My voice is hoarse from too many days of shouting too many directions too many times to students who should for sure know better. I am tired, and just trying to get my girls to bed on time. Christian is out-of-town and this solo parenting thing, even for just three days, is hard.

Beautiful, beautiful, Jesus is beautiful.

Instead of melodic I just belt loud. Loud and forceful is all I’ve got left. Nuanced has never been my strength anyway. The kids join me getting the words wrong. I am surprised by the catch in my throat and the tears in my eyes. I have forgotten that this too is holy ground.

Jesus makes beautiful things of my life.

I think of Holy ground in dark auditoriums, hands raised for the Lord. In quiet moments with a hot cup of tea, my Bible open in front of me, proud of myself for managing to get up before everyone else. I think of conferences where I hear words from the Lord and moments at night where I can practically feel His arms around me.

Carefully, touching me. Causing my eyes to see.

I am learning that this too is holy ground. This chasing the naked babies around the circle, wrestling them into their pajamas, being so bone tired you can feel your eyelids trying to shut. Jesus doesn’t wait for a conference or an auditorium to make my life beautiful. He meets me on my kitchen floor, screaming children and wet diapers, and bedtime battles and Jesus.

Jesus makes beautiful things of my life.

My life. He makes beautiful things of my life. Holy ground is everywhere. Jesus isn’t waiting to make beautiful things of my life. Right here. Right now. Let me take off my shoes. This too is holy ground.

My word for the year is unashamed. It has been wonderful, and freeing, but it has been real. Walking around unashamed is hard some days. What has been so surprising to me is how powerful the me too has been. Over and over again this year I admit something I have been carrying around with shame and the overwhelming response is me too. I struggle with that too.

Every time I publish THAT on the INTERNET someone emails or comments, me too. And I am loving the feel of freedom for me, for my readers, for my friends.

Today, in the spirit of unashamed, I am posting for my friend Nicole Romero’s Love and Making It series. The way that Nicole talks about beauty, bodies, and sexuality is wonderful. I am learning so much from her. I am honored (and a little nervous) to be discussing sex, and more specifically my hang ups with sex even after nearly ten years of marriage.

So, if you are prone to being shocked and a little embarrassed about the things I have posted in the past, you may want to skip this one. If not, you can join me over at Nicole’s place. Be forewarned I went there. I am proud of myself for that.

“I’m wearing my unicorn socks for you today. In the Church of Rock and Roll this is how we pray.”

She doesn’t pray, my friend who has lifted the cuff of her corduroy pants to show me the socks I gave her on her birthday, peeking above her black boots. Not in the ways that I learned, she does not fold her hands or bow her head. She does not recite words that others have recited before her. She sees her saints live in concert. She doesn’t pray, but she wears unicorn socks in solidarity. To me, it feels like being prayed for .

Sometimes we pray with our feet, with our socks, with anything that takes us outside of ourselves and puts us with the suffering of another.

I drew birds on myself. I drew practice birds on my wrist the day before and real ones on my collar-bone. I snapped a picture of it and posted it to Facebook and Instagram. I think I tweeted it too. My dear friend Beth is celebrating the anniversary of the stillbirth of her daughter Eve. I don’t have words that make this okay. I don’t have theology that makes this less painful. Instead I join the many women who are marking the remembrance of our friend’s daughter on our skin. We claim her pain as beauty and we wear it. It feels like prayer to me.

I’m good at praying out loud, at praying in public. I am good at fancy words falling out of my mouth, at pausing at the right times. I was raised in the church and trained on the speech team. I speak the language.  I have a lot of words. Lately those words have been falling short. Sometimes there just aren’t any.

Your baby died before you ever got to hold her. You are wondering if your husband will live the rest of his life as a widower. Your dreams did not work out the way you thought they would. I don’t have words for those things anymore. I am tired of placing a band-aid of words over a gaping wound. This life is so desperately tragic sometimes.

But slowly, I am learning. I am learning to sit in the pain, with those who are suffering. I am learning to find the deep and aching beauty in the ashes, rather than sweeping them quickly to the side. Ashes, if you let them lie, can lead to fertile ground. I am learning this doesn’t always come with words. I am learning there are other ways to pray.

I don’t often write about stay at home moms. I suppose there are a lot of reasons why.

1. I am not one.

2. There are already a ton of people writing about that well.

3. When people google motherhood devotional, there are pages and pages of things that pop-up. When people google working-mother devotional, I am the first hit. Not because I am super important, just because there is a lot of silence on the issue.

But lately, those reasons have sounded more like excuses. I think sometimes in my defense of the christian working mother, I leave in the dust those who are called to stay at home. My adamant shouting of “We are called outside the home too!” leaves out my sisters and brothers who aren’t. Those who have been called to stay at home, who the Lord has called to the carpooling and the room-moming and the diaper changing and the fit defusing. I want to make sure that you know this: Yours is a holy work. It is hard in the trenches of toddler tantrums and baby feeding. It is hectic in the call to home school, or carpool.

This parenting thing is not for the faint at heart and I know sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but You are called to this. You are called to this. If God has you here, then you are called to it. May the Lord remind you of just how good you are at all of this today. There is a lot to do. You are doing it, and you are doing it well.

Please, do not underestimate the blessing that you are to your children, your spouse, your friends. I would not have made it through my first year of motherhood if not for the kindness, the wisdom, the dinner from my friends called to minister from their homes. I would not have been able to make it through this week, except I have some very generous stay at home friends who return my phone calls with “your girls are always welcome here.”

Yours is not a lesser calling. Staying at home is not something that God calls women and men who are less capable of anything else to do. Who knows the reasons for the seasons in our lives (though I think toddlers and teenagers are both seasons to humble us). And yours is not a greater calling. Mothering is holy work for sure, but putting it on the pedestal of holiest and highest has only served in making me unsure and insecure, defensive and defeated. How in the world are you supposed to admit you failed miserably at your own highest calling?

We are equally called you and I. Your work is holy too. There is plenty of room at God’s banquet table, and I am sorry it has taken me this long to pull out your chair.

Editors Note: if you get these delivered to your email box, you likely got an earlier version of this, not quite done. One day I will figure out how to use my cellphone. That is what I get for blogging during church.

Oh how he loves us is being streamed in through the speakers as the band sings live. The words are on the screen but plenty of people have their eyes closed and their mouths moving.  These words are written on their hearts. I see the waving of hands, the swaying; they really mean it. Oh how he loves us.

I notice the t-shirt of the man on the drums. You call. I will go. I know he means that. It is a bittersweet noticing for me. I am sitting quietly in my chair unable to be swept up in the frenzy. I am just too tired. I have too many questions.I am too critical of the  words on the screen. I have seen too much brokeness this week. Is that really true? Do I really believe that? Does he really love us?

After the guitar and jembe are set down the pastor pulls an extra chair  up to the bistro table in the front. A woman from the congregation is invited to chair her story. What she thought was a back ache turned out to be pancreatic cancer. The statistics are grim, a 95 percent death rate for pancreatic cancer in the first year.

I suppose she could have given us the good talk we are all used to hearing from the pulpit. That God is good all the time, that he has met her mightily in this valley. Instead she tells the truth. How she is calling out to God in the middle of the night and all she gets is silence. How all she wants is to feel God holding her hand, and all she feels is an empty palm.

I think that was the holiest truth I have ever heard in church: I don’t feel God and I need to. I am angry at a God who has abandoned me. I am crying out in the wilderness.

I am grateful that I was at a service that had room for both, the frenzied hand raising, the brutal honest of what life feels like sometimes. We were invited to lay hands on this woman, to pray for her. This woman who opened her heart to us, bore her soul, allowed us to lay our hands on her and pray to a God that she can’t hear right now. I surrounded her hands with mine. I prayed she would feel the holding.

If that isn’t holy, I don’t know what is.

I was pretty much done in today. Christian leaves for the National Communication Conference next week. Last night we started doing the text/facebook/phone call asking that needs to be done when we need extra babysitting. I am very very lucky to have such great people in my life that are ready and able to watch my girls. But I still hate asking them. I know that being a stay at home mom is hard work without two extra kiddos. I know that the flex-day middle of the week time is precious to a working mom. If only I had made other choices I wouldn’t have to depend on these very generous people.

All of this plus a whole lot of big feelings about how the word called is often used as a sword when it should be a plowshare. It doesn’t take a genius to see the power structures at play when you look at the patterns of who gets called called. I mean the only thing the church has called me to is motherhood, and here I am calling around trying to put that on other women in my life….and I was fired up, and sad.

But then, but then my dear friend Esther told me she wrote something and it might be for me. And then I ugly cried at my desk. I don’t have to be called called by anyone other than the one who already did. Esther is brilliant. Just go read it. 

From Wikipedia: Wabi-sabi (侘寂^?) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”.^[1]

We went to a wedding yesterday, a beautiful wedding 2 hours outside of the city. The sun was shinning, the leaves were changing, The dying of the trees, it is exceptionally beautiful, isn’t it?

I had forgotten the girls jackets. I had remembered two jackets for myself and one for my friend, but I had managed to forget the jackets for either of the girls. It wasn’t cold yet, but it would be. The whole evening the girls didn’t seem to mind. Running and jumping and dancing, When they got particularly cold, they would sit in one of our laps and snuggle in. No jacket needed when you can tuck your arms into mommy and daddy, rub your red hair up their front like a cat.

My girls are still learning when it is appropriate to excercise their exceptionally large vocabularies. Juliet was narrating the entire wedding. Her exclamation at the appearance of the bride was perhaps inappropriate, but she was right. The bride was so pretty. And perhaps the promise of getting to go pet the goats after the ceremony was a bit too much. Repeatedly I was asked in a three-year-old whisper “now goats?” And the pronouncement of the bride and groom as an officially married couple was followed by a whoop from me, one from my three-year old, and a very loud and excited “NOW GOATS” Sure. Why not. First comes love then comes marriage then comes goats.

And suddenly we have a new phrase in our house to describe the happy freedom after the fancy formalities, to describe the little joys of a brownie or a mocha, or crawling into bed. Now, Goats. Yes we get to ride the train (now goats!) yes we can have candy after medicine (now goats!). I’m looking for the goats in my life. I want to say more often, NOW GOATS!

My husband and the little one didn’t make it through the whole ceremony. Quiet is a relative term and quiet enough for a wedding is not a volume level Priscilla has. Plus, when Christian scooped Priscilla up, her soaked through diaper soaked through her leggings and both of his shirts. I left Juliet with a trusted friend and found a gleeful and naked legged toddler thrilled that she got to play in the front seat. Wabi-sabi. This mis-hap was easily Rilla’s favorite part.

It was probably close with the dancing and the goats and the hotdogs for dinner, but Juliet’s favorite thing seemed to be the sawdust covering the floor. Initially, I asked her to stay out of it. But come on, we were in a barn. Their dresses were totally washable, and it did look fun. She buried her feet and her legs, she threw it in the air, and the girl’s hair and dresses were speckled with saw dust, and so was I after they crawled back into my lap to warm their naked arms up. I love the smell of sawdust. It looked like confetti in their hair. We were celebrating after all.

You, hey you, yeah. The one who stayed up too late grading papers/working on your presentation/answering overdue emails/filling an order/finishing your presentation.

You! Yes you! I am talking to you the one who vacuumed/packed lunches/did dishes/folded laundry/chose the family heath insurance plan when your body was begging you to just go to bed.

I know what your weekend plans may look like. Maybe there are birthday parties and soccer games and dance classes and swim lessons that have already been committed to. Maybe there are houses to be cleaned and meals for the week to be made and groceries to be bought and leaves to be raked. Maybe there is still more work in the they-pay-me-to-do-this sense. Maybe there is Mount Saint Laundry that hasn’t been folded in three weeks waiting to be folded and put into drawers. (Of course that last one is purely hypothetical.

You, hey, YOU! I know you have apologized what feels like a few thousand times this week. Becuase dinner wasn’t done. Because the birthday present wasn’t bought, because the email was late. Because you were just. too. tired. I know you want to cry everytime you have to say your sorry. I know you want to apologize for that too.

This weekend. THIS WEEKEND, not some imaginary future weekend that you promise yourself you are going to get to. Take your to-do list and cross as much out as you can. Feed the kids grilled cheese and raw apples for a few days next week. They will love it, and they will survive. Give the birthday boy cash instead of running through Target like a crazy person. 5 dollars is a windfall to a 5 year old. Then on the top and between every other thing that cannot be crossed off write this:

BREATHE. In. Out. BREATHE.

Go to bed early. If it makes you crazy go ahead and clean the house tonight, but if you can relax amidst the mess leave the legos under the couch and just breathe instead. (Turn your phone off, that helps).

The reason this all-the-things life feels totally impossible is because it IS totally impossible. We aren’t supposed to do it all. Doing the best you can is more than enough. You are doing this. We are doing this. Imperfectly but beautifully we are running this race.

It is Friday. Order your family a pizza, cut yourself a break. You really want to make it special, light some candles if you have them (but do not go to Target to get them. This weekend let it be one less thing) or throw some towels on the living room floor and call it a picnic. If no one spills sauce on them, fold them back and pretend they are clean.

Then breathe. Just breathe together. You are doing this thing, and you are doing it well, and it is time we celebrated that.

I used to think that the Jesus parts of me and the feminist parts of me, that they could co-exist like toddlers play with blocks. They could be in the same space, they could share some of the same stuff, but they didn’t work together, they weren’t interested in the same things.

I used to have my thoughts about this world and a womans place in it. I used to learn about how the world systematically tells women that they aren’t enough, and they are never going to be enough. I used to be horrified at the statistics about women in this world, underfed, undereducated, undervalued. I use to have all these thoughts and feelings I still have today, but they were in a box marked “feminism.” These wrongs were wrongs that feminists care about, this brokenness was one that feminists taught me. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the box marked Jesus.

I used to have my thoughts about this world and how God walks in it. I used to look at the brokeness and beg God to redeem it. The children starving,  the lack of water and education,  the depravity in this world. I used to stand in worship and cry out in the darkness, weep over the brokeness of this world. I knew that Jesus cared about these things.I knew that He was broken over it too. I know your kingdom is coming Lord, but isn’t it supposed to be here?

Still, I didn’t put the pieces together. I didn’t understand. I still thought there were seperate pieces that perhaps didn’t contradict each other, but certainly did not go together.

I started noticing the women of the Bible, (more acurately the Holy Spirit pointed them out to me) specifically the women of the gospel. I started noticing how deeply Jesus loved women. He touched them, he taught them, he called them whole.

And suddenly all the pieces fit together. These two tiny block towers merged into a great block castle. Jesus was a feminist. He acted on the assumption that women were fully people. And that is how we fight the darkness of the world. All of it. We look each other in the face. We declare each other enough. We see women as whole and fully capable, as made in God’s image too. The feminist ideas came so easily to me, because Jesus had already shaped my heart toward redemption.

Of course I am a feminist. Jesus was. I just want to be like Him.

The amazing Sarah Bessey birthed a book appropriately titled Jesus Feminist. I cannot wait to get my hands on it. We are celebrating her book launch with a synchro-blog. Join me?