Mom Laws: These Are Why Chocolate Chips Were Created.

After a few years of parenting, here are some truths that I have found to be the mom's version of Murphy's Law. These also answer the question of why God made chocolate:

~If you choose not to take a shower for two days, you will most surely be called into your child's school for some reason and be seen wearing stretched-out yoga pants and yesterday's make-up by other moms who have recently showered and are wearing cute skinny jean/tall boot combinations.

~If your preschool-aged child takes a short slumber upon an afternoon, you will find yourself watching Curious George at 11 p.m. with said child who is still more awake than you have been in the last five years.

~If your tiny babe gets moderately warm in the car and falls into a deep sleep upon which she cannot be awakened when the car has stopped in the garage, you will carry her into the house on tiptoes and lightly lay her down in her warm little crib only to have her eyelids pop open the moment she touches the sheet. Every. Single. Time.

~The cinnamon oatmeal you lovingly made for your eldest child upon a Tuesday morn will be eaten with joy and gratitude while watching Wild Kratts for a happy half hour. But, upon your Wednesday morning when you lay before that child the same repast,  the oatmeal will most assuredly be met with disdain and suspicion. For. No. Apparent. Reason.

~The moment you find yourself indulging in a tiny piece of Halloween candy whilst hiding behind the pantry door, you can be assured that your offspring will suddenly appear and demand to know what devilry is taking place. You and candy are never safe together. Ever.

~Every phone call you will ever make during the duration of your child's preschool years will be met with cries for "Juice!"and "Watch Curious George with me!" Also, small people will be drawn to you like magnets and wrap their arms around your legs and most likely there will be a river of tears over someone having taking the toy someone else thought about possibly playing with later this afternoon. Lesson: Phone calls are out of the question.

~Anything other than yoga pants being put on in the morning qualifies you for being a human kleenex. And also having people wipe peanut butter on you. And maybe also having small people managing to over-fill their diaper the moment you set them on your lap. It's just science, people.

~It's essentially your destiny to be called upon for some life-saving rescue situation the second your skin touches the cold porcelain of the toilet seat. Accept this and choose to dehydrate yourself and also remove all fiber from your diet. From now on, bathroom breaks are for hours in which your children are not awake.

~Despite your culinary efforts in the kitchen for the past two hours while also breaking up occasional, Lego-related arguments and having two small people underfoot tossing Tupperware back and forth, the meal you offer your family at dinner will be met with cries for "Peanut Butter Sandwich!!" and "I can't eat that green thing on my plate!" And you will declare to yourself that in your next life there will be enough money for a cook. And also a masseuse.

~After a long week of early morning school drop-offs and late night diaper changes, Saturday morning will arrive with the delirious hope of a possible chance of sleeping past 7:30 a.m. Go ahead and let that dream die now. You will absolutely be awake by 6:00 a.m. at the latest.

This mission of mothering, if you choose to accept it, will require every ounce of emotional, mental and physical energy you have ever thought about having and maybe a teensy bit more. A handful of chocolate chips before starting each day may or may not help you make it through. Most likely the latter, but I would choose to eat them anyway.

May the yoga pants be with you. 

A Warning Label: In Which Things Get Real

*It's Day 20 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge, which is why I'm still talking about intentional community. (-; If you're interested in reading yesterday's post and maybe even following along for the rest of the series, check that out here: 31 Days of Intentional Community *

After all that warm fuzzy talk about how fabulous real community can be, I feel like it might be necessary to slap a small warning label on intentional community. I'll let Dietrich say a few words and then we can discuss amongst ourselves...

Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin. - Bonhoeffer, Life Together

So, here's the situation. If we're serious about being a part of a heart-deep community where people invite each other into their messy lives, then we should probably prepare ourselves for the occasional "severe reprimand" Bonhoeffer refers to.

We know that eventually we are all going to be in need of a bit of tough love. A community of imperfect, in-process people is going to require real talk about sin and possibly the occasional minor (or perhaps major) intervention. Community is made up of actual human beings and because people can at times be weird, temperamental, awkward, pouty, selfish, and a dozen other things you might also describe your toddler as at any given moment, there are going to be sin issues that need to be handled. If your community is trying to actually love one another in any sincere kind of way, this is just part of the deal.

The whole already-but-not-yet kingdom situation we're in means that we shouldn't be too surprised when one of the members of our fellowship has some issues, or makes a significant mistake, or gets their feelings hurt too easily, or has a meltdown, or kills a man in Reno. Except, you should be surprised if that last thing happens.

This is where the grace of community comes in. Despite the temptation to not deal with things and just sweep them under the rug with a big ol' "bless your heart," instead stuff has to be dealt with, which will probably be uncomfortable and make things hard for a bit. But, at the end of the day, it's critical that we seriously deal with each others' sin while also offering armloads of grace.

A community where nothing is required of you and no one holds you to any kind of standard is not real fellowship. The hope is that someone cares enough about us to notice when we start down a road that will be hard to come back from and that they lead us back to the gospel with grace and compassion.

Last night our community group met on our back deck because the weather was perfection and it felt criminal to be inside. We talked about the Samaritan woman at the well and how compassionately Jesus addressed her sin and encouraged her to leave it behind. And then we went on to talk about, because we're not Jesus, how in relationships, we need to earn the right to speak into someone's sin. We need to know that we are genuinely valued before our sin gets pointed out. This is one of the most powerful things about being a part of an intentional community. People know us and love us well enough that we can hear a reprimand from them and trust that it is absolutely out of their hope that we can be better.

Living in deep community with one another makes it possible for our real selves to be known and treated with grace and gentleness, especially when we're off-roading in the wrong direction.

I know I desperately need others to point out my blind spots and love me enough to tell me when I'm choosing my sin over what's true. And to experience that sort of kind intervention, I have to be in intentional fellowship with people who love Jesus and love me.

It's a little scary to willingly accept this kind of relational vulnerability. But, how much better is it to be drawn back into community by friends who care enough to compassionately reprimand us rather than be casually abandoned to our sin by acquaintances who just aren't invested enough to say anything.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend.
~ Proverbs 27:6

Old Friends Must Always Begin as New Ones

*It's Day 16 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge, which is why I'm still talking about intentional community. (-; If you're interested in reading yesterday's post and maybe even following along for the rest of the series, check that out here: 31 Days of Intentional Community *

Every morning on our way to Sam's school I come close to veering off the road as I crane my neck to see the sun rising above the treetops and the early morning mist that's still clinging to the farm fields we pass. We drive by old barns that farmers are still actually using as they continue the rhythms of planting and harvesting. There's a lovely little pond that sits at the bottom of a corn field that never ceases to draw me in as we wend our way through the countryside. I realized this morning that as we drove by one of the little farms we pass every day, that I referred to it in my mind as "our farm." As if we have some stake in it now that it has become part of our daily routine and perhaps because it occupies a small place in my heart somehow.

The roads we drive to and from school have become familiar and comfortable and the short drive from our house to where Sam spends his mornings feels like it belongs to us in some indefinable way. I know where to look to see the morning sunlight breaking through the line of trees at one of the turns we make. And I know to look for the horses that have made their way out of the sleepy barn to eat their breakfast. And right now, as our local farm hosts it's own fall festival, there's an orange patch of pumpkins that almost glows with orange-ness through the foggy morning mist before the sun burns it away.

This morning found me pondering how less than two years ago, I didn't even know any of this existed. Even though I grew up in this county (before moving away for twelve years), I never laid eyes on a single one of these barns or farms or backroads. And, now they are becoming like old friends to me, familiar and welcoming and known.

I can't help but relate this to friendships we've made over the last two years since we moved here. I think we're finally starting to experience the depth of friendship we've hoped for and we're beginning to see friends start to feel like family. It always takes longer than you think it will, but once it finally begins to happen, you wonder how people it seems you just met have suddenly become so familiar.

Friendships that matter aren't usually forged over night. It takes time to reach the places in our friends' hearts that endear them to us and hopefully us to them. It takes time to learn the idiosyncrasies and the quirks and the expressions that make that friend themselves. And it takes time to let them discover those things about you.

Communities of friends are always in process. We are always learning new things about each other, hearing stories we haven't heard before, observing hand gestures and facial expressions that make each friend distinctive.

There is time for all of this. Rome wasn't built in a day. The community you and I long for can't be either.Give yourself time to live into the community you are hoping for. And remember that old friends must always begin as new ones.

Choosing People Over Technology

*It's Day 15 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge, which is why I'm still talking about intentional community. (-; If you're interested in reading yesterday's post and maybe even following along for the rest of the series, check that out here: 31 Days of Intentional Community *


Back in the old days (the '80s, obviously), kids who were really into computers and video games were kind of, well, nerds. Fast forward thirty years and those kids are billionaires and the rest of us who can't read code or write html (are those the same thing?) are just as obsessed with technology as those guys were in middle school.

Up until five days ago, my husband resolutely still used his flip phone. Despite it's having suffered a near fatal experience in the pool this summer, it lived long enough for Matt to realize it was time to enter into the modern world and accept the smartphone into his heart. And, now the blue glow of it's screen lights up his face in the evening when I turn to say something witty to him as we sit on the couch. Or is that the glow of the 50-inch television we recently acquired (i.e. won in a raffle.)

We love our screens over here, and despite my constant sense of our lives being sucked into the cyber vortex of our computers, iPhones, Nooks, and television, we cannot seem to pull ourselves away. It's disconcerting.

I know you've probably seen that short video circulating online that is basically a montage of people just living their lives while also staring constantly at their phones. The video is somewhat amusing until you realize what's actually happening. People aren't looking at each other, they're looking down, completely engrossed in whatever is happening on their tiny, little screens. I do this, too. All the time. Every day. It concerns me.

When I was in my twenties, phones were just starting to evolve into the smaller versions we hold in our hands from the bag phones and the awkwardly shaped flip phones that would fit into no one's pocket ever. I remember even then, before the internet had even thought about being accessed from a phone, that we were all starting to carry them with us everywhere. Obviously, that made sense for safety reasons and convenience and all that. But, they were beginning to be a bit intrusive. A pastor I worked with for a bit in my early twenties talked about this in a staff meeting at one point. He was noting that people were beginning to stop conversations with friends in order to answer their phones. The problem with that, according to him, was that it basically communicated to that other person that you would rather be somewhere else with someone else instead of in that moment with them.

That's been approximately twelve years ago since I heard him say that. And, the reality is, the epidemic of social media and smartphone worship is off the charts.

What I'm wondering is, how is that affecting you and I in our pursuit for real community? What do we lose when we substitute significantly engaging with the actual, living and breathing human beings in front of us with a glowing screen that gives us information and show us pretty pictures?

What are really sacrificing in the way of relationships and fellowship and connection (with people, not wi-fi)?

I'm a little unnerved by how enamored my little people are with our phones and our computers and our television. I find myself wanting to be super vigilant to teach them to value people over technology. Not just in theory, but actually, practically, intentionally valuing others over the screens that in the end can never offer what the person standing in front of you can.

Perhaps, today is a good day to consider what our screen time might really be costing us in the way of community and relationship. And, in response to the answer to that question, asking what we can do to change that.

Because in the end, people are what matter.

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which,if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilites, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - These are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - 
immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory 

Make Something Happen

*It's Day 13 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge, which is why I'm still talking about intentional community. (-; If you're interested in reading previous posts and maybe even following along for the rest of the series, check that out here: 31 Days of Intentional Community *


At our little stay-at-home moms' Bible study group the other morning, my friend mentioned that she hated the word intentionality. Like hated it. I think her strong feelings towards that word might have something to do with how frequently it comes up in the land of Christians who love to speak Christianese. Similar to the words authentic, vulnerable, and possibly community (yep).

We Christians love to use words until they almost don't mean anything anymore. I'm sure every sub-culture does this, but we have a gift for it. There are websites dedicated to our idiosyncratic ways of communicating.

All this to say, the word intentionality might make your brain turn off when you read it because you may have heard it a thousand times. But being intentional is a huge part of creating community, so in order to keep you (and me) from going into a word coma when you hear it, here's a list of synonyms to round this word out:

deliberate, 
conscious, 
intended, 
planned, 
meant, 
purposeful,
considered, 
designed. 

Now add the word community to that list. And then take a minute to think about what that kind of community might look like. (i.e. purposeful community, conscious community, etc.)

On rare occasions, community happens effortlessly and it's possible that in different seasons of life we might find ourselves a part of a fellowship before we even have a chance to think about how to make that happen. But, in my experience, it usually takes real effort. Oh, and intentionality. Did I mention that? Making community happen involves what you might expect: prayer, planning, inviting, engaging, etc. Intention.

Matt and I love having people over to our house, but for the last two years we were either expecting a baby, having one, or living in the vortex of a baby year. Now that the babe is one, we're coming out of our cocoon and remembering how to use our home to help create community. We're trying to be purposeful in our desire to engage others in real, heart-deep fellowship.

Somewhat similarly to wanting to be married, the desire for community requires doing more than just sitting at home hoping the UPS man shows up and happens to want to hang out. That would obviously be all kinds of weird, but I think we can sometimes neglect to act because we're "waiting on the Lord" to make things happen. He definitely can drop a husband onto your doorstep or provide community in a completely supernatural way, but I don't know that it's going to work like that for most of us.

Acts 2 shows God's people committing themselves to the fellowship, sharing their food and possessions, attending church together, inviting each other into their homes and in the midst of all that, God was "adding to their number day by day."

Let's follow their example and be purposeful and deliberate as we invite people into our lives. If your intention is to experience community the way God designed you to, don't wait for it to just happen.

Take the first step toward someone else and invite them in.

Be brave enough to be intentional.

When I Don't Have It All Together (Which Is Always)

*It's Day 12 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge, which is why I'm still talking about intentional community. (-; If you're interested in reading previous posts and maybe even following along for the rest of the series, check that out here: 31 Days of Intentional Community *


Sometimes I overachieve. Such as this weekend when I booked us to high heaven with stuff and now it's Sunday afternoon and we all want to crawl into our beds and sleep until next weekend.

A quick overview of the last 48 hours includes: cooking and delivering a meal to a family who just had the sweetest little baby imaginable, having friends we love over for dinner, and celebrating my mom's birthday all day Saturday at Stone Mountain Park. Activities not listed: grocery shopping for aforementioned events, cooking meals, baking a birthday cake, chatting with a long-distance friend who I never get to talk with, cleaning house for company, occasional showers, and keeping small people fed and clothed and alive.

All of this to say, I've been busy. And, on that note, let's talk about how to have community when we're keeping schedules that make us occasionally consider moving to North Dakota to live off the grid for a month or two. Or for always. We are all busier than we probably should be. And that makes it hard to have deep, meaningful, unhurried community.

As a card-carrying perfectionist, I get somewhat neurotic when things get busy because of my love for all things neat, organized, put-together and punctual. Busyness exacerbates this tendency, which is unfortunate for me, for you, for anyone who steps into my small tornado of perfectionism.

Friday afternoon, as I was somewhat frantically getting things ready for our friends to come over, I realized, close to half an hour before they arrived, that I had yet to take a shower that day. And I still had more vegetable chopping ahead of me. And there was a baby to feed. And a living room to vacuum. I considered not taking a shower and just wearing the yoga pants I was still wearing from the night before. They're close friends, but maybe no one should be close enough to make that wardrobe decision a right one.

So, I took a shower, and I felt more like a human being, which always gives your dinner party a better chance at success. But, it also meant that once our friends arrived, there were still lots of things to get done before dinner was actually going to happen. That wasn't ideal. BUT, the kids headed to the yard, the dads went out to get the grill started, and my friend and I hung out in the kitchen to chat while I cut up sweet potatoes and made sweet tea. My OCD nature was slightly disappointed with the fact that the evening hadn't gone exactly according to my plans, but it all turned out just fine. Better than fine.

The next morning my friend texted me to let me know that they'd had a good time and then said something to the effect of how community can still be great even when it isn't perfect. (Sidenote: She brought over a Dutch oven full of homemade mac and cheese that only needed to be kept warm in the oven. Somehow it managed to be baked an additional 25 minutes on 400 degrees.)


If you're anything like me, you can let your perfectionist tendencies keep you from inviting people over or from enjoying the time spent with guests when they do come over. I'm not free to feel joy in the midst of community when I'm so bound up by my need to be perfect or create a perfect environment.

Perfection is a myth. And it's a thief. It's steals significant moments from us by directing our attention to the details that are inconsequential in the midst of the fellowship going on around us.

It's hard, but I'm learning to let things go. To let there be dust bunnies under the furniture and small, greasy handprints on the windows. To be okay with dinner being an hour and a half later than I'd planned. To let go of the supposed need to look like I've got it all together

I'm trying to let insignificant things go for the sake of community unhindered by the trivial so that I can experience the unhurried, undistracted, life-giving fellowship you and I were meant for. Join me?

Let's Do This Community Thing Better (A Re-post)

*It's Day 10 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge, which is why I'm still talking about intentional community. (-; If you're interested in reading previous posts and maybe even following along for the rest of the series, check that out here: 31 Days of Intentional Community *

It's been a day. And by that, I mean, from the minute I rolled out of the bed to get Sam ready for school and pick the baby girl up from her crib, I have been on the move. Despite what it may sound like, it's been a good one, but I've definitely reached that point in the day when putting together sentences is starting to be slightly hard. And so, to save you and me from a blog post that could either be mind-numbingly boring or just incredibly awkward, I've decided to give myself a measure of grace and not write a post on community tonight. Luckily, before I started the 31 Day Writing Challenge, I'd written a little post about community that I'm going to share again. This just happens to be the post that sparked my interest in committing to a month-long conversation about intentional community:

A fellow stay-at-home mom (a.k.a. laundry-dominator, kid-chaser, house cleaner extraodinaire, nutritional snack czar, etc.) called me yesterday. We talked on the phone, which is in itself a small miracle, considering that children are drawn to moms on the phone like moths to a flame, except they're more needy (the children, not the moths). It's a natural phenomenon that I do not have the scientific credentials to explain. Even as her little ones bounced around her house and fought and needed things from her (Sam was at school and the babe was asleep, if you were wondering where my people were), we shared actual words of encouragement and words of understanding and words of wondering what it's all about, this life we are leading, shepherding small hearts and souls in our little homes from sun-up to sun-down and sometimes long after that sun has gone down.

And we hit on something in the midst of that conversation. Something that you have probably already considered or wondered about or maybe even acted on. We talked about the strangeness of raising children the way we do in this weirdly isolated society we live in. And I'm not just talking about the social media phenomenon that helps us keep up with friends who live across the country whom we haven't seen since we were twelve even as we don't know our neighbors or see friends who live only a few miles from us more than twice a year. I'm talking about the situation in which most stay-at-home moms find themselves in day after day, raising their babies in virtual isolation, tucked away in the solitude of their own houses waiting for husbands to come home and give them a couple breaths of relief from the unrelenting constancy of it all.

We don't live in community the way women did fifty years ago. You've probably noticed this. Our neighborhoods are full of strangers who we wouldn't recognize in a police line-up. Our children don't play with the kids down the street because we're kind of afraid they might sell them drugs (or equally alarming, trans fats) or join a preschooler gang. Our mornings aren't spent with moms who live next door drinking cups of coffee on the porch while the littlest ones who don't go to school play at our feet.

We drop older kids off at school and then drive straight back into our garages, retreat into our homes, and spend the day doing our usual stuff, disciplining children, cleaning bathrooms, making meals, paying bills, with the occasional guilty glance at Facebook as we wonder what other women are doing right now and hoping for some small connection with them online as we face another day alone.

Um...that sounds a little more bleak than I meant for it to. But, you know what I mean. Being a stay-at-home mom these days is, for the most part, kind of a loner experience.

And, so, this brings me back to what my friend (we'll call her Courtney, because that's her name) and I were mulling over. We want more than that. We want real community with each other. Community that's more than just a playdate at Chic fil a (although those are occasionally extraordinary). But, how on earth do we make that happen? And, are we even willing to be intentional enough to make it happen? My introverted self can occasionally choose to be alone when community would be so much more life-giving.

We need to be intentional about community with each other, but, I think we also need to be somewhat unconventional about it. Playdates aren't really community. Can we just be honest about that? Playdates make my brain want to explode sometimes. But, if we aren't living across the street from each other, can we even have the kind of comfortable, familiar, intertwined-life community that seems so out of reach? I honestly don't know yet. But, I really want to at least give it a serious try.

My friend and I talked about having family dinners together where everyone brings food, so that no one feels like the burden of dinner is completely on their shoulders. We talked about being intentional about driving over to each others' houses after kids have been dropped off at school to have a cup of coffee and talk for an hour before heading back home to put the baby down for a nap. We talked about going on walks in the evening and about being intentional to occasionally involve our husbands in our pursuit of community so that we aren't tempted to be exclusive in some kind of  "No Boys Allowed" cliche.

I'm curious if it's possible. I think it is. I think we can create the community we were designed for.

We need each other. I need friends to speak truth into my life daily so that I'm not tempted to hide out in my house and allow the Enemy to convince me of things that aren't true. I need friends to walk with me consistently in this parenting thing because on any given day I can easily believe that I'm screwing it all up. I need friends to encourage me to be myself, to live out my purpose, to pursue gifts and talents that I'm tempted to put away until the kids graduate from college.

What would it look like if we made choices about where to buy a house based on where our friends lived? What if we took back our neighborhoods (so to speak) and created the community that we long for? I know that sounds a little far-fetched, but wouldn't living a stones' throw away from a dear friend be worth about a million double-sink master bathrooms? I'm pretty sure our quality of life would benefit from the friend across the street way more than the bonus room in that house across town. I say this and I currently live on a street where I know zero neighbors and I've lived here almost two years. And it's not for lack of trying to be friendly. I think real community just feels so foreign and possibly even outdated that maybe no one really tries anymore.

I want to borrow a cup of sugar from you and I want you to call me to remind me to pull my shade at night before I put on my pj's (because, oops) and I want to know that you'll water my flowers when I'm out of town for the weekend. I want to know that you will drop by and feel the freedom to come in without knocking. I want to feel like we're in this together. Because we are. We just don't always realize it. 
  

Let's be different. Let's pursue each other. Let's get all up in each others' business (in a good way, friends). Let's change this weird trend of moms locked up in their houses trying to go it alone. Let's figure out real ways to be intentional about unconventional community. 

I'm in if you are.