Coming to peace with this season of my life:

• Change is good!
• If God made the world straight up and down, we would have no seasons or change; just the sun shining at the equator all year around. But God chose to tilt it on His axis--making a way for strawberries, red leaves, quiet snow, raging hurricanes, spring showers, and sunflowers standing high in salute.
• The tilt created change
• When transition comes--> learn to take small cues from the built in rhythm of the world.
• Chaos and change--> they aren't always bad. They reintroduce e to my smallness, my limits, and my need for God and help from others.
• Time-->how much work can be done in the dark morning hours. Time can be slow when you pause to savor it!
• productivity--> isn't as important as we are conditioned to think!
• "It can be easy for me to live with a fractured soul--the kind that pulls in ten thousand directions, the kind that insists I compete, do more, and live up until finally I crash down."
• "Like the world, my soul needs a solstice--a predictable rhythm of change."
• As shedules shift so must our souls.
• There is a stillness in me--the place where God lives. I Him, I am not pulled in different directions. I am still and at peace.
• Christ holds us together even when change comes rolling through.
• Instead of fighting change and transition--lean into them in the stillness of God.

How to live a good life:

• Mary Oliver: Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Pay attention: to the shades of the sky over you and the smell of the sol under you and the unexpected ways of the souls all around you. Pay attention to redemption, exceptions, confessions, and His reflection. Pay attention to the lilies in the field, the warmth of the sun, and the soft carpet of hair on the curve of a babys ear.

Pay attention long enough to experience life and you buy your brain enough food so it doesnt starve.

Turn off your phone, be still, be present--and you get the gift of now. "Youll find your true self when you look for your reflection in the eyes of souls-- and not the glare of screens"

You buy awe when you pay attention.

pay attention and let go of reflection.

And be astonished by oppression and aggression and transgressions and be astonished, be a psalmist, and be admonished to just be ravished, by a world that makes children laugh wonder at the spray of sprinklers and the splatter of water balloons and go ahead and be like a child and say again, again to the rising of the sun, and again, again, to the crashing of waves and be astonished like the children for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Tell about what happens when you pay attention, when you are astonished, when you have tasted the Gospel. Tell it to the kid lost in the park, the guy lost in the dark, the family losing their matriarch, a lost generation that needs to be marked by Him before then can make a mark for Him.

Dear Women and Daughters. A lesson on beauty:

• Be defined by Real Love — or you’ll go looking for love in the pages of some cheap novel of romance porn, some plot line that is artificially augmented and harlequin liposuctioned, you’ll go looking for love under the warmth of some guy’s hands, you’ll go looking for love in the size of your jeans.
• Listen for the small voice who is Love who cups your face close and names you Beloved, listen to “hear His voice, and He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out.”
• Listen to the Voice who says, “I am the Shepherd that when the wolf comes to consume you with lies, I would rather lose my life, than let you lose your value.”
• Listen to His Voice: God is turning everything around to turn you into the beauty He knows you are.
• Please hear me, Girl: The world has enough women who know how to do their hair. It needs women who know how to do hard and holy things.

The world has enough women who live a masked insecurity. It needs more women who live a brave vulnerability.

The world has enough women who are trying to do it all — spending everything they’ve got to be found in the crowd. It needs more who are doing the only thing that is necessary — spending time at His feet, being found and known by Him.

Look at the bent woman ahead of us in the check-out, her gnarled and arthritic hand counting out the potatoes she’ll bake tonight for the old man leaning against the cart. That is the quietest reality that hushes all the media voices: We need more women who would rather be beautifully sacrificial than perfectly artificial.

• And then it will happen to you, like it happens to all the women who are soul beautiful and loved:
• For a beautiful countenance — count blessings.

For beautiful lips — only speak words that make souls stronger. To carry yourself with poise — carry each other’s burden. For the most beautiful shape — simply live with one hand receiving all as gift, and other hand giving away the gifts. You becoming the shape of a gift — Becoming the shape of a Cross.

• Beauty doesn’t live in your skin. Beauty lives in the lining of your heart.

Its tough being a woman. Its even tougher being a prideful woman.

• An ordinary day in the dark challenges my desire to perform perfectly. It demands I reconcile that who I am and what I struggle with are not the same thing.
• my identity is in God alone – not in what I can or cannot do.
• The tough things in life teach us, train us and tenderize us. They make us wiser and more equipped to love others like they really need to be loved—with empathy and honesty.
• When we’re most acquainted with our needs, we are most drawn to God’s provision. When we feel our tears, we can better feel the pain of others.
• It’s tough being a woman, especially when life is dark. But, it’s much tougher being a bitter, ungrateful and prideful woman.

Those choices just exacerbate the dark and keep us from seeing the light we long for.

If things are tough for you, or if your life doesn’t make sense right now, hang on.

Trust that God is just…He has a plan and a purpose.

May He give you the treasures of darkness…Isaiah 45: 3