Dear Friends, the first quarter of 2016 has been a wild ride. I have taken 3 work trips to three states, spoke at one church (besides my own) and two events, finished and turned in the first draft of my second book (yes, it is really happening!) had a pretty major medical procedure done (that took three weeks to recover from instead of the 3 days I anticipated,) survived a 12 service Holy Week that coincided with Spring Break, celebrated Easter, took 20 teenagers and preteens on a Yurting Camping Trip, juggled daily work life, family life (including the addition of new after-school activities) and extended family health/wellness crisis, got a mammogram, attended a funeral, a wedding, 6 ordinations (okay, they were all at once,) an adoption hearing and a surprise last-minute family reunion.
It has all (mostly) been wonderful, and it has all (mostly) been exhausting.
Lots of things fell by the wayside – housework, blogging, my hair roots, and things like remembering to buy my family coordinating clothes for Easter.
So there is no family Easter picture this year. No matching shirts, no cute shoe pictures, no hats. It is what it is.
But I have now been blogging for ten years. TEN YEARS. That’s a decade folks. That’s a kid who can dress, feed, bathe himself, and re-program my phone. Amazing.
Over the next month I will probably reflect on this milestone a bit, maybe even do some retrospective stuff. But for now I am just going to post a few pictures of the tiny bit of Easter decorating that I did this year as part of the archiving of my life. When you have a blog for a decade it becomes so much more than a blog. It becomes an archive, a resource of remembering. I cannot tell you how many times I refered back to my blog while writing Book Two. Over and over I would come here and search a term or a title, trying to remember all the details of a certain moment in our life, a certain thought or emotion. Time and time again I have tried to place memories in the right year, the right context, and this blog, like a good journal or scrapbook, helped me in that pursuit.
And so, for no other reason, than the knowledge that someday I will want to remember the crazy first quarter of 2016 and how we lived through it, I am posting these few little pictures of the touches of Easter that I put out around the house. A remembrance of how it was then.
A remembering of the year we forgot to dye eggs or buy new clothes, but the daffodils went wild in the yard and the Easter Baskets were filled.
A remembering of the year when we learned (again) that We do what we can, with what we have, in the season we find ourselves, and that this way of being is good enough, and is beautiful on it’s own.
Amen and Selah.
Congratulations on your ten-year blog anniversary, finishing your book and getting though the last few weeks. Well done. Now I hope you can make a time for rest.
Wow, your past couple of months were so jam-packed and full that it made me tired to read about it all! Congratulations on surviving and on all you’ve accomplished.