Memory of childhood is a funny thing. I think I should remember it better than I do. For sure, there are still a few moments solidly engraved, but trauma has done what it always does… it blurs the joy and zooms in on the pain.

Even though the height of my dad’s alcoholism was in my late teens, trauma has blurred and stolen so much from the earlier years for me. When I drive by my childhood house, I’m arrested with memories of that last year - of his struggle to get free, of my desperate pleas, and of tear-stained pillows.

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A tribute to transition and to a deep and wide life, rooted in the immediacy of my family, my church community, and my own hometown.

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I walked down the road, mind distracted.

And then I looked up….

And I couldn’t help but pull on the dog’s leash to get him to heel.

I had to stop.

There….

The most stunning tree. Naked, its scaffolding exposed.

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To my Lily, on her 9th birthday…

All those years ago, I dreamed up your first birthday party (the literal birth-day one). I brought candles and balloons and cupcakes to the hospital ready to celebrate a long life of loving you and seeing you grow. I think about that day and all of its unexpected surprises in great detail and great sorrow every year on this day, the 19th of March.

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In November my friend Betsy and I co-led a vision retreat for the leadership of our church. We executed our best-laid plans, but we could have never anticipated the way that God would surprise us all with the gift of His presence and leading.

Vision retreats are always exciting for someone like me who lives on her tiptoes for what God is doing next, but this one… it was so much more meaningful. It was sacred.

Because this was the output…

Rather than a formulaic strategy or a 5-year plan, this is what emerged:

A commitment to knowing our Belovedness and to helping others know theirs.

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Unpopular opinion: Friendship is hard. Like, really hard.

I always had this expectation growing up that friendship, with age, would get easier. Like, one day in my adult years, I would reach this place where I could still reap all of the joy outputs of friendship, without having to feed it the same inputs: time, energy, resources.

It turns out, that is indeed a fantasy.

And I guess, for all intents and purposes, I’m now willing to own and admit that it probably should remain just a fantasy.

Because real, sacrificial, big-input friendships are worth their salt.

They’re worth it in the early years, they’re worth it in the middle years, and they’ll continue to be worth it when we’re old and gray.

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Eight years ago tonight, hope danced through the air.

It was bedtime. I was supposed to be sleeping. But instead I was giddy with excitement and anticipation. I pulled back the covers and got up again. I wanted to check one more time.

I unzipped the suitcase again and there it all was. My heart danced again at the familiar surprise.

Party hats.

Cupcakes.

A happy birthday sign.

And 3 gallon size bags.

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Here in Western New York March is always a strange weather month- it’s very much an “in-between.” The weather goes back and forth from 20 degrees and snow piles to 60 degrees and new flowers budding. It is “in-between” and winter and spring wrestle and taint us all with their mud as they do (and the inside of our houses too: I’m talking 3 kids + a puppy kind of mud everywhere). It’s brown, it’s messy, it’s in-between there and what’s-still-coming.

March does that to my heart and spirit too. It carries out that same wrestle - the wrestle between there and what’s-still-coming.

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I don’t know if this is true for you or not, but I can get stuck in my head real easy. The thing (whatever the thing is at the moment) gets stuck on a feedback loop in my head and just repeats and repeats and grows in size in my head until it’s a big giant monster that has both my heart and my head tangled into a knot that needs removing (a knot that my husband, unfortunately, bears the brunt of most often). I’m stuck in my head and I can’t even name what is happening in there.

This week was one of those weeks.

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