From Lisa Jo Baker:

Today we are all telling our stories about what it feels like to trust a friend. And not trust a friend. It’s a project I’ve been working on for nearly a year now.

You’re invited. Just as you are. It’s a free webcast showing four different times today. Come just as you are and be encouraged.

So let’s spend our five minutes of writing today, sharing about friendship. Fight it, love it, hate it, hurt or healed by it, we were certainly built for it.

Set a timer and just write. Don’t worry about making it just right or not.

Go all in with your words.

Are you ready?

3, 2, 1 . . . Go

When I was in 2nd grade I met a friend.  My first real good friend.  She didn't speak very good English, was a refugee from the Vietnam War but somehow we connected and we became friends.  We are still friends.  We don't talk a lot but I know where she is if I need her and she knows where I am if she needs me.  I love her story of survival.  She taught me to love soy sauce on my eggs.  She is now married to a great guy and has 2 beautiful kids.  She was my very first friend.


I met another friend in Jr. High and she was my best friend all the way through high school.  We are still friends and I adore her!  Life has been rough for her but she is strong and a fighter for joy and loves to laugh in the heartache of life.  I am proud of her!  


I have a church friend from those youth group days.  She has traveled this world and has been shaped by those experiences.  There is a bond with her that cannot be broken.  We have too much history together.  We could talk for hours.  I miss her. But she is always a phone call away.  I treasure our last dinner together overlooking the ocean.  I can count on her to be there for me whenever I need her.  She is fierce in love for her friends.  I feel that.


I have church friends.  My prayer warriors.  Those I worship beside.  My sisters.  My cry-on-the-couch buddies.  Together we are figuring out who we are in Christ.  Something happens in life when you become a mom and you forget who you are.  We are learning who we are in Christ at a much deeper level than we have ever known.  Our happy ever after love stories are being discovered as we fall in love together with our Lord.  


STOP 


Linking also with:  Just Write Tuesdays

It was my grandmother's birthday last Sunday.  It was one of those "firsts" since her death last August.  I have been thinking about her a lot lately, not because it was her birthday, but because I have an event coming up this weekend and I have to find a "treasure" to take with me to the "Treasure Tea."  

It has always been said that I am a lot like my grandmother.  I think it is because of our close relationship through the years.  She and I spent weeks together each summer when I was a child.  I would visit her in her white and red two-story home with the creaky wooden staircase and the squeaky interior french doors separating my playroom and the entryway.  I had my own room at her house full of every Dr. Seuss book written, my very own doll cradle with homemade dolls, and a walk-in closet with a shoe rack containing my great-grandmother's triple A narrow slippers that I wore until my feet grew too large.  I remember laying in bed on those humid summer nights and being soothed to sleep by zapping of the neighbors bug zapper out by their pool.

During those summers, my grandmother and I went on adventures.  If there was a hump in the road, she would drive fast over it because she knew I loved the feeling of my stomach dropping.  Over the years we ate so much ice cream together. Her favorite was pecan flavored hard ice cream and mine was any flavor of soft serve with rainbow sprinkles.  We traveled through the locks on the Erie Canal.  We pulled weeds in her garden and then picked vegetables to cook for dinner.  We climbed mountains in the Adirondacks and picked fresh blueberries at the top.  When she was 70 we went to Hershey Park and she went on every roller coaster with me.  We planted flowers on my grandfather's grave.  And she swung me on the swing he made before he died.

We never went on an adventure without bringing along her best friend, her Nikon camera!  She took pictures everywhere we went.  During my absence she flipped through the pages of her captured summer moments with me over and over until I came back and we could do it all over again.  Together we reminisced of the summers before, and then we went out and made more memories.  Summer after summer.

Last summer, after her funeral, I went through some of those photo memories.  They were her treasured possessions.  Some of those albums have become my treasured possessions. They capture so much of those precious memories I have from my childhood.  And they capture something else I treasure:  her. 

Even though she is gone, she left so much of herself to me through those photos.  They are the documentation of our adventures and moments together.  

On Saturday I need a treasure to take to the tea with me.  I can't take along my grandmother, but I can take our memories.  I have picked a few of my favorite albums.  They were her way of remembering me during our times apart.  Now they are my way of remembering her.  Those photos were how she inked her heart and left to fill the empty space in my heart in her absence.

Linking with:

miscellany monday
Still Saturday
Fellowship Fridays
Serving Joyfully
Proverbs 31 Thursday
Jennifer Dukes Lee

It has been awful quiet around this blog since Lent ended.  My heart has been at rest, and I am finding peace in the quiet.  This blog is my space and sometimes anxiety wants to rise up and tell me I should write more.  It wants me to have a quota.  It wants me to feel like I am not enough in the quiet.  But inking my heart one time a week does not measure my worth and tell me I am lesser than on the weeks when I post three times.  So I take back my freedom to ink my heart as the Lord leads and to rest in the  quiet. 

When I was praying about this tonight I asked, "Why have You not given me words to write lately?  Where did this desire to create art with my words and my passion to share my heart go these past few weeks?  

And in the quiet I heard:  Just ink your heart.

Whoops!  I forgot.  That is the point of this space isn't it.  So I am doing some reflecting tonight and I thought I would share some things on my heart.

1.  Time:  Have you ever wondered how God hears everyone's prayers when there are thousands of people lifting up prayer requests at any given moment of time?  I'm reading Beyond Personality by C.S. Lewis and his word picture on this topic is one I can't stop thinking about.  If we were to document our life we would create a timeline with several dots each representing a period of time in our lives.  A leads to B then C happens and D can't come before C and so on.  We travel along this straight line, but God is the whole page.  He fits nowhere on the timeline.  He is timeless.

"God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all."  

"You cannot fit Christ's earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time."

I don't know why this concept fascinates me, but it does.  Just believing for sure that He was there from my beginning and will be there in my end is a comfort to me in a world full of uncertainties.

2.  Tweens:  I had a house full of them this weekend.  I have watched these girls grow out of diapers and into tweenhood.  It was such a pleasure to have them all together in my home.  I LOVE THIS AGE!  Sometimes when I get insecure going into new work environments I think to myself, "Just put me in a room full of Jr. Highers and I will be okay.  That is where I feel most comfortable."  My heart was full having them around, and I was reminded of how thankful I am for their mothers and my friendships with them and other women that I call friends.  Our daughters watch us interact as friends.  And as we love and respect each other as friends before our girls, they are learning to do the same.  I saw that when they were all together, and I am so proud of each and everyone of them!

3.  Insecurity:  I have had this work project to work on.  It was designed around my strengths and I appreciate that, but it didn't make it any easier.  When people put their confidence in me my fears tend to become magnified.  What if I fail?  What if I disappoint?  What if it is not good enough?  Because if it is not good enough then I will not be good enough. Feeling like I am "good enough" is a battle that I fight from time to time. Those battles come when I lose sight of Christ's perspective of me and His promises.  So eventually I remembered to pray about this project.  I handed it over to Him, decided to walk in the strengths and gifting He has given me.  The project became less about me and more about walking forward in faith, in His strength not mine.  Confession:  the project was about teaching kids how to write a story.  Yes, me, a writer, feeling inadequate for the job.   It is silly, I know.  But I am good now!  The project is started (that was half the battle) and I found so much freedom in the creativity of it.  

I think I will end here, but there is more on my heart and in my head.  I have been getting lost in thought a lot lately while driving and consequently have missed turns and exits and have found myself literally lost in the town I live in.

My son says I think too much.  He is right.

My daughter gets frustrated because I don't always answer her questions. I can't always hear her over my own voice in my head.  

Maybe releasing some of the noise inside into the quiet of this blog will help.  

Just maybe.

Thanks for listening!

"On Fridays around these parts we like to write. Not for comments or traffic or anyone else’s agenda. But for pure love of the written word. For joy at the sound of syllables, sentences and paragraphs all strung together by the voice of the speaker.

We love to just write without worrying if it’s just right or not. For five minutes flat.


Ready. Set. Go:  AFTER

Psalm 145:4 "Generation after generation stand in awe of your work; each one tells stories of your mighty acts."  I love reading stories of how God works through your lives.  I love to tell my story of how God works in mine.  Together we write to encourage one another in our faith.  We write to know that we are not crazy believing in a God that is unseen.  We share what we see Him doing in our lives so we can SEE God in each others.  Seeing God in yours makes me feel a little less crazy.  Crazy in the sense that in this world believing in the unseen, pursuing the heart of God is not the standard that most people live by.  But the goal is to live so that those who might think I am crazy will also SEE God. And that their afters of pursuing what they see will be transformed into the after of His redemption, another story full of His mighty acts to share generation after generation.

Done!