Category Archives: Purpose

Finding Myself at a Book Signing

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Sometimes, you just gotta indulge yourself. And I did. One Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago, while watching The Pioneer Woman cook before me on The Food Network, appeared a TV commercial advertising her book signing appearance that afternoon in Denver. No Way, I thought. Today? I had no plans. Why not?

Frankly, I didn’t know a lot about her, this Pioneer Woman. I’d recently begun taping her cooking show on Saturday mornings but didn’t visit her blog/website until that morning. I browsed through her blog posts providing myself the necessary information to call myself a fan. Turns out, Ree Drummond and I have a lot in common: we both live on a ranch, we both have four kids, we both blog, we both homeschool, we’re both married, we’re both women. We are soul sisters, soon-to-be best friends.

I hit the shower, mapped the location, and insisted that my own two homeschool kids tag along for the adventure. We drove 30 minutes to the West side of Littleton and entered the bookstore 1 1/2 hours before her appearance. The organized bookstore staff assigned me a group number and line number upon my arrival. Group ONE, number 78.

“How many people are y’all expecting today,” I asked, looking around the store.

“Several hundred,” the clerk replied.

The 77 place holders before me gathered around the two large screens set up in the center of the store, each holding hardbound books. I was empty-handed. Heart racing, I grabbed one of her cookbooks, her real-life romance story, and her recently released children’s book, Charlie the Ranch Dog, and scooted into the crowd facing the screens. With nothing but time on my hands, I sat on the cold, concrete floor and thumbed through the cookbook making small talk with ladies around me. As I flipped the full-color cookbook pages, one particular woman beside me reviewed each recipe aloud over my shoulder often referring to yummy concoctions in Ree’s other cookbook. With time on my side, I switched out the children’s book for the other cookbook and returned to my concrete seat, thankful I had arrived early as newcomers held numbers in the 600’s.

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Missing buttons

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Each night in preparation for bed, we fold back the heavy, floral king-sized duvet cover and gently place it on the floor at the foot of our bed. Each morning, or rather some mornings, we hoist the duvet back on the bed and spread its folds allowing it to rest atop its lesser counterparts for 12 hours until we return to repeat the process. After years of tugging and pulling the comforter’s cotton fibers, the red fabric-covered buttons had wriggled free from their threads and resided in my nightstand, no longer performing their duty along the open seam at one end.

For whatever reason this morning, I decided to pull red thread through the eye of the needle and stitch the missing buttons back on the plaid trimmed duvet cover. Halfway through the task, it came. It. Overwhelming sadness. A longing to see the woman who taught me how to hand sew a button back on the material beckoning its help.

Today my mom turns 65 years old and she is celebrating in Heaven as she has for the past three years. I miss her birthday celebration. I miss dinner and the seasonal performance at the Country Dinner Playhouse. I miss driving through neighborhoods gazing at Christmas lights and singing carols, especially Winter Wonderland, her favorite. I miss her laugh, her voice, her touch.

I miss sewing together. Creating, learning, ripping out and re-doing, basking, admiring, loving. Words best describing Mom’s testimony, her love relationship with Jesus. She often referred to her weakness and God’s strength, her failures and God’s successes, her misgivings and God’s love.

My mother affixed buttons of faith into my mind, threading scripture from her red-lettered, King James Bible into my very fibers. Armed with the sword of the spirit, she sewed a patchwork of verses and doctrine that, as a mantle, have covered me. I, too, have failures and many misgivings, but in the years matching the age of my duvet cover, God has shored up the weak threads of my faith and stitched his love buttons onto my heart.

December 19th brings overwhelming sadness, yes, but good news of great joy. For today, I boast of God’s strength, successes and love. He outdoes me, out-gives me, and out-loves me. There are no missing buttons.

Great Crepe Caper

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This past week, our house was filled with unfamiliar sights and sounds. Diapers, pacifiers, new-fangled bouncy seats, scampering feet beneath the eldest niece and nephews, ages 2, 3, and 5 and the giggles and coos from the youngest niece, four months. These adored and adorable, well-behaved children are happy, content beings teamed together with their cousins, my youngest two children, 11 and 12. Whether they’re hiding and seeking, building architectural LEGO marvels, competing on Wii sports, or scootering down the incline of the circle driveway, they’re happy. Yay, right? What else could mom and dad, aunt and uncle wish for?

We felt the need to reduce our cabin fever and their happiness and loaded everyone into two cars and four car seats to experience our local county fair. I don’t recall attending many county fairs even though my high school sweetheart was in FFA and raised a pork product named, Bosephus, the nickname of famous country singer, Hank Williams, Jr. Nonetheless, we strapped the underlings into the limo-sized jogging stroller and were assigned the ‘Great Crepe Caper’ at the fair entrance. Each child’s keeper was given a plastic zipped baggie in which we were to gather contents for making crepes. The map designated the barns where each ingredient could be found in hopes of teaching the children that food doesn’t originate shrink-wrapped at the grocery store.

We scampered about, six children and baggies, from barn to barn gathering our ingredients, petting the barn animals, and sneezing along the way. My brother-in-love, former Ag student and rabbit breeder, took a teaching opportunity in the lamb barn while the FFA students busily prepared their lambs for the upcoming show ring. He asked one of the students to demonstrate how they make the lamb’s neck ‘press into’ the student’s upper thigh to flex the lamb’s muscles making its health more apparent to the judges. Most of these lambs were less than six months old and yet fully trusted their young trainer. Such a small gesture, pressing into, created a flex of the will to trust.

We exited our final stop, the cow barn, with our butter, the last ingredient for our crepes. As murphy would have it, thunderstorms broke overhead forcing us to head home before we could receive our delicious french reward for completing the caper. Instead, we opted to make pancakes, a thicker version of crepes, for dinner and collapsed afterward from fair exhaustion while the cousins returned to a state of bliss.

After the young cousins waved goodbye making their way back to the Dallas heat wave, I found some quiet time with God and began praying for the upcoming school year. I was reflecting on the previous week and our time in the lamb barn. “God, my shepherd, I want to press into you daily so as to flex my will to trust you in all circumstances. Not just in the show ring, judged. I want to be empty of self so I can be full of your spirit, fully flexed.” Finding God as I pass through the barns of life gathering together all ingredients necessary to fulfill His purpose. Now that’s a great caper.

This is the plan

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three ring binder

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“So, what’s the plan?” Most summer mornings begin with one of my children posing this question to me. I’ve trained them to think in terms of a plan. What is a plan? My definition: waking hours of the day broken down into increments of time spent fueling our body, mind, soul, and spirit to attain feelings of wholeness, fullness, satisfaction, and contentment in life’s journey.

Yes, I’m a planner. I have goals for my life: I want to intimately know Christ. I want to serve. I want to teach, coach, mentor. I want to have energy to accomplish these things. To reach these goals, I need a strategy. A plan. I plan to pray. I plan to read and study the Bible. I plan to shower and get dressed. I plan to take a walk each evening. I plan to blog. I plan to make dinner. I think about my days. I make a plan and, yes, I enter the plan into my Outlook calendar, complete with reminders.

I’m intentional about the way I spend my time even if my plan includes: watching a movie with my high school senior, reading a book alone, hanging out at the pool with the younger kids and their posse of peeps, enjoying coffee with a friend. Sometimes, on a Saturday morning, amidst the Golf Channel blaring on the television, Lego wars taking place in the hallway, and paper plates holding freshly baked blueberry muffins slathered with butter, I answer my kids’ question, “This is the plan.” Doesn’t seem to meet a goal or have any intention but it’s still a plan.

As a child of God, I pose this same question to Him, “So, what’s the plan?” I ask in the form of conversational prayer. I pose the question and then I wait as He speaks to me through His word, my family, friends, nature, the checker at the grocery store, His spirit that lives within me.

Lately, I’ve asked this question aloud, louder, almost screaming. My 14-year-old son was just found incompetent by our county’s juvenile court to stand trial for his criminal charges against his younger siblings. Due to a restraining order, and our family’s safety and protection, he cannot return home. At his social worker’s request, he will stay in the treatment program, status quo, even though his negative behavior reports outnumber his steps toward positive treatment progress. He needs help beyond our capabilities. His mind is that of an 8-year old and his mental health fails him. “God, what’s the plan?”

Amidst enough legal documents to fill a three-ring binder, therapy sessions to aid in the healing process, and frequent sleepless nights, God responded, “This is the plan.” Not exactly the answer I was hoping for. Doesn’t seem to meet a goal or have any intention. What I realized is that even if I don’t agree with the plan, it’s a plan all the same. It may not seem intentional. It may not fit one of my goals. It might not make me feel whole, full, content or satisfied but God has a sovereign plan.

God’s definition: to take me on the path that fosters a deeper relationship with Him. To strip from me any pride and create oneness with the Father. He wants me to desire Him more than heaven. God’s not as interested in mapping out the most convenient route for me as He is in cementing and growing our relationship. Peace. “This is the plan.”

Type A Procrastinator

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“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

Simple quote that stirs up questions in my mind. Can I read books for the rest of my life? Study my Bible? Feed my brain with new information from YouTube? Travel the world? Learn for fun? This list describes how I spend my time procrastinating the things I should be doing.

Today’s task list glared at me from the laptop screen: unpack from Puerto Vallarta, schedule kids’ physicals, deadhead geraniums, hit the gym, organize the whole house, alphabetize books on organization and procrastination, grocery shop, cook for the month, reduce the national debt. If your task list reads like mine, it couldn’t be accomplished in a President’s term much less crossed off in a day!

After reviewing the looming list, predictably, I spent my morning in bed procrastinating everything before me. Alongside my kids. We read books, studied the Bible and, yes, fed our brains with YouTube videos.  It’s our version of a lazy, summer home school morning. We read about Samuel Champlain and his diligence to settle in Quebec, Canada with his fellow Frenchmen. We raced against each other looking up our memorized Bible verses among the 66 God inspired books. After reading about how spiders hunt their prey, we searched YouTube to discover a spider spinning a web to catch his prey and survive another day. Then we did some mental math calculations, read about the fall of the Phoenicians, and reviewed the different types of land and water forms that we will no doubt see firsthand on our cruise next month.

When I declared to a friend that I was going to home school my two youngest kids beginning after spring break, her response was, “A-type personalities have a hard time homeschooling because you’re list makers and homeschooling requires flexibility.” She knows me well. I am a type-A list maker. I measure my productivity by crossing tasks and errands off my list.

What she doesn’t know about me is that I’m also a bona fide procrastinator, a trait I’ve never bragged about. For the first time in my life, I consider it a positive attribute. Procrastination might be God’s way of keeping me focused on His list, the work that I should be doing.