The banner we stand under: "dearly loved"

Hello dear friends!  The holidays are over.  We celebrated well with family and friends and now we are getting settled back into the routine of school and life.  I realized as we celebrated that this is one of the first years for quite a while that we haven't spent at least some time in the little city where I grew up. In years past we have traveled up to spend Christmas with my parents, and now they are already here!  Yay!!!  But then I realized that I really missed all the little moments of seeing lots of other people from our church there.  I tasted just a little of what has been hard for my parents. We had a lovely Christmas but I think that we all tasted a little bit of the loss in the midst of the festivities.
We are all making new friends in our new environment.  We love our neighbors and we are thankful to be here.  But the richness of life that comes with 36 years of friendships isn't replaced in 8 months.

I have learned one of the key components to harmonious community living is being able to identify and respect the things that are important to each other.  Fortunately for us most of the areas of what could be tension have been easily remedied.  For example, we keep 2 different kinds of coffee in the house.  We also have a coffee pot AND a pour over system.   Everyone might have an opinion on the best way to do certain things and we all have preferences but we are all pretty flexible and it works out well most of the time.

Sometimes it doesn't.  I probably don't really need to elaborate more than that.  Sometimes it is hard to be flexible and sometimes we aren't considerate of what is really important to the other people.*  There are 7 people who live in this house and more than half of us are "First Born Children". We may or may not have really strong opinions about THE RIGHT way to do things and sometimes I have found myself being really stubborn about a ridiculously insignificant detail.

So with that as the back drop I will share with you my favorite Christmas gift.  I had a plain canvas and I painted it black.  Then I painted in white the words "dearly loved" on the canvas.  It wasn't perfect but I was pleased with the outcome and it seemed appropriate that my best wasn't perfect.  I am not perfect at loving people.  I gave my imperfect painting to my parents for Christmas. 

Scott Krippayne wrote a song called "What if". 
... Love will erase the fear...
What if you lived like you were loved? 
 What if you did all the things your heart's dreaming of?
What if you sang your song at the top of your lungs?
What if you lived like you were loved?

It's thought provoking.  Do I really live like I believe that I'm loved?  Can I walk forward in confidence, knowing that it's okay if I fall on my face because the love of the Only One who really matters is unshakable. 

This was my favorite Christmas gift.  The reminder that we are Dearly Loved.  This is the banner that we stand under.  Love is a gift.  A gift that God gave first.  We give love and we receive love because HE first loved us.  So freely.

We live in house where people have different "right" ways to brew coffee and we have different opinions about other things too that are still too sensitive to write about and might never be funny to some of us. We have different priorities and different ideas about what is important in the moment.*  But we stand under the banner of "DEARLY LOVED" and at the end of the day that is what matters. 



*In the midst of writing this I was able to assist in building a Star Wars Lego Star Ship with space for 2 bad guys. This was an important priority for someone who I love.  :)

"...because he is afraid of humans."

A couple days ago I was in the midst of a busy getting-everybody-ready-for-school frenzy and I was sitting on the end of a bed with a pile of clothes.  For some reason every step of progress that morning was feeling like a battle.  I called again. "Please come here so I can help you get dressed!"  In response to my request, I watched this child scoot further into a corner and then peek out from behind a basket of toys and say, "ruff ruff."
One of my daughters poked her head out of the closet and said, "Mama.  He is a puppy and he can't come to you because he is the kind of puppy that is afraid of humans."

Oh my word.  It is a really good thing that I have kids to help me interpret my kids.  I thought about this predicament for a minute and then I said in a falsetto voice, "Baby Puppy!  This is your Mamma Doggie!  Please come here so I can help you put on your puppy undos!"  Immediately, my puppy came quickly on all fours, and happily allowed me to help him get dressed, smiling the whole time and saying "Ruff Ruff!" so that I wouldn't forget what kind of creature he was in that moment.  We moved from that to "Puppy breakfast" and "Puppy paw washing"  and taking people to "puppy school"  and my whole morning shifted from challenging to smooth once I knew what language we were speaking.
My people keep me on my toes... because you know, tomorrow isn't going to be a puppy morning.  We might never have a puppy morning again.  Dragons, Dinosaurs, Ninjas, Firefighters....  I never know.

Kids make life so... interesting.  But you know, grown-ups really aren't much different.

We tend to be more dignified and complicated... but we long to be understood.  I can recall a couple of really significant emotionally charged discussions with my husband that made a quick shift when I suddenly felt like he understood me, even if he didn't agree.

Shortly after we combined households my mom and I had a disagreement. Going into the discussion I had felt like it was really important for her to see why she was wrong so that she could change.  (I know, for some reason I get that in my head sometimes.  What this world really needs is a reformed Grandma, and I'm on my mission.) Somewhere in the midst of our conversation I had a deeper realization that my mom felt alone and afraid.  She left behind her home of 36 years, her friends, and her church family.  There is so much uncertainty with my dad's health and future and she is trying to navigate that.  Suddenly it didn't seem so important to make sure she understood me.  When I had eyes to see where she was coming from, I could just say, "This is hard and I'm sorry.  We are here."  And I can tell her that we are here for her and we are, but that doesn't change the fact that it's hard.

So once again, in a different way, I have seen the importance of seeking to understand before making sure that I'm understood.  There will be other days and other conversations that will need to be resolved differently, but this time, this is what we both needed.

In case you are curious, both my parents are reading this blog.  We are committed to working through the difficulties together and I am committed to writing about the difficulties in a way that honors and respects them.  I don't know how that's going to work, but I also know that this blog is only going to be meaningful if we are willing to talk about the hard parts.  I want to be able to talk about the challenges and how we deal with them.  That's the hard part of hard things... they are hard.  But we know that God is with us and that as we learn and grow together we don't have to be afraid of the things that are hard.  We know that His strength will be sufficient for each step.