Dreams

Hi friends! Happy Groundhog Day! I had myself a little consult with Google to find out if today is Groudhog Day, Groundhog’s Day or Groudhogs Day. According to the fine folks in Whatever-it’s-called, PA, the first one is the winner. But who really cares? Anyway, I have much to share with you this fine Friday in February. My mind is going in a million directions. (Hello adult ADHD!) I’m more scattered than usual because it’s been awhile since I’ve had a good night’s sleep. The hours from 11:00 to 5:00 have been dicey since Greg and I started co-sleeping with one of our babies.

Co-sleeping? Wait a minute. I thought your children were in elementary school, you may be thinking.

I’m not talking about the children I birthed. Oh no, the eleven, nine and six-year-old are sleeping just fine. I’m talking about the eleven pound fur baby (who technically has hair not fur, but WHATEVER). Never in a million years did we think we’d share our bed with a non-human mammal. But co-sleeping with Chloe is what’s happening these days. I’m loving every second of having our sweet dog in our bed, except in the middle of the might when I’m not sleeping because the sweet dog is in our bed.

Enough about my nighttime woos. If you’re new to this corner of the internet, you should know that a “Weekend Roundup” is what happens when I share the work from a few of my friends at Hope*Writers.

The first piece isn’t exactly an essay or blog post or anything like that. Alana Dawson announced that she’s starting a podcast called Moms Want More. You can listen to the intro here. I hardly need another podcast in my life, but I find the subject of moms wanting more intriguing. Now that the Twedlings spend several hours a day at a magical place called elementary school, I have a bit of free time to establish a loose writing schedule. But someday I’d like to take my dream of the writerly life a bit further. Anyway, this podcast is for women like me who want to follow a dream but also happen to be in the middle of the muck of parenting and life.

Speaking of life with kids, how many of you are parenting teenagers? Anyone, anyone? We don’t have a teenager in the house, but I loved the following article by Karen Gauvreau. In fact, I embarrassed myself in the school parking lot the other day with all the LOLing coming from my van as I read Why Parenting Teenagers is Exactly Like Having a Mammogram. I don’t even have a teenager and I’ve never had a mammogram, but the article was absolutely hysterical. I shouldn’t have laughed about it. I recently learned that I’m middle-aged, which means the mammogram is on the horizon. Anyway, Karen’s latest article is titled Marriage: Where Mopping Is the New Sexy. You can find more of Karen Gauvreau here.

I’m not one to rock the boat. In fact, I will risk everything to ensure smooth sailing. Lanie Anderson isn’t rocking the boat either. However, she lovingly and respectfully disagrees with John Piper’s statement against women teaching seminary in her thoughtful essay, “John Piper, Jesus And A Woman’s Place.” You can read it here. Highly recommend. Lanie is a new-to-me writer. She also happens to be a youngish seminary student pursuing a master’s degree in Christian apologetics at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

As for me, I’ve been busy driving three kids to and from school, and basketball practice and Girl Scouts. Cookie season is about to start. I’ve spent quite a bit of time (for me) on social media trying to persuade people to buy Girl Scout cookies and to gush about Jamie Ivey’s book, If You Only Knew: My Unlikely, Unavoidable Story of Becoming Free, which released on Monday. It’s one of my favorites already. Not just the part about becoming free, but the message that even those who are free in Christ will mess up but are not failures. Anyway, I set out to write a review of Jamie’s book but felt God nudging me to share my own story to freedom instead. The links are below the image of the goose (or duck?) lifting off to flight.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The Instant Pot just beeped, announcing that dinner is ready. Those of you who know me in real life know how much I feared my Instant Pot in the beginning. The darn thing stayed in the box for the first year. I even named it Voldemort or “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” I finally dusted off the Dark Lord’s box in January. I’m pleased to announce that we haven’t had a single explosion in our tiny kitchen due to the Instant Pot, as I once feared was my destiny. In fact, Emily and I changed the Instant Pot’s name to Mrs. Weasley. Anyway, we need to eat quickly because Steven has a basketball game at the middle school, and we have snack duty. I’ll publish the Roundup when we get home because everyone knows it is stupid to announce to the world that you are stepping away from home for a basketball game on a dark Friday night in February.

P.S. Do you have a story to freedom to share? What about a dream you have in the middle of the mess and muck of life? Do tell! Oh, and have a wonderful weekend!

Over the weekend I announced that Jamie Ivey wrote a memoir, If You Only Knew: My Unlikely, Unavoidable Story of Becoming Free. Her book releases on January 30. You can preorder it here. In honor of Jamie’s baby, I shared the beginning of my own story to freedom. If you missed the first installment, you can find it here.

Part 2

When spring quarter came to an end during my sophomore year of college, I’d lost a significant amount of weight on top of my original weight loss. I also lost my period. And strands of blonde hair, which fell out in clumps when I ran my fingers through it. In addition, I lost the ability to regulate my body temperature; and when I woke each morning my legs were covered in mysterious bruises. (Bony knees were the culprit.) One of the few friends I had left started calling me Twiggy, and rightly so. I was between a size 2 and size 4, but I slipped perfectly into a size 1 Audrey Hepburn-style dress that I proudly bought from Gap. I’m sure it looked more like a potato sack thrown over skinny legs and an emaciated body. But I was proud of the image reflecting back at me from the mirror on my bedroom door.

It’s important to understand that it wasn’t about losing weight at this point. I liked the way I looked. My fear was that I wouldn’t be able to maintain my new figure. I mean, I could go up a size if I ate a standard portion. What would happen if I stopped weighing myself? It was a matter of time, I reasoned, before my new jeans would get tight. What if Jesus asked me to eat a whole sandwich? Was he worth it? I prayed earnestly for the Holy Spirit to give me the desire to ask God for help.

I truly wondered if Jesus could love and accept a girl who held out on him. He gave his life for me. I hated my life. I lived to eat my daily 6 ounce carton of yogurt with granola or an open-faced peanut butter sandwich; and all I wanted to do was sleep. I dreamed of going to sleep and not waking up. I wanted to be done with the pain and emptiness caused by my secret anxiety of gaining weight. I was racked with guilt for wasting my life. Who did I think I was? My dad lost the life he loved to cancer a few years back. But still, a voice inside said I would get really fat and disappoint God and everyone else if I let my guard down, even for a moment. Still, it was becoming difficult to resist the anthem of freedom rising in me.

You see, I had dreams, dreams of being set free. God gave me the sweetest gift. At night I had vivid dreams in which I was able to cast all hindrance aside as I leapt over fallen trees in rain forests and sprinted through the African savanna amongst mighty cats and the striped zebra, full of energy, full of life. During my waking hours, as cliché as it sounds, he gave me a picture of a dark and ragged tunnel with light bursting through the far end of it. I held on to this image of hope as if my life depended on it.

I made the decision to follow Jesus Christ the summer after my seventeenth birthday at a Young Life camp called Malibu in beautiful British Colombia, Canada. So you see, Jesus wasn’t about to let me go. In fact, he was going to wait patiently for me to get over myself and follow him with my whole heart, all the while loving me with a wild and unending love. I was (and am) a child of God, and my loving father desired me to be free from the chains that bound me.

I began spending time reading the Bible and writing in a prayer journal, pouring out my heart and my hurts to Jesus. In turn, the Lord led me to discover verses from the Bible on fear that became my lifeline. Do you know how many times the Bible tells us “Do not fear. I am with you?” I’m too lazy to google it, so I really can’t say, but the idea of putting our trust in God instead of living in fear is a recurring theme throughout both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. A gem hidden in Matthew 6: “[Do] not worry about everyday life…Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing?” Was this real? I mean, how did Jesus know this was my struggle?

As far as the voice, the voice that told me I was fat and unworthy, I began countering the attack by whispering “No, I will not listen to you. You are a liar. I will only listen to the Voice of Truth.”

But I wasn’t ready to fully relinquish the reins of control over food and my body, though I knew in my heart that Jesus would soon ask me to choose between him and my current ways.

I knew I would have to choose him because this was killing me.

To be continued.

Part 3