Potluck Ponderings

Nothing really prepares you for this level of change. There are days it feels as if a part of my heart has been ripped from my chest. I am walking around wounded, unwhole, and incomplete.  There are moments that my breath is taken and the sobbing begins before the second hand has time to move. In the post office mailing care packages, standing in the checkout line buying Halloween candy, when a song comes on Pandora that she would have belted out singing, when I spot the dusty piano, when I realize this is the first sports season, ever, that she wasn’t there to see her brother score a goal, when I walk by her bedroom and see all the bits and pieces of the life she left behind, as I plan our first ever big family trip without her, as I think about navigating the holidays and know they will be different from now on. There are days I just want to go back to the moment she was born and do every single second over again, but I’m quickly reminded that’s not the way this works. There ...

40 Days... she counted them up and is ticking them off. “40 days ‘til move in day!”, she announced with excitement and disbelief in her voice last night. 40 days, the biblical parallel did not escape me. 40 days in the desert that Jesus prepared for his public ministry, 40 days and nights that it rained and the flood waters rose, 40 days and nights that Elijah was given food, water and protection while he traveled to Horeb/Mt. Sinai... just a few that come to mind. 40 more sleeps, 40 more days of living, laughing, loving and her waking up under our roof every single morning. 40 days for me to get myself together and prepare for this next stage of parenting.  Moving on to the next stage has never before been so clearly defined. The lasts so clearly marked. We didn’t have much notice on the day that a lap baby became a walking/running toddler, a frustrated toddler finally spoke her first sentence, the last time we rocked that little blonde snugglebug in a rocking chair, the last ti...

We are no strangers to mountaintops. We were raised in the mountain side hollers found during a curvy steep climb where trees meet and the sky disappears and you think the heaviness and darkness of the tree canopy may overtake you. Then suddenly you reach clearance and tree tops are below you and the crooked path ascnded is certain. You scan the steep drops and hairpin turns where the Lord protected you. We left our oldest on a Georgia mountaintop yesterday afternoon. There was foreshadowing as we came off the mountain back down into Tennessee. We looked up from our hotel and could see the lights of the high pinnacle of the great Carter Hall of Covenant College. Emily is here as a finalist for a full merit scholarship, The Maclellan scholarship. We’ve prayed for the Lord to lead, direct and allow her to interview and perform well. We prayed for sweet dorm hosts who would be what she needed. We prayed for her to have a taste of college life that would help her make decisions if the op...