Real Life Reflections

We all have bad days, right? You're sick or running late or you have an accident or a flat tire (or maybe all of the above and then some?). Sometimes a bad day is as simple as getting bad news - news that doesn't stop with just the saying of it, the fact of it. Bad news that isn't just a statement but news that reaches into the heart and changes the scenery, colors the way you see things, makes you look into the future and see that your life will look different from here on out because of it. News that catches you by surprise and changes what you thought would always be, changes the status quo of your life. I got news like that recently. Then a few days later, I received a totally unrelated phone call the purpose of which was to rake me over the coals, make sure I knew how badly I'd screwed up. A few days after that, I got a letter from the IRS informing me that the organization for which I work and am responsible for much of the accounting and human resource complian...

Life is teeming with reminders of our need for God. Take today for example: I'm exhausted. I have this ridiculously sensitive body rhythm, and I messed it up yesterday. I went to St. Louis with a mother and daughter. The daughter is strongly considering an extended stay in Burkina Faso as a missionary. So the mother/daughter team that have been there/done that spent the day with the mother/daughter team in the early stages of going there/doing that. It was a great time. Ami and I both enjoyed sharing our experiences, and by their own admission, the time was profitable for the other mother and daughter; but for me, to talk for a full eight hours is waaaayyy past my conversation limit. "Conversation limit?" Yep. Conversation limit. A previous boss used to cite some statistic about how many words an average woman speaks each day as compared to the average man. He'd see me talking and joke that I hadn't reached my quota for the day. My quota, however, is much lower ...

My husband and I talked about parenting last night. We've been at it for a little over twenty-eight years. What I never expected was the constant change, constant adjustments that parenting requires of you all your life. As your child(ren) grow and move into different seasons of their life, so your parenting moves into different seasons and has to adapt. If we treated our twenty-eight and twenty-five year old children the same way we treated them when they were five and two and a half, we would be sorry parents indeed (and our kids would be even sorrier!). The past few years I've learned that now, more than ever before, I don't know what I'm doing as a parent. Fortunately, I no longer have to concern myself with preparing them to be responsible, independent adults. Unfortunately, this is where the problem comes in. I haven't figured out how to adapt to this stage of parenting. In their formative years, I knew what I had to do, my job was clear (although the best ...