shattered dreams

Sunday was our first time to meet as a church in our new building! What a day... Our pastors had us all read the following prayer together:

Disturb us, Lord, when We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love. - Sir Francis Drake

Last week I had been struggling (emotionally and physically), because our sweet MA has been battling her asthma in a BIG way since the middle of October. It's no surprise to anyone that I like to be in control of things, and there's just this feeling of complete & utter helplessness that I feel holding my child at 2am, giving her a breathing treatment so that she can breathe easily, while she fights me, because all she wants to do is be left alone. A feeling of "what in the world do we do now?" when she's on an albuterol high at 11pm, tired out of her mind, but unable to rest because her little heart can't stop racing because of the medicine that helps her to breathe.

So after Sunday's sermon, all I could do was ponder the idea of change and challenge (which I typically hate!) as a impetus for growth in my life. It's always been after my dreams have been completely shattered that the Lord has graciously used my brokenness to help conform me to the image of Christ, to direct my life in such a way to bring Him greater glory than I could have where I was.

Yet another reminder that I must trust Him, must dare to allow my too-small dreams to be shattered, because He knows my pain (my baby's pain!), and He knows my shortcomings, and He has a purpose in the challenges I face that I cannot yet see.

skeletons & such

So Halloween is over! It was a HUGE disappointment for us this year, so much so that we're thinking of doing away with it altogether as we've been doing it, and just having a costume party with other people dedicated to a non-scary Halloween....sheesh! Out here they've, for some bizarre reason, decided to take scary Halloween to an entire new level. Not just cute scary spiders & bats, mind you. We've got to have impaled skeletons on spears, and haunted graveyards, and freaky ghost things like the ghost of Christmas future in a super-scary version of "A Christmas Carol." We're done. That mess is NOT appropriate for preschoolers in any way, shape or form.

We've been dedicated to doing Halloween, mostly because of a great lecture I heard in seminary about putting out a jack-o-lantern at your house at Halloween because it's a great way to reach out to the culture around you. I believe the argument was along the lines of, "Hey, it's the one time of year each and every one of the kiddos in your neighborhood will willingly come by your house. Show them that Christians can be friendly!" (I'm sure it was much more nuanced and theologically appropriate than that explanation, but work with me here...). So every Halloween we sit outside, and hand out candy to all our neighbors...except that we only maybe saw 4 neighbors out of about 300 kids, and just as we were packing up to go inside, a boy in a "scream" mask decided that it would be funny to run up to my sweet Miss K and scary-scream at her as loudly as he possibly could. NOT funny. She turned white as a sheet, and when her daddy picked her up, she burst into tears, and didn't stop crying for an hour!

We're done.

On another note, honey and I went to a party a few weeks ago for a game night. I should have known it might not be a perfect fit for me upon seeing the house - beautiful, and immaculate! Crazy immaculate....I threw something in a trash can at the beginning of the evening, and when I went to throw something in it later, the trash can was empty! When it came to game time, we wound up with a song game, where someone read a word, and teams had to go back & forth singing songs with that word in it. The first word was hot, and all I could think (and of course, say, because I have no filters): "Don'tcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me!" I got a few funny looks, and a few people said, "Is that a real song?" When it came our turn again, honey said "It's gettin' hot in herre!" More funny looks. "Real song?" Honey said, "Well, I did work for DISD..."

So bizarre! That night, I just kept thinking, "I really need to find a skeleton in a closet somewhere in this house! Everything is so perfect..." People didn't know Nelly songs, trash disappeared from trash cans, and everything was so amazingly in place and beautiful. I don't do well in the midst of perfection - it just tends to make me nervous; I need a little mess to function properly (I heard that AMEN from all of you who've been to my house!).

I find that's true with my relationships, too. Authenticity is a key for me. People who seem to have it all together, who are "practically perfect in every way" mystify me. I know I'm a mess...I live it every single day, and because I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, anyone who's around me for longer than 5 minutes can pick up on it. So bring on the skeletons, girls - they'll always be welcome here, so long as you don't run screaming at my girlies on Halloween.