Moments of Mud and Sky

Duets with Shama

Now - a one year cancer survivor

Watching Nathan Green paint life

Salads from our bucket garden in January

Lunch with a friend

Soft horse noses nuzzling

Mud on my boots

Flannel shirt comfort

The steadiness of God

Her tears of deep love at the name of Jesus

My reliable car

A covered bridge

An iron pressing steam in

The bedraggled downy woodpecker

Gardening dreams

When the sky swirls - a water color in the making

Daffodil leaves slipping up

Braided bread all golden

Holding Time

"How can you hold time?"

Laughing, I ask if she means "stop" instead of hold.

My sister says that she isn't ready for school to start again. Already she has spent many hours preparing lesson plans for little wiggling children and selecting the repertoire for two choirs. And Tuesday / Thursday she will have classes straight from 8 until 5! She sighs. Tired, comfortable, and crocheting steady waves of color. Beauty turned warmth.

The portobello barley soup steams in my mouth and I wonder if it is possible. . . To hold time? To scoop up a handful and savor each sip. Certainly not easier than carrying an armful of gravity or damming up light into a lake.

This dizzy world is chasing time like a carrot on a stick. Thrifting, bargaining, and even saving up for it. And some people purchase time shares. But don't we all inhabit this same shared space?

Here. . . Now.

With her crotchet hook flashing in and out. Ivan's chuckles and Daddy's voice in the other room. Succulent mushrooms and friends calling on the phone to link the distance with this moment. Beautiful and warm and held.

Perhaps we understand best what we can hold - what we can touch. Like blueberries and canoes, pine cones and puppies, and 3-D models for studying organic chemistry.

So I am choosing to learn this art of holding time. To learn to kneel and notice these gifts. And it will take a lifetime of bending I know - but I am joyous to begin! And perhaps time does pool in lakes of color - even at my kitchen sink.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end."
Ecclesiastes 3:11

Kisses From Katie

18 year old Katie Davis' commitment to follow Jesus completely led her to Uganda on a short term mission trip. That trip turned into a life time commitment to bring love and hope to the Ugandan people. To begin meeting the overwhelming needs she founded the NGO Amazima (truth) that provides food and education to over 1600 children and is developing sustainable businesses so parents can support their own families. Katie also legally adopted 14 girls who had been orphaned or abandoned in the aftermath of the war torn region. She and her family are radically living tangible love.

Here is one of the many beautiful insights that she shares:

"Mommmyyyy!" I heard a yell as I bounced quickly along the pitted road that leads to our program in my sixteen-passenger van. I stopped quickly, turning the van around to go back for Prossy, who had been walking home to get something.
"How did you see her?" asked my dad, who was visiting.
"I didn't! I heard her yell, 'Mommy,' " I replied.
"But everyone calls you Mommy. Even people we don't know call you that around here."
"Yeah, but I know when it's mine," I explained matter-of-factly.
And then I thought about what I had said and tears began to well. How incredible, what God has done for me. For us. It is true, hundreds of people in this area call me Mommy. Even people whom I have not met before recognize me as the woman who cares for the children and call me Mommy before even having made my acquaintance. On any given day, I can drive down the road between my home and Buziika, and if it is the right time, when kids are heading home from school, I will hear "Mommy! Mommy!" being shouted about every two seconds as I pass all the children on the road. I smile as I hear them. But for fourteen "Mommy"s I stop. I can hear the difference.

"I believe there is only one truly courageous thing we can do with our lives: to love unconditionally. Absolutely, with all of ourselves, so much that it hurts and then more."

"I would like to say that as I am surrounded by sorrow and destitution, it gets easier or less painful. But it doesn't. . . Each and every time, it is overwhelmingly devastating that people have to live, and die, like this - like my girls and I see happening around us. While it does not get easier, I have found that I am able to face each situation with a little more hope. I always hope my friends will live here on earth with me, but I tell them with a new senses of urgency about Jesus mostly because I want them to live with Him, experience His profound, unconditional love, whether here or in heaven. I see sadness, but I also see redemption."

"I have learned along my journey that if I really want to follow Jesus, I will go to the hard places. . . . So we go. This is where our family is today and where I hope to stay - loving, because He first loved us. Going into the hard places, entering into sorrow because He entered for us first and because by His grace, redemption and beauty are on the other side."