The bacon sizzled as the family slowly scampered around getting ready for church. It was a drizzly and grey Sunday morning, where we all slept in since we’d stayed up until midnight to light sparklers and watch the New Year roll in together. Breakfast was finally finished cooking, but apparently nobody around here likes bacon anymore (go figure) and they started complaining about how hungry they were and how there’s nothing to eat. A batch of pancakes got everyone back on track, and all was well in the world again. I had an old Spotify playlist playing on our kitchen speaker with a collection of different worship songs and hymns that we had built up and added to over the years. I was mid-conversation with my middle boy, and he stopped and smiled and pointed at the speaker. “Hey, that was one of our hymns from school - I remember this one.” He then immediately dropped back into whatever he was doing, and the morning moved on. But that moment stuck with me, and I think it’s those simple little things like that I am beginning to store up and treasure. That song we learned was from a LONG time ago, and I was glowing inside knowing that it still caught his ear.

Think about the thing you’re most afraid of. That repeating loop that you carry with you, that pokes at you from it’s darkened corner of your mind, where your fears all lurk and linger. That one that you just glanced over at, but quickly looked away to make sure nobody saw you looking at it? That’s the one. The one you can kind of sort of allude to in a conversation, but never directly name it because it is that crippling, and you’re afraid it just might answer back and step out from its decrepit corner.

Name it. Call it out. Dare it to look back at you.

If I could hold your face between my hands and brush miles away that lay between us, I would tell you this much.

Your heart is golden, and desperately ready to be treasured. There are age-old cracks from past partners, which don’t hinder its beauty at all. However, while it is still radiant and dashing, the compromised crevices can’t withhold the heavy hand that foolishly fumbles and even seeks to break it. Take your heart back into your own hands, my girl, before you lose yourself and can’t find it anymore. You have worked too hard to make it to where you stand today. For every wound that took 30 seconds for someone else to inflict upon you, you spent years healing and becoming whole again. Don’t forget how strong you really are. Don’t forget how good it felt to remember yourself again.

The kids wanted to work on a drawing video yesterday, and I said they could… as long as they did it together. My bigger kids have seemingly opposite personalities at times, and nothing puts it on display quite like art class. Ollie is a “roll with it” kind of guy. If something goes awry in his creation, he just kinda shrugs and keeps it moving. Tacie, on the other hand, cannot bear the idea of imperfection, and we will hear lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth before finding her in the middle of a whole ream of crumpled-up printer paper. She doesn’t always give herself time to learn slowly, or time to fumble and experiment, before she demands mastery of herself.

Every summer, we visit the same beach in the Florida panhandle with a mix of family and friends. The place we stay has a large river canal that feeds into the ocean behind our condo, which our crew always refers to as “the little beach”. It has a small sandy beach next to a long dock, it’s full of hermit crabs and little darting fish, and the traffic of boats or sometimes even barges that blast their long horns for the kids on the shore will pass. The kids became restless playing on the shore, so they began jumping off the dock into the water, and after that lost its novelty, they began to jump off the upper platform of the pontoon boat tied to the pier. They were testing their limits, busting out the flips, and making some waves of their own.

When we started our homeschooling journey all those years ago, I was kind of winging it. And by “kind of winging it”, I mean I had no idea what I was doing.

As we fumbled and explored our way through the first couple of years learning each other and what worked (and even more things that didn’t work), I found myself really sifting what the most important things were. If I only have these handful of years with them, what am I hoping to accomplish? If we can’t do it all (which we we can’t), what things would move us towards our core values? After all, how we spend our minutes is how we live our lives, and if we’re not careful we’ll squirrel them all away on the things that never really mattered anyway.