Category Archives: mothering

trying my patience: grace for others as we grow

Posted on by February 7, 2024

The kids were pulling presents out, and Kav held one up.

“Who’s this for?”

I pointed to the name written on it. “It starts with V. Who do you know starts with V?”

“Dad,” Finn answered for him.

Um, okay. Right, Dad starts with V…if his name is Vince, at least.

trying my patience: grace for others as we grow

We’re all working on the English language here in this house, even the parents who write and wrestle with commas for a living, and also the older kids in various levels of literature and language arts.

Reagan brings me her journal and holds it out to me. The sentence she’s trying to write is “Finn is coughing today,” and I bet you can guess which word is tripping her up. Because English is hard, and also stupid.

So far she’s tried “koring” and “caing” and I’m super excited that she’s figured out the “ing” part consistently. And I know you can’t sound out the word coughing because the letters don’t make sense, but she needs to at least try. She knows what the sounds are.

Often though, she doesn’t want to try, so we get these wild random spellings that aren’t even close. And I can’t blame her, sometimes laziness is my default, too.

I could just spell it for her. If she copied it enough times she would probably learn it, and learning is why we’re doing this, of course. But we’re not just wanting her to memorize; we’re wanting her to think, and solve, and resolve. And for that, she needs to sound it out. We want solving problems to be our (and her) default, not just memorizing answers.

And when she tries that, that’s when I’ll give her the real answer and explain that English is hard and stupid. (Okay fine, probably not.)

But I won’t step in if she’s not even trying. I’m not playing tricks on her; I’m teaching her that we can do hard things. Simultaneously, God is teaching me the same thing, because this slower-than-molasses progress tries my patience like you wouldn’t believe. Her way is not my way. But if I push her to do things my way, we take a small frustration and turn it into a much bigger conflict.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

– Ephesians 4:1-3

I’m helping her navigate problems and grow, and we all do that growing and navigating at different levels. We understand things differently because we have different perspectives.

For example, most of us know exactly what’s happening in this verse:

…for [Jesus] was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”

– Mark 9:31

It’s pretty straightforward to us. We’ve read the Book, seen the crime play out; we know what happened and we’ve heard the story a zillion times.

But His disciples – those closest to Him – didn’t get it. They didn’t see what was coming, and this was their response:

But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him.

– Mark 9:32

To us, there’s no ambiguity. The way Jesus said it is the way it actually happened. But if we put ourselves in the disciples’ shoes, what He said was totally bewildering. Is He really talking about Himself? Is he being symbolic? Does “killed” really mean “killed,” or does it mean something else?

Are we dealing with something that’s straightforward, or is there more to it than that? Is “cough” spelled C-O-F-F, or does it have some of those confusing extra letters in it?

So in their misunderstanding, they respond in a way we totally relate to. They were afraid to ask Him. The Greek for fear here is “phobeo,” and it is a strong fear, meaning to put to flight, terrify, frighten, or incite dread. It’s the kind of fear that avoids and leads to more misunderstanding. I don’t want to know, so I won’t ask. So they didn’t.

Maybe they were too proud, too insecure to reveal their ignorance. Maybe they were hoping the situation would just go away. And we do those things too sometimes, glossing over and avoiding what makes us uncomfortable.

And sometimes we’re afraid to talk about things directly, so we talk behind each other’s back. We don’t want to look stupid or wrong, so we put other people down, instead. Which is interesting because in the very next verses, here’s what the disciples do:

And they came to Capernaum. And when [Jesus] was in the house he asked them, “What were you discussing on the way?” But they kept silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest.

– Mark 9:33-34

They competed. They puffed up. They pointed fingers. And then they avoided again, refusing to admit what they’d been doing. Fear, pride, and insecurity were still driving them, and they didn’t want to do the hard work of considering something unfamiliar and seemingly impossible.

Which leads me to something that happens in our house occasionally: Vin or I will explain something to one of our kids, and they’ll interrupt us with, “I know.”

(Right, this never happens at your house. Humor me.)

So Vin or I will answer, “No, if you knew, I wouldn’t need to be telling you,” and then continue what we were saying, hoping that this time they’re paying attention. Because we know the “I know” is blowing us off. Sometimes it’s insecurity and pride, pretending to understand something they don’t; and sometimes it’s laziness, not wanting to take the time to consider a different perspective. It could be any number of things, really. If solving problems were easy, we wouldn’t call them “problems” in the first place.

And we don’t solve problems in all the same ways, any more than we sound things out in the same ways. For example, I have no idea how they teach language arts in the South, where they are reckless with vowels. Excuse me for yelling, but I AM SO GLAD I’M NOT TEACHING MY KIDS ENGLISH IN THE SOUTH.

Because in some places there, for example, little i says ee, and big I says ah. As in, “Be steel and know that Ah am God.” If I’m quiet, I can hear this in the voice of my pastor’s wife.

But it’s not just vowels; it’s also syllables. In the South they remove them from some words (I was shocked and bewildered the first time I heard a Southerner pronounce “oil,” which to me should sound like “oy-ul” and not just “ull”) and then, messing with vowels again, they put extra syllables into other words where God never intended them.

How many syllables does “sin” have? Two if you’re from certain parts of Texas: See-in. Clap, clap. Two syllables. No big deal, we both agree sin is wrong. We just say it differently.

Months ago I went to a reception for a new friend and I didn’t know how to spell her name on the card I brought for her. So I asked a mutual friend. Unfortunately, that friend is from the South, and I don’t even know how to phonetically write what she said. But as she coached me through the spelling, it was sort of like, “Kye (rhymes with eye) – ah – ee – ayus –”

And I thought to myself, What’s an Ah? What the heck is an AYus? I knew it made perfect sense to her, but I had no clue. So I smiled, nodded, and happened to look down at the cake, which had our friend’s name on it in frosting.

If you’re from the South, I hope you know I love you. We’re saying the same things; we just say them differently.

Communication can be hard. Understanding and loving each other can also be hard. Jesus didn’t buy peace with compromise, but He also knew His disciples were befuddled, wrestling, and had their own insecurities and growth to overcome.

So He patiently let them wrestle – you think He didn’t already know what they were talking about along the way about who was the greatest? – and then He brought some gentle correction and perspective.

And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” And he took a child and put him in the midst of them, and taking him in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.”

– Mark 9:35-37

The thing about little kids is that they love to learn. They don’t pretend to have all the answers. They love risk and wonder. They’re not afraid to ask questions and they’re not driven by pride or insecurity. And generally, if they’re with someone they trust, healthy kids are excited about the unfamiliar instead of afraid of it.

But when we see people doing something unfamiliar or unexpected, we tend to create circles of belonging and exclusion, like the disciples did in the very next verse:

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

– Mark 9:38

Jesus responds to their tattling with perspective and wisdom in His correction, because He knows they are still sounding this out, too. He doesn’t want them — or us — to just memorize; He wants us to broaden our perspectives and consider new things. He wants us to think, and solve, and resolve.

But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us. For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.”

– Mark 9:39-41

We often misunderstand things that are perfectly clear when they’re not what we expected or predicted. But the Holy Spirit is teaching us, making us like Him, and He doesn’t want us to just memorize principles, because memorizing answers isn’t the same as solving problems. He wants us to walk in a manner worthy of our calling:

With all humility and gentleness. With patience. Bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

(Even if we don’t know an A from an Ayus.)

To do that, we need to consider the unfamiliar, and do hard things. We need to grow deep and wide. We need to snuff out comparison with humility. We need to try our patience, stretching it farther than we thought it could go. And when we do, grace will press out our insecurities and pride and unnecessary conflicts, as light presses out darkness.

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bits and pieces: how we build the Kingdom with small offerings

Posted on by December 23, 2023

“You don’t need the light to go down the stairs,” I mumble as I flip the switch off. I do this at least once a day and the stairwell isn’t even dark; there’s a window at the bottom, and light from the kitchen filters in at the top.

And even if it were utterly dark (which it almost never is at our house), humans – even small humans – know how to walk on stairs. We’ve done it a million times, even carrying bags of groceries or dozens of eggs. It’s muscle memory. But the kids flip the light on just for the fun of it, I guess.

bits and pieces: how we build the Kingdom with small offerings

We like to see where we’re going, and we like the way to be clear. I was reminded of this last week when I drove to church through heavy snow and hated it with every mile, knowing I could do it but not liking it. In those times we kind of wish we had the cop-out of not being able to do something so we can beg off from the responsibility. But no, we can do hard things like driving on sloppy roads, and learning how to use cantankerous sewing machines, and going through the bureaucratic hoops of guardianship.

We were officially granted guardianship of Reagan on Tuesday, which is an odd thing because we’ve been her parents for over eleven years and she’s been 18 for a month already. So yay, that’s done – until next month, at least, when we repeat the process with Andrey. Now we just need to get used to all the new paperwork routines and deadlines (have I told you lately how much I hate paperwork? SO MUCH) and new adult-y things for her, like establishing her own bank account, which is also an odd thing because we’re supposed to get all this in place as soon as possible but we won’t even have the decree in hand to do so for 4-6 weeks, because this is the government we’re talking about.

Right, the sewing machine isn’t the only cantankerous one around here. Maybe we should switch subjects and talk about cheerful things, like how we didn’t die when we drove home in the ice fog last week.

It was the same day I mentioned a minute ago, when we were driving in the heavy snow to church. But on the way home, the snow had stopped and the roads were clearer, and I even told Cham she could turn on the radio to look for Christmas music.

And then four minutes later we hit the ice fog on the highway.

At first I thought it was fine, but then I quickly realized we were driving through a cloud that was adhering to us. Ice started building up at the top of the windshield, and then it crept lower. I flipped the wipers on and they helped a little, but within another mile they went right over the glaze that continued to spread downward.

“Turn off the radio,” I said, and flipped the heat to its highest setting. We were still four miles from home and all those little tiny particles kept building up on each other.

And I think this is when I repented of angrily flipping off the light switch to the stairwell, because seeing where we’re going is more than just a luxury sometimes. It’s one thing when you have muscle memory to walk down the stairs, but it’s a totally different thing when you’re on the highway in the dark, and ice is covering more and more of the windshield as it shrinks your view of the highway in front of you.

There was nowhere to pull over. The road was barely plowed, two lanes had shrunk to one and half, and there was no shoulder. Pulling over and putting on hazard lights meant blocking what was left of the slow lane, and surely we would’ve been hit in the fog.

So we did what we had to do, and kept going. The ice continued to crawl further down, and I continued to crouch further down so I could see the road out of the clear space left in the windshield. We were in this catch-22 – we had to drive slow because we couldn’t see far in the fog, but we also had to drive as fast as possible to get home before we couldn’t see anything at all.

Sometimes stopping and quitting isn’t an option. Sometimes we must keep going; we have to see it through, even when we can’t see ten feet in front of us. We know we’re in danger, we know God has to protect us, and we know that stopping doesn’t just mean rest or quitting, but something far worse.

And we made it, obviously, because I’m here writing to you about it. We barreled through the last intersection and pulled off the highway, drove up the hill, and then up our driveway, and the relief would’ve been complete if we hadn’t driven separately, because Vince and Afton were still out there behind us somewhere.

Eight minutes later they pulled in the driveway and pounded up the stairs and into the kitchen. Our conversations were all “Oh my gosh,” and “I’ve never seen it like that,” and gratitude that we pray over this highway every single day.

I wonder if those tiny daily prayers matched that ice fog granule for granule, keeping it at bay so we could get home in time. Because good and great things build up on themselves, too.

Over the last several months I’ve seen encouraging progress in prayer, and sometimes it surprises me in its suddenness: Oh yeah, I prayed for that, as I notice a kid making better media choices, and another kid having better sleeping patterns. I keep noticing small but visible victories, these little pieces that start adding up and instilling courage, reminding me that prayer is a powerful work that builds on itself, too. We don’t have to know what the answers or details are, we just need to agree with God’s will for goodness and healing and restoration.

And that brings me back to my efforts with the sewing machine, because I don’t really know what I’m doing with this fabric, either. I just know that I want to make something beautiful out of these bits and pieces.

I don’t have a pattern, and I don’t really want a pattern. Some people follow intricate geometric designs, and I admire their precision and planning. But I don’t want to do that; my brain space for precision and planning goes to writing, and this is play.

Why is it that it’s so much easier to not have a plan when it comes to this? With bigger life situations when I don’t see light on the next five steps, it’s not play; it’s frustration and fear and self-doubt. But here with these bits and pieces, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m also not doubting myself. I know that if I mess up, I can seam rip; if I cut too many pieces, I can use them in something else.

That’s what I can do in your situations, too, the Holy Spirit keeps reminding me. That’s what grace is. Nothing is wasted.

We take things so seriously. A lot of our situations are serious, of course, but we fret over them as though we’re more attentive and concerned than God is, which is stupidly presumptuous. We spend a lot of our lives flying by the seat of our pants, and it seems like that’s by design because God does amazing things with our loaves and fishes, scraps and thread. He knows we don’t know what we’re doing half the time, and there’s huge comfort in that.

It’s not my job to create the material or know exactly what the finished product will look like. I’m just taking the material available and pulling certain pieces together, doing what I know to do – and when we know better, we do better – so these bits and pieces in front of me can become something beautiful, useful, and redeemed.

There’s a dark, moody scrap here, telling a kid no, they can’t go to a certain event. And there are lighter, brighter scraps over there, laughing together during movies and telling old family stories. Threads of abiding prayer weave through every day, holding pieces together. And I think, so far at least, this is all I need to really know.

We want to do something grand, but often all we have energy for is bits and pieces. Are the bits and pieces enough, though? They have to be, because it’s the only way things are made and accomplished. A book is read – or written – a word, a sentence, a page at a time. Relationships are built one interaction at a time. Breakthrough is achieved one steadfast, grace-filled, desperate day at a time.

Our obedient, faithful bits and pieces counter the ice fog of life, and it’s enough. We have vision for the next couple of small steps, we have strength for the one busy day ahead of us, we have patience for one more go-round with the kid who’s been cooking our grits. It’s all we can do. Like manna that cannot be hoarded for more than the day ahead, we cannot store the effort and strength and energy we need for all these things. We can only build the character that perseveres and comes out victorious with one small, obedient decision at a time.

It’s not about doing everything just right. We don’t always know if it’s working. We know if we’re obeying, though. And we also know when we’re procrastinating by praying for more guidance when the way is already clear, but just not as clear as we want it to be. We want undimmed light for all 17 steps, not just the first couple.

But if risky obedience is approached a little more like play, joy suddenly takes the place of anxiety. It all hinges on trust, though – Does He care? Does He have our best in mind? Is He big enough to cover my imperfections?

Yes, to all three.

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts. Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts.

– Malachi 3:10-12

The angel of the Lord encamps
    around those who fear him, and delivers them.
Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!
    Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints,
    for those who fear him have no lack!

– Psalm 34:7-9

Joy and freedom and expansion are markers of the Kingdom. Fear and dread and anxiety are the enemy’s methods to waylay those.

Obedience, courage, and surrender are contagious. Sometimes people wait for the obedience of someone else to move. So your obedience creates a current that moves the less willing, and momentum sweeps through like a rising tide that lifts all boats and aligns many in the right direction. Our obedience isn’t just for ourselves; it changes the atmosphere and culture around us.

Is the dim light enough? Just enough for this step, and the next one, and then next one? Because these days, just those little steps might be all we have in us. And maybe that’s for a good reason.

Will you find your identity in your grand achievements and accomplishments, God asks us, or will you find it in Me?

I believe in the bits and pieces: Joy, freedom, expansion, obedience, courage, and surrender. He’s using these small steps of ours to make grand, beautiful things out of the scraps we have left.

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getting it right: finding grace on unknown roads

Posted on by November 22, 2023

Reagan brings me her journal so I can check the sentence she just wrote, and some days this is how it goes:

I will be done the green Book with pretty soon.

She means her math book, the one I told you about months ago, the one she’s wanted to finish since forever so she can move on to the next book. And you probably see the same errors I did, so I remind her that the words need to be in the right order and that only the first letter of this sentence needs capitalized.

getting it right: finding grace on unknown roads

She returns with this:

I will be done with the grrrn Book pretty soon.

I’m not sure if this is on purpose or if she’s just being lazy. There’s no way to tell; sometimes she knows what she’s doing, and sometimes she doesn’t. But she does know how to spell “green” so I tell her to fix it, and she returns with this:

I will be done with the grenn Book pretty soon.

And then this:

I will be done with the green pook pretty soon.

You see it? I do, so I ask, “What does ‘book’ start with?”

“B,” she says, and I tell her to fix it.

I will be done with the green Book pretty soon.

Aaaand we’re back to uppercase. “How do you make a lowercase B?” I ask.

“I make…one…bump?” Her answers almost always sound like questions.

I will be done with the green Pook pretty soon.

At this point, I’m pretty sure it’s on purpose. Yes, it’s one bump but she knows which bump it’s supposed to be.

We could do this all day, fixing one thing while adding little errors elsewhere, refusing to get it right and never making progress.

“Do you want to do school today?” I finally ask.

“Yes!!” she says, urgently.

And that’s when she fixed the sentence and brought it back, written perfectly. What’s the saying? Seventh time is a charm. Something like that.

We all fight new levels and battles on many fronts, trying to get everything right, and the details can be overwhelming. For us, one of the big new levels in this season is that three of our kids turn 18 in the next five months (!) and we’re in the process of filing for guardianship for two of them. Afton is the other one, the biological one, who just has five months left at home with us because he wants to move out as soon as he can – sayonara, adios, I hope he misses us sometimes – but of the other two, Reagan will probably always be with us and Andrey needs at least a couple more years of help with daily responsibilities and care.

It’s what we signed up for, sorta. We just never really know what we’re signing up for until we’ve lived in it for a while, and that’s probably for the best.

So last week we had our second trip in as many months to the Palmer Courthouse – clerk’s office, to be exact – to submit paperwork for guardianship, and yes, it is as boring as it sounds.

We drove through town and stood in line and went to the counter and handed over documents. I raised my right hand under oath. This part is easy; I’ve done it twice now. It’s all the other paperwork, applications, deadlines, visits, and court hearings that I’m not sure about.

Then we drove back through town on the other side to go see Grandma, who turns 92 next week. We passed Afton on the road like ships in the night and waved; he was picking up a friend who lives in her neighborhood.

Grandma’s hair swoops to the left across her forehead, and she brushes it aside. My dad’s hair does the same thing, and mine does too unless I force it to submit to the attentions of a flat iron.

She sat in her rocker and I sat in the other, and she told us stories about her aunt and uncle who built barns, and how she lived right next door to her grandparents for the first ten years of her life, and how that was the best thing ever.

It makes sense to me that she adored those grandparents, because she grew up and became like them. She’s the grandparent I most adored, too.

She kept asking how the kids were doing, and I updated her on the guardianship and how we’ve also been trying to navigate Andrey’s health issues. I mentioned a couple months ago that he had a cyst that showed up again and needed oral surgery, but six appointments later we discovered that it’s not oral surgery but reconstructive plastic surgery that will be needed because of how the cyst has destroyed some of the bone structure in his face. And that’s a battle we never saw coming. In light of his 18th birthday and guardianship proceedings coming up, the surgeon recommended we hold off on that procedure until early next year when those are completed.

We all have our stuff in crazy overwhelming seasons. Yours is probably different from ours, but we overlap in the general mayhem of living on the brink of apocalypse.

It was a short visit and as we were leaving Grandma’s, a pickup stopped in the road and the guy inside waved as we passed. We reversed back and rolled down the window; he looked like Santa but with a short beard. Seeing us closer, he grinned and apologized.

“Oh gosh, I thought you were Thornsleys!”

I grinned back, leaning toward Vin’s window. “I am, I’m the oldest granddaughter.” It couldn’t have been my hair that gave it away; I’d wrestled the flat iron that morning.

“Well! I just know the boys,” he said. “I was comin’ to tell y’all about someone encroaching on your property –” and he went on about someone’s trailer that’s half on their own property but also half on “ours,” though I couldn’t tell which one of us he was talking about.

“Which of the boys is your dad, did you say?” he finally asked.

“I’m Greg’s daughter.”

“Oh, the fuel guy?” I nod. Small town. Most people know each other, and Grandma and Grandpa moved here when “the boys” were still in school, over fifty years ago.

We exchanged names and went on in our opposite directions, passing Afton again as he brought his friend back home. We wound along the old highway back toward town and I know these curves; I grew up on them, and there’s something so comforting and familiar about feeling them in the sunshine, gently swaying left and right as they follow the Matanuska River, while we navigate all these other curves we’re so new at.

It’s not easy to tell if you’re doing something right when you don’t have a template to follow. Pioneers know this, though I never saw myself as one of them until this year. But if you have followed a new or unusual calling without a map, role model, template, pattern, or any previous experience, you probably have wondered many times if you were going the right direction when it just felt like you were moving in circles. Homeschooling, adoption, self-employment, ministry, special needs parenting, whatever…transitional generations know this, the feeling of walking and wandering and weariness, looking for a signpost that confirms you’re on the right track.

Sometimes we know what we’re doing, and sometimes we don’t – and often, the answers we get sound more like questions.

Am I doing this right? has been the refrain of my life, and I am finally understanding that it’s the wrong question. For the last year or so He keeps asking me, “Do you want to be right, or righteous?” and now I understand why – because He’s teaching me to rest in the grace of His love for me, since He knows my heart wants to look like His.

So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

– 1 John 4:16

When Reagan brings me her writing, I don’t expect her to have a perfect sentence every time. I expect her to do the things she knows, and to try with the rest. If she’s trying and fumbling but not doing it wrong on purpose, I have all the time in the world for her. It’s when she does things wrong on purpose – this is what we call transgressing – that I ask her if she really wants to make progress or if she’s deliberately self-sabotaging.

By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.

– 1 John 4:17

So I am learning that as long as my heart wants to be like His, instead of being consumed with perfection, afraid of punishment, He has all the grace in the world for me. He just wants me to resemble Him.

When my heart is at rest because it’s focused on the perfect love that casts out fear, I can trust that He’s giving me wisdom and helping me get things right, whatever the circumstances look like at any given moment. I don’t have to fear punishment for not knowing what I’m doing and for making imperfect efforts without a template to follow, because He loves our trying and investing and taking risks, and He rewards those efforts – but He rebuked the cowardly steward who buried his talent in safety.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.

– 1 John 4:18-19

I sat up late with a friend last night and confessed to her that I have often thought of every reason in the world why things were hard, or why they weren’t working out, or why I didn’t deserve this good thing, or why I did deserve that bad thing. I have spent years making excuses for the enemy, rather than resting in God’s love and agreeing with His will for me, because I felt like getting it right was my job.

But oh my gosh, it’s not.

Obedience and getting it right are not the same thing. As I’m typing this, it feels like a veil is tearing in the atmosphere. Sometimes we fear and worship all the details of obedience rather than fearing and worshiping God. Our performance goes up on a pedestal, and we climb right up there after it.

Breaking the lie is one thing, but renewing the mind is another. So the Lord pours us into this wide place with tight borders where it feels too overwhelming, like too much responsibility – and He tells us to claim the land. This is how He broadens our tent pegs, teaching us that we are bound by love, and therefore, free.

You gave a wide place for my steps under me,

and my feet did not slip.

– Psalm 18:36

A wide place for our steps seems like a great thing, but we tend to prefer more structure. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you had several good choices before you, and you hemmed and hawed about which one to take? That was a wide space.

Sometimes we’d rather have a small space and not carry the responsibility of choosing where our feet get planted. Sometimes we make ourselves small, so we feel safe, so we have less details to be responsible for, so we lower the risk of getting things wrong.

The steps of a man are established by the Lord, when he delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand.

– Psalm 37:23-24

So there is grace that covers our imperfections and unknowing, grace that flies in the face of our fear, pride, insecurity, and perfectionism. Gratitude and grace go together, because if we’re still earning our way, then we’re still taking credit…maybe not overtly, but in the back of our mind we’re still thinking, I did this.

That grace – knowing we couldn’t earn it, it’s all His love – removes the fear of shame and punishment and the next shoe dropping. No, we don’t deserve it, we deserved other. And even though the enemy convinced us that shame and grief was our penance for imperfection because we don’t deserve to be free, now we walk in gratitude, astounded by His many gifts we could never earn, achieve, or merit on our own.

But now we have them, because He paid for it.

It’s this kind of freedom that led us to celebrate at the ice cream shop that day, after the courthouse, after Grandma’s, after the stranger who recognized someone else in me. We pulled out of the ice cream shop and back onto the highway, and that’s when Afton passed us for the third time that day. We grinned shamelessly, waving our ice cream cones at him through the window as he drove past, ahead of us on the way home. And over these last few weeks I’ve felt dread and jadedness lifting, and a lightness that’s new in the midst of all these hard unknowns, because I am finally at a new level of tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.

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