Meeting in the Mornings

The conversation ran through my head over and over with the Lord as I sat for a few minutes this year cramming in the word and spending no more than 10 minutes in prayer throughout the day..."Lord, I know I need more time with you but there is NO WAY I can wake up before 6:30. I am with 3 wild little ones all day long and I am exhausted in the mornings. Lord, you made me and you did not make me a morning person. Lord, I just can't focus early in the mornings....The excuses went on and on...and then I went on a prayer retreat. To be honest I dreaded this retreat because I tend to feel that a whole bunch of women in one room praying can tend to be a bit dramatic and weird me out...but instead I was given hours with no children, with no distractions, with no interruptions...with the word of God and a list of questions to think on and let the Holy Spirit reveal deep sins buried in my heart.

..and then it hit me...real hard. I knew that the Lord had been calling me into a deeper time with him. I knew that I needed to wake up at 5:30 before anyone else in my house. I knew that I had been making excuses for years instead of stepping out in obedience in this simple area of my life. I DID NOT want to do it...but I knew that it was time to repent of my disobedience and turn from that. So I began this journey into early mornings with the Lord...

And it has been so beautiful! Just meeting with the Lord in the silence of my home when all are sleeping and peaceful. Being awake and in the word and prayer when my littles wake up so I can be happy to see them instead of angry that they are making me roll out of bed. Being able to begin the day with them focused and prayerful has been so amazing! Even more amazing is the fact that 5:30 has become so sweet that I am beginning to wake on my own without my alarm. I never believed this could possibly happen but I am so thankful for the gift of that time with the Lord...that time where He meets me in the quiet place. 

Dancing...

We have had Sara Grace for about 9 months now and it has been a wild ride! Today Levi took the boys to play tennis while sis and I stayed home. We cooked, we played with toys, and of course...we danced! As I was holding her in my arms spinning around, she started singing "Jesus" at the top of her lungs and laughing so hard she was crying...and time stood still. That moment where I realized that laughter, love, and Jesus all wrapped into a second would happen again and again and again in her life and mine. That moment where dancing, and cooking, and talking about nonsense were no longer a dream but a reality...that moment where I knew I was living the dream. It was so humbling to see the hand of the Lord in that moment reminding me that the days that go by where Sara Grace whines all day and I feel as if I could lose my mind...are worth it...that moment that reminds me to fall on my face and continue to plead with him to be the first thought in her mind, the first goal in her life, wait, not a goal...to be her whole life. the goals, the dreams and everything in between...may it all be Christ...and may her life be complete in and through Him every single day. So tonight my thoughts are full of dreams for her...dancing dreams, laughter dreams and dreams of her walk with Jesus...

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When you know that in less than 2 months your life will change forever

We are almost at the 2 month mark...In 1 month and a few days we will take 2 bags (one for Levi and I and one for the boys) that weigh less than 40 lbs a piece and board a flight for Thailand. We have a meeting there with our company but decided to meet some dear friends a few days early to reconnect. ( These were our closest friends in India and they moved 2 years ago. We haven't seen them since! ) We will be in Thailand for about 2 weeks and then we will say goodbye to our boys who will fly to America to have an amazing American summer (which they have never experienced) with the grandparents getting spoilt and having a blast. We will put them on a van for the airport (we have decided for Levi's mom's sake we will say our goodbyes before taking them to the airport. Airport goodbyes are way too hard for the boys and the ones carrying the boys away while they are screaming to stay) and head to China to pick up our little girl.

After being with her in China for 3 weeks, we head to America to get her US passport and for the whole family to get new visas to India. We pray that this is an easy process as many expats are having major complications getting back into India. So, we are advised to pack up our stuff (which we plan to do because we are leaving for the whole rainy season which means mold is sure to invade our home and we hope to keep it at bay with our clothes and linens by packing them in plastic bags and keeping them in the sunniest room in the house.

So, the past few days I have been packing cooking and freezing food for a Mississippi team that arrives at our house tomorrow... and dreaming. Because we don't live near any place to shop and we are going straight to America, we are letting Levi's mom get the clothes for the first few weeks (she has been so supportive and amazing) and then we will rely on the "hand-me-down" boxes of clothes from my sisters. (Our family does hand me down boxes...they are huge plastic storage containers labeled for girls sizes and boys sizes. My oldest sister just put all her hand me downs in them and then I used them for our boys, adding pieces here and there, and Emily used them for her girls. As the kids in the family increase, the hand me down boxes have been such a blessing and we are all benefitting from them!) Anyway, our house looks exactly the same. I have pulled out some baby toys but besides that you would never know that a beautiful little girl is about to enter our home.

I am spending several hours a day cuddling both boys but especially Tate who loves to be held and can't stand to see me sitting down without holding him. I know these cuddle times are so important because a new baby in the house means the expectations of our baby Tate are going to suddenly increase and baby Tate will be bigger in the moment that we realize what a baby really looks like again. I am taking mental pictures, writing down every funny phrase, playing ball, and shedding a tear or two as we say goodbye to life as a family of four. What joy awaits us! I am so excited about the future that lies ahead but new days dawning means that days are also done...and the days of holding the hands of "all" my kids as we walk down the road will never be again.

I spend my nights writing letters to the boys for the days we will be apart and trying to figure out how we are going to do this. I have never spent more than 3 days without these wild and crazy boys and there have been 5 days or more on numerous occasions where Levi was gone and it was too cold to get out and they have been the ONLY ones I have spoken to...for 5 days...the ONLY ones!!! Sometimes this isolation in my life totally blows my mind! haha They drive me crazy and there are many times when I tell myself "if only we had someone who lived near and I could just leave them for a couple of hours!" But the crazy thing is that I daily struggle with the idea of the weeks we will be apart and the only way to not cry about it is to dream of her. To dream of holding her, of the tears that are sure to fall from her face when she hears a language she is not used to, smells things she can't place, and sees a world that is so unfamiliar...then I think of holding her with Tate crying and screaming that she can't be with "his mommy" and Wyatt crying because he is hungry or wants me to play with him and I am quickly reminded that we are making the best choice to leave our wild ones with grandparents so we can focus solely on her.

So, needless to say our lives are so up in the air! we are packing our house in case we never make it back to India, we are leaving for months with 2 small bags and 2 carry ons for our family of 4, and we are leaving and adding a new addition to the family...I have to write lists upon lists of what I need to do and when to do it, I have already packed a bag and weighed it, repacked it and weighed it about 3 times until it got down to the bare essentials of what we really need.

I praise the Lord for the lifestyle we live. It is hard, it is stretching, and it is stressful...but it is sweet and it daily brings out the parts of me that need the Lord's grace and mercy to chisel the yuck and show me that if we leave this house in India never to return, stuff is just stuff and it just doesn't matter...if an earthquake comes and our house gets swept up in a landslide and ends up in another city, stuff is just stuff and it doesn't matter....if I come back to Shimla to a home full of mold that has ruined so much of our stuff, then it really won't matter....if I didn't pack enough cute clothes, play clothes, work out clothes, or sleep clothes then it really won't matter...because life is more than stuff, more than clothes, more than any of the other "things" that I have on my mind...it is about KNOWING HIM, it is about loving others, investing our lives in relationships that matter...living in obedience to the King of Kings!

the other night Wyatt was praying for his friend down the road and he said, "God, will you just show him that you are the One True God who can hold the whole world in your hand?" God, tonight with so many unknowns ahead in my life....thank you for reminding me that you alone...are the one who holds the world...you alone.

This guy....gets just plain silly when it snows!

T

When Pictures Don't do Justice

There are so many times I wish I could paint a picture of life here. The smells of masala and curry that seep into my bedroom windows at 8am, 2pm, and 9pm at night. The noise of monkeys pounding on the tin roof, men yelling up and down the road that they have a new rug for me to buy or a new blanket to try, huge buses trying to squeeze up a road that is made for tiny cars and has no guard rails...the sights of beauty mixed with poverty...children who run around in the freezing cold with no shoes and women carrying babies on their back who are only wearing thin cotton outfits...

Overwhelming and after a few years one's body hits a protection mode of sorts and begins to become hardened to the noise, the smells, the sights of India. This is the only way to survive. So daily I have to go before the Father and ask for an examination of my heart....Do I still have compassion? Is my love still strong? Is Christ's love what shines through me or have I somehow lost his voice in the noise of life here? Do I still hear the whisper? Do I still want to?

We went home to America for Christmas and returned to a sweet place spiritually in our lives...a place of intimacy that we have struggled with for a while. We were in a place in our walks with the Lord where we just "didn't feel right". Levi's sweet place started in August when he just kept saying, "I feel the Lord speaking to me again." I was not there yet. My quiet times were still dry. I was reading the bible and applying every quiet time to my Indian sisters, my children, my neighbors...but never allowing God's word and God's spirit to penetrate the wall I was building around my heart. I started seeing this wall right before we left to go home.

As I said goodbye to one of my closest friends here who I did life with everyday, I realized that though I was in so much pain, my heart no longer hurt as goodbyes did my first year here. Goodbyes are so normal here...Every close friend I have had on this side of the world has left. Every one. I am from small town Mississippi where no one leaves and goodbyes are NOT normal for me so this is one area that affected me in deeper ways than I understood. I didn't see the walls I put up to protect myself from the hurt. I didn't see the wall I had put up in my walk with Christ. The feelings of pain, of hurt, of distrust...I was an empty well because of deep hurt and loneliness that I had covered for so long. I didn't have anyone to talk with about this. How can my family and my best friends in America understand such a life? So I just covered it and allowed it to hurt me deeper than I realized. After saying goodbye and realizing the hardness of heart, I started going before the Lord and pouring myself out. Years of hurt, of pain and issues came to the alter as walls began to fall. Healing...sweet healing is taking place...accompanied with a realization that this world is not my home, but my heart was created tender and that is where it must be for me to be whole. If my heart becomes too hard, I lose myself so I must depend on the Lord for healing every time...every time.

It is all about Him right? When we sit in that place of "something is just not right" in our walk with Christ, we must stop as soon as it happens...if not, years will past and so much time wasted without that intimate walk with the Lord. May our life be full because of Christ.

With 2 boys, we tend to get really messy! During rainy season outside time is limited, so I have to find other ways to get let them get wild and messy...This is one way we love to play. Shaving cream, food coloring and spatulas to get wild with! Then clean up time to give mama a break and take up even more time ;)