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Go in the strength you have

I love this photo and quote from Ann Voskamp on Facebook this morning. It touched my heart, and I’m hoping Ann doesn’t mind if I share it here with you. If you want to read an awesome blog, check out Ann’s: A Holy Experience website. We all are human beings with feelings and emotions and opinions and dreams and regrets. I regret hurting teachers’ feelings when I wrote about kindergarten. I’ve found that when I am passionate about a subject, often readers are passionate, too. And sometimes our passions are fire and water. My passions have been doused from time to […]

By Paula April 27, 2015

You don’t know how bad you’re hurt

You’re hurt worse than you think, I wanted to tell her when she didn’t respond to my text. When her silence was deafening the other day. It’s like the Chinese lettering the doctor wrote on my husband’s knee before surgery. Or maybe it was an H and a P. Or a stick man. Who knows what that symbol meant. We didn’t know Scott’s knee was that bad. The doctor expected a tear in the meniscus, not the damage he found. The damage he fixed. Because this doctor knew what he wrote on that knee. Knew what he was doing when he […]

By Paula April 18, 2015

Pruning

When I returned from Mt. Hermon our new orchard needed pruning. My brother Patrick does the big pruning in winter, but this was the small pruning of spring, the tedious job of cutting off all the new shoots the tree tries to grow when cold days yield to warm sunshine. Scott hurt his knee and couldn’t bend down to help. The older boys were working in another orchard. So it was me and the one-year-old trees, with Cruz hanging on my back like a monkey. Trees are a lot like people. They want to grow their own way. A good […]

By Paula April 13, 2015

Crossing the Creek

“I don’t think this is funny,” I told God when I saw my classroom assignment at Mount Hermon. What were the chances of being put back in the same classroom where my breakdown began? Creekside. For a moment I stared at this name on the wall where I would spend the next three days learning the ins and outs of social media and blogging. Mount Hermon has lots of classrooms. I couldn’t believe I was back in Creekside. The windows were open and I could hear the creek rushing past the building. “It’s just like you making your horse cross […]

By Paula April 7, 2015

Looking for Easter Calves

When I was little, I loved looking for Easter calves. After church Easter morning we’d walk out into the pasture searching for newborns. Back then, I believed Easter calves came from God. Forget the Easter Bunny and hunting Easter eggs, finding Easter calves in the pasture always thrilled me. Not every year brought an Easter calf. Yet other years, two, or even three babies graced the morning wobbling on wet, shaky legs or curled in tight little fetal calf positions on the dew-damp grass. The curled up ones were my favorite. Sometimes a little girl could pet these sleeping babies […]

By Paula April 1, 2015

Back to Mount Hermon

“I know I need to do this, but I’m a little scared,” I told my daughter a few days ago. “It’s like getting back on a horse,” Lacy said with a smile. “You always told me if you want to ride horses, you have to get back on when you get bucked off.” I hadn’t thought about going back to Mt. Hermon this way, and when I did, I told myself, yes, you always get back on the horse. And then I remembered the time I didn’t. I was a little girl when my dad found me walking up from […]

By Paula March 22, 2015

Making the Butterflies Fly

I’ve spent the past several days praying about what God wants me to learn from a wedding Scott and I witnessed at the ocean this past weekend. We weren’t invited to this ceremony and didn’t mean to be there. It just happened our hotel room was right across from this wedding and we sat on our balcony as it unfolded before our eyes. Scott kept looking for the groom after we heard the bride bossing everyone around in the room next to ours. She wanted everything just right, and so far it was turning out that way. The weather was […]

By Paula March 16, 2015