Celebration is in the air. Graduates are flinging their caps. Schools are shutting their doors. Lifeguards are grabbing their whistles as throngs of kids sprint toward the water.

One moment frozen in time by the above photograph captures my heart. Some dozen boys took the “stage” at the 5th grade picnic and danced with all their might.  One mother approached me and asked how Joshua learned those moves. “He’s outdancing the girls,” she gasped. She pointed out how it would take hours and hours to learn all the steps to Party Rock Anthem. 

Yep. That and YouTube will set you right up.

You also need a little zeal. Little zeal is an oxymoron. These boys had zeal defined as great energy or enthusiasm. Feeding off one another and singing the lyrics (how’d they learn all those words?), they sang and danced with all the vigor of Bieber if not the finesse. 

I watched on the sidelines and listened to the chatter of parents enthralled. We recognized a rare moment caught between childhood and adolescence. A moment unstained by self-consciousness. A moment of children letting all that they are surface and interact with fun and tunes. Unhindered. Transcendent. Inviting.

Something called out to us. Something grabbed at our hearts. Something tugged our inner children to come out and dance and play.

“Play begets greater good. And the fruit of playfulness is always meant to invite others to the generous bounty of the party,” says Dan Allender in How Children Raise Parents.

In our stuffed-shirt, self-important world, we adults forget to play. Thank God our children remind us every so often. My children continue to change me for the better. Perhaps they really are raising me.

“You can’t have children without being transformed. You can’t let them play with your life without becoming an entirely different person, who then proceeds to become another entirely different person as you allow your children to mess with you. Every day that you get up and help your children dress, eat breakfast, and send them off, you enter a realm of prodigal play that is more serious than life itself.” Allender, p. 208.

Later that afternoon as I went about the serious business of exercise, I danced the entire four miles and improved my pace per mile by 1 minute and 30 seconds. My soul stepped on the clouds and my hands would not remain by my sides. Even with cars passing by and lawn-men gawking, my hands lifted skyward in praise of a God so wild as to let children instruct me.

13. Some dozen adolescent boys dancing with all their might and reminding me to play.

After the first dramatic entry in my gratitude journal, I had a hard time finding the second entry. 

Something surprising showed up. The cynic. Now few people would label me a cynic including myself. So this shocked me. And instructed me. 

Insomnia heralded the cynic. After an hour in the bed checking the clock at 4 minute intervals, I finally gave up and got up. It was 2:30 a.m. I wrote the post about 1000 gifts #1 being underwear, folded clothes, read some blogs. At 4:00 a.m. the birds started singing. Normally this would indicate the dawn of a new day and new mercies but to the red-eyed and bedraggled, the birds spotlighted the fact that sleep had eluded me.

I uttered: #2. the birds singing at 4:00 a.m. I suppose it was the sarcastic tone that gave up the cynic, undetectable in these black and white words. Nonetheless, gratitude did not live in the text. 

The cynic looks like Randall from Monster’s Inc. A chameleon, he shows up dressed in camouflage wherever hope may flicker. He’s a fast-talker, sell you some dirt in the Mississippi Delta-type. He’s a survivor. We all have a little cynic in us. It’s one way we make life work apart from a grace banquet.

Cynicism works on hope much like the fly zapper. Like the fly, hope meets a quick and certain death. Gruesome even. The electric current of the cynic nukes hope before it has a chance to bloom. Why? Because hope is a scary thing to the cynic. Hope has often been met by disappointment. The cynic chooses to remain safe and lifeless instead of reaching for hope.

When several other “entries” showed up in this sarcastic cynical voice, I started to pay attention. The grateful words did not drip from my pen like I thought they would. I honestly searched for my own voice and not Vosskamp’s sometimes syrupy “bands of garnet, cobalt, flowing luminous” aka a soap bubble. 

And so it is with honesty that I will proceed in the hunt for 1000 gifts. And with courage that I will tame and parent the cynic.

9. Sam’s indomitable smirk after he zapped a fly at 6:55 a.m.

(Note: Vosskamp identifies her own “Pollyanna” language and takes us deeper into her heart. Her journey inspires mine.)

The tiny journal the color of a robin’s egg snugly fits in my hand. I open it and write the number one, then “underwear.” 

A new friend gave me the journal at our book club - my first book club. I love words and I love books. How I never got in a book club before now is a mystery. Our first book in my first book club was One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. 

On this morning, I rushed to the gym. I have reached a new level of commitment to re-conquer my body and health. This includes a grueling 30 minutes with Joey at Temple Fitness three times a week. As I drove down Del Rio, I realized I had forgotten a towel. I needed to shower there at the gym in order to make it to book club on time. Walgreens is on the way, I’ll just pick up a towel, right? Then it hit me, I had forgotten underwear. 

What to do?

In accord with this new commitment, I pointed the  grey Odyssey toward Temple Fitness and did not look back. I finished the book on the treadmill at times groaning aloud as my spirit absorbed these hallowed words. After one hour of walking and holding on to the rail and not being able to tear my eyes away from the page, I stumbled outside in the sun to finish it. I bawled aloud as the Tennessee sun baked the back of my neck. 

I collected myself and found the shower. Let me spare you the details but just say that I am not made to shower at the gym and then walk out glowing and ready for the next meeting. I need my space and my stuff. Obviously. 

I arrived a little early to two of my new friends with margaritas sitting in sunlight. My necklace in my hand, I sat down and explained to them that I was still getting dressed and my hair was still wet. Kim says this makes her like me even more. I think, “if you only knew.” 

We enjoyed green corn tamales and shrimp tacos and grazed on Voskamp’s words. Can we live a life of gratitude? Can we thank when God chooses to blow our minds and our expectations? Can we trust when our hearts are blistered? And we even touched on the last scandalous chapter... Can we union with our God? 

What an honor to attempt to map out the heart with these women and to be known. I did not tell them about the underwear. But I busted through the door at home and before I ran to my dresser, I opened my new notebook and gave thanks. Number one of one thousand things I will find.

Opening the hand to receive the moments. Trusting what is received to be grace. Taking it as bread... We take the moments as bread and give thanks and the thanks itself becomes bread. The thanks itself nourishes. Thanks feeds our trust. -Ann Voskamp

Today a mother will hold the hand of a son with a traumatic brain injury. She will talk to him and know deep within that he hears her. Her words will call to him and summon hope. Every cell of her being calls him to heal. 

Today a mother of four boys will visit the grave of her own mother. She will sit in the rain and remember. Grief will mark her days. She bears the scars of the fall  - of cells that have rebelled and gone their own way. 

Today a mother prepares for another week of chemo. She checks the freezer for the meals brought by friends. Her daughter sits in her lap and she brushes the braids from her hair. 

Today a mother will dial up her son on Skype. Her daughter runs through their front yard and dark curls bounce. She lives in Honduras and the son in Illinois. This is the first Mother’s Day she will not greet her own mother and thank her. 

Today a mother will call her son. For 40 years plus they were separated. She chose life. She chose another family to raise him. They found each other. 

Today a mother will cry into her pillow. Her daughter is lost. Will she come home? 

Today as I thought about mothers - myself, my own, my living grandmother and the women who have mothered me - I pondered the failures and the victories. 

These are all true stories of people I know. Mothers fight for their kids. Mothers search until they are found. Mothers sacrifice, clean, cook, love and mold. No one impacted my story like my mother. No one continues to call me up to a higher standard of love than my own children. 

Today I thought of my children as arrows. Weapons in a spiritual war. I asked God for the strength to love them well and to launch them. 

Mamaw hand needle-pointed the pillow I am holding... Sunflowers.Today I told someone this of my grandmothers and my childhood: “They were like two pillars on either side of us... holding us up.” 

One the town side: Momice. She had CIA instincts. The first sniff of trouble, she appeared at our door. 

On the country side about a mile and a half down the road: Mamaw. Preaching the Word to us.

I have written a tribute to Momice aka Zelda Bernice Williams Morgan. Read it as posted on 4/8/10 and tagged under “heroes.”

Mamaw holds a power over our lives. Growing up at times I felt like her presence could hold my world together. And on a number of occasions, it did. 

The Sunflower River bordered her back yard. An azure pool separated her house from the river and entrapped all the water moccasins. I remember the snow-ball bushes, aka hydrangeas, lining the back of her house. A lover of roses, she grows a garden of them wherever she lives. She seems to carry a bunch with her whenever they are in bloom.

As an adult, I’ve sometimes thought that I possessed a similar power. Like a quintessential jewish matriarch, I have hoped that I possessed some mo-jo that could ward off evil. If I took communion, confessed sin, read (even memorized) the Bible; wouldn’t that protect me from evil? 

That is not the way of Calvary.

God dunks me headfirst into the world, at times being laid waste by the effects of the fall. For a believer, the power of the cross means that God uses even evil to polish our souls so that we can reflect more accurately the image of our nail-scarred Savior. Broken and healed. Resurrected on our behalf.

We show our Father’s power, His omnipotence, when we walk in our broken places willing to be known. We resemble Jesus more and more as our brokenness is healed in His presence.

We walk with scars. We walk with glory radiating from our faces. Jesus bore our shame in His Body. Our abuse. Our perpetrations. Our sorrows. He bore them, so we don’t have to.

Momice is in Heaven with Jesus. Singing in the choir like she used to belt out praises from the back row. I’ve never felt safer than right under her wing in that back pew. I know for a fact that she is up to a lot more than that, though. Her mischievousness must be a delight to Jesus. 

Mamaw, still with us, is recovering from a fall. She still holds a mysterious power over her family although not in the way I thought of as a child. She is a beloved woman and those she loves are blessed.

Matt and I on our wedding day, January 5, 1991. Anger invaded my body and pushed aside good sense. 

I risk nausea to read in silence Safe Haven Marriage, a book assigned for the marriage group we are about to attend. We are late. And I am bringing the refreshments. Joshua and Sam chirp in the backseat as Matt navigates our van toward church. 

Matt and I had argued only an hour before and I had not recovered. Given a choice, a root canal would have been more appealing than a marriage class at that point. I couldn’t even look at or speak to my spouse, how am I going to absorb any information about loving him?

I read... “Contempt blah blah blah predictor of divorce. Criticism blah blah blah predictor of divorce.” Great, I am thinking but still not speaking. Matt drops me off first with the snack and drives around to take Joshua and Sam to childcare. 

Larry Kayser greets me as I plop down the chocolate chip cake on the table. “Wow! You look so tan! Have you been in the sun?” I want to tell him it is the glow of anger but blame the soccer field instead. 

Somehow I make it through half the group with this strategy: Say as little as possible. 

An hour in, I pray to Jesus. Help me. I don’t want to be robbed of this time. 

And I speak a few sentences because it is hard for me to be quiet. I steal a little look at Matt.

Then in closing, Larry opens his Bible and reads:

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Colossians 3:12-14

And I feel it. The sword. I give myself over to it. Like a pin poking a balloon, the sword deflates my swollen ego. Divides bone and marrow. Rage and blame. Fear and loathing. I feel something soften deep with me like a moisture infiltrating a dry shell. Living Water rushes in and my heart is clay again. 

Later that night I sit with an open journal. I ask for honesty and humility and grace. I write these words: He bore it in His body so I don’t have to bear it in mine. Once again the Water in the form of tears softens my hardened heart. 

Then I take that much softer heart to Matt and we begin again. The anger is important identifying markers in my soul... things Matt, my soul-mate, needs to know to know me. Intimacy. 

It is a remarkable moment birthed in hope and promise.

God means what he says. What he says goes. His powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, cutting through everything, whether doubt or defense, laying us open to listen and obey. Nothing and no one is impervious to God's Word. We can't get away from it - no matter what.

Hebrews 4:7-14

Today I did something sneaky. I bought Joshua the Hunger Games book 1. It sits on his bed now waiting to captivate him. He’s been asking me for weeks now if he could read it. I need to read it first, I always said. This morning he wistfully told me that he had wanted to read it before his cousin Dan’s birthday. Dan’s plan is to go see the movie for his birthday. Newsflash. Today is Dan’s birthday. 

He’ll get this gift when he gets home. I won’t be here but later he’ll hug me big and say he loves me. He will forgive me for not getting it sooner. We’ll read it together and talk through all the characters and plot twists and turns.

I wait in anticipation for Joshua to get this gift. I’m probably more excited than he will be.

Today I’ve been hearing God’s love song to me. I’ve been noticing all the ways he spells  out his love in the magenta blooms falling like so much snow in my neighborhood. The scent of wisteria wafts in through the windows and reminds me that winter’s reign is done for now.

Tonight we will gather with seven other couples as we did fifteen years ago around this time. We dreamed together back then of a church. We desired to go deep in our faith and plant and give our lives together. As it happens with a mustard seed, God took our tiny dividend and blew it up. Fellowship Bible Church exceeds any of our dreams. 

As I prepared the sacred dip (recipe below), I raised one hand in worship. Who but You, God? Who but you? I thought of myself at 30 years old. I still worked hard at my faith. I hadn’t learned yet about resting. About how Jesus sat down when He got to Heaven and it was ok if I did too.

When I think of all the places we’ve been, I stand slack-jawed at the grace of God. Through victorious and joy-filled days and through the pits of hellish nightmares, God has walked with us. He’s never left us. All along, He’s doled out gifts.

He waits for me to find these gifts. Gifts He’s been anticipating me opening. And I hear the song of His love for me.

Sometimes God picks you up from one path and places you on a different one, a better one.

I thought of the things she had lost. Her health. Her energy. Her youthfulness. Her sense of control. What had she gained? Better eating habits benefiting her family and her. Powerlessness. Unanswered questions. No promises of a cure. Gratitude for things she once took for granted.

Often God radically changes our paths. Sometimes the world changes just by a few words. 

Has your life ever changed as a result of a sentence?

When this happens, the path we find ourselves traveling seems anything but safe or friendly or good. As I listen to my story and to others’ stories, I see a pattern of God re-creating circumstances. At first glance, this seems cruel. But seen through the grid of God’s goodness, they become opportunities for healing. 

I met a woman whose three year old son recently went through chemo for leukemia. She lost her mother to cancer when she was 8 years old. She is courageously living this traumatic season with an eye for what God may do to bring her healing in her inmost being - not just as a mother desperate for her son’s healing but also as a girl who lost a beautiful mother. 

God baffles us by these stories. What do we do with a God like that? What do we do with the wildness, the unpredictability of God?

Redemption’s work is making up for loss. I cannot author my own redemption. When I attempt to orchestrate my own circumstances to build a scene for redemption, I am in a dangerous spot. Redemption rarely, pretty much never, looks like what I think it will look. Most of the time we look around and say “chaos” or “disaster” not redemption. 

My experience and hope tell me that at those times, God is nearest. He is often poised in the wings to blow your socks off with how He brings His presence to the broken. It happens in the heart. What changes is your spirit. You are able to say with the saints of old: He is enough.

In Him we have redemption through His blood... Ephesians 1:7

I can relate.

Life comes at you fast to quote an advertisement on tv. Seldom do we feel ready. Rarely do we feel whole. 

My small group of women decided to study James. I really like these ladies a lot so I went along. Well, ok, I voted to study James too. So I asked for it. James keeps the barrage of commands coming like the waves of a rough surf. He talks a lot about perfection. And as a recovering perfectionist, this makes me shudder.

I’ve learned that the word for “perfect” that James uses means mature or complete. Whole. When God looks at me, He says, “Imagine how beautiful she is! She is whole!” Of course, He saw me in my mother’s womb. Before I was formed, He knew me. His eyes saw my unformed body. 

I will not know a day on this earth free from sin. It boggles my mind that my Father sees me as perfect through the lens of His Son’s Blood. The work for my salvation is complete. Jesus finished it on the cross some 2,000 years ago. 

I’m growing up. James calls me to. Wholeness does not mean external perfection. It has a lot more to do with internal completion. When I was 10 and asked Christ into my heart, I was completed at that moment. Perfect. But not mature. That takes place over time. 

Even the gaps and spaces are beautiful. Time wears us down and certainly our bodies are degenerating. But our souls are growing toward wholeness. The souls that are weathered by trials are gorgeous and unique. 

I dare say the reflection of our Father is clearest in the souls most pocked by trials. As hardships erode away our external facade, the soul’s gleaming light of rest in the work of the cross shines brightest.

I do. And the beach is the perfect place for it. Sometimes we get clogged up or weary. Sometimes the soul is tired from carrying things it is not meant to carry. Sometimes the body gets exhausted. 

Even God rested. Surely I can admit that I need to be refreshed. 

Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest and the slave born in your household, and the alien as well, may be refreshed. Exodus 23:12

The verse above uses the Hebrew verb napesh and it means to be refreshed as if by a current of air. I’ll add a gulf breeze.

It can also mean to take a breath and it is a close relative of the verb in Genesis 2:7 “to breathe” describing the moment when God breathed into us life and deposited our souls. 

Soul and breath are inseparable.