Well, here I go again. Another blog. Another adventure of writing.
I love it, but I have to admit, it’s intimidating. Writing puts you out there. It asks you to be vulnerable and transparent and to share your heart.
Life is full of valleys of heartache and mountaintops of full hearts and joy. I wanted a place where I could share all of those moments. The joy, the sorrow, the ordinary days and the extraordinary days. The happy moments, but also the sad ones. The beautiful parts of us as human souls and, yes, the ugly parts too.
I am a woman in her fifties with grown children and parents who are aging. It’s a place in life I think most of us look forward to. We imagine that by now we’ll have figured some things out.
And here I am, kinda struggling in it.
I have four amazing sons. I have been so blessed by my children. Raising four boys was hard, but looking back from this side of it, it was incredibly rewarding.
I’m sure if you ask A, J, N & M they would remember me yelling all the time or grabbing the wooden spoon. But I hope they remember the home-cooked meals. Sharing our goods and bads around the dinner table. Bedtime stories. Me being their biggest fan at their games—and there were so many games. Summers spent at the waterpark. Trips to Big Bear to sled in the snow. The kisses on foreheads when they were having a rough day to our mother and son date nights.
All of these memories I cherish in my heart.
Now I get to enjoy the young men they have become and the daughters-in-love they have given me. I prayed for these daughters. I prayed that each one would be the perfect fit for my son’s heart, and God has been faithful.
And while my children are building lives and families of their own, I find myself on the other side of life too. My dad will be 80. My mom will be 79.
Life keeps changing.
Maybe that’s part of what has brought me back here—to writing.
Years ago, I wrote a book called Return to Me: What if God Hates Religion? At the time, those words came out of the life I knew then and the things God was teaching me then.
But a lot of life has happened since I wrote that book.
And I’ve changed.
My family has changed. My relationships have changed. My understanding of faith has been challenged, stretched and, in some ways, stripped down. There are things I believed I understood back then that I see differently now. There are other things I wrote that I believe more deeply today because I’ve had to actually live them.
Maybe that’s what this blog is really about.
Returning.
Returning to God. Returning to ourselves. Returning after disappointment. Returning after getting things wrong. Returning after life doesn’t turn out exactly the way we thought it would.
Because life isn’t lived amongst the wildflowers.
It’s lived mostly being the last wildflower left.
The wilderness of ordinary Tuesdays, quiet prayers, difficult conversations, tending chickens, waiting rooms, backyard gardens and comfy living room couches.
And maybe if we look closely enough, we’ll find that God has been planting something amongst the wildflowers all along.
That’s what I want to write about here.
The things I’m learning now. The things I thought I knew then. The questions I still don’t have answers to. Marriage and motherhood. Grown children and aging parents. Faith and doubt. Joy and heartbreak. Getting older. Starting over. And finding God in places I wasn’t expecting to find Him.
I don’t know exactly where this blog will go.
But then again, I don’t exactly know where this season of life is going either
So here I go again…
