thoughts from the deep recesses

Life takes us into and out of the spaces and moments of other people in the most fascinating way... I am just beginning to recognize the sacredness of interacting with people - participating with them in the moments that define their characters and stretch their limits and grow their hearts - crying with them when the heaviness of it all spills out in a blessed grace-filled saltwater-y release and laughing at the Hope that prevails in spite of tremendous darkness. In just the past few weeks I have sat with wives who question the strength of their marriages, reminded numerous people of their amazing strength and resolve in the face of ongoing struggles, said goodbye to a friend who chose to take her own life, reassured a dear new friend that God is for her and loves her even as she struggles to define how her affections will impact who she will choose to be and how she lives out her days, helped someone make a life-altering decision in light of God's grace and mercy, k...

It's been awhile since I've done a 'ten' and most of my posts have been heavy of late so I thought I'd indulge in a good old-fashioned 'here's ten random things about life' blog. All three kids are FINALLY in school. Eastern is on the quarter system and started classes last Wednesday. Monday I rode the bus out with Kyler and Savannah to make sure they knew how to get there and then wandered around campus so Savannah knew where all her classes were. Kyler didn't want help, which of course made me feel ridiculous. I really wanted to walk with him to each of his buildings. " Come on, mom, I'm not in kindergarten ." Sheesh. I can't help myself... Ethan is playing bass in the Spokane Youth Symphony - and loving every minute of it. He's also playing in jazz band at school as well as the orchestra there. He came home after a jazz band rehearsal playing the bass line for Chameleon... which if you're from Astoria, Oregon is sim...

Life has it's way of ebbing and flowing... This past summer was a deep ebb... a back flow of purpose and vision and a time of flagging ambition and confusion. The tide was low. I struggled to find the resolve to push past my perceived lack of relevance. I questioned my function and found a deep boredom settling in. Looking ahead to the continued 'moving away' of my children, I feared a complete loss of vision and knew it would be necessary to redefine my ambitions or I could easily be left dry and shriveled on the shore. I'm so thankful to my dear husband and the friends who helped me find value in this forced retreat from what I've known for so long. I began to see it as an opportunity instead of a loss. And then, slowly, opportunity came. And gratefulness began to permeate my thoughts. And hope filled my bones. God met me in a lonely place and said "But look here..." and I beheld a vision full of purpose and intention and promise. And so ...

This was the hardest summer I've ever been through. I've written a lot about it, so I won't rehash the challenge of the past three months... I really haven't written much, because I didn't have much to say that hadn't been said. I loathe sounding redundant and whiny. I felt God asking me to wait. Silently. Waiting is hard. But slowly, I find myself sneaking glimpses of new purpose... Renewed vision for what it means to parent at this stage in my life. New responsibilities and challenges at work. New relationships and new roles in old relationships - dear people God is bringing me to love and nurture and pour into. And so I sit this morning in quiet gratitude for hopefulness. I'm pondering and dreaming and anticipating - all of which are infinitely better than lamenting and feeling lost. Hope is an amazing, powerful thing. There is an air of excitement and a posture of looking forward in this place... as Asia gets terribly, wonderfully clo...

It is absolutely ridiculous how often I find myself alone this summer. I know I've whined about it A LOT. It's just almost unbelievable to me. I seriously wake up almost every day thinking "Oh good - the kids and I will have three hours together this afternoon" and then when I get home to commence the togetherness, they all disappear. One to a movie. One to a friend's house. Off they go... over and over and over again they leave me here. Alone. I was thinking about this in my own teenager memories... how I never once thought about my mom when I would take off. I took off a lot. I worked. Had cheerleading practice. An older boyfriend with a really cool car. The beach to go to. A friend with a boat and a lake at which to spend long summer days. Girlfriends who hosted amazing sleepovers. I was just doing what teenagers do. And I never once thought about what my mom might possibly be doing while I was gone. After all, she was mom... didn't she alwa...

July was a pretty quiet month around here. In an effort to not sound like a broken record, or to be too vocal about my current struggle/situation, or to sound like a whiny, pathetic middle aged mom, I've sort of avoided writing. Although, to be honest, I've tried. I've sat down several times, wanting to write. Writing has always been a cathartic release for me... a way to process my thoughts and emotions... and often it has the ability to take me from a deep, dark funk into a healthier, more centered space. Not lately. Lately, I sit down to write and nothing comes. So I've decided to wait. Which seems to be a theme right now in my life. This whole quasi-empty-nest-husband-is-working-ALL-the-time-and-I'm-bored-out-of-my-gourd-and-feeling-irrelevant-and-lost season is pretty stinkin' hard. I KNOW there is something out there for me. I BELIEVE God will bring me something. But right now, I'm waiting. Waiting for some inspiration. Some vision...

100 degrees? No thank you. This heat can go back to Arizona or wherever it came from. I live in the Pacific Northwest for a reason. I become a total slug in this kind of weather. All I can stand to do is sit in a chair with a fan blowing directly on me. Don't ask me to move. Obviously, we do not have air conditioning. By conscious/moral choice. (Yes, moral... don't get me started...) We have a little window unit that we've used a few times over the years... but mostly Asia asks me if I want him to bring it up and install it and mostly I say no. I think we've owned it for ten years and we've used it maybe four of the ten. We have some dear friends with an old house and two sweet little boys who haven't been sleeping because their room is upstairs and WAY to hot - so last night we were able to loan it to them. I live in a house full of people who can bite the bullet and muscle through a heat wave... but those poor sweet sweaty little boys didn't know what hi...

Sometimes I have a blog post rolling around in my brain for a few days and I ultimately decide not to post it... this is almost one of those posts. But I'm goin' with it. It's going to be pretty raw so fasten your seatbelts. My kids have been out of school for one week. And I can already say this is the hardest summer ever. And here's why: I don't know what to do with my kids. First of all, they're BIG. Physically, they take up a LOT of space. Frankly - they're in the way of keeping the house clean and organized and they clutter up the place. Secondly, they listen to the most awful 'music'. And they all own i-somethings... pods, phones etc... full of this terrible noise. And inevitably, it is playing loudly. All the time. Third, their friends. Here. Eating all the time. Adding to the noise. Taking up even more space. And last - they leave. And then the house is ridiculously quiet and boring. And I feel left out. Unimportant. Unnecessary...

So over the weekend we celebrated the successful completion of high school by none other than Kyler Warren Goins... We were blessed by a crazy houseful of people who came to help us celebrate... I did a terrible job of taking pictures of the guests, but I did get several pictures of the party décor and the graduation itself. I LOVE throwing a party - especially one where I can decorate - and this party came together just the way I'd hoped. Kyler's high school colors are orange and black and their mascot is a tiger... it was fun to pull together decorations around that theme.... I asked a friend who has a cake business to make his cake - she used his varsity letter to decorate the cake and then made white and oreo cupcakes... we saved the cake to eat after the party - it was for sure one of the best 'decorations' on the table and I didn't want it to get ruined by cutting into it.   Paper mache letters and glitter paint made a fun sign for the front ...

Yesterday was muggy/thunderstormy... so much so that when I got home from work around 7:30 last night my house was super stuffy and uncomfortable. I set about opening windows... and when we went to bed we left our ceiling fan for some much needed circulation. At 3:30 am, Asia woke up, got out of bed, walked around the house creepily for a couple of minutes and then came back in the room and turned the fan off. I, who hadn't been sleeping most of the night, said, "Please don't turn that off... it's so stuffy in here..." to which my dear husband replied, "I woke up with a premonition that I need to turn it off." Chalk that one up to one of the weirdest marriage experiences in our 21 years of sharing a bed... I laid there for another 45 minutes wondering if the fan was on the brink of flying off it's screws and killing us both or if my husband was just in some crazy sleep-walking stupor. Of course, he went right back to sleep and I ended up getting out...

Grad announcements/party invites are in the mail. Phew! That's a big job... and one that reminds me how desperately I need to do something about my address organization... right now I have all my addresses saved by piling all the envelopes I've received over the years in a great big stack. Not very efficient. Mother's Day was lovely... my family bought me a Vitamix... and we're having LOADS of fun with it... Best part? I got Asia to put spinach in his 'orange julius'. One leaf. But hey - you have to start somewhere, right? There is a new elementary school being built at the end of our block - opening in the fall. They are beginning to put the hardscaping in - and the school itself is really beautiful... I'm eager for it to be done so we can enjoy it. The pictures of the landscaping look so nice - it's going to be nice to have trees and benches and pathways in what used to be just an empty field. I found out this morning that Kyler's prom date is ...

Saturday night was prom night for five high schools in Spokane, including ours.   Kyler took a lovely friend - and they as a couple went with fourteen other couples, spending the evening being driven around town in a couple of limos, enjoying dinner together, as well as the dance and the obligatory hour spent at Manito Park so parents could get all their desired group and individual couple pictures.   It was so fun to watch all these seniors - Kyler's friends - enjoying this milestone event at the prime of their teen years. At the kids' high school - you only go to Sr. Prom if you are a senior or are invited by a senior... so it really can be a once in a lifetime event and is a very special night.   When Kyler's date, Kyler and I went shopping for his attire for the evening, we all had the mentality that he should look nice without overspending on clothes or a rental that wasn't really necessary... I try to run all my choices through my 'Africa filter...

I read an interesting article this morning that has gotten me thinking about living life with others... Asia and I have always tried to be really intentional about being real with folks... putting our faults on the alter of friendship and honestly walking through life without pretending. The truth is - we're madly in love and struggle to love each other. We adore our kids and despair for them in the same breath. We have a lovely home that has piles of junk in every corner and massive dust bunnies hiding under every bed and dresser. We give money away and we spend way too much on selfish desires. I live my life in a body that's at a healthy weight but have a constant driving desire to sabotage my health with unhealthy, temporarily satisfying, non-nutritive junk because I have an addictive issue with food. You see, what you see on the surface is not always what lies beneath. And I don't ever want to pretend that what lies beneath doesn't exist. I sneak choc...

On our usual post-church Costco run last week, Asia bought Les Miserables... I didn't think we needed it - I'm typically not a fan of owning movies... I figure if I've seen something once, I'm good. However, when we watched it that evening with the kids, I was so glad we bought it. It's just SO good. Savannah is showing it to her friends one by one, so it's playing in the background an awful lot lately. I'm good with that. We had our annual Weight Watchers staff awards luncheon last week - I was awarded the Diamond Leader award for the third year in a row... Diamond Leaders are ranked in the top 20 percent of leaders in our whole district - which includes almost all the northwestern states... I'm honored to enjoy this prestigious distinction and feel so privileged to be able to do something I love so much AND be rewarded for it in this way. I never planned to have a 'career' outside of the home - who knew I'd find something I even want to c...

Monday morning is most often spent erasing the evidence of our weekend... Fingerprints get wiped off the fridge... dog slobber cleaned from the floor around her dishes... errant socks and shoes picked up and deposited in the hamper or the shoe rack... coffee cups gathered from favorite sitting spots... laundry started. As the three little people who have spent their lives here have blossomed into full size adults, this space seems to get smaller. Sometimes the introvert in me feels a little trapped by all the bodies and stuff that go along with five full-sized bodies wandering within these walls. Five phones. Five backpacks/bags/purses. Cords, earphones, chargers, ipods, tablets, computers. Paper. Oh - the paper/mail/homework/books... Sometimes it closes in on me. It's not only the physical space that gets cramped... there is this unquantifiable expansion of ideas as well... five sets of opinions... five different ideas... five sets of values and standards... where there us...

For several years, I've embraced Lent... finding ways to challenge myself to recognize God's generosity toward me by sacrificing something significant... I've let go of Facebook and chocolate... gone vegan... This year - I decided to do a Daniel Fast . No processed food, no animal products, no leavened bread, no sugar. Basically, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes. It was the hardest dietary choice I've ever made... but I've learned over the years that preparation and planning has a significant impact on how hard or easy something like this can be... so I made a lot of soups and things I could eat ahead of time... I ate enough veggie soup to feed an army over the last 40 days. And oatmeal. Oatmeal EVERY day for breakfast. With a sliced banana and two dates cut up and sprinkled on for sweetness...  The bread thing was the hardest part... I love a good hunk o' bread - especially with my soup... So - yesterday was Easter. I started off th...

For six years, every time I have folded laundry there has been a huge pile of Kyler's running gear in the stacks of clean clothes. Shorts, t-shirts, enough socks for an entire team, warm-ups, sweat bands, uniforms. Piles of running clothes. When Kyler was a young school boy, we really didn't think he was going to be an athlete... he tried a few years of baseball but spent more time in the outfield looking at the sky than actually playing and after a broken nose at a practice, decided baseball wasn't his thing...   He tried basketball once... playing at Hoopfest with a few buddies. Yeah... again... not his thing. Then, at the end of his sixth grade year, he took his spring fitness test and came home with a mile-run time that impressed his dad. We were looking ahead to his transition to junior high and had some concerns about him finding his way there... Asia told him, "I want you to run cross country and track next year." And so it began. It was a...