump.

Can you do it?

Can YOU do it?

Yesterday was one of those lock-myself-in-the-bathroom type of days.

All summer discipline has been jeopardized by late nights and late mornings. The girls have already begun to grate on one another: the younger one too eager to play with the older one and the older one is just plain exasperated. I’ve been trying to pepper down days with sight words for said four-year-old and multiplication practice for my ingoing third grader. We’ve spent days at home, mornings at the local zoo and afternoons at swim lessons.

But no one wants to work at getting along, it seems.

Actually, no one likes to work.

And frankly, neither do I. At least not during the summer.

So my discipline lags and my daughters naturally follow suit. There is whining and crying and an occasional Get-Outta-My-Room! There might even be some scissors used in inappropriate ways, some left-out-of-the-container play-doh and many, many spilled cups of yogurt/water/diet coke {mine} and dog dishes. No one, not even me, is exhibiting much self-control around my house.

Oh I know it’s my own fault. I can see it on their faces.

By the middle of the afternoon yesterday, after I’d shut myself in my bedroom to dial off an emergency call to my husband. {So you know, I reserve these for the very most worst days totally only about 3 or 4 every year}

My littlest one followed me into the room. So I retreated one step further into the master bathroom, sat on the toilet seat and locked the door.

“I just can’t do this,” I tell him.

She pounds on the door.

“They are out of control. I’m out of control. That’s why I’ve locked myself in the bathroom,” I confess.

I’d like to say he calmed me down but he didn’t. He was just as stressed out at work as I was at home.

End Call. This wasn’t helping.

I took a deep breath, wiped the sweat from my neck and opened the door. My four-year-old stood outside the bathroom angry-crying that I wasn’t listening to her when I was on the phone with her father.

All it took was a few minutes by myself to get myself together. I guess I’d hit my “rock bottom” of summer parenting because I was ready to do whatever it took to fix the problem I’d created. I understood that the attitude in my home began with me. If I could be kind and calm with my words, they might be too. If I was disciplined, they would be more prone to it as well.

“Okay girls,” and I called them into my room. We sat on the floor and I doled out a few new rules, a couple consequences for what had gone on that day and I also confessed my own wrong.

I apologized for yelling and for allowing things to go on as long as they had. Then the three of us prayed together.

And then somehow in the mess and noise of the afternoon, a calming balance took over each one of us. We spent the rest of the day in {relative} harmony. Honestly.

There was one or two mishaps, but nothing like what had gone on before.

Tomorrow might be a different story but for now I’m working on my own attitude and discipline and watch it trickle down to my daughters.

Do you have a parenting confession?

When I was a middle school teacher I had my one big magic book.

Each August before school began I’d arm myself for the upcoming school year by visiting the teacher supply store. Posters and maps. Sticky Putty. Next aisle was staplers and hole punchers. Then there would be row with hundreds of the dark green classic teachers’ planning books on shelves. Every iteration of planning book to fit the needs of all kinds of teachers could all be found there.

The book I always chose had big boxes for planning for each class period organized in week by week at the back of the book and the class registers in the front.

Ahh.

A new book for a new school year. There is something clean and disciplined about a crisp, perfect new planning book.

I’d sharpen my pencil, sit down with my curriculum and begin to plan out the first month of school. I’d print everything carefully and neat little rows. As soon as I received my class rosters, I’d print each of their names in pencil by class, last name first, first name last.

By January my planning boxes would be littered with red pen scribbled in the corners as I made adjustments, the lines in my class registers would be eraser upon eraser as students moved classes, and the book itself would be bent and the pages cluttered with paper clips as dividers. I’d gotten lazy and hurried as the months wore on.

My perfect book would be worn and tired before the school year was even half-way done.

If I’m honest, sometimes I feel like that halfway-through-the-school-year book.

I’m cluttered, even though I began so neat and ordered. I am filled with eraser marks and pencil lead. My heart is lazy and fat with the school year, it’s bent and broken and torn in place.

With matters of the heart, I can’t just “buy a new book.” Oh, that would be too easy.

The human heart doesn’t have the luxury to reinvent itself every time it needs rejuvenation. Or redirection. Or reprimand. What about the heart that’s lapsed into selfishness {mine} or the heart that has eased into comfort {mine too}. And there’s the heart that has been broken too wide and then split up the other side, or the heart that has been hardened. How do I start over with any of that? I can’t just buy a new book and sharpen my No. 2 Ticonderoga.

The answer is to allow the One who created my heart to renew it. He can make it crisp and new and clean again. He can smooth the bent and broken pages and straighten the places that have gone crooked. He can erase the sin and the grief with His blood.

He can make the heart lean and efficient, sensitive and empathetic, compassionate, caring.

God can re-make my heart. If I allow Him.

Do you ever feel like you have a cluttered, lazy heart?

My eight-year-old has been obsessed with horses from the time that she could pronounce the word “horse” at the age of two. By the time she was four she could easily saddle a Breyer horse and by the time she was six she could saddle a real pony.

And like any normal horse-swayed young girl she even loves to do the grooming and brushing that keeps a horse clean. Except picking the hooves. She hates it. The hooves are cumbersome, the horse sometimes does not cooperate and for her, hoof-picking is like the toilet-scrubbing of the grooming regimen.

“The hoof is so HEAVY,” she complains. “Lilly doesn’t want to let me do it!”

She grunts and whines and asks me to help. Her riding instructor and I shrug. “You can do this yourself”, I say to her.

“But I just CAN’T!” as she slides her hand down the length of Lilly’s leg. Lilly leans slightly and stands gently on that foot, ready to give her hoof up to be cleaned. Hope groans and holds it with one hand as she scrapes with the other. It’s heavy and I can see the her little bicep strain at the weight.

She has to do that to all four muddy, caked, manured horse feet. She stands up and looks at the other three and sighs. She moves to the back leg and begins again.

But it’s part of the job. It’s part of the joy.

“I can never do that,” she says again the next week. I just laugh because she’s done it before. She knows she can.

I’m learning that as soon as I say “I could never do that!” God seems to put that very thing right in my path.

I could never

write a book

overcome food addiction

send that letter

go to the places in my heart that are scary to go, and to go there with others.

And I’m not a pro at any of those. My book is half done {and has been half done for several months}. My battle with food and weight will always be a burden. And I still struggle with telling my marriage story sometimes. I wonder how many women sitting out there have been the victims of adultery and how many of them will hate me for what I’ve done. That always crosses my mind.

I’m learning to look at the things I’ve said I’ll never do and calculate the cost. Is it more expensive to live in fear or is it more expensive to take a risk?

I’m not quite sure that I’ve gotten any better at living my story necessarily, but I’m pretty sure I’m getting better at tackling those things that I claimed I would never be able to do. And the pay off for that, I’m learning, is priceless.

And Hope? She picks up the hoof pick week after week and still wonders why I don’t help. It’s good for her to struggle with something, I think. It makes her strong, makes her ready, makes her fearless. And it makes the ride worth the cost.

And after you’ve done the work, only then do you get to ride the horse.

And its the ride that makes it worth it.

Are there things you’ve said that you’ll never do?

.

“I’m going to go spend my money, Mom!” Hope called out to me as she skipped off toward the Art Studio. She had gathered a thick wad of light green “cash” in her hand as we’d spent the morning yesterday at a local children’s museum.

The kids “earn” money for performing tasks around the “city” and then, if they choose, take it home. Or {I learned yesterday} they may purchase amateur art from the arts and crafts studio inside. I had no idea.

She ran all the way there and I followed with the slowness and non-urgency that motherhood brings. By the time I walked in the room behind her, she had already bartered a deal with the attendant and was beginning to count out her cash to buy a piece of art.

“THAT’s the one I’m buying, Mom!” She exchanged the pretend bills for the mini-masterpiece {which I carefully held in my hand for the rest of our visit} and smiled at me.

You Can Be An Artist. She read. “I like this one, she told me. I think its true.”

We took it home and she taped it up on the wall in her bedroom.

Hopefully it will remind her to draw and to dream. To think and to let her thoughts go places amazing and beautiful.

It won’t CREATE art in her, but it will remind her {I hope}.

She’s already an artist: Eight-year-old hands flying over white computer paper with a pencil. Erase, wipe away pink eraser rubbings, sketch again. Erase. Forehead down close to the table, eyes squinting because she’s trying to see the image in her mind. She sketches again… and gets it. Closer this time to how she imagines it. She looks up and smiles at me.

She is an artist.

But so are the rest of us. Did you know that? If you don’t think you are, you just need to be reminded. We all just need reminded once in awhile.

We need someone to say to us, YOU ARE AN ARTIST. You can do this. You can write/sew/speak/paint/create/sing. You are an artist.

Whatever it is you need to do to remind yourself that, yes, you are born to create {we are because we are made in the image of the Creator}, then do it. Don’t wait for inspiration to come crashing in your front door. It usually comes

once

you

begin.

So remind yourself who you are. Put something up on your wall to say You Are An Artist. Tell your husband to remind you. Write it in the front of your Bible. Put your guitar near your pillow so you will have to move it in order to sleep. Write ARTIST in lipstick on your mirror; just make sure you don’t forget that you are one.

And then do it, summer-damp hair slung over your neck, forehead close to the paper with the image in your mind. Create.

Do you like to CREATE? What is your forte?

Sometimes I have to peel my summer-logged kids off the couch. Even though I’m trying to keep them pretty busy so that the tendency to SIT and VEG doesn’t take over, if you were to visit my house on a July afternoon you might find all three of us sprawled in front of a movie.

Summers are made for lazy afternoons.

But at some point the mom in me has to rouse herself {usually around the time I panic that dinner is coming sooner than I think} and I devise ways to trump the television or video game.

Let’s clean our rooms

Let’s straighten up the play area

Help me fold some laundry

or, Let’s work on multiplication tables for next year.

Yep. None of that is very inviting.

They might raise one eyebrow in acknowledgment to me. Cozy and sunk in deep to the sofa cushions, they are the poster children for comfort. They don’t want to obey me because it’s hard and it doesn’t even make sense.

“WHY??” in unison they wail.

It even hurts to obey sometimes.

I do things in progression like stand in front of the TV, then I ask them nicely to “get their little rear ends up off the couch” and do as I ask. After that the television goes off and gentle reminders about lost privileges make their way into my vocabulary.

Like two little old lady spinsters they creak and crack as they drag their tanned legs from horizontal positions and messy July hair from pillows. Their faces are not happy, but

they obey.

Obedience requires the hard thing sometimes. Not the comfortable. Not the safe. Not the easy. But sometimes, the most difficult road. The path that takes me from my sunk-in, deeply-cocooned, pillow-piled existence toward obedience to Him is exactly where I need to be. It takes courage to obey because it’s so much safer here on the sofa: familiar, soft and warm.

The semi-dark, shade-drawn afternoon is nice for awhile but as soon as I’m called to obey, I must. I can’t stay in the dark with a quiet mind. I must act because my love-relationship with Him requires it.

Lord, let me be brave in my obedience today.

Have you ever been obedient when it took courage to do so?

I don’t think I have to tell you that words are powerful.

I’m not always the best with them, I think. I consider myself a communicator but I can’t write with snarky humor like her, or paint a word portrait of heart-wrenching beauty like her. And although I write from a poet’s heart, I don’t use poet’s words like her.

I really do try to use words well. {I guess we all have our own places in the world of words}

Last week I wrote about how someone else’s verbal explosion when I was fifteen altered the course of my life. Those were words that hid selfishness, that exposed her own hurts and that were delivered with a venom weak with pride. It changed me.

And so many of you talked openly about words that had been said to you over the course of your lives. You remembered each one with accurate detail and I was brought to tears because of the vividness.

That says something, doesn’t it?

But words don’t always work that way. They have set me free with wings I didn’t know I had. A few months ago a friend spoke some words to me, a step of faith at the time, but have begun to alter the course of my life. I promise you she didn’t know that that was what would happen. Faith on her part is bringing freedom to me.

And then last week an author-friend told me,

YOU CAN WRITE THIS. There is a book in that.

I can? Yeah, maybe I can. And maybe I will be able to look back on that sentiment and recognize how the spoken-words of a friend changed me. Fixed a funk in me. Helped me see myself with different eyes.

So don’t try to tell me you don’t have a voice. An audience. Words to say.

You do. The words are sitting there on your tongue and at the top of your heart ready to be spoken. The audience you say you don’t have? It’s sitting at your kitchen table during breakfast or next to you on the bus.

Today:

Say a word. A good one. One that heals with wisdom and one said in faith.

But be careful what you say in outburst to your kids, husband, the sales girl at the store. Words can alter the course of a life.

Do you need to say something today?

Six and a half years ago I walked away from an extra-marital affair. And if you’ve hung around my blog for any length of time you might have read my whole story. {If you haven’t, you can read it here}.

Six and a half years ago, Chad and I did all that we could to break and re-set our marriage like a broken bone and to attempt to heal from all the pain I’d caused us and all the filth we both had been involved in.

I went to counseling, I dove into the Bible, I submitted myself to the authority of the leadership of our church, I was honest about every last horrible thing I’d done.

But there was one thing I never did.

I never apologized to the wife of the man I’d had the affair with.

It wasn’t because I wasn’t sorry. I was sick with myself about what I’d done.

It wasn’t because I didn’t wake up each morning and regret every minute of the past several years. I did.

And it wasn’t because I didn’t think I needed to. I knew I did; I just didn’t know how or when.

The why of that story really isn’t important. It would take more explaining than I am willing to do in a single blog post. You can certainly judge me for my belated-apology if you wish. But I would hope that you wouldn’t. I would hope that you would have grace.

I wasn’t being disobedient to God. I wasn’t purposefully running from the prospect of contacting her. For a very long time I felt that although I would contact her someday, now wasn’t the time.  And I firmly believe it wasn’t the right time until earlier this year.

I woke up one day and realized that I needed to make the apology that had been on the tip of my tongue since 2004.

Once I decided to do it I was scared more than I ever had been. Contacting her opens both of us up to the past and to things perhaps better left there. Contacting her means the probability of not being forgiven, it means all of us reliving it all over again and it means

so

much

vulnerability.

So I mailed a letter a couple weeks ago.

I know it might seem anti-climactic to some. It might even seem shocking to others of you that I haven’t done this before NOW. But, this is ME, right here in the present. And hopefully, being honest about the now and the here rather than only about the was and did is a good thing.

{To view video click here}

Fear: I’m getting over a lot of it one step at a time. And this was the first big leap.

Have you done anything lately that scared you?

I’m going to take advantage of the long holiday weekend

with fireworks,

and movies,

and a few extra calories

to take a day off from any serious writing.

First thing Tuesday I’ll be back with a video of my first serious foray into Fear-Smashing. I did something that might seem anti-climactic for some, shocking for others, but believe me, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.

What did you do over the holiday weekend?

The house I grew up in is bordered on the south by a low brick wall.  I’d throw open the front screen, scramble up to the top and walk along the length of it.

I did it hundreds of times.

One afternoon I didn’t know that two important bricks were loose.  I walked on the wall like I had done countless afternoons before {each time reaching the end intact}, but when I reached the wobbly pieces, my foot gave out.

Two seven-year-old feet went out from under me.

Two seven-year-old shins scraped the length of the wall.

Two bloody legs scoured free of skin from ankle to knee.

I collapsed and screamed and was carried into the house. My mother bandaged my shins and let me lay on the sofa to watch cartoons. But the legs of little girls heal quickly and soon after the bricks had been mortared back into security, I ran the length of the wall again.

Balancing atop the low brick wall as a second grader wasn’t a bad choice, it wasn’t unwise, but it also wasn’t safe. I’d made the best possible choice with the information in front of me and fell anyway.

WISE and SAFE aren’t interchangeable.

I can also live in extreme safety, never making a choice that might result in exposure or failure, but that may not be wise.

I have grown up thinking that wise and safe were the same thing. My life is full of safe choices. Thinking I was making the wise choice for college turned out to be me just making the safe choice. Thinking I was being wise in getting married so young, I was actually worried that we just wouldn’t make it much longer as a dating couple. We needed to get married to make it “count”.

So often we equate safety and wisdom and risk with foolishness. But that isn’t always true.

Sometimes the wisest choice is also the riskiest one. And the safest, most comfortable choice is the most foolish one. I can create this safe, comfortable, fat life for myself never taking a risk and never worried that I might fail. But what kind of life is that?

I want to be wise, but in that I believe that it won’t always be “safe”.

Our family is about to make some changes that we believe will be made with wisdom. But they are anything but safe. Wisdom and safety do NOT mean the same thing, but in wisdom and prayer we believe we will rest within God’s safety and not our own.

What do you think? Are you a safe person? A risky one? How does that expose itself in foolishness or wisdom?