Faithful With My Little

 If you ever start talking about joy too much, you'll end up waking up in a bad mood the next day, and that is sort of what has happened to me this week. Summer days, for anyone, but probably especially for a parent and maybe especially in the unbearable heat of Florida, are interminably long. Like a million hours in one day long.  To pass the time and burn the endless energy of 3 boys and their friends, we go to the beach twice day.  Every day I optimistically lug my folding chair down to the beach and set it down with the towels. Then I look longingly at it and head out into the ocean with my 3 younger kids and usually 2-3 of their friends. If the waves are like they have been, I am not only a mother, but a lifeguard and the currents whisk us at least half a mile down the beach while I count and search for heads bobbing in the white foam. Today I even performed a rip current rescue on a kid that was not in our group who drifted too far out and could not get back to shor...

 Today is the day I start writing again. I don't know if it will last. I don't even know if it will matter, but I know that my heart has been longing to let my words free again. It is always spinning with words and ideas and a longing to tell some small part of my world what God has done.  Speaking is not my gift at all. One of my kids has struggled with a form of anxiety that essentially makes words freeze up when they feel under pressure and watching it has helped me understand more about myself. Not to the same extreme, but I have often felt the same. Frustratingly, in the chaos of the last few years, even when I put a pen to paper....or sit down at a keyboard...always my greatest form of release: my brain has been doing the same sort of freeze. With so much tumbling around in a million directions, where do I begin. I guess I begin here. Last year I briefly tried to start blogging again. But now that my kids are older there is more of an intense need to guard their privacy,...