periphery

i have done it again.

it is the first day of the new year, and we are all assessing where we are and where we want to go. and i realized again today that i have turned secondary issues into primary issues, i have allowed the temporary to swallow the eternal. and i have let myself get all bundled up in fears and thoughts that i can do nothing about.

i have a friend who's mom is dying. things are crystal clear for her right now. the most important things remain, and the extemporaneous disappear. her mom found out just a short month ago that she had terminal cancer and given about two months to live. so now, every day, my friend watches her mother degenerate little by little.

i know this feeling.

i know it too well. these women, our moms. feisty, full of life and laughter. brilliant. sharp minded. and then one day they face their mortality and we who love them, hold them and walk to death's door with them.

psalm 23 - though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i will not fear. You are with me.

death is a shadow. and yet, we never feel more alive. the air feels thicker, breathing becomes the most important issue. saying the right things at the right times. releasing, healing, blessing, nurturing, soothing...

i can promise you today that my friend is not worried about whether her house is clean. she is not worried about what next year will bring, or whether she will have enough money or not. my friend is watching her mother breathe while she sleeps and thanking God for every single one of those breaths.

the day will come when her mom will not be here. she will have taken all of her secret recipes and unspoken wisdom to the grave. and my friend will change forever. she will not quickly fight the petty battles that we all find ourselves in, she will remember when Jesus came to take her mom home. she will be grateful for life. and determined to live it.

it has been seven years now. and i must remember this. it is not about my bank account or my comfortable, immaculate home.

it is about every day, EVERY DAY, living with purpose and clarity. every day fiercely extracting the essence of our destiny and deciding to not get bogged down in the menial.

we learn in these pains. it is like backwards pregnancy. and we coach them to their final rest. naked i came from my mothers womb and naked i will return.

so it doesn't really matter does it? does it matter if i have the best clothes, the nicest house, the cutest kids?

in the end what really matters?

love.

that is it

and i need to be reminded. without love i am nothing.

not just love that comes in our western, squishy, watered down, tolerate everything sort of package.

i mean the real stuff. the stuff that sacrifices, the stuff that gets into the deepest places of peoples messes and pain and sits down to say "tell me where it hurts, and let's get you out of here".

and the love that stays even when it is hard and there is conflict. it is the love that says sorry, and means it.

and this is the love that we know when we say "turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace."

Jesus

He stepped out of His royal place in heaven stepped into our mess of a world and said, "i will make this right".

I betray Him every time i worry. i reject Him every time i resist and refuse His grace. and i ignore Him when i turn peripheral things into primary.

forgive me.

so, this is my confession and my resolution - to catch worry and fear when it comes crashing in, and to spend my life on love.

so help me God

dad's on the front porch

We just finished a great week of meetings with one of my favourite people: Jim Anderson, from Spokane. He was here this week to speak to our class. This man has dedicated his life to instructing a generation about God's view on sexuality and His heart for women.

He is like a floodlight in a dusty room. He begins to speak about the heart of a woman and I sit there, thinking "how on earth does he know that stuff? I can barely verbalize what is going on in the recesses of my heart and here he is pressing on all these tender spots!" He will say things like "women are wired for security, safety, permanence, and commitment."

and he is right. we may resist those old fashioned boxes, but we will all prove in time that these are indeed the greatest longings of our heart. We try to pretend that we don't need commitment, but we fight every time a relationship starts to keep from blurting out "where are we going with this? are you going to stick around?"

even if some hide it better than others, if we were really honest we would have to say we will not give our deepest selves unless we are safe.

anyway that is not really what i wanted to say. but it is important.

what i did want to say was that Jim told a story once that really left an impression on me.

He was outside one day and he heard his girls (2 of the 6 that he has) crying. He ran around the corner to hear them say "dad, those boys were throwing rocks at us". He went running after the boys and with his pointer finger out he said "WERE YOU THROWING ROCKS AT MY DAUGHTERS?"

I bet those boys wet their pants.

Then he went on to say that if dads would spend more time on their porches, their girls would be safer and boys would not be free to throw rocks at them.

and that is one of the main tragedies of our modern society. there are not enough dads protecting their daughters, and not enough men teaching young men how they should behave.

so rocks are thrown, hearts are broken a hundred times over and young people are left to figure it out on their own.

it was never meant to be that way.

God placed the older to teach the younger. to lead, guide and model what real adulthood looks like.

i have confessed my love for porches in earlier entries. so let me add this...i love porches with dad's on them, ready to chase and train the next generation.

i shudder to think that my girls would feel like an object to be used, or preyed on. and i can promise you the words that would come from my husband.... "over my dead body".

a girl without the voice of a father is left to fill her heart with the glances of a thousand men. and it will never satisfy. only love, permanence and acceptance for who we are will create an atmosphere where we can be who we were truly made to be.

it is like my little girls now. they love running around the house naked, it cracks them up. it cracks me up too, i am sure you can imagine. they are free, they are loved, they are not ashamed or afraid.

this confidence comes from their surroundings. they are safe. they are loved. they are delighted in.

and while we will not encourage that naked behaviour forever (ok, ok, we will teach them manners, i guess), i do pray that the security they feel here will cause them to run into life with the same boldness that they run around our house with now.

i wish i could stand on my roof and shout "DAD'S! GO OUTSIDE AND PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT IS HAPPENING AROUND YOU! we need you so desperately. teach your sons to honour and protect, teach your daughters to walk in purity and confidence."

i think we should all get busy building porches again. i am more and more convinced that the fall of every great civilization starts when people get rid of their front porches.

did the romans have porches? see? i rest my case. goodnight.

gratitude

the older i get, the more i am convinced. gratitude is the key to all longevity, and mental wellness.

it is the cure for familiarity, entitlement, disappointment, discouragement, self-pity, anger, jealousy, apathy and anxiety. there are more, but that should cover most of the things that ail us.

think about it.

we are robbed by ungratefulness. when we feel we deserve more, we get angry or disappointed - it a gratitude issue. maybe this why David said "it is better to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to dwell in the tents of the wicked". (Ps. 84:10)

he was just glad to be there. so it makes me wonder...am i?

why do i hesitate to give my heart?

why do i withhold time, affection, attention because i forgot what it was like to feel like i was on the outside looking in. am i still grateful for all that He has done for me?

do i still have a heart for the lonely, now that i am not lonely?

do i still have a heart for the aching heart, now that my heart is not aching?

and to these questions i would say, it depends on how grateful i am.

but i also learned in those seasons of loneliness, and aching that i needed to be grateful - not for what i had, but because of who He is. His love never fails, it never gives up. even when i didn't see my circumstances changing, it was still my job to be grateful. and if i couldn't thank Him for the things i couldn't see, there is no way i would have been grateful when i could see them.

there were days that it was so hard, that i literally just said "thank you that i have feet".

i couldn't think of anything else, but i KNEW  i needed to be grateful. so, sometimes it was feet. and even still - some people don't even have feet, and they still have to be grateful. that is what makes them heroes to the rest of us who have everything and we are still unhappy.

the worst thing is, try to tell a room full of 18-25 year olds that this is truth, but if they are not grateful to receive the truth, it cannot set them free.

i feel my own conviction kicking in here...i have been overwhelmed this week. of course i am grateful to be pregnant, but i am starting to imagine trying to wrangle four children under 3 when these little bundles arrive sometime in the late spring. and i am telling myself, as i am writing to the big blogging world, that He will not give us more than we can handle and i have to fight to stay in a place of gratitude and away from anxiety and fear.

i am thankful tonight, not just for my feet, but for the other 5 sets of feet that now make up the Harvey family.

overtaken

i laugh a bit when i see the title of my last post. and forgive me for not writing sooner, you see, a few days after i posted about being overtaken by blessings, i found out that i am pregnant....with twins.

i just can't stop laughing.

i am totally overwhelmed, overtaken, over my head, over the top. just over all over.

if you read my blog, or know me at all, you must know that there were many days that i didn't think that we would ever know what it was to have one child. and now! we are going to have FOUR!

i was praying one day and asking for new strength in our waiting season - and the Lord told me "i don't waste money". that may sound a little too earthly for the Lord of the universe to say - but listen. we didn't pay ONE DIME for our in vitro process. we were given every cent - and let me tell you it is expensive. so when He said that he doesn't waste money, i think what He meant was - "lots of people trusted me, and believed that I would do this for you, so i am not going to let that investment go to waste"

so if you gave us any money, or prayed for us even once - you can just join in the laugh and the blessing - we have all of you to thank.

our brains are exploding with logistics and planning. but our dreams are coming true - and we have a new mini-van to prove it.

i will resume more blogging when i am not so blooming tired. all this blooming is exhausting.

goodnight.

come upon and overtake you

i used to claim this promise...in deuteronomy 28:1-2 

¹ “Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the LORD your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. ² All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the LORD your God"


and now...my goodness, it has happened. 


I am overtaken with toys and noise and a bustling house. and there is not a day that goes by that i don't remember the emptiness, the hollow sound of loneliness. The crying, the hoping, wishing and dreaming.

it is the simple things: I used to have cold feet in my little single bed, all night long. and now, i have a warm husband to tuck my cold feet under - and he is even a willing victim!

and my kiddo's...they want me, they need me, they delight in me. and they are the delight of my heart. we were so grateful to be married, but we missed little footsteps in fuzzy jammies running all over our house.

and now, every morning, i hear the "da, da, da, whooooo" from alina, and the "mommy, come and get-choo" from emma. (this is what we taught her to do as an alternative to crying until we came for her in the morning. we actually told her to say "mommy, daddy, come and get me" but she came up with her own version)

it is so hard to wait, so, so hard to wait. but what happened? He made it all beautiful in His time.

nothing is the same.

car rides are not the same. alina has "joy spasms" which means that out of no where she just yells until she  gags herself. she is not mad, or crying, she is just "singing". emma doesn't appreciate it, so she joins in with her own blood curdling scream - and we drive, somewhat helpless because alina doesn't understand Shhhh. and Emma doesn't really understand that alina does things that she is not allowed to do.

so we just have to laugh. it is our blessing, coming upon us and overtaking us. and making us deaf.

and i might as well tell you that we have another one coming.

yes, that means three under three by next summer.

My God, help me. running after these promises is a lot of work!

and now i am running with morning sickness and a crazy kind of tiredness.

but i wouldn't trade it for the world, no i wouldn't.

my tsunami of promises, that is how i see it. it is abundant and beautiful. and again, i am so grateful.

(if you are waiting for your promises - hang in there - and in the meantime...sleep. because when they come you may never sleep again!)

what a dad does

it is an interesting journey every year to watch a new group of young people come into our program. They all come with their "stuff". We all have our stuff, but tonight i am thinking about the dad stuff.

i was talking to one of the students today about what a dad does. this young man didn't have a father in his life, he was raised entirely by his mom. so at this stage, he tends to avoid interaction with most older men, they intimidate him. so instead, he seeks out motherly figures that he can relate to. i asked him today what his idea of a father was, and he said something like "a guy that encourages, or shows me how to do man stuff" (i can't remember exactly what he said, but you get the idea - he really didn't know what a dad did).

that young man will have a problem if he doesn't figure it out. he wants to be married and have children, but he has not been able to find a man that he can replicate. so if he is not careful he will parent more like a mother - which of course, mothering is vital, but that is not how he is wired - he is made to be a dad. and if he doesn't know what a dad does, his image of a dad could be "crawl up on my lap and cuddle - and i will tell you that you are wonderful all day"

so i told him about my dad. now understand, my dad is a rockstar.  there were times that i got to crawl up on his lap and cuddle (not now, of course) and there were times and still are, that he encourages me and reminds who i am. BUT he was also the one that would say when i had climbed a tree and couldn't get out "well, you got yourself up there, you get yourself down". Or, we would be at an amusement park and he would want to go on a roller coaster and i would say "uh...no", then he would say "what is the worst thing that could happen?" "well, dad, i could die" and he would respond "ok, so what is the issue?"

that might sound a little rough (and maybe he would tell it different), but in both examples he was teaching me - one, to problem solve and two, to face my fears.

mom was a rescuer, a comforter, an encourager. dad was an empower-er, and a poke in the bum when i wasn't being what i should be.  he wasn't santa claus (but you need to know that right now he is growing his beard to be santa at christmas -and we have a family photo shoot on saturday - this is going to make for years of great story telling to the children) he didn't give me everything i wanted, but he gave me what i needed - the confidence to rush into the world and take hold of every opportunity that i could.

he used to say "i don't care if you collect garbage for a living, you just be the best garbage collector on the planet".

so in my world it was - no compromise, no shortcuts, honesty first, respect and honour to authority, and a fierce determination to dream for the impossible. My parents song was "the impossible dream" - look it up, it is a great song-  this is a little bit of it:

this is my quest to follow that star
no matter how hopeless
no matter how far
to fight for the right
without question or pause
to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause
and i know if i'll only be true
to this glorious quest
then my heart will lie peaceful and calm
when I'm laid to my rest
and the world will be better for this
that one man, torn and covered with scars
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable star

and this is in my  DNA. because my dad put it there.

he overcame hell to march me into heaven and i am living in the fruit of his faithfulness.

so i tell this young man - you fight to know what a dad does. find dad's  - seek out older men - be determined and fierce in finding your identity as a man so you can give your kids what my dad gave me. he limped so i could run, he made hard decisions that i will never have to make, he showed me what courage and determination looks like.

and of course, if you asked him, he would just shrug his shoulders and say "meh, it's what a dad does".



(am i right dad?)

the front porch

i read a series of books a few years ago by Phillip Gulley - i think that is his name. he suggested that the decline of western civility began when people stopped putting porches on the front of their houses.

and i agree.

I have been to, and lived in, houses that had them, and those houses haunt me to this day. i ache for the beautiful swing at the Delaney's in Spokane. and the Breedens had a sweet little porch perfectly situated in the middle of a beautiful little rose garden in the front yard. I have roses in my backyard as a tribute to that yard.  i love those porches. i love the conversations i had there, and the people i knew there. i love that people would just stop by for a visit, put one foot up on the step and jingle their keys to indicate that at any minute they may need to leave, but for the moment, they were content to stop and visit for a little bit.

porches are made for quick little conversations, a bit of catch up time. or, they are made for surprise deeper conversations that may be needed for the moment.

in any case, porches are simply inviting.

they are your outdoor living room, but more open to the passer by.

i dream of those lovely southern porches with the hammock and an outdoor fan. sure, they pre-date air conditioning, but i still love them. if i can have air conditioning and an outdoor fan...really? what else could i ask for? maybe my house in heaven will have a porch with a swing and a fan. (will it be hot enough in heaven for a fan? i do love fans)

we notice that new housing developments are adding porches to the homes. and we are glad. mind you, there is a postage stamp of lawn, but still there are porches and they stand as a tribute to our need to connect with the people in our neighbourhoods. the kids may not have a place to play in the sprinkler, but at least they will know what it is to sit on the porch and wave at the crazy people who live across the street.

so the markets tumble and governments rise and fall, but a society without porches is also a tragedy, and i don't think enough people fully grasp the contribution of a neighbourhood that cares enough to sit in their front yard.

i will have a porch someday - maybe not now because our street is really loud and i sleepwalk sometimes (see earlier posts). but when i live in a safer neighbourhood and i can wander around whenever i feel like it, i will have a lovely porch with a swing and couches and a fan and, oh...the options are limitless.

thank you for listening to my little dialogue about this strange little topic. we must all have our secret loves.

long live the porch!