Faith Climbs

Tribe Building 101

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A few weeks ago my friend Sophie and I had an impromptu wine and movie night. We shuffled through her stack of DVDs settled on a retro, stupid-funny movie called Superstar. If you’ve ever heard someone say “SUPERSTARRR” in a weird whisper voice, this is where that comes from. 20-something-year-old Will Ferrell is the main character’s dreamy crush and the snooty, blonde stepmom from Parent Trap is the popular mean girl. Most of the movie was absolutely ridiculous. And when I say ridiculous, I mean the lead Mary Katherine Gallagher, a quirky Catholic school girl desperate for her first real kiss, talks dirty to a stop sign and other inanimate objects for practice. But there were some surprisingly sincere takeaways. When Mary’s grandma finally gets on-board with her granddaughter’s dream of being a “SUPERSTAR” (aka winning the school talent show), she tells Mary she must compete well and for herself, not just to win over her crush.

If you’ve scrolled back through my blog, you may have noticed that several months went by when I posted absolutely nothing. “Where’d she go?” you wondered.Continue Reading

Would you like to dance?

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My fellow bridesmaids, the groomsmen, and the wedding guests had all been bopping around for hours straight to JT’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling”, V.I.C.’s “Wobble” and the like when the DJ finally toned it down with a slow song. A handsome, funny groomsman asked if I would like to dance and I, of course, said yes because he is handsome and funny, and I like to dance. Soon after we started and it became clear to me that he actually knows how to dance—like literal waltzing maneuvers. Despite how difficult it was to walk much less dance in my 4-inch wedges and floor-length dress, this amused me. I (unknowingly) began trying to anticipate the next steps. “Oh, opps. Was that your toe?” I asked, more than once. To my dismay, I was not an impromptu Waltz master. Eventually I stopped asking if it was his toe and he said kindly with a confident smile, “Let me lead.” This surprised me. Had I been trying to take over!? I said something super-humble like, “Fine, but actually lead me. And whatever you do, don’t drop me.” I accepted that I am not a suave dancer and did my best to let him guide me.  I wanted to dance; I just didn’t know the steps. Rather than continuing to awkwardly fumble along attempting to help us waltz, I let his comment remind me that he is the one who asked me to dance. And I had accepted.

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Buried Treasure

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In my family, cottage clean up is a mandatory, all-hands-on-deck kind of thing. We get the house looking all cute for summer because summer means visits from friends and grandparents, and that means appearing a touch tidier and more normal than we actually are. My task was to resurrect the garden. There were no flowers to plant. I was simply asked to yank out the weeds, mess up the soil, and spare the rose bushes that were somehow alive after a northern Michigan winter.

So, pretending I had a green thumb, I started attacking the gnarly weeds and old plant roots with my mini shovel. I yanked, raked, and dug until I ached all over. For those of you who are gardening newbies like me, don’t try this at home unless you’re prepared for a full-body workout! There were many, many weeds and they dove real deep into the ground.

Then it hit me: THIS IS MY LIFE, or what God has been doing in it this past season.

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Permission to Smile

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I’ve been trying to make sense of this new reality for months. Someone significant in my life let me down and I’ve had a really difficult time trying to figure out what to do. I was engaged, and now I am not, and that’s a choice I never anticipated having to make when I was a little girl. When dreams and plans shatter, there are two primary options: numb ourselves and deal with it later, or cling to God as we sift through the facts until they make some sort of sense.  I don’t have all of the answers, but I do know this: as counter-intuitive as it seems, we have to trust God and smile during the difficult seasons of life.

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