"A hope and a future"

What does it mean to say “this has been the longest day of my life"?  I think I can answer this question. Today was a LONG day. And it was all of my fault and Jake had to pay the highest price of all.

      The Lord has been especially good to me as of late, I mean, He is always good but I don’t always perceive it this way. This last week was a good week. First of all, the Waelty’s gifted us with a dog. We were in need of one (in my opinion, maybe Paul wouldn’t use the word "need"…) and they had one to give. We were totally, completely blessed. We have had our great big yellow lab for the last two years and he has filled my heart to the brim with joy. Still, in the winter months I longed for someone to snuggle against my feet and 120 pound Rush would crush me. My parents have 5 rat terriers and I craved something like that, something small and bouncy that would fit in my bed. We’ve been praying for months that maybe God would open a door for a dog, a very casual prayer. And here she is! We call her Reagan, just to kind of continue the trend of “R” named dogs (Rush is our yellow lab)…and coincidentally we have two very conservative dogs, I guess. But Reagan was a kiss on the cheek from the Father! I love her little smushy face (she’s a Shitzu) and how she bounds to see me when I wake up in the morning. I love her. I look at her and think, “God loves me,” radically, intimately, personally- incredible! And even though Paul has nicknamed her “floor pooper” (not funny or original) once she figures out where our door is it should get a lot easier!

Anyway, I wanted to blog because I had a devotional kind of floating around in my head. A favorite verse of some is Jeremiah 29:11:

" For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope."

Is there a Christian that cannot quote this verbatim? Probably not. I love this verse but tend to forget it when things get rocky. That is mostly because I fail to consider the future. But let me tell you that the future is worth waiting for, and this promise is true. I’ve seen it, I’m a living testimony to this.

Today was a long, difficult day for our family because we had to take Jake for oral surgery. Jake stayed on bottles until he was 2. Now, in my defense, which trust me I don’t think I deserve one, my rationale was that we moved across the country in the time that Jake needed to be weaned and so we put it off. And then we moved in with Paul’s parents, and then two months later we moved into our own house. It just never seemed like the right time. And he fought it so hard so we backed down. Wrong move. And now cavities. And then when I saw a cavity with my own eyes I put off calling the dentist until Jake got a toothache and an abscess and then we ended up at a surgery center. I hate myself for letting it get this far. My poor boy had to suffer because of a million mistakes that I’ve made. Not fair. So after watching my son get knocked out with tranquilizer so that he falls asleep with his eyes open (terrifying!), he then gets a shiny silver tooth where the cavity once was (grateful it was a back tooth!), and after the surgery as the anesthesia is wearing off he’s crying because he wants to wake up and he can’t. They told us that Jake would be sleeping all day, except Jake loves life. He loves to be awake, and talking, and playing and watching trucks and cars drive by. So he fought the anesthesia for quite some time and it was so hard to watch. Then came the nausea, and puking. Did I mention it was a long day? My kids are from now on adhering to strict teeth brushing regiments!

     Ok, my point of all of this. I love Jake. I love him. Today when he was all wiped out from the drugs I was thinking “I miss his voice! I miss all of the joy that he brings to my life, to a simple car ride he adds so much! I miss our game of watching every car that drives by and deciding who we know that has a vehicle just like it. I miss his smile. I miss his silliness (“YOU STANK MOMMY!”…we are trying to put an end to this), and how he loves sprite, and how simply seeing cows in a field will prompt him to Old Mcdonald…Oh how I miss when he sings with me...I miss looking behind me and seeing that GIANT smile, and hearing his giggles fill the car...” When he is sick, my heart just aches. Jake is so much fun. Seriously, he is fun to be around. You cannot be around Jake very long without either A) laughing, or B) staring at him in bewilderment because he has the silliest ideas and themes for little stories he tells. He is so brave, I cannot think of anything Jake is afraid of. He is my joy, that is all I can think to describe him, pure joy.

So I think of Jeremiah 29:11. I think about how Jake came into the world and who I was at that time and the things that I assumed God thought about me. God wants to give me a future? Maybe He should have thought about that before He “blessed” me with an illegitimate child!

But I love that boy. Tonight I was rocking my sassy princess to sleep (whom I also adore) and thinking about my day with Jake. The words of Jeremiah 29:11 were kind of playing in my mind creating a movie and I saw myself as a young pregnant girl certain that the only hope I would have was in case of a miscarriage! But I see now. Standing just 3 years into the future, I have a taste of it: raising Jake. I couldn’t help but raise my hands in surrender and praise to God, my God who knew the plans that He had for me. For peace, for hope, and for a future. I do not want anything but what I have now, I wish nothing different for my life than what it is now. That is Jeremiah 29:11 to me. Jake is the fulfillment of this to me, “more than I could ask or imagine” is my happy son.

So I’m praising God for his faithfulness. For His promises fulfilled! I love you, Jake. By the way, he’s feeling better, happy and healthy- that’s my boy!

Sew much fun!

      I love my sewing machine. It’s true, hands down the best gift ever. The worst part about the sewing machine is that it was just another attempt to maybe be normal. It’s an endless quest, I’ve found. I never have anything in common with anyone. But sewing was something that every one seemed to be doing. So I tried it and surprisingly, I fell in love.

      Unfortunately, like most girly things that I do, I’m not talented at it. I have talents, ok, I’m not totally putting myself down here. I just don’t seem to have typical talents and I don’t always enjoy my talents. I was MVP long distance in track in high school, but I hated it. I rode horses for years and certainly enjoyed the competition and I love horses, but I was never going to be the girl to major in equine management and go on to run a barn. Sorry to all of the barn moms that saw this in my future. When I was in high school, I opted out of running cross country my senior year so that I could play tennis. I never got to play outside of exhibition. I literally wasted my time going to practice after practice to never play, and I won’t even mention how many points I was away from earning a letter for my jacket. In fact, I would have been MVP of the women’s cross country team had a I run, but instead I played tennis.

I have regrets about it sometimes. All I know is that I loved tennis. All I know is that I love sewing. When I wake up to this…

And finish my day with this…

I feel so accomplished.

     Sewing is teaching me a lot right now about who I am, and the way I operate, and the kinds of things that are holding me back. In sewing, you don’t really have to be intuitively creative. Or I wouldn’t sew. There are enough online ideas that think for me. You don’t have to be smart to sew, the instructions are pretty clear (although I won’t even share my initial threading error when I began to sew…let’s just say that for the first three months I wasn’t even sewing). I've been convinced for a long time that being creative and smart will make me a good person, a good mom.
     What I am getting at is that the one thing that separates a good sewing project from a bad one is neatness. For me, neatness is determined by time. I am not naturally neat. I am a fast paced project completer, ergo sloppy. I hate taking my time and it shows in every hem that veers off more and more until I’m sure you get the picture. Each time I rush a project, skip ironing and pinning and the like I realize that I wasted fabric and worst of all, time. I wrote in my last blog that the Lord has really been speaking to me about adding peace to my life. I need some peace. A lot of times I bypass peace because I refuse to slow down. And it’s funny because the more I sew the more I want to sew…difficult things. I want to quilt. I want to sit down with a needle and thread and create. And I can’t expect it to happen in an hour. I can’t expect to be talented at all of this in a couple of months. And maybe that’s the thing about sewing that has so impacted me.  I won't even finish a board game if I think I'm going to lose halfway through. I don’t like losing and I especially do not like to be "bad" at something. It’s probably the vulnerability of it all and pride. But I like to sew and I don’t want to stop.

     I feel like I keep telling the Lord, “I can’t do this, I’m just not neat enough,” (Jesus knows all of my sewing woes!), and I just hear Him telling me to slow down, and to wait, and to pay attention to what I’m doing. I am fighting condemnation in my head, “You are so terrible at this, why do you even bother to sew when you are so awful? Go to Etsy.com so you can see how talented all of these other moms are. What a waste of time!” Stupid enemy.

     I sew because I love to sew. And even if I’m never any good, I’m learning to slow down, and anything that holds that kind of power over ME deserves to stick around.