An Encouragement: What is the ULTIMATE Homeschool Rhythm?

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

I was sipping a summer drink, my shoulders draped with a blanket. I can’t QUITE bring myself to wear a sweater yet, but the leaves of fall are dropping, reminding me with the cool breeze that the days of summer are ending.

I found myself pondering the successes and challenges of the past homeschooling year, hoping that the total number of wins outscored the total number of defeats.

Then I took a fresh page, another sip of my iced drink, and pondered the coming year.

There is a certain RHYTHM to homeschooling, as there is a RHYTHM to the best things of life: summer-fall-winter-spring, or sunrise-daytime-sunset.

What is the ULTIMATE homeschool rhythm?

After much strategic thinking, erasing, and pulling from my wisdom of X years (I will NEVER admit I homeschooled THAT LONG!) of homeschooling, I think the ultimate rhythm goes something like this:

1) Read good books aloud to our children.

2) Focus on the relationship with each child. Talk to and listen to them.

3) Spend a 1/2 hour yelling at them and watching them cry during “math”.

And that’s it!

The ULTIMATE life of a homeschooler!

Repeat tomorrow!

By the way, both of my kids made it to high school math (pat on the back for me please). I’m thinking there are a LOT of martinis I’ve earned and saved for getting them that far.

Well done, mom, dad! You made it through math today! (Don’t have a martini yet – I was just joking).

Or maybe it’s not math but insert-monster-of-choice-here: toilet training, setting limits on technology, grammar, drawing lessons. (True story. One of my friend’s kids cried every time the art supplies emerged).

We all have our own battles but you get it.

On reflecting a bit more after writing this out (I process my thoughts via writing – thank you for reading and therefore helping me to think more clearly) I think the conclusive ALL ENCOMPASSING homeschool rhythm is the following:

1. Kids are trying to drive us crazy, to lose our sanity. This is called “sanctification” to us. It’s good for you (albeit eventually).

2. Don’t let them.

3. Bake cookies with them, or declare Pajama Day and watch a movie and eat popcorn with them.

4. Repeat.

(5. My editor keeps trying to delete this next one – I don’t know why!) When your kids are about to leave home, drink all the martinis you didn’t have on every bad homeschooling day. (And let’s admit it, there were a lot of bad days).

OK! OK! I won’t include that one!

My editor reminds me that I am in a sort of grieving process as my oldest child is getting ready to leave the nest and fly off to University.

Whole can of crazy is down there in my heart, waiting to get stirred up.

Well – ENOUGH writing for today! I’m fine!!!

Encouragement For When You Can’t Take Another Step Down Homeschooling Road

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

“You. You have nice kids.” People say this to us. Often. And this is what I want to reply: If you put plants in partially acidic soil and leave them there, they will grow but not to their full height. They won’t blossom with flowers of kindness. They are hunkering down, in survival mode.

If you want your plants to thrive, you need to put them in well-aerated soil of the proper pH. How much kindness is in the soil that your kids are stuck in?

Then we pull our little plants out of that soil and stick them in other soil with just as low of a pH or perhaps even more acidic. Time for hockey culture and dance practice. We wonder why they are withering, skinny characters blown by the wind into an awkward shape. We wonder why they are so fragile, so easily broken, with so little inner strength to stand against the wind, in joy.

It’s the soil. The rocky, sandy, paltry soil.

And the truth is, dumping manure on our plants is a hard job, that makes us sweat and that only seems to make the problem worse. The plants scream in protest. It burns.

But as we hold their hand, bring water on a cloth to cool their foreheads and to pour on the plant, the water seeps, bringing much-needed nutrients to their roots. They taste of your love, your love tinged with your sweat and your blood, and the water fills their small, malnourished bellies and satiates.

Your sacrifice is what is encouraging them to flourish.

And when little flowers of kindness bloom on your child, you can lean in close, smell the fragrance and let the rich scent soothe your soul.

Well done, homeschooling Mom, Dad.

And when our child graduates from high school or from our homeschool, that is the time to put our feet up and rest, not years earlier.

So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit. The Message

And now, brush off your knees where you skinned them when you fell, wipe your eyes, dear homeschooling parent, and let’s take another step, Jesus holding your arm to steady you.

You’ve got this.

Let’s take it one year, one day at a time, shall we? Where is Jesus leading you next?

Blogpost Footnotes

Homeschooling is one of the many ways to pour water of kindness onto the parched soil our kids are trying to grow in. What are some other ways?

God Spoke Through You And You Didn’t Notice?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

It was amazing. God is soo amazing! I mean, why COULDN’T He use other people, even, yes, STRANGERS to speak to us, if we have ears to hear?

This is what happened.

I had been working on growing to LOVE reading my bible, not blowing dust off the cover, reading it for 90 seconds, slamming it shut, and flicking YouTube back on. How do we LOVE to read our bibles?

One mentor suggested that AS I read a few verses of ancient text that feel particularly FRESH in this season to pause and ask God what He may be saying as I read.

For example, I was meditating on Psalm 139. This is the Psalm describing how God made each one of us with SUCH exquisite care. “Do you have anything else You want to say about how You made me?” I asked him.

I saw a picture in my mind of Jesus making a pot of soup, and adding a dash of this spice, a dash of that.

I am the soup that Jesus was making.

He is the master chef, knowing just how much spice a dish needs to be delicious.

My mentor suggested that I ask Jesus more specifically, “What are the spices you put into my soup?”

He said basil was one of the spices.

Kind of an ordinary spice.

I thought I must have heard incorrectly. Didn’t he mean SAFFRON or maybe something a bit more exotic? Nope. I asked Him again that afternoon.

Basil.

I felt that I should learn a bit more about basil, just in case I was hearing from God correctly, so I typed that keyword into Wikipedia.

I didn’t know this but basil is used by the Greek Orthodox Church to make holy water.

Purify my church, He seemed to be saying.

Not quite sure how to do that except perhaps to speak truth about the absurd in church culture. And perhaps He was encouraging me in my various roles of prayer and ministry?

The next day I was at the grocery store, and a customer one foot away from me asked the clerk about basil. She was yelling.

“You don’t have any basil?“ She was incredulous.

“I’ve been to every store in town and there is no basil anywhere!”

“Are we in a basil shortage?”

Now, there are lots of other foods to eat in our culture, praise God. But this woman REALLY WANTED basil. She pondered aloud with her daughter what they would do about the Thai wraps they were supposed to make that night.

I felt that God was speaking to my heart, that what I carry is a unique gift to the world. Something that others want.

Kind of like basil on the night you are making Thai wraps.

Kind of like the gift God put inside of you.

“The key to our identity is if we can love ourselves . . . If we know we are loved, then we have something to give others.” Steve Chua

Are you transparent enough that others can see your basil when they are searching high and low for it?

What gift that the world needs is lurking deep inside of you stuck behind layers of fear? Ask Holy Spirit to whisper what the next step is to reveal this. He’ll give you a shovel and help you dig it out.

Homeschooling Will Probably Drive You Crazy (But Do It Anyway)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Those cement factories overseas, where people labor in dust and despair, with no relief in sight by the power of unions, would be a hard place to work.

Homeschooling our kids is not as hard as working in one of those factories.

But neither is homeschooling sitting next to the pool, a martini in hand, flipping through a magazine as we ring a small bell every hour to usher our kids onto their next subject.

Homeschooling kids would eat you alive if you tried that.

Homeschooling your kids is not the hardest job on the planet.

But neither is it as easy as we thought, right?

Sort of like parenting.

Because homeschooling is also about kids.

Consider taking our kids to a baseball game, as any good parent does.

(Wait! I’ve never taken my kids to a baseball game! Ahhh! Now I have to have many long evening baths to appease my guilt for messing up yet ANOTHER aspect of parenting! “No!” I yell at my family. “I won’t be available to help clean up the kitchen for a few weeks after supper again because I have to take many long baths to appease my homeschooling guilt!” We all find our own ways to get downtime, but that is a topic for another blog post.)

Now where was I?

I actually forgot where the baseball analogy was going. True story.

But yes, parenting has, even for the most accomplished-looking of us, had us all on our knees at some point, begging for mercy.

Why was it that we decided to raise kids, we all wondered at some point?

Ah, yes, it was because we need them to sanctify us.

So God made babies cute, we want one, and before we know it, our tyrannical children are regularly winning battles against us.

“Time to get stronger,” we think, as parents, going to the gym to increase our muscles to fight against these ultra-small beings. Except the muscles we are building are metaphorical. We are getting stronger in selflessness, in empathy, in understanding more clearly our need for grace, in spirituality, as we cry out to God for help.

And so, in exactly the same way that parenting sanctifies us, homeschooling provides an even deeper opportunity to sanctify us.

Because those tricky little kids are involved, the ones that came out of the womb stronger than us, we have met our match in the work of homeschooling.

They have an advantage over us because they already know their need for God.

Jesus . . . said . . . “Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God’s kingdom.” The Message

And homeschooling forces us to remember that we need Him to complete our tasks successfully.

And so this homeschooling journey is a marathon that will transform us. Not from sloth to athlete, but from capable to incapable. From standing and shouting orders to kneeling and begging for wisdom.

And just as an athlete is rightfully happy in their new body after the race, the stronger, more capable one, we can be rightfully happy as our hearts are cleansed a bit more, thanks to this homeschooling adventure.

Ready for your spiritual life to be supercharged?

Keep homeschooling, mom, dad.

God’s homeschooling adventure is equally for you as for your children.

Sanity is overrated anyway.

Nerdy Homeschooled Kids Are Our Hope?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment
(Photo credit: Blimey Cow*)

Yah! I know! My homeschooled kids look nerdy!

Look. We tried to tell them to only buy clothes at stores that cost five times what other stores cost, or twenty times what thrift stores cost.

We pleaded with them to only wear clothes that say little subtle things like “Lululemon” or “Nike”. We told them this.

We told them the kids would only like them if they wore those clothes.

And still, these dang homeschooled kids choose to wear their own stuff they found balled up in the bottom of their closet, or found themselves as a great treasure at a thrift store. (The cowboy hat phase really stank. Maybe because my high school nickname was “Hippiechick” and a cowgirl in the family messes with the cool teenage identity that still lurks inside me somewhere).

We explained these consequences clearly and slowly so they’d understand.

But they have the nerve to wear clothes they like instead of following the rules public high school kids tried to impose on them regarding clothing.

And you call OUR kids maladjusted?

Look – here’s a REAL LIFE ACTUAL HOMESCHOOLED kid to speak* on this topic (unlike me who spent twenty-plus years in public schools and public universities) and you can see how INFURIATING they are!

These are the clothes we told our homeschooled kids to wear:

(Photo credit: Blimey Cow*)

These are some of the clothes they actually wear:

(Photo credit: Blimey Cow*)

I mean, homeschooled kids just wear whatever they want!

And OUR kids are the ones with a problem?

Whatever.

Maybe being maladjusted to our culture ACTUALLY means you have your head screwed on straight.

Maybe the cookie-cutter mold everyone is supposed to fit is broken.

The most popular TED talk of all time is Sir Ken Robinson’s Do Schools Kill Creativity? (Maybe this talk is popular simply because of his name. Isn’t his name awesome? How did HE get a “Sir” in front anyway??)

But um, yeah, public schools are broken.

Maybe homeschoolers will get around to improving our society someday. They already are some of the kids giving society some hope.

Is homeschooling nerdy the new cool?

Hmm… Our family met a bunch of homeschooled kids we liked at a recent homeschooling conference. Some of them were ranchers. Maybe even I might . . .want . . . to wear a cowboy hat, after all. . . ??? Hmmm . . .

Blogpost Footnotes

*The majority of today’s blogpost photos are from a hilarious video produced by Blimey Cow: Seven Lies About Homeschoolers. Well worth your 4 minutes.

My Heart Reaches Through This Blog Post To Shake Your Hand. Really.

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

She reached her hand through the book I was reading and grabbed my throat, squeezing me.

Her name was Immaculée Ilibagiza and she was the author of the book Left to Tell. Her hand was her words, convicting me.

The book was about her true story of surviving the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Up until that point, I had been reading, my cool drink by my side, sipping as I lounged in my comfy chair.

“Where were all the foreigners who should have been speaking to their politicians, holding up banners to raise awareness, sending us relief?”

Her hand round my throat.

In one sentence I had gone from passive observer to active participant. To an active participant who had failed the protagonist during her moment of terror.

Yes, where were we, anyway?

I read later that the criminal and civic trials of football star O.J. Simpson dominated the news during that time.

We were distracted.

And now it’s my turn to reach my hand through this blog and to touch your heart.

I want to shake your hand and say thank you.

I am writing this blog because I am looking for the types of conversations that I want to be having more frequently.

I can tolerate shallow conversations but just barely.

I mean, I can tolerate shallow conversation in the same way that dogs can handle cuddling. Most of us assume that dogs love to cuddle right, just like most of us assume that all we want is shallow conversation.

But multiple dog trainers have assured me that dogs DON’T, in fact, love to cuddle. “The cuddliest breeds can simply tolerate it,” one assured me.

As an aside, I have learned that the only true exception to this general principle is my own dog. If I wrap both my arms tightly around his neck and hold him close, he likes to stay with me.

(Doesn’t shallow conversation feel a bit like that sometimes?)

And so in the same way that most dogs (besides mine) can simply TOLERATE cuddles, many more of us than we realize, I think, also can simply TOLERATE shallow conversations.

Topics with depth are what I truly love to write and talk about with others.

And because you are interested in these kinds of deeper topics, that are further under the surface of things than the weather and that sometimes touch the depths of our hearts, well, my heart reaches out to your heart in a warm embrace.

I am thankful for you. You reading these posts encourages me to keep opening up to the deeper thoughts of life.

And please be encouraged to comment with your thoughts, so we can get the conversation going both ways.

Or join us in our next conversation and prayer time.

That’s all.

Science Proves Your Teen Doesn’t Have To Be A Jerk! (Part 2)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Last time I gave scientific evidence to begin to prove teens don’t HAVE to be jerks!

Here are some more nails in the coffin of the idea that teens are generally jerks. The kids from the homeschooling culture we encountered were not in the habit of constantly being jerks. Also consider:

2. My eyes didn’t have to unwillingly be subjected to myriad low-cut cleavages and to buts mysteriously falling out of swimwear (wait – you mean they DESIGN modern bathing suits to do that? WHAT now?) when we were at the swimming pool with many of the kids from the conference.

The young men were not lurking nearby with half-crazed hormone-induced semi-leers, noticing with appreciation the buts and cleavages so mentioned above.

They were just kids having fun.

Even the older ones.

In fact, assuming they would behave like this, with their cerebral cortex’ filled exclusively with ideations of sex, would be dishonoring to them all.

The adults who assume this is all our teens think about are the ones with the problem.

It’s almost as if these adults assume self-control isn’t a real thing.

These kids know better.

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Ancient Text

We moderns like all this fruit of the spirit, except, of course, self-control. Who wants that? It turns out that the fruit all come together as one big package. Joy and self-control are linked.

Why would these youth grovel in the mud when they can soar into God’s purposes?

So they just had fun together, playing random games with all ages of the kids there, laughing, and creating a whirlpool with 50 kids running in a circle in the small hotel pool. One tried to dive into the shallow end of the pool on one occasion (they definitely didn’t all have FULLY developed cerebral cortexes yet). A random parent yelled at them and they cut it out.

Which brings me to my next point.

3) Parents were welcome, and generally unnoticed at all of these get-togethers. Reminds me of the study mentioned in the last post that they WOULD hang around adults willingly.

Why? Because it didn’t actually matter if the adults saw what they were doing or not.

And ironically, of course, the parents are bored making the decision of whether they should actually be there with their kids.

It doesn’t matter if they are there.

They yawn and go to bed, as my husband and I did, and we let our teen girls frolic around with a hundred youths we didn’t know until 2:00 in the morning.

We heard later that was when they got back. We were asleep.

We found them in the conference room of the hotel singing praise songs to God together late into the night, when I got up to get a drink of filtered water. They had a couple of guitars, a violin. Some younger kids were playing cards nearby.

Sometimes a table of adults sat nearby, sometimes not. No one was really paying that close attention.

These were good kids, in general.

They were used to having healthy, hearty fun.

And so they blew the expectations we had for youth wide open.

Maybe our expectations are too low.

Maybe we are the ones with the problem.

These homeschooled kids open a door to another culture for us to glimpse into for a short time, a weekend.

May this glimpse be enough to blow open our current expectations for our youth.

Is this another way that homeschooled kids may offer hope to our society and discussed here, here, and here?

Science Proves Your Teen Doesn’t Have To Be A Jerk! (Part 1)

/ Lori Lawe / 5 Comments

It was the kind of research results that make you readjust your position in your seat, sit up straighter. Your hand automatically reaches out to tap the audiobook’s 10-second replay button a few times.

Huh?

Yup. Your teen doesn’t HAVE to be a jerk!!!

I was listening to the audiobook Your Best Brain: The Science of Brain Improvement by John Medina. Consider the following excerpt from Lecture 17:

“Epstein makes several important observations about the powerful effect of culture [on teens] . . . Epstein points to a study . . . looking at adolescent behaviour in 186 pre-industrialized societies. The research did NOT find lots of classic impulsive, obnoxious, get me away from my parent’s teenage behaviour in ALL of them. In fact, they found the opposite. More than half the young males exhibited no rebellious behaviour at all. Teens in these cultures spent most of their time hanging around their parents. They often helped with the chores both in family and in broader social activities”.

It kind of sounds like the homeschooled kids I met.

We attended a 4-day get-together with classically homeschooled kids from almost every US state and many Canadian provinces recently.

It was a culture shock.

In fact, the previous year, I attended this same event with only my kids. “You have to come to this event next year with us,” I pleaded with my husband. “This is culture shock.”

So my husband rearranged his holidays to attend this year with us.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed. He was glad he came. Some things just have to be seen to be believed.

The biggest culture shock is that all the teens weren’t jerks.*

“That must be your own rosy glasses you have put on only when you observe homeschooled kids!” you protest. “You don’t even know most of these kids for Pete’s sake!” you spit. (Wait- I know you don’t spit but it kind of ruins the effect if I say “You say politely”. Stay with me on this one.)

Consider the following reasons why it seems to me that these kids were not in the habit of constantly being jerks:

1) At the family barn dance (Can I stop there?) in which parents and all ages of family members including teens danced in the same big hall (Can I stop there?), often a very young child would join in the fray. Partners switched every few seconds sometimes, in a (deliberately) Jane Austen style. EVERY SINGLE TEENAGE BOY that I saw whose turn it was to dance with the 3-year-old, hunched down, smiled and spun the little girl in time to the music. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Photo Source: Logos Online School Website

It was so sweet to watch teen after teen do this, it made me tear up.

These are not the teens skulking in corners, hoping for a chance to get outside and smoke some more pot.

As if this itself is not enough nails in the coffin of the myth that all teens HAVE to be aloof jerks, there is more evidence to follow that I will talk about next time.

Hold onto your hat. Adjust your position to sit up straighter and to take more notice. 

Entering this homeschooling culture, even through reading this blog post, may be enough to seriously damage your low expectations of today’s teens.

Check out this site below to blow another sock off the low expectations we so often hold for our teens.

the rebelution – rebelling against low expectations

Blogpost Footnotes

*Yes, of course, there are homeschooled kids who are jerks. I’m a jerk sometimes. So are you. And, similarly, there are myriad amazing public schooled kids. Of course!

We are observing cultural norms among various groups of teens. And the culture of these homeschooled teens aligns well with the science quoted in the study.

God Speaks Hope Without Speaking – Do You Have Ears To Hear?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

We look at the Son and see the God who cannot be seen. The Message

She spoke in metaphor at the prayer meeting.

Kind of like Jesus did.

His disciples came and asked [Jesus], “Why do you use parables when you talk to the people?” Ancient Text

Holy Spirit reached through the metaphor, through her words, and touched my heart.

Her metaphor, her prayer, was one of the ways Jesus spoke to me recently without using words.

“Coming to Jesus, with our box of “need” is like going to the chiropractor,” she began.

She didn’t know I had been to the chiropractor the day before. I had even forgotten, until that moment, that this chiropractor was a gift from God to me. A gift I forgot to be thankful for.

But I was attentive to the metaphor, tracking.

“Yes, we come to God with our problems just as we come to a chiropractor.” I concurred with her words as they flowed from her mouth, ministering to me.

Some of her words penetrated a deeper level of my heart, further than words can go.

“Do any of you feel that your life is a clock and you are constantly late? And not just by minutes but by decades?” she continued.

I had just poured out my heart to God that week, alone in the car, tears flowing, “Lord, time is a monster that terrifies me, renders me immobile!” I cried out.

This was a depth of my heart that lay buried beneath more pressing items: making dinner for the family, paying the bills, helping the struggling one, being busy, busy, doing the life stuff.

What do I do with the angst that lies buried within, at a depth no scuba diver, and no words can plummet?

Under it all, lay this monster, most often asleep, but threatening to awaken just before I fell asleep at night. Would I wake this monster when I fell asleep? In the depths of night, would this depth of my heart surface and waken me, demanding conversation again?

I came as a patient, God as my chiropractor. “I can’t help you adjust me,” I say to Jesus. “I bring only my pain. Adjust me. Realign me. I surrender to your unusual ways.”

The chiropractor bent my body and slammed herself against my leg, dropped a part of the table beneath me on purpose, and I walked out straighter, with less pain.

Like a healing chiropractor, God wants to adjust the depth of my fears, to re-align my thinking to His ways, to help me run without so much pain on this journey of life.

Yes, God can pick me up again, like the toddler that has fallen, and say, “Good job, keep walking in that direction.”

He is the Head and we are the body. We can grow up healthy in God only as he nourishes us. The Message

Re-aligning my thinking to the truth that Jesus completed his work on earth in only three years, that He multiplied the meager child’s lunch to feed a stadium, that God created the universe in one breath, that God lives outside of time is the healing oil that soothes my anxious heart, today.

May each one of us come to You, Holy Spirit, with the tangled mess of our fears that we have no words for. May You, like the faithful chiropractor, realign our thinking to flow from Your thoughts of the direction You want for our lives.

May we walk in joy, again today, because our thinking has been re-aligned, put under submission, to the great chiropractor of our hearts, You. May You, without using words, heal even what we don’t have words to express.

We surrender the outcome of our lives to You and choose to walk in obedience along the path You lead us on. You’ve got this.

May we run and dance in freedom, again, on this day, we pray.

Jesus Longs To Guide You Through Pain (And Hold Your Hand)

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

I hobbled around, one hand on my back, bent over and twisted.

I did too much at my new CrossFit class, and I could feel the muscles in my lower back clenching, pushing me into a C-shape. Maybe this strain will get better on its own? I was in denial, but my body kept slowly bending me over.

The name of my chiropractor popped into my head. Oh right! But we were leaving on holiday. I didn’t have time. I continued to pack, holding my aching back. But again, and again her name went through my head that morning, as I was thinking of other things.

This is one of the ways God speaks to me. He reminds me, again and again.

I don’t always notice the first time.

So I called the chiropractor, the one I hadn’t seen in five months, the one I had somehow forgotten about after a season of happy back. She surprisingly had one cancellation that morning, which worked perfectly before we left on holiday.

Her touch was like the hand of God. I don’t mean to be overly dramatic but that is what it felt like to me. My body obeyed her and re-aligned. My posture was upright. I (carefully) went about my day and in only several days, instead of several months, I was running again.

“Yeah, I don’t even know how I found her,” I mentioned to my husband offhandedly, as I distractedly finished my lunch. I had forgotten.

The next morning, my prayer group reminded me.

Years earlier, a friend had some trouble with her foot. She mentioned the name of the person who is now my chiropractor.

Her, Jesus seemed to say.

My friend was reluctant to give me her contact information. “I have no idea what she’s like concerning backs,” she cautioned.

Her, Jesus repeated.

I was in a phase of rejecting all therapy.

Everything I tried, every physiotherapist, chiropractor, masseuse, and others had made me worse. Much worse. I was afraid to try anyone else. “I’ll just have to solve this on my own,” I had thought.

But with a nudge from God, I made the call.

I was tense and nervous in her office that first day.

But she became the gift God gave to me.

I could run faster, complete the triathlon, and horse around with the kids again sooner, much sooner.

(There is Another and another who helped my back a ton as well, but those are different stories).

God walked with me in my pain and His Spirit guided me to a person who used her skills to allow God’s healing through my body.

And I am thankful for her.

And I have remembered, now, to be thankful to God for her, too.

If I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me. Ancient Text

Need some advice?

Ask!

God, you long to give out treasures, but we so infrequently come to You to receive. Help us, Jesus, to run to You as a small child in distress runs to their father, longing for an embrace. May we receive Your love, and may Your hand guide us ever more often to the gifts You long to pour out upon us, as a good father loves to give good gifts to his children. May we trust You more deeply with our headaches, heartaches, body aches, and spiritual aches.