Category: faith

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the only way out is through: Image Bearing, education, and the true cost of AI

I am passionate about teaching.

My dad was a teacher for decades, off and on, throughout my childhood and teens.

I have blinked and— somehow— I am now well into two decades of teaching myself.

(I’m still working out how, exactly, that happened.)

I want to be transparent about what this post actually is. It is not a polished position paper. It is not a formal research summary. It is something more like what happens when my brain has been carrying a growing weight of concern for long enough that it just needs to become words on a page.

These thoughts have been living in me for a while now— surfacing in quiet moments of lesson prep, interactions with students, in conversations with other educators, in the way I watch my own children move through their days. I have turned them over and over, tested them against what I see in my classrooms and what I feel at my own kitchen table.

And I finally decided the best thing to do with all of it is to just write it down.

This concern.

This bit of a sinking feeling when it comes to education and educating.

This shaping of conversations with both my students and my children when they look at the world around them and wonder where they will fit in it.

The world is changing so fast, I’m just not quite sure what to say.

(And friend, that is not something I say lightly. I tend to always have something to say. Ask anyone who knows me.)

Here’s the thing, though: I am not “just” a teacher sitting here writing this.

I am also a parent sitting exactly where you are sitting— looking at my own kids and feeling the same overwhelm of love mingling with uncertainty. (I’m sure you are not a stranger to this particular mixture of emotion…)

My children are walking into this same future. That’s not an abstraction for me.

It’s my daughters. It’s my son.

Which means everything I’m about to say, I feel with my whole self— not just as an educator, but as a mother who is wondering on how to make the same bets on the same uncertain future that you are.

We are standing at a genuinely strange moment in history. The future our kids are walking toward looks different from anything we were prepared for— and I think most of us feel that, even when we’re not quite sure what to do with the feeling.

The advice we were given? The path that seemed reliable?

“Do good in school. Get a degree. Get a good thinking job.“

That map seems like it will no longer be accurate.

As the adults in these children’s lives, we owe them something better than outdated directions.

Here’s what I am coming to believe, from years in this work and now watching my own children grow: the skills that will matter most in what’s coming are the same ones that have always made humans most fully human.

Beyond that, they showcase who we are as Image Bearers.

The ability…

To listen so carefully that you hear what the other person couldn’t quite say. Or what is actually being said under and around words. To know what you believe and why… and communicate it well. To tell a story that moves people and connects them to The Story.

These aren’t extras.

They aren’t enrichment.

They are the foundation.

It’s one of the main reasons I teach what I do.

I teach speech and debate because when a person learns to debate, something happens that goes far beyond learning to argue. They learn that ideas have real weight and real consequences. They learn to examine a claim— really examine it— and ask:

Is this actually true?

Is this something we should believe and do?

What happens if we take this idea and follow it all the way through?

They learn to disagree with someone respectfully— which means they first have to genuinely understand what that person actually believes and why. (This is harder than it sounds. Trust me. Actually, you probably have an idea of how hard that is.)

In a world increasingly flooded with generated content, recycled talking points, and information that sounds authoritative (whether it is or not)— the capacity to actually process those questions is not just nice to have.

It is survival skill.

I want your children and my children to be the ones in the room who can say wait— and mean it.

Who can slow things down to ask the right questions.

It only comes from practice. It comes from wrestling with words, learning to choose the right ones, and being vulnerable enough to share ideas in front of others, face-to-face. (Not screen-to-screen. But that’s another blog post for another day.)

It comes from having argued and won.

It comes from having argued and lost— and having to sit with why.

It is hard work, this friction with ideas and words and identity.

But it is good work.

It is crucial work.

Moving on from speech and debate is something I am even more passionate about…

Story.

Think about every culture that has ever existed on this earth. What do they all have in common? Not language. Not geography. Not customs or clothes.

Story.

Every single one of them.

Story isn’t just something we tell. It is something that tells us. It shapes the way we understand who we are, where we came from, what we owe each other, and what we are reaching toward. The stories a culture passes down are not just entertainment or history— they are formation. They are the invisible architecture of a people.

And the stories we tell ourselves? Quietly, in the small hours? Those are forming us too, whether we know it or not.

This is why it matters so deeply what stories our children are given— and what stories they are learning to tell. Because a child who can shape a story is a child who is learning to share meaning, not just consume it. They are learning that the world is not just a series of things that happen to them— but something they have a voice in. Something they can bear witness to. Something they can have a hand in. Something they can pass on.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to: we were made by a God who is, at His very core, a Storyteller. The whole of Scripture is not a rulebook or a list. It’s not a theology “textbook”— it is a story. With a beginning and a crisis and a turning point and a redemption and a promised ending that is better than anything we can imagine. When we teach our children to tell true stories— to tell The True Story— we aren’t just telling them to find the words, to shape plot, to speak with honesty and intention— we are not just teaching a skill.

We are echoing the One who started our Story when He spoke the first words into the dark.

And called it good.

A child who knows how to tell their own story knows who they are. And a child who knows who they are is far harder to manipulate, mislead, or simply sweep along by whatever current is moving fastest.

There is a practice I use in my home and in my classrooms that is over a hundred years old— and I am convinced it is one of the most radical things we can do for children right now.

Charlotte Mason called it narration: the simple, demanding act of closing the book and telling back what you just took in, in your own words, from your own mind. No prompts. No multiple choice. No algorithm to autocomplete your thought.

Just you, and what you actually understood, and the work of making it yours.

It sounds simple.

It is not easy.

And that difficulty is precisely the point.

Narration forces a child to own their thinking— to reach for their own language, to discover what they actually grasped and what slipped past them. In a world where any text can be instantly summarized by a machine, teaching children to summarize from the inside out is not a nostalgic, 1800s-based skill.

Today, it is resistance.

When I sit across from my own children and watch them find words for what they’re thinking and feeling, it takes more time and effort than slipping them a worksheet. But I do it because the ability to articulate your inner life— to name what you think and why, to say it out loud and own it— is one of the most protective things for both ideas and identity a person can have.

I believe that with everything in me.

Now, another thing to consider. It isn’t a new idea.

In fact, you are probably very familiar with it.

We humans gravitate toward the path of least resistance.

There has always been a version of this struggle in education— students who want the grade without the growth, the answer without the wrestling. That has always been the part of teaching.

(Frankly, it’s the part that tears me down the most.)

But something has shifted. The ease available to students now is unprecedented. And I have watched it— I have felt it— as students simply stop reaching and working and start accepting whatever is handed to them, then hand it to me with a look as though I should be satisfied with mediocrity.

(Sidenote: I’m not speaking about every student. I have some hardworking, delightful, amazing students. I am talking about an overarching shift in caliber as a whole.)

Here is what makes it harder: it’s not just that they want it to be easy.

They expect it.

Ease has led to entitlement, and somewhere along the way, the systems meant to support education have started agreeing with those who want. I am handed standards that ask less, and ask me to assign higher grades for less work (and A, B, C, etc. are NOT what they used to be). There is a quiet but unmistakable message that rigor itself is somehow unkind.

I am being asked to lower the bar at the exact moment in history when raising it has never mattered more.

I want to pause here and be clear about something, because I think it matters:

I am not advocating for raising the bar past what is developmentally appropriate. There is already a strange tendency in education to push harder in all the wrong directions— rushing literacy into four-year-olds who need to be playing, drilling academics into children whose brains are simply not yet built for that kind of abstraction.

That is not rigor.

That is anxiety dressed up as standards.

What I am talking about is something different entirely— the friction that belongs to each stage. The age-appropriate struggle that actually builds something. And about how we are systematically removing that struggle the moment technology offers an easier path.

It produces a deeply strange result. We expect kindergartners to read fluently and third graders to perform on standardized tests… but somehow, by college, students cannot construct an outline without assistance.

We accelerated the wrong things and smoothed away the right ones.

The friction we are so eager to eliminate is not the enemy of learning.

In most cases, it is the learning.

I am finding myself becoming more rigid— not because I want to be stubborn— but because I know what is being given up when the students do not.

I refuse to believe this is what learning has to become.

The exhaustion I carry isn’t from the work. It’s from loving students enough to grieve what they’re losing while they’re becoming too ignorant and too comfortable to notice it’s gone.

I am not afraid of artificial intelligence as a tool. Used wisely, it’s remarkable. But I am genuinely concerned about what happens to a generation of children who grow up using it before they’ve built the skills to know how to use it well.

Here is the risk I want to name clearly: AI doesn’t just threaten jobs. Used without wisdom, it quietly erodes the very capacities we need in order to think at all. If your child never learns to construct an argument from scratch, they won’t recognize when an AI-generated argument is wrong, or manipulative, or missing something essential. If they never struggle to find their own words, they lose the ability to notice when someone else’s words are shaping them toward a conclusion they didn’t choose and don’t want.

There is a version of the future where AI thinks for an entire generation, and that generation simply accepts it.

Not because they aren’t intelligent.

But because they never built the muscles to do otherwise.

The friction of real thinking feels unnecessary when something smooth and fluent is available on demand.

(And honestly? I think about this when I watch my own children reach for easy answers. It makes me more committed to this work, not less.)

Communication, debate, and storytelling are how we build those muscles. They are what grows discernment— so they can show discernment.

So they can share discernment.

I believe something that puts me in a somewhat unique position to speak on all of this is the fact that I don’t just homeschool my kids or teach one age group. I have my toes in all of it. I teach elementary children, junior high students, high schoolers, and college students outside my home. I see the arc— all of it— and what disconcerts me more than anything right now is that I am watching the same pattern at every single level.

The expectation of ease doesn’t arrive in college.

It is already fully formed long before then.

It is being shaped early, normalized young— and by the time students reach higher education, the idea that learning should require genuine struggle feels foreign to them. Or worse: offensive.

I’m concerned this isn’t a phase or a generational quirk.

It is systemic.

It is accelerating.

And it is starting earlier than it ever has before.

Which tells me the place to address it is not college.

It isn’t even high school.

It is now— before the expectation of effortlessness calcifies into something we can no longer reach through.

So here is my encouragement to you as parents:

Hold the line on appropriate rigor.

Keep expecting real work from your children— even when they push back, even when it causes friction, even when letting it go would be so much easier. I know that temptation intimately. I live it in my own home, with my own kids.

It is hard to be the source of the friction. It is hard to watch your child struggle and not rescue them. I know. I know.

But that struggle is not a sign that something is wrong.

It is the sound of a mind being built.

It starts with learning to speak in front of people when it’s terrifying. It starts with defending a position and discovering what you actually believe. It starts with writing a story and finding out you have something worth saying.

The people who will shape what comes next are not the ones who use AI the most. They are the ones who think rigorously enough, know themselves clearly enough, and communicate compellingly enough to direct it— and know when to push back against it.

The only way to get those skills is to be uncomfortable enough to acquire them.

I will be honest with you— I wonder, often, if I’m preparing my own kids well enough for a world I can’t fully predict.

Teaching these skills (and trusting my God!) is my answer to that fear. It’s the most honest and hopeful thing I know how to do.

The goal has never been to produce children who can compete with machines. It has always been to form people who are fully human— curious, discerning, grounded, and capable of genuine connection. People who bring something to the room that no algorithm can replicate.

Because they are what AI can never be.

Image Bearers.

We were made in the image of a God who spoke the world into being. Who told stories. Who revealed Himself through burning bushes and parables and the arc of an entire human history. Who reasons with us, invites us to come and argue, asks us to give account for what we believe and why.

To communicate, to tell truth in creative ways, to wrestle honestly with ideas— these are not merely academic skills.

They are acts of image bearing.

When a child stands up and finds words for what they believe, they are doing something that reflects the nature of the One who made them. When they learn to listen and reason and persuade with integrity rather than manipulation, they are practicing what it looks like to bear that Image with dignity.

This is why I cannot be indifferent to a generation that outsources its thinking and abandons its voice. It is not just an educational loss.

It is a human loss.

We are cultivating something sacred when we teach children to speak well, argue honestly, and tell stories that are True— and we diminish that sacredness when we let them believe that a machine can do it for them.

The goal was never just to produce good students.

It was always to form whole people, fully alive to who they are, Whose they are, and why it all matters.

That hard work has never mattered more to me than it does right now.

And it is the greatest privilege of my life to do it alongside you with this generation we are raising.

As an educator.

And as a mom.

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breaking the silence.

As the Old English proverbs goes, “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” Layman’s terms? You don’t know what you have until it is gone.

Possessions?

We all have lost them.

Opportunities?

People?

We’ve all lost those, too.

I don’t think people think of the losing of themselves.

But here I am, over a year after my mom’s passing, months after my dad’s strokes, realizing that somewhere in the avalanche of grief and survival mode, I lost something pretty precious (to anyone, but maybe more to someone who has degrees and a livelihood in what I do…)

I lost my words.

Not all of them, of course. I still had the necessary ones—the “good morning” to my children, the lesson plans for my students, the “how was your day?” that keeps a household running. But the other words? The witty ones that used to flow from my fingertips onto pages… the more introspective ones that helped me make sense of the world? Those went silent.

It’s strange how grief doesn’t just take what’s obvious.

It reaches into the corners of who you are and quietly pockets pieces you didn’t even know were connected to what– to who– you lost.

I haven’t written here in longer than I care to admit. (A fast scroll to the date of the previous post tells you that.) It would be nice to say that I tried to open a post to write, and the blank page would just stare back at me, and the cursor would blink– ever patient and persistent– and I would just sit here and try to squeeze words out like water from a stone.

But that’s not what would happen.

I didn’t even open to write a post.

Not until this morning.

I didn’t even try.

I did try in my personal journal. But the topics bounced around the obvious. I could casually write about my day, or what the kids did. This, that, and the other.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Everyone kept saying I should journal through my feelings, that writing would help me process the grief, especially my friends who have walked similar paths. I went to a program called GriefShare, which also praised the virtues of writing as a healing exercise. Articles online and social media all say the same thing: “Write it out. Put pen to paper. Let the words heal you.”

Me?

Proverbial Crickets.

It’s a good thing God doesn’t need my words, because He wasn’t immune to the silence, either. To be honest, I’ve always struggled with prayer a bit. I want to be a woman of prayer. More than that, I guess I want to be a woman that accepts the answers to prayer with faith, not faltering. It is a hard thing to pray hard for things– miracles and mundane alike– and just get No’s. Or Waits with an undetermined timeline. Especially when other prayers from other people seem to get the replies you pray and wish for. He’s all of our Good Father; and it is His prerogative to do as He wills. I just wish I had (have) a stronger faith to immediately take the His No’s, no questions asked, and still feel just as loved and cherished as the children that He says yes to. It’s was a Struggle. It still is.

So I borrowed words. I let David carry my complaints in his psalms. I found myself in Job’s questions. Habakkuk’s wrestling became my own—asking for answers from heaven while simultaneously declaring trust, even when you look around see emptiness where fulness used to be.

On Sunday mornings, I borrow the words straight from the worship music. I lift my voice, often wobbly. I lift my face, often wet with tears as I sing. Meanwhile, my brain is busy– stacking circumstances like pieces of evidence, crafting careful arguments against every word my mouth shapes:

“All my life you have been faithful…”

Mom’s empty chair.

“All my life you have been so, so good…”

Dad’s strokes.

“With every breath that I am able…”

Bed-bound. Slurred speech.

“I will sing of the goodness of God.”

The way what used-to-be-fun Thursdays now felt like a mountain to climb.

But I sing anyway.

Because faith isn’t by sight.

Because someday it will be.

Because truth isn’t determined by how I feel on any given Thursday.

Because sometimes the most honest thing you can do is let ancient words carry what your own voice cannot, trusting that the God who inspired them understands the difference between your doubt and your disbelief.

So I kept to the main things. I maintained my home as much as possible—though “maintained” is generous. (Ignore some doom piles and dust bunnies, please.) I poured myself into homeschooling my children, determined that their education wouldn’t suffer because their mom was drowning in sadness. I showed up for my students, crafting lessons and grading papers, channeling what felt like the last reserves of my professional self into being the teacher that I wanted to be, and that they deserved.

Honestly, some days, even these “main things” felt (feels?) like too much.

Some mornings, getting dressed felt like a monumental achievement and the simple act of making breakfast required more emotional energy than I thought I had. But I did them anyway.

I’ve learned keeping going isn’t grand gestures.

It’s stubborn insistence on putting one foot in front of the other.

Grief is like living in a fog—not the romantic, misty kind you see in movies, but the thick, disorienting kind that makes you wonder if you are going to trip at every step.

I’d find myself standing in my kitchen, completely forgetting why I’d walked in there.

I’d start sentences and lose them halfway through.

(I still do.)

But I have noticed some words are trickling back slowly, tentatively. A bit like birds that come back after being scared away. They’re different now—maybe quieter, maybe more timid. This post itself is proof of that; these sentences that fought their way out despite everything. Maybe, just maybe, they were singing “a tune without the words.” Maybe they “never stopped at all.”

To anyone else who’s lost pieces of themselves in the wreckage of loss—whether it’s your words, your joy, your sense of purpose, or something else entirely—I want you to know that those pieces aren’t gone forever.

Maybe they are just rearranging themselves, learning how to exist, to come back to a world that’s been fundamentally changed.

Be patient with them.

Be patient with yourself.

Be patient with your faith– the fumbling, the clinging–

Be patient with Frowning Providence, when He hides.

Be patient.

We’ll see the Smiling Face.

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a liturgy of preparation for a meal

I don’t know about you, but sometimes… I grow weary in well-doing. I’ve realized it isn’t actually the doing… it’s the reception of it. I feel like my work is worth something when it is received with gratitude and appreciation; but when my meals are met with whines or disenchantment, I mourn. And even get disgruntled deep down, because I feel like all of my good motivations and hard work— and good food— are just wasted.

Maybe that’s why this liturgy, found in Every Moment Holy, resonates so deeply. (The audio for this clip is not the whole thing, merely the beginning thoughts.) See, I need this prayer and reminder: that my meal planning and prep, my cooking and baking, my placing it on the table before my family is not just an act of service to them— but an act of worship to God.

And whereas one can argue that my children still need to work on thankfulness and the expression of it (they do 😂), I don’t need their approval of the main course or veggie side. It was and is worship— and God sees my work, even though He doesn’t need my meal to stave off His own hunger.

He takes and sees my offering.

And as the days pass, and I pray and cook, I have every hope that I am “an agent of a deep eternity, whose prepared meals might feed more than the body, nourishing also the hearts and hopes of those sometimes-weary souls who are well-served” by my labors.

Amen. 💛

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the yoke is easy.

Last month, when we visited the Log Cabin Village in Ft. Worth, TX, we saw— and picked up— a yoke. As the woman explained how a yoke works, I had so many thoughts. I think part of the whole thought shift was the fact that I never actually thought of yokes as being something people carried— I always thought of them as something oxen were strapped with. But as I saw my husband lifting the yoke up and over his shoulders, the woman explained how carrying buckets of water was really hard on not just the arms, but the hands. The muscles would get tired, and the rough rope would dig into the palms and fingers, making it painful to carry water for long.

And it dawned on me— that the yoke doesn’t actually take the burden away, or make it “lighter” in pounds. But when the burden is wrapped around a yoke— the yoke shoulders the brunt of it. It makes carrying the same amount of water much easier. It saves the weaker joints and the muscles and skin from the extreme exhaustion of the task.

Another thing about the burden of carrying water is that it wasn’t optional— water was something that HAD to be found and transported. The burden wasn’t optional. Water was life, and finding it and taking it back to people and animals and plants HAD to happen.

Isn’t that the truth about life? There are burdens that we simply must carry. Daily. As much as we would want to skip a day or a week or even all of our lives— we can’t. The burden must be borne.

If our burden must be carried, why? Why do we insist on having it dig deep, in a way God didn’t design for us? Jesus is offering a way— the Way— to make our burdens easier to bear. The burden might remain, even in the same amount.

But with Jesus, we can rest.

He bears the brunt. He takes on our weight for us and in the doing, saves us from the acute, painful task of trying to do it all alone. 💛

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embarrassment, empathy, endurance: why the show must go on… and why we should help it

Once, several years ago— before marriage and babies— I found myself giving a 50 minute long one-woman show to an auditorium with over 500 people watching me.  As if that wasn’t adrenaline-inducing enough, I had just stepped on the edge of my floor length skirt and felt the clasp in the back pull and undo.

That was fun.

I remember, continuing my performance, and simultaneously pleading for the Good Lord, in His mercy and goodness to prevent my skirt from completing its malfunction in front of everyone.  That I could just do my “job,” without something very important falling down around me.

It’s an extreme AND completely real example.  It’s one that I thought wouldn’t apply to me again very much at all in my life.  But, man, was I wrong.

Here we all are, aren’t we?  Just trying to do our “jobs”— trying to live and maybe tell our stories.  We don’t want any extra drama.  We don’t want anything more to think about because the job, though hopefully enjoyable , is still daunting enough.  But then… we feel something begin to give way that shouldn’t.  We suddenly shift into worry and doubt and fervent prayer because we know, that just a little bit more… just another inch… just one more slight shift… and we will be vulnerable in ways we never, ever want to be.

IF my skirt had actually fallen down that day… if that whole auditorium had seen me, standing there, exposed in my undergarments and embarrassment… honestly, what would have happened?  Okay, so I would have been completely mortified and would have wanted to claw up the floorboards of that stage in order to disappear… but besides that?  What would have happened?

I wouldn’t have died, no matter how much I would have wanted to.  I would have swallowed hard, and pulled my skirt up, made some comment to attempt to save face, and feel my cheeks grow hot.  My throat might have almost closed from choking down the emotion of it all… and I might have even had to excuse myself before going back out and continuing where I left off.

That’s what would have happened.  Because I needed to finish my job.  Finish what I started.  Tell the story that placed me on that stage in the first place.

I think, whether or not you have been on stage at all, you know exactly what it is like to be in the scenario I found myself.  Life has taught you to be afraid that something horrible is going to derail what you are doing— and what you are doing is plenty enough already, thankyouverymuch.  We are afraid to be left exposed and scrambling.  We are petrified of our jobs being harder, our lives more complicated.  We are scared of contingency plans and crisis modes and being distracted from what was **so carefully** planned, practiced, and rehearsed.  And maybe, just maybe, we are worried about what people would say and think as they witness it all fall.

Hardship is so, well, hard to even think about.  There’s a reason why those thoughts instantly drive us to worry— and hopefully and much better— prayer. The grand irony of it all is that we are just as much audience as performer.  We watch others live all around us, and don’t think for one second that they are worried about their own wardrobes exposing them, or tripping on stage, or forgetting their lines.  That they are just as afraid and vulnerable to messing up themselves.  They seem to have it all together as they go along, while we feel like we just stumbling by.  Honestly, shouldn’t we know better by now?

We know the truth.  The fact that we are all actors should make us the most empathetic audience in the world.  It is exactly because I know what it is like to imagine the worst case scenario (by almost being or ACTUALLY being in worst case scenarios) that I can lean into other’s experiences when their worst case scenario happens.  It’s why we can join others in the uncomfortable, and not let our own awkwardness keep us from doing what is right.  And what is right? Right is swallowing your own discomfort to make it easier for your friend or neighbor or fellow momma to pick up her skirt and her pride, swallow hard, and keep going when her world is falling apart.

Best of all, we don’t have to say and think anything beyond admiration and support— in whatever capacity we can.  

Life itself is a stage, someone brilliant once said.  

We are all players.  

And in this global cast, faith, hope, and love is the obligation for all of us.

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examening your home

I was listening to a podcast the other day, and it was talking about the Daily Examen– what’s typically considered a spiritual practice of reflection by asking & answering a pattern of questions at the end of the day.

As I was listening, my thoughts connected that idea to my goal for the month of February– loving my home and making it easier for my family and I to love being in it. I’ll be honest; I am so thankful for my home… but the daily-ness of all the daily tasks that are also housed here overwhelm me at times. I like to do things and then move on the next thing and for projects to be “done…” but there’s nothing done about the bits of food that reemerge on the floor, or the dishes that reappear in the sink, or the laundry that regrows in our hampers. And sometimes, those things make me feel like I can’t actually do what I WANT to do in my home and with the people in it.

So this month, I’m reshaping my thoughts around my home, and finding better tools for me to love it better.

As I listened to the 5 steps of the Examen, my mind tweaked the points a bit… and I wanted to share them. You know, just in case someone else needs to regroup and offer a reminder of a bigger, lovelier picture.

1) Think back to your day and find the love that you had while at home. Was it something specific about a space? An item? A moment you had there? The people in it? Find a moment at home that brought you joy, for whatever reason.

2) Show gratitude for that moment. Offer thanks for it.

3) Allow yourself to feel whatever feelings arise after that. It “makes sense” that offering thanks would/”should” bring a positive emotion, but that might not always be the case. I can be thankful for a moment, and still feel a shadow that someone or something wasn’t in it. That’s okay to feel and to acknowledge.

4) Take that moment and pray from it, journal about it, process it.

5) Look ahead towards tomorrow. That might mean just having hope that tomorrow can offer the same experience… or it might mean making a mental action step about how to encourage the same type of moment. (For instance, if you realized that your morning was super peaceful because of waking up to clean surfaces and no dishes, maybe resolve to do that more often. No guilt or commitment attached– just an observation and maybe a thought to try it again.)

Anyhoo, taking time to think big picture and reflecting is huge for me– especially when I sometimes tend to make lists that feel too large and daunting OR even make it a measurement of my worth. Here’s to noting the love for and in our homes, offering gratitude for it, and believing that we can have more of it in our moments. ❤

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Big Feelings. Bigger Help.

Last week, we chatted a bit about clearing clutter to make room to parent well.

I want to continue that conversation this week.

Let’s start with an “incident” with my oldest.

I won’t go into details, because first, they aren’t that important… and secondly, they are more her details than mine to share anyway.

But let’s just say, E was feeling some big feelings, made a poor choice that shocked ME, which then made me have to take a step back before dealing with the situation. Because without that space for a minute or so, my own big feelings would not have handled the situation well at all.

I think any parent can appreciate what I’m talking about.

In the past, I probably would have just called the problem what it was and go ahead and dish out/allow for the consequence to come on in… but not this time.

This time, I followed some of the talking points that Dr. Becky mentioned in some posts/stories on Instagram. And it played out surprisingly well.

We started off talking about feelings… and how there isn’t such a thing as a “bad” one. Saying this point blank to my daughter made her mouth drop a bit. We talked about how feelings can FEEL bad, and how we can do wrong things with them… but the feeling itself? It is a messenger. It is something our bodies and beings have to let us know that something doesn’t feel right or isn’t right about a situation. Maybe something we believe is important isn’t happening. Or maybe something we feel shouldn’t be happening is. Our bodies let us know. Our feelings come up to tell us something is off. They tell us to pay attention– and it serves us to listen to what they are saying.

More specifically, our feelings conversation focused on anger– because that was the big feeling that provoked the choice that shouldn’t have been made. And whereas anger itself isn’t bad, because even JESUS was angry, we can choose to use that feeling to hurt ourselves and other people– which isn’t right. We talked about how, the next time her big feelings get too much, she should find me and tell me and we can figure out what to do with that big feeling together.

(Pain point: I soveryoften feel my children’s feelings and take them on myself, so that makes big feelings suuuuper hard for me to work through with them. But that’s my own thing to work through and clear out.)

My 8 year old isn’t the only one in the house who has been on the struggle bus recently.

<<cough>>

This 30something has been having her own big feelings recently.

Lots of big stressors makes it easier for my personal triggers to be mashed and throttled. And Lord bless them, my kiddos can mash and throttle those buttons. What normally I feel I have the grace and ease to handle, with big stressors… I don’t anymore.

Right now, we have been hitting car troubles, financial troubles, family issues, etc., + the whole “the pandemic still isn’t letting life get back to normal and it’s been a whole stinking year now and can’t this thing just stop already” thing.

All of the big things hitting at once, merged with the chronic pandemic fatigue, taps on an underlying lie that I fall into the trap of believing all the time: that if I have hope, or have gratitude, or take a breath or rest or really feel happy– somehow, it invites bad things to happen.

Now, I KNOW that’s not true. I KNOW it’s bad theology and my Jesus doesn’t work that way. But it’s a struggle.

All of this conversation and thinking and processing brings me to Thursday. I’m driving E to piano and she brings up an incident where she had a big feeling. And we started talking it through and pulling it apart a bit. As we finished the conversation, she heaved a big sigh and said, “It was a big feeling, and I didn’t like feeling it.”

“But did it show you something?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And what it showed me, I guess that was good.”

And it was behind that steering wheel, as I was getting into a median for a left turn, I heard it. 

That Still Small Voice that whispers in your soul Epiphanies so beautiful that a breath escapes your body.

All my life, I’ve heard it, and if you are a Christian, you’ve heard it, too… so let’s just all recite Romans 8:28 together:

“All things work together for good…”

We know it’s true because God says it true. And we might even know its truth more personally, versus in the abstract. I do. I’ve seen it. Some of the hardest road and trials I have personally faced I can look back at now and see God’s Hand in it– though it looked invisible at the time. 

But that life experience doesn’t change the fact that I still wrestle with my faith sometimes. I’ve never really had a hard time believing that God is Sovereign. But His Goodness? THAT’s what Satan and the fallen world likes to cast shadows of doubt on.

But you see, it is His Goodness that is my Epiphany.

Maybe, just like feelings aren’t necessarily good or bad… our circumstances are, too. We are so quick to label big circumstances that make us feel “bad” as bad themselves and rush to write off the value in them. We silence them and push them away because we don’t want to “feel” their “badness”… and instead, miss why we have them in the first place.

What if circumstances, like feelings, are messengers? And what if, instead of fighting our feelings, or rejecting and regretting what’s happening in our lives, we accept it all for what it is, know it has a purpose… and trust that when we have a hard time (because we will), we can and should reach out for Help.

What’s so wonderful about that Help, is that unlike our feelings and circumstances which come and go, ebb and flow…

Help is Ever Present.

❤

The Big Four

Imagine: This week’s creative outlet isn’t connected to the kids. Note: the Big Four are just as necessary for mommas and caretakers. In fact, the term “mother culture” hits on this, and I’m a big fan. This week, I’ve taken a few minutes here and there to learn and practice a new crochet stitch and am making it into a blanket. I’m almost out of skeins, so will need to grab a few more this week. Read why making blankets is actually an anomaly for me, and why I’m glad I’m actually enjoying it this time.

Encourage: As this post has touched on, the main way I’m encouraging my kids is by working through my own Big Feelings and helping them handle theirs better. If you haven’t checked out Dr. Becky, I totally encourage you to!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CK9EEzsJwS7/

Educate: We are starting a unit on fairy tales, and I’m super excited. We read East of the Sun to the West of the Moon this week, and it was the first time *I* had ever read it. E loved it. I read it aloud and do voices and all that (thanks, speech degree!), but here’s a video/reading of the story from the Blue Fairy Book. As with most fairy tales, there’s some things that strike adults as kinda weird, but kids are like, “no big deal.” Life’s funny.

Enjoy: To celebrate a new unit, we got a new game! We haven’t played it yet, but I’m heard great things about this one! Can’t wait to break it out tomorrow!