It’s Elsie, jumping on for the #wildandfreeconf #fridayintroductions with my hair still full of beach sand 🙈🇬🇧 🙌🏼 I’ll share 10 quick things. 1) 📚 on my nightstand: Scot Cairns, LM Montgomery, Madelaine L’Engle, Nancy Pearcy, Calvin & Hobbes and GK Chesterton. 📚 2) I just spent thirty minutes having tea and biscuits and reading Edward Ardizzone books to my youngest and it 3) beat the thirty minutes prior which were spent getting sand out of our 12 passenger van. 4)My family was able to leave Cuba and come to the United States in part because of Eleanor Roosevelt. I’ll have to tell that story sometime. 5)Jo’s Boys by Louisa May Alcott and Rainbow Valley by LM Montgomery were two of my favorite books growing up. In my heart, I knew. 👦🏻 👦🏻 👦🏻 👦🏻 6) When I was a little girl my imaginary friend was Davy Jones from the Monkees. I would blame him/yell at him (in Spanish) for getting my hair dirty. 🎸 7) Saving books is my jam. Sometimes I buy or rescue books just for the inscription. 8) I love cooking for huge groups of people. I pretty much want to feed everyone I meet. The ministry of good food and gathering round the table is powerful. 9) I impulse buy chickens, ducks, turkeys, it was a problem. I’m recovering. I’ve made promises to my husband. 🙈🙈 p r o b a b l y won’t do it again? 😂🤷🏻♀️ #prayforjeff 10) THe book I can’t wait to read next is “The Supper of the Lamb” by Robert Copon. That’s my 10! Can’t wait to read your #wildandfreeconf intro 🇬🇧 ENGLAND! I can’t wait! Stopping in London (for museums and theater), Oxford (for inklings and to show Jeff my old haunts) and Stratford upon Avon for the @wildandfree.co conference 🎉🎉 I wish I could take you all with me! Have a beautiful weekend
I’ll be honest, sometimes my brain is a stew pot of probabilities and news stories and webMD panic searches and what if’s.
There are many times when I have to put the lid on that pot of bubbling anxiety and SURRENDER so we can LIVE. Because if I spend my life panicking over their physical health, it will likely come at the cost of our collective mental health. Because if I live a life of fear in which my actions directly countermand the words of beauty and courage and freedom I read over them each day, the lesson lived will trump the lesson read. Outside observers will often ask, “aren’t you worried they’ll get hurt?” We’ve adventured enough to know that getting hurt is part of going outside. It’s part of learning, part of healthy development, part of what motivates us to exercise the muscle of new experience the next time we venture out. A decade of boyhood has left us well versed in bruises and stitches and staples and stings and bites and burns and splinters and scrapes which means we’ve had a decade of recalibrating, adjusting, dealing with disappointment, showing mercy and empathy, sacrifice, care, self education, humility, understanding of physical limitations, and the value of second and third tries, facing fears, acceptance, fighting dragons, overcoming obstacles and failing with the knowledge that we will survive that failure. Funny how that list includes nearly all the things I could not do, could not handle, in the years following my PTSD diagnosis. As for those jagged rocks that crown the churning surf? The one a dozen strangers sent messages about the day I shared our beach day in my stories? My boy knows his way around them, that’s why he moves fast. He understands how tides and surges work, that’s why he knows the best paths to take. He isn’t reckless, he is learning. I’m not reckless, I am learning. He is wild to be free and I am free to let him be wild. Together we are practicing the beautiful art of holding close and letting go. The greatest adventure is remembering that we are redeemed, no longer bound to fear, and living out that truth with confidence. 🌊🌴☀️
This morning my youngest ran up asking, “can I hear that music again? PLEASE! I thought about it all night! I need to hear the music.” I start fumbling through albums. Andrew Peterson? Herbie Hancock? Sibelius? He shakes his head and runs into the library and begins rummaging through shelves. I hear a happy shout and then he runs up to me with a book in his hands. “This one!” he says. I look down and see the copy of Beowulf I’ve been reading aloud to the older boys. “I love that sound. Will you repeat that music to me?” His eyes shining up at me, his face smudged with dirt, his Gryffindor jersey streaked with paint— the image of him star struck over Beowulf, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I’m glad this messy little one had the chance to hear the music in Beowulf and fall in love with it. I’m so thankful I got to be the one to read it to him. Im so glad spoken words were heard as music, as singing. I’m holding that picture he painted with his words, the image of singing and repeating music over my children, close to my heart. Like my friend @ainsl3y says, “It’s not what we have to do, it’s what we get to do.”
He is the echo of all my toughest traits. At times we crash against one another like unrelenting wave on immovable rock. But there are moments like this, moments when rock cradles water and there is nothing but peace and understanding. Our eyes meet, we take a breath, we share a smile. This boy that crashed into my life and wore the jagged places smooth—-even with a thousand pools of water between us, I know the stories thundering in his heart, I know the shape of his wildness unfurled. I get to bear witness to it all. What a gift. 🌊☀️🌴
Today we are practicing “endless echoes,” as Mother Teresa so wisely described the power of kind words. My little boy’s face lit up when his brothers cheered him on to finish the last page of his work. When it was done, he beamed and we could see the echo of our words filling his heart and mind. I love these small tender moments that lay the foundation for something so much bigger than I can imagine right now. I set timers on my phone today for each child, morning and afternoon. A reminder to whisper an echo into the deep well of their soul so it can echo back and out into the world around them. I am painfully aware that words are my gift when well chosen and my downfall when poorly fashioned. Motherhood repeatedly reminds me to use my words well, to build up rather than tear down. They’ll have many teachers throughout their lives but only one mother. In the midst of teaching and guiding and correcting, I never want to lose sight of our relationship and the chance I have now to speak kindness and love and life into their hearts. The real gift is not my speaking them, but the heart breaking miracle of hearing them echoed back at me from my children when I forget to be kind. Now I’m off to practice these words. Happy Wednesday, friends. 🐫 🙌🏼❤️
