Category Archives: purpose

growing through it: the fullness that comes after waiting

Posted on by March 12, 2026

Well, friends, with the dry air and spring temps, there’s a new game here at the Lighthouse. It requires two people, or at the very least, an ornery human and an unsuspecting cat.

Here’s how you play: Create a charge by running your hands back and forth on the couch (or just sit there long enough to accidentally create friction), then touch someone within reach. If you induce a loud zapping sound, some screaming, and cause the other player’s hair to stand on end, you win.

growing through it: the fullness that comes after waiting

In the spirit of science and brotherly affection, one of our kids actually got a few siblings to hold hands together to see if the current would fly through the chain and nearly electrocute the person on the end. I’m happy to report that this has been unsuccessful so far, but we’re having people over soon and I suspect they may inadvertently participate in the troubleshooting process.

I’ve been going through an old journal as research for the next book – speaking of painful, healing, hilarious, and wretched experiments – and in retrospect I’ve noticed that particular season of our lives was not all that different from taking someone’s hand and getting electrocuted.

And really, I struggle with how to write about the hard situations when they involve others. It’s come up in conversation a few times recently with friends (and a husband) who are also writers – this quandary of sharing our story when it overlaps with the stories of others. I’ve prayed about it and here’s what God answered:

Write about your past as though you were now close to the people who caused the pain. Write about it as though the sins were atoned for – because they are – and as though the relationships were restored – which they can be, through surrender on both sides. You are only responsible for your own surrender, but you’re not off the hook for praying for theirs. Writing about your past in this way leads you to write the truth in love with compassion and maturity, as you should.

So there’s that, and we’ll see how it goes. Anne Lamott also gives hilarious and accurate advice in Bird By Bird, but I can’t quote it here because if I did your content filter would block my website.

But in the summer of 2013 there’s a journal entry where I wrote out Isaiah 55 in its entirety and what He was speaking to me through each verse. And one of the things He said was, You will tell people to spend time with Me, searching Me, being honest with Me in their day-to-day dilemmas and drudgery.

Several months later I started writing some of the earliest content for what became Oh My Soul, which wasn’t even birthed until a full five years after those earliest posts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11

Fullness takes time. The waiting is hard and there’s no substitute for steadfastness, for the grit it takes to hang on to His Word when nothing seems to reflect it in the reality you see.

There’s no substitute for the time it takes to grow through the process of living. In any given half-decade, we all go through loss – and gain – that we never could have anticipated, touching hands with many people. Some of them let go too soon and leave us grieving. Sometimes we’re the ones who let go after getting burned too many times. And other times, we hold on for dear life through all the mayhem – because these ones, they are our people.

If He had told us ahead of time the loss and gain we would experience in the last five years, we never would have believed Him. Sometimes keeping us in the dark is a mercy that helps us toward obedience. We are not simply unsuspecting victims; this unknowing is actively doing a work in us for good.

…Getting old is our secret weapon. Readers come to books for many reasons, but ultimately they’re looking for wisdom. That’s something writers can offer only after we’ve accrued it, like scar tissue, usually by surviving things we didn’t want to deal with—a process otherwise known as aging.

– Barbara Kingsolver

And looking at it that way, I don’t really want to know what the next five years will hold. Just yesterday we lost someone we loved. And even though we knew it was coming, I’m not sure that grieving in advance makes it any easier, or if it just prolongs the process.

For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

– Isaiah 55:12

Life requires troubleshooting and the unknowing is unnerving. But the fullness that rewards us at the end of waiting only comes from learning from life’s friction instead of just getting burned by it.

We get to choose if we want to be more mature at the end of our hard times or not. You can tell the difference if you hold yourself to the same standard you set for those who hurt you, or if you make excuses for yourself without offering grace to others.

You can go through it or you can grow through it – we can learn the hard way, or not all.

Weeks after this game started, I’m still getting zinged from the couch several times a day, and more often than not it’s completely unintentional.

At the end of the night, I’m sitting on the couch with Bingley, and neither of us have learned our lesson. I reach down and barely touch him before zap – he gives me a black look. The tip of his ear is practically smoking and my finger is numb.

Like I said, you can learn the hard way, or not at all.

And I could tell you what he was probably thinking, but I’m pretty sure that would activate your content filter, too.

work in progress: what happens when we fill the lake

Posted on by February 5, 2025

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

order of business: what we do to win the day

Posted on by January 6, 2026

Somehow I forgot about this phase of parenting toddlers: The floor is covered in abandoned puzzles and piles of blocks, the couch is drowning in buttons he dumped all over, and throw pillows are arranged like so many lily pads across the living room. You can barely walk through here. The Floor is Lava was obviously invented as a way to avoid picking up toys while still navigating a room without stabbing your foot on an action figure.

order of business: what we do to win the day

But instead of cleaning up, little Finn is distracted by improvising new forms of gymnastics. Three-year-olds are geniuses; leave it to them to discover that a large couch cushion can be used successfully as both a slide and a pole vault.

And let me just confess that I’m not the cool, laid back, mom-of-many that some of you might give me credit for. No matter how simple or minimalist we endeavor to be, there’s no getting around the fact that nine people and four cats create a ton of noise, clutter, and movement. Multiplied by physical pain from nursing, and magnified by looming deadlines and not enough time or quiet space to meet them…all this at once makes fire shoot out my ears.

(Or lava, whatever.)

It’s a quiet, cold evening when the blood moon is eclipsing, and without resorting to too much bribery, manipulation, threats, and gimmicks, we persuade Finn to clean up all his messes. The kids play outside in the dark, candles are lit inside, and this is the kind of atmosphere that we long for: Dinner’s frying, the baby is burping, Crowder’s singing the whole world’s about to change and you can’t help believing him, but you’re also praying the change will be good. We resist fear and choose to walk in boldness to the future He holds.

And I need some good change. Because it turns out, part of living the dream of writing full time includes the nightmare of technical and administrative work. It’s been consuming my weeks lately and I’ve been so frustrated, feeling thwarted as a writer who almost never has time to write.

People talk about love languages all the time but, just for a second, can we acknowledge that there might also be such a thing as Hate Languages? Because if they’re real, red tape and techy stuff are mine. Hates them we does. The urgent tasks suck up the day and there’s no time left to create, and deadlines loom. Toward the end of the month, it’s Cutthroat Kitchen for writers – I’m trying to make a gourmet meal with only leftovers in a mostly empty fridge.

So the Lord keeps bringing me back to this concept of Quadrant 2, or what I’ve often called filling the lake: doing those beautiful things that fill us before we need to pour out, like reading, writing, studying, brainstorming, and investing in relationships.

And maybe it sounds dumb, but I needed permission to prioritize those essentials, simply because many of them are what I most want to do. I tend to put them off until the end of the day, and often there’s not enough of the day left to do them.

Quadrant 2 encompasses activities that are important but not urgent, and easily put off because of their lack of urgency. When put off for too long, though, they become urgent Quadrant 1 activities, messes that need cleaned up and fires that need to be put out.

Breakdown results from avoiding that kind of routine maintenance, and by then we have a situation that is more expensive, more painful, and more time-consuming. The work isn’t always performed as well because of its frantic nature.

It’s the difference between reading books for fun because we want to learn (Quadrant 2) versus cramming for a test because we just want to pass it (Quadrant 1). Or, it’s the difference between picking up your toys when you’re done with them versus waiting until you’ve destroyed the living room and your mama has lost her ever-loving mind.

Urgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action….Importance, on the other hand, has to do with results. If something is important, it contributes to your mission, your values, your high priority goals.

– Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

You can do it early or you can do it in haste, and we’re living it out both ways. There are so many things I’m glad I learned years ago so I don’t have to figure them out now. But there are a million other things I still need to learn, and I wish I knew them yesterday. And to be honest, there are plenty of things I don’t even want to learn. (Here’s looking at you, Photoshop.)

But when I fill the lake and work with His priorities and my own giftings instead of against them, I do better work. I do it with joy. I’m a happier wife and mama, a better friend, and a more effective leader. It creates the atmosphere that fits me and fills me.

It is the difference between getting up early and pulling a 12-hour shift to get it all done, or getting up on time to spend the first hour in study and prayer, and finding that the work is finished an hour early.

As I type, I’m pulling overtime on a Saturday, but if there’s an easy way to do it, it’s this: Sitting on the couch with a sleepy Kavanagh, with the same music playing that he heard so much in utero, and the biggest distraction I face is his occasional eruption of spitup. This quiet time is sponsored by Vince working through his own hate language – he’s downstairs with the rest of the kids, painting.

I can hear the paint rollers running back and forth and it’s a liberating comfort to know that progress is happening downstairs without me. It will be beautiful when they’re done. I am up here doing my part of the work, they are down there doing their part of the work, and we all enjoy the fruit of everyone’s efforts.

And looking back, I can see how He’s been telling me this for a long time. We had a worship night at church last weekend, and I heard a song I’ve only heard once or twice before, and wondered where it’s been all my life.

You go before I know
That You’ve even gone to win my war
Your love becomes my greatest defense
It leads me from the dry wilderness

And all I did was praise
All I did was worship
All I did was bow down
All I did was stay still

– Rita Springer, Defender

And I needed to hear it because even though there’s work that I can do, most of the big work is out of my hands. There’s breakthrough we need that only He can do. Just like last year, when we knew He was moving us but we didn’t know where or how He was going to do it. We never would’ve guessed the outcome. No amount of bribery, manipulation, threats, and gimmicks could have brought that kind of resolution, and it won’t now, either. We win through surrender, just like always.

On New Year’s Eve I was nursing Kavanagh on the couch, and suddenly the fireworks that had been sporadic for two days went off all at once, all around us, and I realized it must be midnight. I looked up and there they were, out every window; you could see them all the way from Houston and Big Lake in the east to downtown Wasilla in the west, and there were more than a dozen eruptions between – around the highway, up Vine, along Knik Goose Bay, Fairview Loop, all across the MatSu.

I had never thought of what fireworks would look like from this bluff overlooking the valley. It was magical and marvelous and riotous, and wholly unexpected.

It was like the whole world was about to change. And God leaned in close and said, See? I’m not done surprising you yet.