🌞 “What is August like in South Carolina?” you may ask. Imagine, Dear Reader, that you’re standing in the thick of a rain forest. It catches fire. The end.

“What words best describe you in August?” you may ask. Words that immediately come to mind are: languishing, faint, quiet rage, apathy. The moral of the story: August isn’t my favorite.

✏️ This August will forever be an “extra special” one in our hearts. We started school weeks earlier than normal, on August 3rd. Neither our heads nor our hearts were ready to begin that early, but start we did. Then, just yesterday, we unstarted. In just 9 days, our Covid numbers were too high to safely continue. My boys will resume senior year and 8th grade virtually on Monday. (Please see the aforementioned words in the second paragraph.)

💐 In other news, my husband and I celebrated 26 years of marriage. We do not feel old enough but lo, we are! I wrote a post about it earlier this week. We sat down for a lovely and leisurely meal someone else prepared, and talked about things we’d like to do together once our children have graduated. We then laughed when our number 1s were the exact same thing. Hopefully that’s a good sign.

🏠 In the last couple of weeks, in between golf tournaments and work and surviving the August heat, I moved our girl out of one college apartment and into another. She’ll be a junior and not a single year of her college experience thus far has been untouched by the limitations and losses of Covid. I don’t have anything profound to say, only that it breaks my heart.

🌍 If you’re feeling a bit like me right now—weary, overwhelmed, triggered, sad, fearful—I encourage you to let go of what you can’t control, to ruthlessly choose rest, to name the scary or sad things and bring them into the presence of Christ, a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He is our safe and sure place.

P.S. Thanks for bearing with me through this post alternately titled: “Tell me you’re an enneagram 4 without telling me you’re an enneagram 4.”😂

And thanks to @kimberlyacoyle for this #windowontheweek invitation (via Instagram.)

Twenty six years. We’re celebrating by getting a new alternator in his car and sitting with our youngest as he gets his last 3 baby teeth extracted. Because you have not truly celebrated your love until you’ve spent an anniversary in the waiting rooms of your local mechanic and family dentist. Why spend over a thousand dollars on a weekend away when you can pay for car parts and laughing gas?

But seriously, if a day can serve as a metaphor for lasting devotion through the messy, mundane, ridiculousness that comprises much of real life, it’s today. And there’s no one I’d rather have by my side than this guy who steadies us all with strength, grace, and good humor.

Years ago I wrote “Love bears all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7) on a chalkboard just inside our door. Our love has borne everything from crises and hopelessness, to parenting woes and the chronic inability to put away one’s clothes (him) or remember where they’ve put anything (me.)

A love that bears all things is not a natural love; it’s a supernatural love. And it can only come from above, from the living God who chooses to make his home in our hearts so that we can make a home that welcomes and binds up one another’s hearts.

Today, as we squeeze our child’s hand and pick up each other’s slack and keep cars running and hopefully sit down for a meal that someone else prepares, we’ll give thanks for the supernatural love that keeps seeing us through.

Summer of 2021 has already folded itself inside the invisible treasure chest that a mother stores within her.

It was a summer of risk-taking & inside jokes, of mothering & connection. I am exhausted and I wouldn’t trade a second of it.

My oldest son is 17. He’s the middle child, sandwiched between a big sister who’s no shrinking violet, & a charming little brother who’s 4 years younger. Most things have come easily for this middle one—school, friends, navigating life. If “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” he’s the one without smudges. Which also means he’s probably gotten the least attention over the years.

But this summer the two of us burned up the interstate, woke to early alarms, scavenged for decent breakfasts, rinsed the sweat from our faces in golf course clubhouses, & treated ourselves to a few steak dinners, suitable for both celebration & for consolation.

This summer I had the privilege of walking alongside him, 18 holes at time, with a cooler strapped to my back & a sweat-stained scorecard in my pocket. We don’t know whether the time, energy, & resources will bear fruit in the way he hopes. He played some of the best golf of his life, including his lowest score ever. He also played rounds we’d all like to forget, & a qualifier 4 hours away where he pulled a shoulder muscle during warmup & had to withdraw after 9 holes.

This is golf. Equal parts exhilarating & soul-crushing. Sounds a lot like parenthood, doesn’t it?

At the beginning of summer, my sister & I were running on the beach & she asked what our summer looked like. “A lot of golf,” I said. “And it feels like such a risk.” She told me that regardless of outcomes, it would still be a gift because of the time I’d get with my son. It has been exactly that.

I’m so proud of him—his perseverance & resilience. His ability to self-reflect & know what needs work. His acceptance that there are no short-cuts; it’s a long game if ever there was one. Kids will teach you a thing or two if you’ll let them.

This summer showed me that sometimes the dream you think you’re chasing might also be the gateway God uses to bestow better & lasting gifts.

⛳️ Four out of my last 6 days were spent on a golf course. I’ve stayed in two different hotels and burned up the interstate. Helping a child chase a dream is equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. I keep trying to emotionally disconnect from the highs and lows of it all but to no avail. I suspect this is simply a cross we bear as mothers.

🍝 After being gone much of the week, I decided I couldn’t eat one more bite of fast food or takeout. I drove to Publix last night and got the ingredients for spaghetti with meat sauce, a good salad, a loaf of Tuscan bread, and a bottle of red. Because I believe there’s not a single thing pasta can’t help fix.

🏃🏻‍♀️ We’ve been watching the Olympic trials and we are SO PUMPED. My husband and I are lifelong runners and he ran the steeplechase in college. We told our youngest that when we were in college, they didn’t let women do the steeplechase or pole vault. And just like that, I felt 85 years old. (Also, just another example of how the world has continually underestimated the strength of women.💪)

📚 I’m reading Pat Conroy’s South of Broad but took a break this week to listen to The Fortunate Ones by Ed Tarkington while on the road. I’m not quite finished but I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s an @anniebjones05 recommendation and she never steers me wrong.

🍦 Pro tip for enjoying ice cream this summer but not eating the whole pint. Buy the baby size Ben and Jerry’s or Haagen Dazs. They are $1.49, a small price to pay for instant moderation.

🐶 Guys, if it’s not the kids it’s the dog. Our beloved Jetta had surgery a week ago. She somehow got into the stitches, cone and all, and we had to have her sedated yesterday and restitched. Also, she has bled all over our living room furniture. Does she not realize we are paying college tuition? #whylord (Let it be known that my husband, the one who was against getting a dog 9 years ago, is the one who has taken her to all the appointments AND tended to her like an actual baby.😂)

Thank you @kimberlyacoyle for the #windowontheweek invitation (via Instagram.)

I just finished a two-day virtual conference with people from across the country, all of us community workers in some way. Yesterday the convener of our group, a highly educated and esteemed Black man at Harvard, began by sharing a picture of a slave family taken shortly before emancipation. “They could never have imagined an interracial conference 150 years later where people from all backgrounds would be discussing ways to live out the unfulfilled dreams of earlier generations.”

He told the story of his great-great grandfather, a man who had found success against all odds and who they strongly suspect was lynched as a result, leaving behind a grieving wife and children.

He then concluded by reading a poem he wrote in 1975 that was inspired by the words and sentiments of his great-grandfather, then 94. The words rang with love instead of bitterness, perseverance instead of despair.

It took a minute for all of us professionals to gather ourselves after that. I saw tears streaming down the faces of my Black colleagues on the other side of the screen and “Glory!” written in the chat box.

The patriots of our colonial days justified revolution and the founders signed a Declaration of Independence because we were “slaves” of England. But England did not own the colonists’ actual bodies as chattel property. They did not sell human babies away from their mothers.

And so I ask us, how much more shall we celebrate the end of actual, literal slavery in our country?

To all of my Black brothers and sisters, I’m sorry that most of us, myself included, have been late to the commemoration of Juneteenth and to the work of equality, that we have celebrated our nation’s freedom with bunting and barbecues, all the while failing to acknowledge and dismantle the systems and stereotypes, power and prejudices still crushing our very own.

In the words of Desmond Tutu, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

On this historic Juneteenth, I can think of no better occasion than to commit or recommit to the sacred work of being human together. ❤️

Image: “The Harp” by sculptor Augustus Savage. This piece was was inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s song, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” and depicts 12 African Americans singing, held by the hand of God. It was commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair. Due to lack of funds and storage after the fair closed, all of the art pieces were destroyed, including The Harp. 😭 Thanks to my friend, Dr. Keri Manning, for teaching me about this piece in her Facebook series last year on Black art.

Naming what matters.

It’s a Lazy Genius principle (@thelazygenius) and it helps me so much. When everything is important, nothing is important. We have to name what matters and that looks different for each one of us.

I know this. But lately it’s been hard for me to untangle what matters most from the things that can wait or even from the things that never need to matter.

We can’t be a rock star spouse, parent, soar in our career, keep a tidy home that’s styled the way we want, stay fit, eat healthy, cook, DIY, be spiritually disciplined, be involved in our community, serve as team parent, look cute, read to our kids, read for ourselves, care well for our extended families, remember all the birthdays, be informed about all the issues of the day, work toward necessary social change, help with homework, support our kids’ ambitions, put away money for everything, take trips of a lifetime, and make the memories…(comes up for air) all at the same time or even in the same life.

I know. You’re laughing. I’m laughing. Because when you see it in writing, it’s ridiculous. It would take an army to do all of those things, or at the very least The Proverbs 31 Woman. 😂

But all of these perceived “shoulds” can slowly move in and take up precious real estate in our brains. The Shoulds make us overcommit, multitask, and live without healthy boundaries. We stay stressed. We walk around feeling behind when it’s not a race, less-than when we’re enough, dissatisfied when we have all we truly need.

Receiving this season of my right-now life means pouring time, energy, and resources into my children, especially the one who will be a senior and has certain goals. It means saying no to good things I love because there are people I love more.

It means waiting. (And not being a brat about it.)

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or discontent—I invite you to take an honest look at this right-now season and name what matters. If you can’t, enlist a trusted person in your life to help. I’m doing it this weekend and I hope to come out on the other side with more acceptance and less angst. ❤️

How do you name what matters?

This post is part of a #OneDayMay series hosted by @laura.tremaine.

These are the days of real life being real full. I missed last Sunday evening’s weekly retrospective in stories. And I’ll miss today’s too.

Instead, I submit this photo, which I texted to my husband (and had no intention of sharing with the world, but here we are.) It’s from my seat at a coffee shop where I worked from 3-8 today. My to-do list is happy (though still very unfinished.) My back, however, is not.👵🏼

These are the days of working weird hours in weird places. Because these are also the days that require much tending to hearts and home. As it turns out, none of these jobs are 9-5 and I have given up on any semblance of schedule. ☕️🏡❤️

These are the days of squinting behind thrifted turquoise readers in a higher prescription and always opting for sensible shoes. 🤓

These are the days of kitchen counters and coffee tables scattered with March Madness brackets and golf score cards, plastic tees and empty Gatorade bottles.🏌🏼‍♂️

These are the days of counting off calendar squares—desperate for spring break and hopeful for rest. ☀️

These are the days of remembering that I am not called to an extraordinary life. I am simply called to be faithful and true in beautifully ordinary ways, right where I am. 🌎

I haven’t always known this or lived it. But I can tell you with hard-won certainty that peace begets peace as season after season, I practice receiving my right-now life—even as I wait with hope for certain circumstances to be different or less or more. 💝

Wherever you are at the start of a new week, may you have grace to trust God’s timing and provision for all things. And may trust give way to peace, as you relax your grip, give up your (illusion of) control, and reject your limited view of how life should go. May you receive—with palms up and chin tilted toward the sky—the grace and unexpected gifts that come from a posture of surrender and childlike trust. ❤️

……….

“These are the days” Sunday evening posts, usually on my IG stories, are a weekly practice inspired by @emilypfreeman and The Next Right Thing Guided Journal (which I love and recommend. 😉)

Life allows for a bit more creative space.

It’s who I am. Creativity—in an eclectic array of hues and mediums—makes me feel most like myself.

So I find myself laughing a lot, because at this particular point in time, my canvas is bathed with shades of calendar-keeping, kitchen-managing and all things teenagers. (It’s a moody piece. 😉)

But I need you to know that my right-now life is its own work of art—dreams fulfilled, answered prayers, a wild cast of characters. It’s a real life in technicolor (with a splash of reheated coffee and neon post-its.)

I already know I’ll look back on this colorful season with longing, so I hope you don’t hear me wishing it away. But it’s hard to live well in the tension, isn’t it? To wait with patience for a more spacious place, even as you treasure the here and now in all of its busy, messy, precious, complicated glory?

If you’re looking for answers or a tidy benediction, I don’t have one. I only know that the mundane tasks—the carpooling, the peanut butter spreading, the unplanned opportunities to listen—they’re the everyday brushstrokes that make a life. The everyday brushstrokes that *give* life.

These are sacred days. And this is sacred work.

Maybe your current season doesn’t exactly sparkle with the studio space, the renovated home, the cookbook, or the published collection of essays you’d imagined. But if art is communication, expression, beauty—I have a feeling you’re creating the most lovely, one-of-a-kind piece right where you are. And that I am too. Even on the days when it feels like we’re in survival mode, eating chicken nuggets instead of risotto.

Keep receiving the beauty of your right-now life, even as you wait with hope. ❤️

……….

This post is part of a series on Instagram, #OneDayMay, hosted by @laura.tremaine.

To stop multitasking.

To let go of unnecessary stress and perfectionism.

To rest when I’m tired.

To move and get blood flowing when I’m stressed.

To do my dumb back exercises because they really do help. 🙄

That it’s okay to only do exercise that I enjoy.

To keep wearing shorts in the summer even though I am too old for shorts because it is so hot here and comfort matters.

That it’s a privilege to grow old. An incredible privilege actually. Age isn’t something to defy. It’s a gift to receive.

What is your body telling you?

……….

This post is part of a series on Instagram, #OneDayMay, hosted by @laura.tremaine.

That my kids love to come home and love one another.

That my husband and I have as much fun together as we did before kids.

That I can still run.

That I work for myself and that life allows me the space to write All The Words and think All The Thoughts and read All The Books.

That I’m loving my community in tangible ways.

That I’ll know I did all I could to receive and cherish this long and storied season of child-rearing and schedule-managing and sports-cheering and plate-spinning and laughing at any semblance of work / life balance.

That I’ll testify to answered prayers.

All of which begs the question: What can I do now to help cultivate these hoped-for realities? ❤️

What do you hope for in 10 years?

……….

This post is part of a series on Instagram, #OneDayMay, hosted by @laura.tremaine.