Positively (Im)perfect

“Sacrifice is meaningless without remembrance.”  -Unknown Today is the 70th Anniversary of D-Day. I have always been fascinated by WWII history, and I've always gravitated toward WWII books and films, but for the longest time it was merely history that lived in a book to me. Not the lives that my grandparents lived before I was even blip in the universe. Not the stories that only came out when their generation--who had already lived through the worst and survived--reached old age and began to come to terms with their true mortality. My brief time in the military thankfully changed some of that. As the last of our WWII vets leave this earth, and as their experiences become more and more distant to both our generation and future generations, the need to write them down before they are lost seems ever more urgent. Some of the memories and stories of that great generation that I’ve encountered are beginning to elude even me as the years go by. So I'm using my quiet time ...

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my two-year-old’s room, a clean diaper in one hand and a…well, let’s skip that part. One of the older kids came running down the hall to the bedroom door, urgently calling “Mommy!” and proceeding to detail something Very Important that needed my immediate attention (like a hitting offense or lack of clean underwear or that blue and green make this crazy blue-green color called teal or something). But instead of hearing the Very Important Declaration, I got stuck in this Twilight Zone-esque moment where I found myself in a daze thinking, “They’re calling me 'Mommy'. I'm the mom! When did that happen?! Who decided I should be in charge?” The moment ended as quickly as it began, and I went back to diapering a fresh backside while attending to the big kid crisis of the moment (I still can’t remember what it was). But in my nanosecond of bizarre altered-reality state, I came to grips with the fact that I’ve spent a whole lot of life going, doi...

A few weeks ago, I got a message from a sweet classmate who I hadn’t talked to for awhile. We had a brief exchange, in which I learned that she’d just been blessed with another addition to her family. But then she wrote something that caught me totally off guard:  “You look fabulous!” she said, “and it amazes me that you’ve had three kids! I’ve been meaning to ask you, what is the best way to get your pre-baby body back? Does it take awhile for the pooch to go back down to normal? You should totally write a post about post-pregnancy body tips!” It made me so sad. Sad because I was talking to one of the sweetest, most beautiful women I’ve ever met, inside and out.  Sad because her baby was only three weeks old and she already felt the immense pressure to look like she hadn't had a baby, instead of being able to celebrate the incredible miracle of what she and her body had just accomplished. A miracle that so many women out there are desperate to experience, bu...

This Lent, I’m trying to simplify. The idea that simplifying can bring us closer to God is fairly easy to get behind. But the application is pretty difficult. Near impossible. How do we simplify when the world constantly demands the opposite? When it tells us that to be successful we must pack our schedules to the max, up our spending, fill our homes with more and more stuff, and do or be any number of competing personas all at once? That’s why I love the season of Lent. It’s meant to be a time of internal renewal away from all the external pressures. For forty days, the church tries to set aside that time that the world refuses to give us, the kind we so desperately need. In ancient traditions, Lent was a forty-day period of time before Easter when those who wanted to become baptized Christians learned about the faith they wanted to profess—Jesus’s life, his death and resurrection, and the beliefs and practices of the early church. It was also a time when baptized Christian...

"You see, sometimes God allows  us to be uncomfortable." "Oh?" "Yes. Because it's good for us." So my dear sister-friend, Sara , explained to me one day, impassioned by this truth she'd discovered in a recent podcast. She was embarking on her own personal revelation, but I listened attentively, her words snapping into place like scattered puzzle pieces finally coming together in my mind for a glimpse of the full picture. "It's not about whether it's easy or hard, it's about whether it's uncomfortable. Sometimes it's the easiest things that are uncomfortable...but God wants us to do them because it's the only way to stretch and grow ourselves from where we are." I've paraphrased, of course, because my mind was too busy spinning in place at the time to trap her exact words for safekeeping. It kept spinning as the full picture came into view: Degrees of suffering differ. Degrees of difficulty differ. Bu...

We slid into our chairs on New Year’s Eve, wine glasses and hearts full, ready to break open the board games that sat expectantly on the table, and get the party started as the rest of the family laughed and buzzed around us. But light as the atmosphere was, my dear friend—who carries the eminent title of Sister-Friend—and I were still feeling the weight of the weeks that had led up to this moment, and understanding the importance of those to come. And each of us knew that the other felt it. “So what’s your word?” she asked me lightly but quizzically. She had been texting our other sister-friend, who lives far too far away yet is the indispensable third party in our soul-baring and heart-binding struggle-through-life-together-trio. They had been sharing their chosen ‘word’ for the year, a recently popular concept in which one single word carries enough meaning to encompass one’s lofty resolution and focus for the entire year to come. “You know I don’t do just one word,” I repl...

It's no secret that I love to read, and I thought this link-up with Haley over at Carrots for Michaelmas served as the perfect year in review for all of my bookish finds; especially because she has just as many books on her "started but not yet finished" list as I do! Guess I'm not the only one... I also can't wait to snag a few titles from her list and the rest of the bookworms taking part in the link-up so I can get my read on in 2014! I ultimately had to consult three different places to "find" all of my books--my Kindle, my Goodreads , and the various 'shelves' around the house where I tend to leave my non-digital books. (And I had to wrack my brain for the few I borrowed from the library, too, if that counts as a place). But I think I got them all. So here they are, grouped into loose categories, with the understanding that many fall into multiple categories (anything more is beyond my organization level!): Don't be fooled - ...