In the midst of sticky fingers and parenting fails, it’s as if God sharing a very good, beautiful secret with me of a glory that only he knows in full.

We threw Noah the cutest little book launch party you ever did see, and it was a picture to me of God’s delight in his children.

We cannot have a “life we don’t have to heal from.” But we can know that healing is possible.

Our acts of love are held by God.

What if God not only loves me, but also likes me? I am learning to receive and trust in his delight in me.

A prayer for my little girl on National Daughters Day

I ask his Spirit to bring life and joy and do a new thing, but I know life and joy and newness are so often born out hard things. And I feel myself bracing for impact rather than opening my hands. 

I really love exceeding (my self-imposed, often-unreasonably-high) expectations on the first try. Admitting to being a beginner is hard for me. But I’ve been a beginner enough times to know that God will meet me in this season where my weakness is not so easily hidden, that he is equally present as I figure things out by multiple trials and errors as he was in my fruitful rhythms and routines of the previous season.

Our experiences growing our family have not been simple and straightforward.

What verses have most helped you understand what the love of God looks like?

On the day after Mother’s Day, when the fun and flowers and watermelon champagne sugar cookies and breakfasts in bed are now an afterglow, and life returns to a more regular, unheralded rhythm of laundry and cutting crust off PB&Js and scheduling doctors appointments and listening to little kids with big feelings, I need to know that ours is a God who sees what is unnoticed.