My three-year-old cousin raced around our downstairs yesterday. All joy and determination, he desperately wanted to go as fast as he possibly could around and around the center fireplace in our home.

He sped past stone corners un-childproofed, near wooden beams not padded to protect little heads, and by shelves that wouldn’t budge. The mom in me winced at every circuit. But he laughed and he ran and in all honesty, I don’t think it occurred to him he might fall.

At three you don’t worry about the stone hearth you might crack your head open on, you just worry about going fast and the fun you will have while doing it.  You aren’t scared or stuck or stopped. At three, you don’t count the risks, weigh them and wonder if you will survive. You just run.

At three, you are free.

The opposite of fear isn’t courage. The opposite of fear is freedom.

The past year was a difficult one for me.

I got stopped and stuck and at times I wondered if I really was going to survive. I did not live a year that felt free. Instead it felt heavy and hard and bogged down.

I’m pretty sure I’m ready to run again. I’m ready to speed around the fireplace and not worry about the sharp corners. The sharp corners will always be there and I’m stupid to think I can avoid them and still live a life that is free and full of adventure.

So let’s ALL begin to run again. Let’s jump up and take a step forward and another one. And let’s take another one until the moving forward turns from a creep into a walk into a run. Let’s move with joy and with determination in the hope that this year is full of promise and of freedom.

I’m ready. Are you?

This one is for everyone who feels alone at Christmas, who feels like an alien in their own home town, who feels like no one really, really knows you.

{And it’s for the rest of us too.}

You are not alone. You are a part of a community.

Illumined

We sat in a row by ourselves.

Christmas lights had been artistically arranged on the stage. The staff was adjusting their microphones and getting ready to begin the Christmas Eve service. The worship team was already in place.  And hundreds of people, families and groups of friends, were streaming in the door.

And we, the new family, hardly knew a soul. 

For over a decade we’d spent the 24^th at a Christmas Eve service at the church we had gone to for 12 years. We had sat in long rows next to both old friends and family. In our old church I could look around the small room and know, at least by sight, every face.

But this year everything was different. Six months before we had left that familiar church and now we were in a new place and everything thing about it, especially at Christmas, felt foreign.

To read the rest of this post on (in)courage, click here.

Selfish as it might be, I am going to worry about me this Christmas season.

I’m worried that my fear rests more on the stuffing of my own stomach and bank account than it does on the welfare of others.

I’m worried that I’m more scared of my own loneliness than I worry that others will be lonely this season.

I’m worried that I try to fill myself before I try to fill others.

I’m worried that I try to gather more accomplishments than I try to help in the accomplishments of others.

Plainly stated, I’m worried at the state of my own heart.

My Christmas prayer for myself, my selfish Christmas prayer, is simply this.

Lord, make me scared that others are hungry and let me seek to feed them. Let me be fearful that others do not have enough and let me try and meet needs. Lord, make me more worried that others are loved and cared for than if I am loved. Let me be anonymous in my giving and unnamed in my helping. Let it be Your name that is used.

Selfish as it may seem, don’t just feed the hungry this season but instead change me. Work on me and let me focus on the changing of my own heart so that in that, I might help to serve the world.

What is your Christmas prayer today, selfish or not? Have you ever been the recipient of an anonymous gift?

Loving your family around the Christmas table might be the hardest thing you do all year.

That weird uncle. That horribly judgmental second cousin. The grandparent who will never get you.

I’m writing about giving our families a second chance this Christmas and bringing Grace home.

Join me on People of the Second Chance today. Click here.

Do you struggle with bringing Grace home to your family?

She devours fact books like they’re pancakes on Saturday mornings.

War Horse. The Unwanteds. The Lightening Thief. And encyclopedias and almanacs: How many seconds in a year.  What polar bears eat. When Pluto was “discovered”.  And why the Titanic sunk.

She asks, “Why DID the Titanic sink, Mom?”

So I try to bring up my memory of James Cameron’s behemoth  film of 1997 and what I remember of an iceberg ripping a hole the size of New York in the side of the ocean liner. I explain that icebergs float with 90 percent of their mass beneath the water.  I don’t tell her about Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet with blue lips in the water or about the lower class passengers drowning below deck.

“Did babies die?” She wonders.

“I’m not sure if there were babies on the ship,” I lie.

But then I realize that she can know that. She’s almost ten and she can know that.

I explain to her that there weren’t enough life boats and that the rich people stayed in staterooms with windows. That the poorer people weren’t allowed on the boats before the rich people escaped.

She decided, “I think babies died, Mom.”

“They might have, honey. I’m sorry. Does that make you sad?” I asked her.

She sighed the sigh of realizing that the world is not perfect, that people do bad things, that earth isn’t always filled with butterflies and ponies in a meadow.

“Yes. That makes me sad,” as she moves on to another page in her book. Insects’ olfactory glands or the lowest point on the globe.

But I’m left with a catch in my throat. Not because of the sinking of the Titanic almost 100 years ago and the babies that probably died. But because my daughter is quickly learning that hatred exists outside of the tiny world of her school playground and that there are bad, evil people in the world.  And soon she’ll find out that even I can’t protect her from it all.

Babies die.

Those with the least money are given the short end of all the sticks.

Sometimes there aren’t enough life boats.

But I’m here, as her mother, to help her put the difficult pieces of the puzzle together, to guide her wild thoughts and to point her to the Answer that I can’t fully explain.

There is Hope and His name is Jesus.

How do you guide your kids through hard things? When you remember as a kid understanding that there really is evil in the world?

{This is adapted from a post I originally wrote in 2009}

It doesn’t take much for me to want to walk away from people. People who hurt, that is.

Preserve my own heart? Yes please. Fix my own hurt? Why not?

Sometimes it isn’t a big deal of things when I walk away. It’s just a casual, imperceptible slide. But even so, I often “leave” to protect my own heart. I wrote about leaving on A Deeper Story today.

God WITH Us

We are leavers. Serial leavers.

We leave jobs and churches. We leave homes and neighborhoods. Sometimes we leave children and spouses.

We are blessed with the means to leave most of the time. With cars that start or bank accounts that allow employment switches. We are fortunate to have running shoes to lace up to run out the door when an argument gets too thick to work through.

We leave friends behind. We leave homeless people on the side of the road. We leave someone alone when we know they need human comfort.

We leave when things feel uncomfortable or when we see the promise of something better somewhere else. When it gets too deep or too painful, we skip out.

Most of all we leave to protect our hearts. It isn’t necessarily right but it’s true.

Christ did not leave us. Instead He came…

To read the rest of the article, click here.

It happens to us all.

We forget our spouse was ever a blonde-haired, blue-eyed adorable little boy, some mother’s son.

We can’t even think that the arrogant barista who makes our coffee might have a story of heartache and grief to tell.

We get so angry at our kids that we don’t remember the days of quiet, nursing babies and rocking chairs.

We forget and we are blind.

Naomi, my five-year-old, floated on a cloud, it seemed, around the gathering room in the retirement community. Her class had taken a Christmas field trip to sing to the seniors. After Deck the Halls and Jingle Bells, Naomi delivered Christmas cards, candy canes and hugs to white haired women she’d just met. When most of her classmates were too scared to venture into the audience, Naomi led with confidence, grace and smiles that would melt anyone’s heart.

Beauty and love bubbles up in her, yet some of her instructors see only her misbehavior.

She holds friends’ hands when they are crying, the only compassionate heart in a sea of Kindergartners. Yet there are some who only tolerate her.

She is creative and beautiful and smart, but sometimes it is hard to see.

She throws occasional tantrums. She is naughty. She doesn’t obey, talks out of turn and she interrupts.

But then again, so do I.

And so do her teachers and babysitters.

So does her father and her sister. And so do most of us.

As we all walk the road to maturity together, let us each remember and see one another’s tenderness {even if it is below the surface}, each other’s story {even if it is yet untold} and each other’s intentions {even if it is muffled by pain}.

Let us each reframe each other with the eyes of love and notice beauty.

And let us each move beyond tolerance and begin to love again.

Do you have trouble seeing the beauty in others? Do others have trouble seeing the beauty in your own children? What helps you remember the humanity of others?

The transition from sixth grade to seventh grade is a giant one.

1. You used to be a big fish in the small stagnant pond of sixth grade. Now you are a little fish in the big stagnant pond of junior high.
2. People used to know you in the lunch room, on the playground, in the office. Now NO ONE remembers your name. Or that you go to school there. Or that you exist.
3. The Cafetorium is the coolest place to hang out.
4. Sweat, odor and razors are now a part of your daily life.
5. And my personal favorite, you begin to hug your friends.

When you get to school and you see anyone you recognize at any of the lockers, there is an immediate hug.

OH MY GOSH, it’s Julie and Jenny! {hug, hug}. What’s up? How are you? Did you watch Who’s The Boss yesterday? Did you talk to Jessica on the phone last night? How’s she doing? Is she still sick?

And there are hugs all around as if Julie and Jenny and I haven’t seen each other in months or weeks.

In sixth grade, hugs were reserved for graduation, for end of the year parties, and when Jeremy Watson and whomever he was “going around” with at the time were hanging out near his really cool BMX after school. {It’s okay. My Jeremy Watson crush was short lived: he never tied his shoes or washed his hands.}

So when I arrived on the seventh grade scene and saw immense and frequent bouts of hugging, I thought (I kid you not):

I’m so glad the world isn’t getting worse. It’s actually getting better because everyone has begun to hug. EVERYONE HAS BEGUN TO HUG and it began with my seventh grade class. We actually invented the hug-when-you-see-someone form of greeting and someday they’ll trace it all back to us.

I can’t make this stuff up. I really thought this.

Naivete. Gullibility. Innocence. Whatever you want to call it. We knew we weren’t cool because the 8th graders made sure we knew that, but somehow we thought we might be able to change the world.

I couldn’t translate the shift in friendly affection as simply a slight SLIGHT maturity in us, a shift in our age, or that we now had less familiar people around us all the time. I thought we had completely and utterly invented the hug.

I was a sweaty idealist and I honestly didn’t realize people had been hugging in this way for a very long time.

There really is nothing new under the sun. Solomon had it right. Sometimes I laugh when I think that fifteen year old girls think that skinny jeans were invented for them, that it’s something NEW to discuss theology with a cigar in one hand and a beer in the other or that “social justice” is something entirely invented between 2010 and now.

It’s all been here before. We wore leggings in the eighties, CS Lewis drank a beer or two, and people have been working to care for the poor and marginalized for centuries.

But it’s new to us and that’s what’s important. It’s okay to be an idealist. It really is.

It’s okay to think we invented hugging. It’s okay to walk on the edge by discussing the Love and Grace and Hell while imbibing and it’s very okay to think that our new non-profit and for-profit orgs who are participating in social justice causes are cool.

We are children of the age we live in and it is really hard to translate our experiences into the perspective of the timelessness of the history of the world. It’s hard to exist outside of this tiny spot we live in.

Like 7^th grade.

So drink a beer (if you are of age and do it responsibly), wear your leggings (if they aren’t see through and if you aren’t a boy) and buy your fair-trade coffee (unless you are at a Starbucks and then go with the skinny peppermint mocha). Think you invented all of it if you want.

Be an idealist (with deodorant) for as long as you can because your I-can-make-a-difference attitude will be squeezed out of you quicker than a seventh grader can speed dial her BFF with a rotary phone in 1987.

Change the world before you realize you might not be able to and by all means, hug your friends.

Did you ever think you “invented” anything? Did you ever think you could change the world? Why do we stop feeling positive and idealistic about the world? What changes, do you think?

The hardworking wife and mother flopped down on her bed to answer the phone. The kids had gone to bed, the laundry was folded and the husband (who was briefly out of town) had called. She pushed the little green “ANSWER” rectangle and kicked up her feet.

No sooner than she had said “Hello” to her husband did the woman notice the inch and a half long slug that now sat face to face with her on her comforter.

Slug. Aka snail without a shell.

Slug. Who belongs in the garden and not on a king sized comforter.

Slug. Visions of that weird boat scene in the old Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory danced through her head.

The husband who would normally kill or dispose of such a creature was not physically there to rescue and the suggestions he made on the phone didn’t help. The woman could swear the slug’s beady little eyes bulged a little when she screamed.

She flipped it with an envelope. The slug hit the wall with a dull thump.

The woman glared with disgust, not at the slug, but at her worthless cat snoring nearby. Isn’t this why people have cats? To keep a home free of such disturbances?

After the woman had bundled the slug comfortably in a wad of tissue and flushed the beast down the toilet, her husband noted with acumen and intelligence, “Man. That slug must have been crawling for days to have been able to make it up on that bed.”

True. Whether or not the slug had slowly slid up the side of the bed and quietly crept up the quilt or whether it had been placed there by a resident child, the woman would never know. But assuming the slug had reached the top of the bed by natural means, her husband was correct. A journey like that must have taken forever in the short-lived world of a slug.

The lessons from this parable are endless. 1. Don’t get a cat that would rather sleep than eat a slug. 2. Make sure your bed is free of disturbing creatures when you plop down to have a conversation. 3. Keep a tissue box by the bedside at all times.

And the woman’s personal favorite, 4. Before this short life ends, think big and crawl (or slither) high. Don’t let things like useless felines, seemingly comfortable environments, or crazy-haired mothers deter you from doing what you have set out to do. If it takes all day or all year or the next decade, “crawl for days” to reach your goal.

Do you give up easily? Do you have discipline to keep trying even when it’s hard? What makes you give up? Have you ever reached a “crawl for days” type of goal?