MollyMadonna.com

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loud in here.

Every time I turn around lately I am reminded of one thing: God’s grace is sufficient. He is MORE than enough.

We don’t need to bridge the gap, because HE does. Every time we ask Him, and so many times when we’re too clouded by a given moment to make the request, He does. There is nothing–not any one thing, that is too big (or too small) for Him. And what we see, from our vantage point in any situation, is such a microscopic, limited view of a much, much, much bigger picture. This is such a hard truth, but a good one to tuck in our back pockets.

In these past few weeks (months?) I’ve worked diligently at getting quiet. If you know me, you know that I don’t have a history of being good at this. I am not a quiet person (what?!), and I’ve never been a “no” person. As a result of this dynamic duo, my life has rarely been quiet. For a long time, I’ve kept a schedule that is louder than loud. Too many directions and too many commitments at the expense of too many things. The heart behind it was never bad (at least intentionally), but conviction has merit, and in my case, the conviction to strip down my life has finally grown louder than the way I’ve been living. Imagine this: God can get louder than the lives we’re living, and if we ask Him for input and give Him a little room, He’s going to get right down to it. He’s going to call us to things, and call us out on things, and love us mercilessly through the hard and the stripped down and the brokenness of the process.

I have a love/hate relationship with this reality, but mostly love. Why? Because I’m not in control anyway, and when I’m not listening for God, I’m just pretending that I am in control and trying to figure out how to run my own life from my very limited point of view. It’s fairly exhausting.

In some seasons I’m better at remembering that I function better with God’s help. But I’m stubborn. I like to have the answers. I want to be able to make everything just right, and on top of it all, I’m human. I’m also learning. The more I make room for God in my life, the more He makes room in my life for the things that should have been there in the first place. It’s not always the type of room I expected, but it’s the best kind of room.

And sometimes the packaging is strange…

I wake up in the morning, and all I want to do is go back to sleep. I went to bed too late (again), but I know that if I don’t get up, I won’t get a shower in before all of the crazy begins (and I’m not a very nice person if I haven’t had a shower before all of the crazy begins). So I talk myself out of sleeping longer by weighing my options. And I ask God for help. Since I’ve started making more room for God again, I crave my time with Him. Akin to my need for a shower to make my day right, I need some time with God, too. And I’m not very productive in that time if I haven’t showered. You get the picture: I wake up in the morning and I ask God for the time I need to take a shower. Then I ask Him for more time to spend with Him, in the quiet. Before the kiddos wake up. On my part, I just have to get out of bed.

The packaging is strange, because the time I’m getting rarely looks like I expected. This morning, it was Henry and me, side by side on the couch, reading Psalms and 1 Corinthians together. Strange, because my three year old is obligingly listening to an NLT translation of the Bible aloud, and I’m finding time for God even after the littles have entered into the mix. Beautiful for the exact same reasons.

I don’t share this so anyone reading feels guilty about the time they did or didn’t spend with God today. I share this to say I wasn’t doing it, and now I am doing it, and it’s only by the grace of God that that’s happening. I play a very little part, truly.

This is apparent all over my life right now, and it’s catching and glorious and scary and wildly attractive. God is giving me space for the quiet. Not only that, but He is cultivating an even greater desire in me for solitude. I drove 30 minutes home tonight in the car by myself, and I didn’t once think to turn on the radio or call someone. I can’t remember the last time that happened. I say “no” to things all of the time these days, and that power isn’t my own–not at all. And it’s not to offend or isolate or exclude. It’s just the thing that God is calling me to right now, and He’s giving me the ability to do it.

In my life, in this season when things should otherwise seem quite loud and busy and maddening, I feel peace. It’s not my own. But God can use it. And I know He will.

Please be encouraged by this and not discouraged. We are reminded as Christ offers His peace, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” So many people I love are hurting right now, for reasons grand and small. When you’re in the trenches, it can all feel insurmountable, no matter the scale. I understand this deeply. I am getting quiet on your behalf, friends. Please let me know how I can pray for you. Email me, call me, drop a note in the mail. I really, really mean it.

take heart, dear ones.

mm

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ground work.

Planted. Rooted. Grounded. These words keep pushing up through brown, ruddy earth in the deep, deep parts of me. God is ever faithful to join us in tilling plots of land He’s offered up.

Three weeks ago today, I could not push rawness down. I could not see past packing and last feedings with our littlest and arrangements around the house to make things easier while I’d be gone. I waded through fears (irrational and founded), folded clothing into piles, checked off lists. I’d been out of the practice of doing, for anything outside of family and children and home, for a long, long time.

All of this–the worry and the adrenaline and the vulnerability of things was messy, but crazy-encouraging. Whenever God is up to something big, I feel it. I sense it in the opposition and the emotion, the irrational moments and the over-thinking and the way I’m suddenly a battle ground for good. When Aslan is on the move, everything in the air changes. Just as in this season, with the November sky beckoning winter and the last cascading leaves turned to gold, the whole earth waits and so do I. God was going to make a move, and soon. I just had to get on the plane.

I love what happens next, because it’s so gigantic and beautiful that I can’t possibly contain it in a blog post, although I’ll try. My dear friend and I arrived in South Carolina for four days of breathing God in and breathing Him out at Allume–a conference and experience He’d been edging into our lives graciously for months. We sat under the teaching of wise, wise women and men, gleaning from their obedience and desire to bring forth light in the world through Truth. We met beautiful soul after beautiful soul–all women with the same longing in their hearts to know God and make Him known through communication and the written word. We worshipped all day long, gained inspiration, got to know each other far more deeply, and opened ourselves up to what God would have for both of us–not just in that weekend but in the days to come.

Three weeks later, it’s the first time I’ve written about it because I’ve been processing so much good and wanting not to miss one bit of what God is doing within. Because I want to share it well with you. Because I believe the things that God is doing are Kingdom things. Big things. Life changing, community changing, heart changing things.

I was feeling a little washed up before all of this. I’d not done a very good job of giving God my first fruits for a long time. I’d not been a very good steward in so many areas, catching myself up on just a few I thought were most important…at the expense of much. Despite my efforts to be open, welcoming, invitational, honest and real, my interactions have lacked a dimension I long for–one I think we all do.

I’m not getting down on myself for missing a boat or wasting time, although I could. What I am doing is putting a stake in the ground as God promised He’d show me when 2014 began. In the days and weeks ahead, I’ll be unpacking Allume and the nuggets of wisdom I gained that feel so important to share with you. I hope you’ll be along for the journey, and patient with me while I lean into God and listen. I think the changes to come are worth the process.

love to you, my faithful friends. God has big plans for us…so big we can hardly imagine!

mm

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making room.

Give God an inch and He’ll take I mile, I tell ya. Man, He’s good like that. Seven months after purchasing our tickets, my dear friend Lindsey and I are attending Allume this weekend in Greenville, South Carolina. I’d be lying if I said we just hopped on planes and landed here without a hitch, but I like the real story better, anyway. Getting to Allume wasn’t half a day’s journey, or even a seven month journey. For me, I think it’s a nearly-five-hundred-blog-posts-later journey that God put me on far before I knew Allume existed. And in the past few months, everything He’s done in my heart has been about making room and creating space for Him to do His work in me.

His work in me. Isn’t it crazy that we serve a God who is willing enough and attentive enough to ask us to make room in our own, very small, very humble little lives, for Him?

If tonight is any indication, my world is going to be rocked a bit this weekend, and I’m going to jump out of my comfort zone on purpose with the intent of praying hard, listening harder and writing like I mean it.

God put Allume on our hearts and a little bug in my ear about getting back–truly back–to the thing He created me to do, and then He made a way for us to be here. All I really did was whisper, “Yes, please.” I do love it when God takes a mile 😉

lighter already,

mm

 

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happy birthday, eloise!

Well, sweet Eloise, as I type this, it’s midnight on the dot and officially your birthday. I’m taking a step back to let this sink in a bit, and I probably will all day tomorrow, too. Watching you grow is a miracle in itself–no less than the miracle of your beautiful birth one year ago. I can’t imagine ever forgetting that day or how I felt when your daddy announced it was you. You are everything I sensed deeply that you’d be, and far more.

heaven

 

For so much of this past year, you felt like this tiny little baby–strong and able, certainly, but still so vulnerable and attached in a way that took me a little by surprise. Perhaps I hurried Henry along too much the first time, or maybe it was just all of those nights snuggled close together, you and I, until we figured out how to get you comfortable and settled into your own skin. No matter, you were just little little in my head until not more than two months ago, when suddenly you became this person with thoughts and opinions and an ability to express them. I have marveled at this change in you as you’ve asserted yourself into a very distinct place in our family. The dinner table is often where this is most notable–you contribute to the conversation in your own way, making us laugh and engaging each of us around you on a remarkable level for someone so small.

You are petite, your features, strikingly delicate. You are all girl, and while so young and tiny, you tease glimpses of your future self with regularity now. I envision conversations with you in your adolescent years and wonder how our equally strong and resilient wills will blend or clash for a time. I pray to the end that we will love deeply enough not to be separated by this. Holding you close for this past year has bonded my heart to you in a way I didn’t know to expect with a second child–not because a mother can really love any of her children more than the next, but because I’ve loved your brother so intently that I once worried I might not be able to love you with the same kind of intensity. Indeed my worries were for naught. I love you both, equally and differently, together and individually. I treasure you just as I treasure Henry. The joy of loving you both so deeply is often hard to express.

We celebrated your birthday this past weekend with family and dear friends we consider family, and every bit of the celebration was in honor of incredible little you! I got wrapped up in the details of things as I so often do, but only because I wanted it to be both perfectly Eloise and and perfectly welcoming in every way. I can’t speak to the latter, but everywhere I looked on Saturday, there were traces of you. Indications of your sweetness and joy and the way you radiate light in all of our lives. I could burst just thinking about it, really. The sun shone brightly all day, a warm breeze blew fabric buntings and vintage table cloths, flower petals and paper napkins in our backyard. All of your friends laughed and played and gathered together on the big patchwork blanket for a picnic lunch, and all the while I just couldn’t stop thinking about how stinking amazingly blessed we were to park on such a beautiful scene. You are the why for every little detail. Every. Single. One. And the reason nearly forty of us would gather to sing and eat and pray on a bright, sunny Saturday in the summertime.

birthday baby

Now, as we turn the page on your first year and head enthusiastically into your second, I am trailing traces of the tiny babe I’ve had by my side for all but hours at a time since one year ago. You’ll have to forgive me as I bring them along for a time, but as much as I can embrace how you’ve grown and changed, baby Eloise is going to linger a bit longer in my heart. I know it’s not long before I’m called to turn towards toddlerhood and a walking, talking, articulating version of you–I’m just going to take it slow while I’m able.

In the morning, you will push your little red baby buggy around the house, filled with your baby dolls and treasured things, and you’ll look up to check in with me every few steps as if to say, “I’m doing fine, right mama? Do you see me?” And I will see you and reassure you of both things, and you will go on–you gaining a little more independence with each step and me trying hard not to tear up a little at the new you. In just over nine hours we’ll toast to your birth, then later, we’ll all devour leftover birthday cake and button cupcakes from the weekend’s festivities in your honor. All day long I’ll look at you and praise God for you with such deep thankfulness, just as I seek to do everyday. And all day long we’ll sing to you and teach you how to raise your finger to declare your “ONEness,” and we’ll look for ways to celebrate just how marvelously marvelous your are.

You are Eloise. You are ONE. And while you do not live at the Plaza Hotel, you are certainly as precious and precocious and delightful as another little Eloise I know and love…

may you move mountains in this lifetime, my dear. and may God protect you and provide for you all that you need for your whole life long! happy first birthday, my eloise josephine!!

xoxo,

your mama

eloiseandmama

 

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mountains, high and low.

So here’s the deal. I know it’s not much, but as I ease back in, I’ve committed to blogging once a week. More if the spirit moves. I’m telling you so I’m accountable to someone–you, out in the world, whoever and wherever you are. Will you track with me? I’ll do my best to make the content worthwhile, and to begin creating a better community for dialogue and supportive chatter. That’s always what I’ve wanted this space to be, and I’m eager to make it more of a living room than a two-dimensional screen. Care to join?

A lot happens in seven days, and since I last wrote, the sky continues to open up over this new space where I find myself. I can’t share all of the details yet, but there’s so much good on the horizon! I know that this season will take shape in an unfolding kind of way–I can only see individual layers of it at a time myself. I am re-learning what it means to make room in every day. Not just physical room, but more significantly, emotional and spiritual and mental room that I’ve really, really needed. How is it that we are often our own biggest stumbling blocks? I’ve been in my own way a lot in the past year (and honestly, for probably a lot longer than that). I’ll credit my stubbornness and my oh-so-human desire to control things for the delay in clarity. But no matter. When clarity arrives, it seems to push through all of the yuck to something beautiful, and now in the mess, I’m staring at it.

I love this reality.

In the midst of this breaking through, there’s so much else that feels fulfilling and good right now–what a refreshing and necessary change of pace! I am looking forward to a trip with our littlest to visit my sister and her family later this week. I can’t wait to spend five days in the beauty of Colorado with some of my favorite favorites in the world. It’s been almost seven months since I last squeezed my niece goodbye…a very, very long time when the kiddos are little. Eloise was four months old the time, so this visit is sure to look different than the last 🙂 What’s more, my sister is preparing to welcome a second little love into the world soon, and I am over the moon to become an aunt again before long. Beyond that, Miss E turns ONE in four weeks, which feels perfect and wonderful and good. I so love celebrating our babies at this milestone. A year feels like the greatest gift–babies are becoming sweet little (walking and talking) people, parents do a tiny victory lap for making it through some of the trenches, and then there’s cake. Cake! And party planning(!!), which you know I love. I’m having so much fun with the details for Eloise’s 1st birthday party. Gathering friends and family to celebrate life is always a joy!

There’s so much more, but I can’t go on for sake of time and a pre-travel to-do list as I head into this glorious week. Before I go, I just have to share a moment from this morning, which is crazy-dear to me and such a picture of how God works in the small things…

At breakfast, Henry reminded me that we needed to read our daily excerpt from Jesus Calling for Kids, a book gifted to us by a dear friend when Henry was first born. We’ve been reading it together at breakfast and talking about how God wants to be involved in our lives. Sometimes H seems like he’s really tracking with me, and other times, I think I’m just meant to read it that day for the reminder to myself! Today, we talked a bit about how God is always with us and desires time with us. After I put the book down, Henry asked me, “What if we hided in a pile of dirt under a mountain? Then he wouldn’t know where we were.” What a beautiful, processing thought for a three year old! I was overjoyed at the opportunity to explain to Henry how God sees us wherever and whenever, and that He always knows where we are and what we need. How glorious is it, to be able to share the good and powerful news that God is always with us? With our children, no less?! I can’t help but think about the way we’ve prayed for so long that Christ would make His way into the hearts of our children. God hears our requests, every time. I hope this is an encouragement to someone today. When you think He doesn’t hear your prayers, He does. He hears you. And He sees you in that pile of dirt. Under that mountain.

grace to you for today, my friends. you are so loved.

mm