grace in miscarriage, part two

[Disclaimer: This post is fairly long (for me) and personal. Maybe to the point of overshare. Like the first post, my goal here is not to describe the general experience of miscarriage, but rather to bring it one more small step into the light. By sharing my story I hope to make it easier for a few other women to share theirs... Even better if it is helpful for women who haven't yet had miscarriages, but statistically may eventually do so. If this doesn't sound like your thing, I'm not even a little offended if you head back to whatever you were doing before.]

It's been a couple months now since my miscarriage and, while it was important to talk about it as it happened, I've learned a lot since then. Here's some of that...

Grief can be slow.

I was basically numb for a couple of weeks. There was kind of a background sense of sadness, but mostly there was a sense that I had this weird dream that I was pregnant, but then I woke up. (My dream life is pretty active and vivid, so this is basically life as usual.)

There are lots of people who want to share their stories.

This was overwhelming, but in a good way. There seem to be lot of people who really want to share about their babies, but just need permission or an excuse to do so. (Even if you're ok talking about it and you ignore the cultural taboo surrounding miscarriage, it's not something that comes up frequently in conversation. It feels like a downer.) It was a beautiful and heartbreaking privilege to hear so many of you speak of babies that you miss.

People can be totally awesome at wholehearted compassion, given the opportunity.

I had this really terrifying realization the day after I shared the first post... I shared it Friday night, then Saturday I remembered I was singing on Sunday morning. Now, I love every second I get to help lead worship. But also, when I do, my mother-in-law watches my kids for the morning and brings them to the second service. So I'm there at both services without kids to chase (in this case, hide behind.) Usually, this is awesome. But this particular week, I was pretty anxious about the vulnerable, exposed feeling I anticipated. And, as one person pointed out, going public with a miscarriage could very well mean processing my pain with a lot of well-meaning but casual acquaintances... daunting for an introvert.

But do you know what? My church family is awesome. Kind and compassionate, not awkward or overwhelming. I hadn't shared it looking for support (which is funny, because that seems like an obvious outcome now), but support is very much what I found. As for processing with casual acquaintances, it turns out a lot of people I know (but not well) wanted to share their experiences in a really positive way. The general sense was, "here's what I experienced, it's hard, and it is going to be OK. You're not alone." 

Also? I found out (again) that worship is a really good antidote to self-consciousness. It turns out that when I'm focusing on the greatness of God, I kind of lose track of how vulnerable I'm supposed to be feeling.

Grief is worth looking for.

So here it gets messy. Brené Brown says in Gifts of Imperfection, "We cannot selectiely numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions." For a couple of weeks, I wasn't feeling sad, but I also wasn't feeling... anything. I started to panic that I was doing it wrong, what ever "it" was. So I went to see my therapist. We figured out a couple reasons why I was fighting the sad so hard.

First, it was easier to believe it wasn't really a baby. When I was  a teenager, I had a man in spiritual authority explain logically why babies- born and unborn- go to Hell if they die before receiving Christ. I have no recollection of why we were discussing this and I've long since come to believe otherwise, based on scripture and what I know of God's character, but the words were still there, ricocheting around my brain. (Don't get mad at him, that's so not the point. He was a good man trying to handle the Word accurately.) 

Then also, I had this thought (apparently a common one) that the reason I lost this baby was because I couldn't take one more right now. I had this story in my head that one more kid would push me over the edge into psychosis and I'd end up on national news after destroying my family in some horrible way. That being the case, this loss was God's gracious way of sparing my whole family (baby included) from some crazy trauma. It follows then that I should be thankful, not sad.

Sometimes I need someone to help me figure out what lies are circulating around in my head and point them out for what they are. I have an excellent, Jesus-loving therapist that can help me with that. (Ok, since the point of this is authenticity, I actually have two. But that's a whole 'nother thing.) I left her office crying. She apologized for that, but as far as I was concerned, it was a win. Once we found the lies ("it's not a baby, because if it were, it would be in Hell" and "I would go crazy and destroy my family") and corrected them (it is a baby and she's not in Hell and I'd have been a darn good mama to her), I was free to grieve. 

Sometimes grief looks like obscene laziness.

I cried some, but not much. But wasn't very functional. Six weeks. SIX WEEKS sitting on my recliner, basically. Every now and then I'd have a day where there was energy enough to do something, get out of the house, maybe clean something. We ate a lot of corn dogs and chicken nuggets. My internal response to every single thing that came to my mind to do, from cooking dinner to shopping to effectively training my children was "I cannot. I just can't even." My husband started getting groceries. (He keeps doing it, even though I could manage it myself now... Bless him. Shopping with three preschoolers isn't the easiest thing I've ever done.) 

But... sometimes depression looks like obscene laziness, too.

Another blessing of everyone knowing was that I periodically had people message me just to see how I was. One friend that I like but don't get to talk with a whole lot did this several weeks in... I gave her the line about grief looking like laziness. She responded, "It doesn't sound like laziness to me, from what little you said, I thought depression of sorts."

I laughed out loud.

Not because it was ludicrous, but because it was so obvious. If I heard anyone else talking like I was talking, all the bells would go off in my head, too! But it was me, so I didn't see it. And neither did the people who were in my life daily. It took someone outside the situation to point it out.

The way God decided to handle this ahead of time was fairly simple- I was already on an antidepressant for postpartum anxiety that showed up after #3 came. (Side note: That's a thing. And it's only just now getting any press, but it's apparently more common than postpartum depression, and, untreated, it sucks the joy out of everything.) The way it was written, I actually had some leeway to tweak the dosage a little while remaining compliant. So I did that. Shortly after that, I was back! Magic! It's not a forever thing, but it sure is nice to be able to show up to my life again. I'll take the support.

Hope really does make a difference.

Haha! Now it's a little confusing that we named this baby Hope. The hope I'm talking about right now is the hope of Heaven. It had been a long time since I'd had much drive to look very deeply at the reality of Heaven. And, honestly, it took a while to come around to it. But (again) a friend who'd been through it sought me out and we talked while our kids played and she talked in great detail about what she's learned about it, and the reality is, no matter how big and how great and how beautiful we imagine it, there's no way we will be disappointed. I mean, it's HEAVEN.

And it's not just my grand imaginations. Scripture has some pretty great stuff to say about the place, too. There's lots of light. Better than Fairbanks summers. Also, no more curse. It's spectacularly, unimaginably beautiful. Jesus is there. Heaven isn't the entire focus of my existence- that spot is ideally reserved for the God of Heaven, though saying so gives the false impression that I have anything that resembles an undivided focus. But I'd be lying if I said verses that involve it didn't hit me a little deeper these days.

The loss gives me the ability to fully "weep with those who weep." Sharing it gives me the opportunity.

A friend sent me this print not long ago. She's also experienced loss and she's one
 of many who has known how to grieve beside me.

Here it gets sad again... A few weeks after I lost Hope, my sister-in-law (who was so very supportive through my miscarriage) lost her first baby, a little guy they named Jeffrey. (She also decided to share her loss publicly and gave me permission to talk about it here.) Despite living thousands of miles from Amanda, the freshness of my experience gave me the opportunity to be fully, viscerally there. With some actual, useful information. (Side note: for some reason, very few of the mamas I've spoken with have gotten really good information from their doctors' offices about what to expect when you're no longer expecting. This is crap. The biggest source of information seems to be other moms who've been there.) I hate that we both lost babies. But, given that we did, I'm really grateful for God's timing and the ability to walk with her. 

God gives grace and redeems tragedies. And since he is redeeming mine, I can trust him to redeem hers, too. 

The prospect of another pregnancy is utterly terrifying.

For reals, yo.

What if I lose another? What will that do to my heart? What does that say about my body and the ability to carry more children? What if I keep this one? It feels like total betrayal to "move on" from Hope! I mean, she's mine! How can I possibly grieve her *and* be excited for #5 at the same time? I don't have a clue in the world how to hold both of those things at the same time. And I'm hesitant to be emotionally engaged with this pregnancy because the prospect of loving and losing another baby is so daunting. But also I want to be as "all in" as possible, in case I DO lose this one, so I can love it as long and as well as possible, however long that might be. 

(Yes, I'm pregnant. I figured I already broke the rule about talking about a miscarriage, so...)

Somehow pregnancy went from totally routine for me to reallyreally complicated. And that's kind of sad. I suppose it's good to have a more realistic view of my theoretical chances of miscarrying again, but mostly I hate that, on top of the standard scramble of emotions that usually goes with finding out I'm pregnant (Yay! We make awesome little people! and Oh, crap! What have we done?!?) there's all this other mess.

As before, I don't have a good, clear way to end this post. I'm still working that part out. Praying for grace and God's protection. Trusting that, however this winds up, grace will meet me there. 

refugees-in-quotation-marks

Um, guys? We need to talk.

Since the attacks on Paris last week, I've seen an alarming amount of talk about refugees-in-quotation-marks. How we can't let "those people" in or "they" will wreak the same kind of havoc here. In my circles, this opinion is being voiced by a minority, which is good. 

But that minority is from among those who vocally follow Jesus.

And since my blog is read mostly by friends of mine who follow Jesus, I'm going to talk to us for a minute.

Stop it.

JUST STOP.

For the love of the God who bought us at a very high price while we were still his enemies, we must stop.

Here are some Syrian refugees.

(source)

(source)

(source)

(source)

Oh wait. Nope, that last one is my kids. My little dude's brown eyes don't look so different from the eyes of those Syrian babies. 

And seriously? The thing that separates my babies from the ones above them is geography. That's really all.

You guys. According to WorldVision there are upwards of 4 million refugies and half are kids. My math degree came from UAF, but I'm pretty sure I can work this out... two. million. children. So of the 4 million, most  are families. Like mine. And yours.

So when we talk about refugees-in-quotation-marks, the sneering implication is that "refugees" is just a cover for "terrorists." As if these babies had anything to do with the carnage in Paris. 

If we're going to follow Jesus, we need to listen to what He says.  Here is what he didn't say:

Avoid risks at all costs. Insulate yourself from the possibility of danger. If that involves turning away millions of sheep to keep out a couple hypothetical wolves, by all means, do that. (Notinmybible 38:4-5)

You know what he did say?

(And here's where you DON'T get all sidetracked by the fact that not all of these were said by Jesus while he was on Earth... They're said by God. In the Bible. Jesus is God. Settle down.)

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. (Matthew 5:7)

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.  (Deuteronomy 10:18-19)

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

The LORD watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Psalm 146:9) 

 Love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:31, among others.)

[Important edit: In the interests of handling Scripture correctly, I have to note that none of these deal directly with American Christians being hospitable to Syrian refugees. The reason that I mention these scriptures is because they teach us something important about God's heart- He is FOR those who are in need and have been mistreated, both of which describe the Syrian refugees.]

These are people. Made in the image of God. They need him. As his followers, it is absolutely despicable for us to tell them, "we don't want your kind 'round here." Because your kind is our kind.

Are they all good people? Nope. None of them are. Neither am I. Do they deserve grace? Um... No. Did you get the part where it's called grace? Do they need Jesus? Absolutely. So do I.

Now, I get it. There are all kinds of very real questions here. And I'm just a mama. I don't pretend to have all the answers.

Can the US absorb 4 million refugees? Of course not. But it can absorb some.

Will there be economic consequences? Yes.

Is security an issue? Yes. Of course it is. But almost all of these people are running away, at  great peril in the fleeing, from people who are terrorizing them. 

Yes, most of them are Muslim,and the terrorists are terrorizing in the name of Islam. But the fact that they are Muslims and the terrorists are Muslims does not mean that they are terrorists. That kind of logic is ignorant crap. 

And do you realize that Jesus loves them like he loves you? That he paid just as high a price that they might come, too? How can we possibly show them his love while curling our lip at these refugees-in-quotation-marks?

We cannot claim to be followers of Jesus while outright rejecting millions of people, millions of children, who are made in his image. 

magical dream wishcards

This is not a beat-up metal "purse" full of dud photos. These are magical dream wishcards.

I sometimes order prints willy-nilly. When they're a penny each, sometimes it's just easiest to order them all and figure it out later. That's what I did last month. I ordered a couple hundred prints from the last TWO YEARS and then sorted them for distribution when they arrived. (Side note: this is not a good way to handle this. My new process involves uploading just a few from each month that I actually want prints of. But I hadn't realized that when I was uploading photos in November of 2013. Oops.) 

Anyhow, I pulled a reasonable number of pictures I wanted to send to the handful of places I wanted to send them and was left with this huge stack of leftovers. They're still good pictures, but I have no plans for them, so when the girls asked if they could play with them, I just shrugged and said ok.

They came up with a number of fun and interesting things to do with them, but a few hours later, J started talking to me about "magical dream wishcards." I figured she was talking about the prints, but I wasn't sure what, exactly, I was supposed to do with them.

"Mom. I turn all these cards upside down. You pick one and look at it. Then you take it to bed with you and you try and dream about it! And if you start to dream about something else, you just... you push it out of your head with the right dream!"

And it hit me...

Any one of these couple hundred pictures would make a reasonable dream. 

I picked one where I was introducing the girls to their brother. But it could just as easily have been one of J and her dad at the zoo. Or K at the museum. Or that one time they were decorating cookies with a friend. Or their brother making a silly face. As far as my four-year-old is concerned, any one of these would make a great dream. Far better than some of the scary ones she deals with on occasion.

I know these photos represent a highlight real of sorts. Not that all of the pictures are of the big moments- most of them are downright mundane. (Lots of pictures of kids in high chairs. Because they're happy and they're sitting still.) But they're at least relatively happy- I don't tend to take a lot of shots of my kids in time-outs or throwing tantrums or sticking their faces in pubic toilets. Mostly because I'm too busy in those moments to bust out the big camera and document them, but also... who wants to relive that? 

But at the same time, what if my kids' memories work a little like that? 

What if your people's memories worked a bit like that?

Nostalgia can be a bit that way, right? So maybe it's not out of the question...

I tend to be pretty hard on myself, in general. All I can see is the times I spoke a bit too sharply or wasn't so present with my kiddos because I needed to check out from all the incessant words for a minute (or thirty.) So when I look at our life together as a whole, I sort of assume that that's what they'll remember, too. And this month has been a doozy... a miscarriage and all the ways that's affected my mothering in the weeks since. A car accident (everyone's fine, car's functional) and all the hours of insurance phone calls that the kids have had to wait through. I haven't been at my best.

But my firstborn's magical dream wishcards make me wonder... 

What if she sees our life that way? What if it's pretty much all the things that happy dreams are made of? What if she's gonna be ok and my shortcomings won't send her to years of therapy? I mean... not that I shouldn't call my sin what it is and walk toward holiness, but what if there's enough grace to cover my failings? 

What about you?

What things do you tend to be hard on yourself about? 

What if your people paid less attention to that than you did? What if they just see you? Showing up, loving them, doing what you do? 

What kinds of magical dream wish cards might they be carrying in their heads and hearts? (Snuggles? The way you sing in the car? When you remember their favorite thing and provide it at the right moment? The time you met them for lunch? That time you went on a field trip with them?) You love your people. They can tell. These little moments matter, probably more than we realize.

Give yourself a little bit of grace today, ok?

...in which we discuss that which is always kept quiet.

I'm in a really weird mood and I'm about to overshare in an obnoxious and rambling way. Please feel free to skip.

So... I joined a club this week, I guess. Unfortunately. It's not the club I wanted to join, and most of the members are silent. 

I had a miscarriage. (Am having a miscarriage? I'm not familiar enough with it to know exactly how the verb tense works with the timeline.) And I'm looking around, knowing the stats that say 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies end this way, and it's a weird and silent place to be in, knowing I'm not alone, but knowing very, very few of the others who have been here before.

Why is it so quiet? 

Where is everyone? 

I'm not judging my sisters who choose to deal with it privately. There are so, SO many reasons a woman wouldn't want to walk through this publicly... It hurts too much. There aren't words. There have been several and you just can't talk about it one. more. time. If that is you, I am so, so sorry. Please hear my heart here: if you need to work this out on your own with Jesus, please, please, don't feel any judgement from me.You don't owe me or anyone else any explanation at all.

But also... is everyone choosing to deal with it quietly, or are a lot of us just doing it because that's culturally how it's done? I feel like there's a weird veil of silence over the whole thing that's not just because so many of us want to process alone. 

I've kept three pregnancies (now four, I suppose) under wraps (sort of) until the magical mark of 12 weeks, because that's how it's done. 

Why? Well, in case it doesn't work out.

Ok, I totally don't want to announce a pregnancy at five weeks, lose it at six, then have people hearing about and congratulating me on my happy news while I'm trying to process the loss. One of my best friends walked that road and it was heartbreaking.

So I know why I choose to wait to share the news. But, now that loss has happened, why, again, do I feel I have to stay silent?

Culturally, it's no big deal, I suppose. "Just a lump of tissue." (It's only a baby after it reaches a certain size, perhaps. And only if the mom wants it. That makes sense, right?)

Nobody knows what to say.

It makes people uncomfortable.

Here's the deal. It happens. A lot. And not talking about it doesn't make it into something else, something more palatable, something that didn't happen at all. And this week, I have no bothers to give about the cultural norm that says "we just don't talk about it." 

I don't need your sympathy, but I suspect we would be better off if the people who wanted to share felt free to do so. So I'm going to.

So, sister, if you're out there, this is my story. You are not alone. Your story probably looks different than mine, and that's totally fine. Take the parts that are helpful and leave the rest.

I found out I was pregnant on a Saturday morning. It was a faint but unmistakable second line. 

It took me the whole day to even start wrapping my head around it.

A baby. I love babies. But I HAVE a baby. And he's still... a baby. So, [mental calculations] we're looking at end of April. So... 17 months and change between the youngest two. That's the same as the gap between the girls. So... that's insane. We. are. insane. Also? Four carseats will not fit in the Ridgeline. I'm going to have four children before the first even starts kindergarten. One-way ticket to crazy town. Wait. My due date is like a day after the Weekend to Remember. I'm going to drive to Anchorage and work really hard at 39 1/2 weeks. I had like a week and a half of increasingly convincing false labor with #3. That could be really disconcerting driving 360 miles, twice, in week 40. 

On and on it went, my brain doing a thousand different calculations to wrap my itself around this baby's place in my nearish future.

But, at the end of the day (and I do actually mean the literal end of that Saturday), I'd come to land squarely on gratitude for this gift and a sort of nervous excitement.

Tuesday, I decided to test again, hoping for a less faint second line, so I could tell a few family members about it. Negative. What? Negative again. Hmm... Chemical pregnancy? Early miscarriage? Highly unlikely false positive? Or slightly more likely false negatives? Later in the day, I took one for reasons I'm still not sure of, and it was positive. No, really. What?!? Obsessive as I am, this led to a weird ritual of testing a couple times every second or third day, with mixed results. I was very, very tired of holding emotional space open for either outcome. Come the following Tuesday, I was getting all negatives (including an officialish one at the birth center. Same technology, but administered by professionals, so I somehow have more faith in it. Not sure why.) It was over. I talked with a midwife about what to expect when I'm suddenly NOT expecting.

I carried a dead baby inside of me for at least several days. It was weird. Sad. Disturbing.

Thursday, ten days after I found out about the littlest, my body decided to let baby go. 

Somehow, that isn't better.

And I'm sad. It's not the soul-crushing grief that I expected, the grief I've experienced in empathy with friends over the years.

And that fact leads to a fair bit of guilt. (I firmly believe this baby is an actual human person, not just tissue. But apparently, emotionally, I've absorbed the cultural belief that it's not a person yet. What kind of Jesus-follower am I?!? A crappy one, that's what.) (I totally don't believe that. My head is a jerk and I wind up feeling irrational guilt over stuff like this sometimes.)

There's relief. Certainly NOT relief at the loss, but it was so very taxing to have to hold on to both "He gives" and "He takes away" in the same moment, for the same baby. So there was some relief just in knowing. {Insert more guilt.}

And I'm still living inside my crazy and beautiful life where my kids are running around half-naked, screaming like banshees about having crayon stuck in their teeth. (True story.) And that sort of helps. Rather than crushed, I'm numb, sad, distracted. And tired. So very, very tired. Thankful for the healthy babies I have. Thankful, somehow, that I knew about this one. (For various reasons, it would have been really easy for me to not know about the littlest one at all.) But also, this morning I was looking at my baby boy's toes, and realized that the little one we lost was just a little smaller than his pinkie toe, and I won't ever get to smooch his little sweet self. Somebody actually did die. 

And here's where I come to an abrupt and awkward end. 

Because that brings us more or less to now. 

I don't have anything neat to tie it up. I don't have any big perspective or any reason why this generally applies to you. It probably doesn't. I hope it doesn't.

Well, actually, it does apply to you, at least a little. Can we make a little room for this discussion? Be willing to hear and be a safe space for a friend? I'm thankful beyond words for the people in my life who have been that safe space for me for the last little bit. (I'm sure your job isn't over!) 

As far as my story goes, as always, there is grace enough.

There's grace enough for the relief and the sad and the numb and the distracted and the thankful. We're OK. God is big. He gives and takes away. Blessed be his name.

the simply tuesday of anniversaries

One of my favorite things of late has been the celebration of the ordinary Tuesday. Emily Freeman talks about Tuesdays as the smallest day of the week. And every week, there's a little party on Instagram where a bunch of people snap pictures of the ordinary beautiful and we all enjoy each other's small moments. (Here's #itssimplytuesday. At the moment, the feed isn't entirely representative of normal, because Emily has a book coming out soon-hooray!- and her launch team got it this week, so there are a lot of shots of that. It's still lovely and wonderful and good for a smile.)

Today, Andrew and I celebrate eleven years of marriage.

Oh, how I love that man.

Before "selfie" was a word. This a little bit past our first anniversary. I had to scan the thing in, because we're old and the first several years of our marriage were photographed on film.

And these later, not-divisible-by-five anniversaries feel a little like Tuesday to me. There's no newness and no big round numbers. Last year, we celebrated ten with a four-day trip out of town. This year, it's a simple night away in town. (Somewhere. He's not told me where yet. The magic still lives.)

Please hear me clearly: I'm not complaining. 

Just like Tuesdays have become a favorite because of their ordinariness, I love the smallness of an eleventh anniversary. I love the fact that we've had enough years for there to be ordinary anniversaries.

Ordinary is where we live anyhow. 

It's the little things that make life and the little things that make a marriage.

Quiet not-quite-awake workday mornings.

Not-at-all quiet Saturday mornings, when the kids are up before we want them to be, and asking for Daddyday breakfast. (This man makes hash browns that have ruined me for any other hash browns, period.) Better get them fed before somebody gets hangry.

Holding hands in the dark while we try to stay awake long enough to pray together.

All those times I get thirsty right after I settle in to nurse a baby and he gets up to get me my water bottle. (Usually without snarkiness.)

More than half a lifetime's worth of inside jokes. (We were friends long, LONG before we got married.)

Talking in code or spelling to sneak stuff past our kids. "I was thinking we could go for I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M tonight after dinner. What do you think?" This is rapidly losing effectiveness. 

Companionable silence. 

Doing dishes. Lots and lots of dishes. Sometimes he, sometimes I, sometimes we. 

Brief back scratches in passing. 

The way he works around my BIG FEELINGS and I work around his sometimes-crazy schedule.

Reading each other's faces and tones.

Apologizing for misreading each other's faces and tones. 

Arguments about nothing. Or the same something eleventy billion times.

Lots of grace to cover (and frequently avoid!) arguments about nothing.

Choosing to be on the same side, over and over and over again.

Learning to give the benefit of the doubt.

Diapers. Thousands of them.

Rubbing off each other's rough edges.

Growing up together.


For better and for worse. Until death do us part.

This marriage thing. It's a good, good gift. By God's grace, we're getting better at it. We're living the dream, Andrew. I love our very ordinary life.

Mostly mundane.

blessing for insult

So I need to start out by saying I'm totally embarrassed to share this... I'm going to look kind of like an immature brat a few paragraphs from now. But... it's been something I've been specifically convicted to share since the beginning of this process (when I was being an immature brat, but before I realized it), so out of obedience, I shall.

(Because real blogs have photos, and I like this one. Oh! Wait! Pussy willows mean springtime here and springtime is all about new growth! This blog is about growth! It totally goes. See? Plus maybe if I stall you with a random picture, you'll miss the bratty part.) 

Last week, I mentioned that we recently got help out at Family Life's marriage conference. Part of the the volunteering gig includes actually going to the conference, and it's fabulous. Also, the material is more or less the same as it's been since I first went in 2004, and actually basically the same as it was when my parents first went in 1978. It's solid, biblical stuff, and I come away with new insights every time (because that's how the Bible is), but also, I've heard it a number of times, so occasionally I check out just a little. But every year, there are a couple of points that seem distinctly for me and for now. 

Last year, the big take-home was "blessing for insult." 

1 Peter 3:8-9 says:
8 Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. 9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult.On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. 

The idea as applied to marriage is that God's plan for communication includes paying back an insult with a blessing. (Actually, that's fair to apply to communication anywhere, but this was a marriage conference, so...) If my husband says something mean to me, I can choose to be kind in return.

So that was my big idea from 2014. 

Which I pretty much instantly forgot.

But God is patient and reminded me again. So we circle around again in 2015. 

Determined not to let it slide this year, I started kicking it around a bit and have continued to do so for the last two weeks. And you know what my thought was?

My husband almost never insults me. 

Now, he's not perfect. But he's a kind man and it's pretty rare that he spits out something that could be considered an insult, even when he's angry.
However... I happen to have a special ability to read insult into almost anything he says. It's a gift, really. Except the crappiest gift ever. 

So as I'm pondering this idea of returning a blessing for an insult, I started to wonder what I'm supposed to do with the fact that like 95% of the insults I hear from him aren't really insults. They're just him talking, and me being weird about it. Really. (Don't you wish you lived with me?) So I hear myself asking (I warned you that bratty was coming)... So... if he's not really insulting me, but I feel insulted, is blessing really the best way to go? I mean, if I bless him when he pseudo-insults me, he won't catch that I'm returning blessing for insult, he'll just assume that's the response he earned (after all, he wasn't being mean) and carry on his merry way. Sounds like a good way to encourage behavior that, while not malevolent, isn't very considerate. I mean, he's coming off really rude to ME! Plus, won't that build resentment in me, if I just keep being nice and he keeps being [sort-of-not-really] mean? 

Seriously, y'all. It was like a week and a half I was having this huge conundrum. Are you annoyed? Because I totally am. Here's the [completely obvious] truth that finally hit me:

Who the heck cares?

It's not my job to figure out at that moment whether or not he was trying to insult me. And anyway, how backwards is it to withhold kindness if he isn't?!? (...If it's not legitimate "evil," I apparently don't need to return blessing? Mmkay.)

So here we are. My huge, genius, lightening-bolt idea from Weekend To Remember 2015, just like 2014:

Blessing for insult. 

And we're counting anything that feels like an insult.

Now I'm not saying I'm going to be good at it. (Hon, are you reading this? No promises this is going to be as great as it sounds!) I am the girl who forgot for a whole year. And what, exactly, does blessing look like in this case? I have no idea, honestly. But I'm committed to doing my best. Every single time I remember. And because depending on my memory basically guarantees failure (see: 2014), I asked for a some backup from the Holy Spirit... Because He's all over this kind of thing.

grace extravagant

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of grace enough. Like daily bread and strength to match my days, grace sufficient for my various circumstances is sort of soothing. I named a whole blog for it, actually. 

You know what I'm not as comfortable with?

Grace extravagant. 

It feels... too much, sometimes. It feels awkward or something, receiving a huge gift that you can't reciprocate in any way. 

This happened last weekend. It was my favorite weekend of the whole year to start with... Every April for the last several years, my husband and I go down to Family Life's Weekend To Remember. We get there a day early, set up all the sound and stage stuff, then stay late to tear down on Sunday. It's a chance to get away, listen to great teaching on marriage, and to serve together (which we don't do nearly as often now that we have kids.) But this year, somehow it exceeded even my (rather high) expectations... In a million ways, big and small, God showed up and showed off and I spent a bizarre percentage of the weekend on the edge of laughter, dancing, and tears because we were having SO. MUCH. FUN. 

Just one example: this was our view.

I loved it. And I was (am) thankful for it. But also, there was an uneasy feeling. Unworthiness? Maybe. Probably. "Wow, thanks! ...But I don't deserve it." or maybe, "This kind of awesome should be reserved for someone who DOES deserve it." 

And at this point in my ponderings, I'm totally pierced.

OF COURSE I don't deserve it. Nobody does. That's why it's called grace. (And did I really use the word "reciprocate" earlier?!?)

But what of "grace enough"? 

I think I've gotten too comfortable with it. Too entitled to it. I seem to have forgotten that it's still grace, so I can't possibly deserve it. A fresh experience with over-the-top grace reminds me of this:

It's all over-the-top.

Common grace is extravagant. Sun and rain and baby giggles? He doesn't have to give any of that, but does. Because He loves us. 

Saving grace is REALLY extravagant. 

(I keep looking at a blinking cursor at the end of that sentence, waiting for something else to say, but there aren't words.)

Anything this side of Hell is grace.

... And now I'm back in my real life. Where it's ordinary. Where there's relentless noise and discipline issues and bodily fluids and a medical thing that has most of my right foot temporarily useless and do you KNOW how many things you need a right foot for? So I'm back in the place where I'm just asking for grace enough to handle this day, this situation. But I'm aware, in a fresh way, that sufficient grace isn't small grace, and now grace enough is overwhelming me the same way grace extravagant did.