I heard my husband say this to someone not too long ago and it stuck with me.  I thought that while we’re all thinking about New Years resolutions, I’d throw it out at you:

We spend all our time praying for direction, when what we really need is courage.

I heard this and I realized that the courage I need is the courage to be right now the person I was created to be.  The courage to agree with “the gift” the Father says I am, to live out my dreams and to give myself the freedom to change, to embrace each season of my life for what it is and enjoy it to its fullest. Not a bad challenge, eh?

If you were going to act on the dreams you already have in courage, what would you do? How would it change things?

Tuesday night, 3 days before Christmas, 12 am. Excited to join my family in Texas for Christmas, Tim heads to bed as I keep packing my and the girls’ suitcase. We’re going to leave at 3am–an hour earlier than usual.

12:30 am Ellie wakes up and her skin feels like it’s been in a 400 degree oven. I take her temperature–101. Add 1 degree like we’re supposed to with the underarms and we’re up to 102. I go back to bed telling Tim that we have to go to the doctor in the morning. Then I waver, telling Tim that she might not have a fever at all, complaining about the inaccuracies of the underarm thermometer.  She may just be a hot sleeper, I say.  In any case, we decide to forgo our 3am goal for letting Ellie sleep till she wakes up.

7:30 am Ellie wakes up and seems peppy, I decide we can just go ahead on our drive. But then I catch her staring blankly at the bottom of the stairs. She’s at 100, unadjusted. I change my mind again and decide to go to the doctor on our way out of town.

10:45 am We’re finally taken to the patient room for our 9:45 appointment. I say that if it’s nothing, at least we won’t be driving to Texas worried. Ellie is happily entertained by her daddy, who draws this on my phone:

11:00 am The doctor is in the room with us, and we find out that Ellie has a sinus infection. She’s cleared to go and we head out of Colorado Springs, prescription in hand, and pick up where we should have been 9 hours earlier, already feeling like we’d been in the car too long, already at the point where it all falls apart.

About 6 years ago, before kids and before marriage, someone looked across a table at me and said, “You need to trust your instincts more.” I’m often the one who feels more comfortable gaining a consensus from the masses before making a decision–it would have been easiest and most natural for me to call everyone I know, tell them the story of the middle-of-the-night wake-up and take a vote whether or not we should go to the doctor.

Confession: When Ellie was born, she stayed in the hospital nursery every night and most of every day. I didn’t know what to do with her. I didn’t trust myself with her. I didn’t think I had what it took to have her in my room.

But these 2 years of motherhood have forced me into having to make choices on my own. I have to trust that I have the wisdom I need for my girls. I have to be willing to take on the responsibility and know that God has put in me everything I need to be the best mother for them.

Thank God for mommy instincts. Not only would we probably have ended up at a strange doctor’s office in Texas on Christmas Eve but the worry of whether Ellie was sick or well would have resulted in her having her temperature taken every fifteen minutes and me staring at her for the whole 10 hours, which is what I do when I’m wondering if she’s sick. That would have made my back hurt.

Do you have a story of when you have had to muster up faith in yourself and listen to your mommy instincts?

Whelp, I’m new at this whole blogging thing.  And, basically, this deal is playing second fiddle this Christmas week to my beautiful family.  But to show you that I’m still here and I care, I give you this:

Merry Christmas, and happy downloading.

A little while ago, maybe a year even, Tim and I were driving home from Costco.  We pulled up next to this awesome blue mini-van.  A Honda Odyssey, to be exact.  The precise mini-van I have been coveting for about 6 months or more.  Anyway, we pulled up beside it and my eyes fixated on the beautiful hubcaps with the “H” on them–a little slanted, a little raised, and oh so sexy.  I stared at those hubcaps; I imagined myself putting Ellie’s travel snacks into the secret compartment under the floor instead of in a bulky tote bag at my feet on the passenger side.  I imagined Tim neatly placing all our instruments, luggage, pack n’ plays, and strollers in the back, and thought about what it would look like if I couldn’t see the headstock of the guitar case climbing out from behind the backseat.  And then I started talking to the Lord.  “This is the right time for this for us, you know,” I told him as I looked back at Ellie, squished in her car seat between her stroller and the boxes of Costco veggies piled three-high.  She had already broken in to the mushrooms and was happily munching away.  I griped to him about our lack of space, and how, with one more kid, we weren’t going to fit AT ALL.

“Don’t be like the Israelites, who so quickly forget,”  I heard in return,  “who so quickly forget.”

The Israelites, I remember, were the ones who were miraculously taken out of slavery in Egypt, and they were the ones who, as soon as the going got rough, forgot the miracle of the Lord and tried to convince him to let them return to slavery.  I mean, they had seen God turn the Nile river into blood for goodness’ sake, but as soon as they started the work of having to redefine themselves not as slaves but as sons, they begged to return to what they knew best.  They begged to be returned to slavery!  They seemed to have forgotten the Father’s provision for them. They had forgotten his show of power. They had forgotten who he said they were–not slaves, but heirs. All they needed to do was to remember the favor the Lord had shown them, the miraculous ways he had provided for them in the past, and trust the Lord to continue to love them and provide for them.

I face the same temptation. I know that the working out of my salvation in this life means to be working out what it means to find my identity as a daughter…a son, a co-heir with Christ…and to discover how that plays out in my daily life as a mommy, a wife, a worker. It means I have to become a ruler and not a reactor. I have to be someone who takes every thought, every feeling, captive and tests it against what I know the Father says about who I am. But the minute I feel like I’m wandering through the wilderness, the minute I feel like I need something I’m not getting, the temptation is to forget the ways the Lord had provided for me before, to forget the stories of his faithfulness in the past and revert back to old ways of thinking and believing.  Like believing the Lord doesn’t care, has forgotten me, or has filled up his miracle-quota for the month.

Whether or not we ever end up with an awesome Honda Odyssey doesn’t matter. I frankly don’t know if the Father even really cares that much what kind of car I drive. I think he was and is more concerned with where my trust is, with how I see him, and with how I see myself. I don’t want to be like the Israelites, who so quickly forget.  I want to be someone who can trust the Lord’s goodness for tomorrow because I can see how he’s loved me today and in the past. I want to be someone who can face temporary trials and needs and messes and gripes with the deep residing rest in my spirit that comes with a steadfast understanding of who I am to God.

Let’s make this short and sweet. Here’s a parenting nugget from my mom that I think about at least 3 times a day:

There are three things our kids do that we, as parents, cannot control: going to the bathroom, sleeping, and eating.

Bam. Some of the best parenting advice I’ve ever received. Actually, right now in the midst of potty-training, it feels like the absolute best parenting advice I’ve ever received. Whenever I feel myself ramping up, ready to start a battle over how much Ellie eats or whether or not she actually sleeps during her nap or whether she gets potty trained when all her friends do, I think about this gem from my mother.

Mom encourages me to choose battles that I can always win. After calling her on the phone with some new thing I don’t know how to handle, I usually hang up the phone with a shift in my perspective. I move to saying things like, “Ellie, now is the time for resting.  You can choose to sleep or read in your bed until I come to get you when rest time is over.” Or, “feel free to have some more milk as soon as you eat your meat.”  Control over whether she actually sleeps or eats is in her hands anyway, so I might as well give her the freedom to make that choice.  But I can control whether or not she stays in her room so that I can have my much-needed mommy time during naptime. I can control whether or not I get out of my chair to give her more milk.  Thanks Mom, you’ve saved me from yet another lesson in the “hard-knocks of parenting” school.