Have you ever thought about how important the sun is? I’ve always loved the warmth of the sun on my skin. I love the “golden hour,” where the sun hits so perfectly on the Earth and makes things beautiful. The sun provides so many good thi ngs for us, but really until we planted our garden this year, I’ve never taken the time to think about how truly important the sun is for the Earth. Don’t worry, I’m not about to give a lesson on photosynthesis. (But Amelia can tell you about it, her shirt taught her!) One of our little blunders in our garden was that we definitely overcrowded one of our beds and our peppers got “leggy,” meaning they had to grow taller than normal in order to seek the sun. We kept a seedling in our window when we couldn’t seem to get our basil growing well outside. We loved watching it grow toward the sun. We’d turn it the other direction, just to watch it shift directions back towards the window. It was as if it was reaching out for more. ...
While we wanted to tie this difficult year up in a pink or blue bow, announcing our pregnancy at Christmastime, plans changed as we were dealing with our second miscarriage. What a year this has been. There are moments in this year that will shine brightly, but for me, this has been a year of lament, and 2021, at least the beginning of it, will continue in that spirit. Lament is a difficult season for Christians to be in – we don’t like to feel bad for long – but I know that God is going to do something in our lives if we open the doors and create the space. If we create the space. Every year I choose a word of the year. Something to work towards, strive for, aspire to. My word of the year for 2020 was “grace.” I wanted to feel God’s grace in my life. I wanted to have grace for myself. I wanted to have grace for people in my life. Little did we know, 2020 would need a lot of grace. I learned a lot about myself through the process of receiving, having, and giving grac...
“I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enameled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden.” --St. Thérèse de Lisieux This week is Maternal Mental Health week, a week dedicated to bringing awareness to the ever-present issue of a mother’s wellbeing. It seems strange to have a week dedicated to an issue that feels so pervasive in my own life and the life of many women. Before COVID, 21 % of those who gave birth will have a mood disorder during the perinatal period and that number jumps to over 30% for women of color ( statistics from mindbodybabync.org ). I’m sure those numbers are climbing since the pandemic ( see this article for more on that click here ) Through my involvement with Mindbodyb...
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