hope

Quickie 2

quickie thought #2… talking to myself again…
 
Your fat cells cannot keep the love out.
Love penetrates.
You, my Darling, act like fat destroys Love –
like Love will disintegrate upon contact.
How weak and fragile you imagine It.
Love knows no destruction, fear, or preference
for which kinds of cells it touches.
As long as those cells carry the distinct signature inside
that reads, “You” … then they are each perfect. 

 Previous Quickie Thoughts to help you get in the mood for love.
 

 

By |May 12th, 2015|Beauty SOS47, Love and Making It|0 Comments|
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How to keep a marriage

What lights a relationship on fire?  What keeps it going after fifteen years?
What sets butterflies to flight in your stomach when your eyes make contact?
What keeps your bodies magnetized so that the pull towards each other never weakens?

The obvious answer is mutual attraction, but what is that exactly? How do we stay mutually attracted?  What’s the answer to “How to keep a marriage magnetized?”
 
People are not permanent magnets. We do not just naturally hold onto our charge in a relationship. We must keep electricity running through us so we can keep our magnetism pulling us together.
 
 An electromagnet is made from a coil of wire that acts as a magnet when an electric current passes through it but stops being a magnet when the current stops.
 
At first it seems like our relationship is more like permanent magnets than electromagnets. We are pulled together without even trying. The attraction just seems to happen and we accept it as fact, but there is a vital element available in a new attraction that wears off over time without an intentional electric current shooting through your coils.
If you want your coils to stay attracted to his or her coils for years to come, the essential electric thought you must keep flowing through your mind so that your bodies will attract is this:
I’M SO LUCKY TO HAVE YOU & YOU ARE SO LUCKY TO HAVE ME.
 
The more time you spend counting the ways your spouse is awesome and how lucky you are to have them, the more humbly grateful you will feel for your relationship. Equally important is the time you spend realizing how awesome you are and how lucky they are to have you, because this gives you confidence.
HUMILITY + CONFIDENCE […]

By |October 8th, 2014|Love and Making It, Uncategorized|5 Comments|
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I Dare You to Look

I DARE YOU TO LOOK.
 
I dare you to look in the mirror and see beauty; see a face that God loves and made.
God loves your face. You are allowed to love your face too.
 
There has been a lot written about fasting from mirrors. Good challenges have come from good people to help end our obsession with mirrors and just go throughout our days without looking at ourselves constantly. These challenges can have important freeing effects for us as we try to stop obsessing about our flaws, but the mirror and the looking is NOT the problem. It’s always the motivations behind the actions that matter. 

 
We may fast from mirrors as a way to realign ourselves with the issues inside these bodies – the issues in our souls about worth and narcissism and the tension-filled dance we all move through each day…
 
We may fast from “looking” at ourselves so that the next time we look, we look with love and acceptance instead of obsession and self-loathing…
 
But we do not fast from mirrors because looking at ourselves is somehow less holy or less healthy than ignoring our outsides. It is not shallow to love your surface area.
 
In this culture, where a specific kind of beauty is power, there is nothing more Jesus-like or revolutionary than loving YOUR OWN face, no matter how it compares to anyone else’s. This is the upside down kingdom of God – where everyone is beautiful, even you. (Even if you don’t believe in God, trusting in the abundance and beauty of all people is powerful.}
 
Looking at your own face as a spiritual practice is a powerful rebellion.
 
I dare you to look in the mirror and LOVE your face.
 
Love your face, not […]

By |April 6th, 2014|Beauty SOS47|2 Comments|
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God is here

God, when I sit in this room, I can feel both alone and the opposite of alone.
I can be aware of the table and my coffee. I can feel the air moving in and out to my nose. There is a chair beneath me and a black cat walking back and forth around it all.
I can choose to be aware of You, too: The I Am, The Presence. The One who is always here. I can choose to feel you in that air and in my bones.
God, when I sit in this room, I can feel both alone and the opposite of alone.
I can choose to see you as separate from me. In this way, you are here and yet different from the Me I consciously know. You are a loving relationship that requires space between us. I pray and you come. I request and you give.
I can also choose to see you as essentially in me. In this way, you are here as surely as I am here. You are a loving Presence in my cells that requires a connection with my own mind and body. Here, to love myself is to be loved by you. Here, to accept the body I am in, is to accept that this body is Us. Here, to pray for peace is to know that the peace is here waiting to be accepted already in my guts. To ask you to be with me would be like asking myself to go hang out sometime.
You are here. You are more here in and with me and available to me than my own thoughts and emotions and needs. You are the beautiful, quiet option that I don’t always know […]

By |January 13th, 2014|Beauty SOS47, Free Flying Faith|0 Comments|
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Naked Truth

Love and Making It is a series about wholeness and love, even more than it is about sex. Since sex is really about wholeness and love, anyway.
This post contains pictures of partial nudity.  This is a simple warning. Now you may proceed as long as you are over 18-years-old.

**** 
****
After adultery.
After years of secrets.
After hard choices.
There is still hope and healing.
When you need a reminder that miracles are possible through love and perseverance, return here and see.
****
The Story:
After ten years of marriage, a husband and wife each committed adultery.  It took them six more years to tell each other everything and come clean.  Instead of running… instead of fighting each other to the death… they decided to fight FOR each other.  Now, they are still married and choosing every day to focus on how to heal rather than the wounds of the past. This is not everyone’s story, but this is theirs. 
 
In this guest post conceived by my dear friend, Jennifer Upton (in partnership with her husband, Tony, and a talented photographer named Kathryn Nee), we see another side of intimacy. We see what it looks like to let yourself be loved despite history, despite failures, despite self-doubt.
This is what it looks like to fight FOR your covenant love. This is what it looks like to allow words of affirmation and adoration to seep into your skin… the skin you didn’t think could be forgiven or beautiful or chosen ever again.
 
Words, truths, finally becoming part of YOU – seeping down deep into your heart.  Forgiveness. Beauty. Love.
 
Below are pictures of Jennifer as her husband writes words on her skin.  This entire process was not easy for Jennifer, but it has been holy and sacred and used […]

By |November 29th, 2013|Beauty SOS47, Love and Making It|26 Comments|
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3 Things to do to Make Holiday Moments Matter

Because, it’s the holidays. Thanksgiving is almost here. Christmas too. And we know who we are…
What I thought would be a short post about the holidays for a link-up with an amazing spiritual leader and director, Tara Owen, has become a mission statement.  I refuse to see failure or stress in moments that I didn’t think worked out “right”.  The wrongness does not make the moments worthless. Only my attitude can make them worth-more or worth-less.  
Keep reading if you want to join me!
Because, it’s the holidays. Thanksgiving is almost here. Christmas too. And we know who we are…
 
We are moment makers.
We plan and we dream. We buy ornaments and the perfect decorations; not from Pottery Barn (ok, maybe one thing), but even better than that. We find each piece of our decor all over the city… some at Michaels, Target, Ikea, save-on-crafts, Hobby Lobby … we arrange, we find, and we organize. We make treats and we pray over them when we remember to take the time. We want to create the perfect Christmas Season full of a love our families and friends and OURSELVES can feel. We want to feel it! We want it to soak into our bones in every possible way.
We light candles to remember the light. I have candles. Oh, I love them so much!** My favorite ones are discontinued. I can’t find them anywhere. And when I burn through the last two I have, there will be no more Christmas or Jesus in the world.
We listen to music, we make smells, we bring out the soft blankets and warm boots. We read scripture. We make lots and lots of plans to see every person possible because we love […]

By |November 18th, 2013|Free Flying Faith, Honest Home|2 Comments|
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Jealousy Remedy

 

The Interwebs of Jealousy.

The more active you become online the more overwhelming it can become. I look at Pinterest and the world of blogs and it sure seems like there’s a huge movement of women and men taking it upon themselves to be amazing.

Let’s take just one topic, for instance: FOOD

“Talented Girl’s” evening…
Organic, home-grown, or farmers-market-bought produce… fresh salads, home-made salad dressing… and for dessert she grinds up those almonds herself to make that almond butter and drizzle in dark chocolate made from local, small-farm ingredients. Oh, and, side-note, when she purchased the block of chocolate, she also somehow helped save starving children in Guatemala. She took crisp-focus pictures from multiple angles at every step of the process and put it all on Pinterest, Tweeted it, posted it on her Blog, and on Instagram too – ending with a beautiful picture of beautiful kids in a beautiful backyard under homemade bunting.
Oh, the foodporn! Oh, the earth-helping, child-saving glory!!
Delicious. Real food. Made from scratch with no processed ingredients. I am beyond jealous. Not only do I WANT the food in my mouth but I also want to have made it, grown it, taken such pretty pictures of my creation that others pin it repeatedly, and written eloquently about it all so someone else (NOT ME) could be jealous.

 

well…

I guess I could take pictures of the Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken we ate last night. I could take a picture as I pull it out of the TJs freezer it grew in. I could talk about how the cold bag kept my ice cream from melting in the car. I could take extreme close-ups with my phone as I rip open the bag with my bare […]

By |June 28th, 2013|Free Flying Faith, How Can I Help|4 Comments|
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Spring and Summer

My daughter is at her last day of preschool. This is an incredibly big deal to the cells in my body. I feel them shrink today in preparation. Outside the hustle of the moment, quiet inside myself, I see her – all spunk and 5-year-old skin. I watch the families around me carrying babies, smiling, correcting, juggling – the ones in the middle.

This is the end of a huge season of my life. This season of spring. Our Spring. The beginnings of life.
SPRING

Spring: Getting to love Miracles up close and have their love in return.

Spring: Feeling incredible pain and holding on for dear life to the factual importance of love. 
Spring: Seeing cherubs crawl around my living room, rolling in clean clothes and pulling the cat’s tail.
Spring: Experiencing love with all five sense.  Singing through chores, tears kissed on lips, sleepy hugs, hearts made with whole hands.
Spring: Spending months lost in a tornado of messiness and full-out joy, tantrums and hysterical laughter.
Spring: Knowing Tiny things matter.  Errands. Dishes. Smiles. Hope. Fingers, toes, touches, breath.
 

I will miss, miss, miss, miss these little years. Everywhere I went, whether I could see it at the time or not through sleepy eyelids and Starbucks hangovers, a community of babies and new moms and toddlers supported me. Smiles from strangers. Doors held open for strollers. Reassuring eyes making soft contact with mine while screams rang in my ears.

I hold the last 8 years as gently as I can in these desperate hands. They are a gift I struggled to appreciate completely. It is exhausting trying to keep multiple emotionally turbulent people alive all day long. Days felt like eternity, serious eternity, but the months went by in a […]

By |June 11th, 2013|Honest Home|2 Comments|
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