Childlike, not Childish

This event took place two years ago. I am just getting around to documenting it now. Thanks for indulging me.

I drove to the store with my little girls. Our local store is tiny and quaint and wonderful. It also happens to be about one quarter of a mile away--at the bottom of a very steep hill. This hill is so steep, in fact, that in the winter, my mini van (which is front wheel drive) cannot make it to the top; we just slide backwards down the hill.

We purchased what we needed, and when we came back out to the van, it would not start. The battery was dead, dead, dead.

I guess you have to drive longer than one quarter of a mile if you want your battery to charge.

Well, I was put out, to say the least. Now I had to trudge up the gruelingly steep hill with my small girls in tow and my groceries weighing heavy on my limbs.

I didn't cry. And I didn't scream. But I was huffy about it all.

Half way up the hill, when my breathing was becoming labored and my patience was waning thin, my five-year-old spoke up.

She simply, happily, declared: "I'm so glad Jesus gave me legs! Then I can just walk home."

My children have a grateful, submissive, joyful relationship with their God. I know why He wants me to be like them. I am thankful for the many chances I have to become as a child.

Winning through Him

Today I felt like I was failing at everything; that on some level, I was falling short in every aspect of my life.

Failing my husband. Failing my children. Failing my neighbors. Failing myself. Failing at my commitments and goals and dreams.

Have you had days like that? I like to think I'm not alone on this one.

Here's what I've learned about that. This is what I know for sure.

God does not want me to feel like a failure. Sure, there is always room for improvement, and I have to keeping stretching and growing and reaching.

BUT, failing?

That feeling doesn't come from God.

And what's more, it shows a lack of faith and hope in the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. And that's just a miserable place to be.

This is not the end for me. He died for me, and all of us, so that we can try again, begin anew, start afresh, change, grow, conquer, become.

Isn't that the very definition of winning?

Let's not give up on ourselves. He never has, and He never will.

I'll take a baker's dozen

I think it's good advice to learn a second language. So in my school years, through college even, I studied German.

It was by default, really, that I chose German. I wanted to speak French, but my mouth just couldn't form those beautiful words. When I said them (or read them), they sounded more like I was choking on a fresh croissant with too much Brie.

Spanish would have been my second pick, but I couldn't get the accent right. I sounded like I was reading a Taco Bell menu: See senior Rita, me goostah inch a lottas.

But German and I just clicked. It turns out I do guttural real well.

Now that I've been out of college for more years than I care to admit, my German has mostly by the wayside gefallen.

The years of tiny, dirty hands and looming laundry and school loans and little sleep has led me to whole heartedly embrace another culture and another language.

I'm fluent in cookie.

That's what I said. I speak cookie.

And they speak back to me on a regular basis.

Cookie is such a beautiful language! I like to let the small nuances of the intonation wash over me like a warm milk bath. Which, by the way, goes great with cookies.

Plus, the natives who speak cookies usually have such nice personalities! With soothing promises and nourishing encouragement, they rarely yell at me. Even the feisty ginger snaps are some of my closest friends who have proven, time and again, that they will always be there for me.

It's probably cliche, but my favorite dialect is the chocolate chip cookie. With interspersed, perfectly melted chocolate morsels, it is the vernacular that keeps on giving and giving and giving, until it disintegrates into folklore. Some days I just relate to that, you know?

I appreciate how cookies are an international language. When I grow up, I hope to be the ambassador of cookies everywhere. Then I can help those nations who tainted the cookie language by replacing jam centers with strips of lying papers. Clearly, a fresh tomorrow waits on the horizon for them.

Cookies understand me. They get me. They heal me. I would tell you about the conversations we've enjoyed together, but that would feel like betrayal. There is no Cookie-to-English translation book because it's different for each mouthpiece. I'm pretty sure one of my sisters has a negative relationship with cookies; they must yell at her and lay on the guilt real thick. She always reports the number she's eaten with disgust and surrender, like she's being arraigned before the Betty Crocker tribunal.

I'm not sure how long I'll speak this love language. Maybe someday they'll turn on me. But I doubt it.

And if they do, I'll just drown them in a tall glass of cold milk until they stop screaming, and then bite off their heads.

No matter the language, we must be clear in our communication, I always say.

Some Encouragement

I had another baby. . .NINE months ago.

The fact that I'm back typing away at this machine may make you think that I must finally have it all figured out; that I'm back in the saddle again.

If you're thinking that, you're wrong.

I don't mean to give the wrong impression here. I adore this baby and all my other babies. I wanted them, hoped for them, prayed for them. Their lives are miracles--each one. They teach me how to be like God, and they lovingly, patiently, happily encourage me on my journey to be His.

It's a messy journey.

An exhausting journey.

The kind of journey that dreams are made of.

It's imperfect. I'm imperfect. That's okay. This is what six children looks like for me,  and that's good, because it's my journey to take and my journey for which I will give an accounting.