Call Crayola. I’m pretty sure God created a new color.
June pink is the sky at 5 a.m.
June pink is the peony that grew in my backyard.
June pink is the peony that grew at the Arboretum.
June pink is the sisterly duo in the backyard, learning about caterpillars.
June pink is the softness of bunny ears.
June pink is that spot upon my hubby’s head that doesn’t grow hair anymore.
And June pink is a spot on the wet nose of a Holstein having breakfast.
Seen any June pink in your neck of the woods?
Eyes dancing blue, smile warm and bright
Heart always true, hugs always tight
Sweet memories stay, though you have gone
In my heart may your legacy live on.
I cried today. Mother’s Day is a hard day for me. It’s hard because I can’t be with my mom, or call her, or tell her how much I love her.
This is the 17th Mother’s Day since I lost my mom to cancer. So now half of my life I have been “celebrating” Mother’s Day as a motherless daughter. Every year, I struggle with the lingering loss and the disappointment that my mom is no longer a part of my life and will never be a part of my children’s lives. Sometimes, I worry I am forgetting my mom, and that, too, is painful.
This Mother’s Day, in memory of my mom, I thought I’d tell you a little of what I remember about her and how I’m dealing with being a motherless daughter.
Mama did all the things good mothers do. She kissed my skinned-up knees, sang sweet songs, and hugged me tight. She always knew just how I liked my sandwiches fixed and wrote little love notes on the napkins she slipped into my Holly Hobby lunchbox. She also had a big wide smile that went on for miles.
But sometimes Mama’s face transformed. Her jaw set back so that her beautiful, perfect white teeth formed a very unnatural underbite. Oh, that’s when I really knew I was in trouble. That was her “I-am-mad-and I’m-trying-to-regain-my-self-control” expression. Every good mom has a look like that, and every good kid who sees it knows she’d better duck and run!
Most of the time, though, Mama was cheerful and high spirited. The very outgoing life of the party. The glue that kept our family together. Mama’s eyes danced clear blue, and she told funny stories and jokes and laughed a lot. Mama’s laugh was so loud and contagious. Sometimes it embarassed me, but that rollicking laugh was unforgettable.
She’d never have said so, but Mama was an amazing seamstress. She made me so many beautiful dresses when I was a little girl. She even made the white prom dress I wore my junior year, and the only pattern she used was the picture I tore out of a teen magazine! Yep, she was that good.
Mama also was quite well-known in our small town as a financial whiz. She owned and managed a very successful tax consulting and bookkeeping business. As a little girl, I loved going to work at her office on summer days. I sat at her receptionist’s desk since the receptionist usually only worked full-time during tax season. I typed on the typewriter and played with the copy machine and the adding machine. I felt so grown up and important behind that desk. I felt just like Mama.
Of course, nobody could enter numbers on a ten-key adding machine faster than Mama. How I loved to watch her fingers fly across the keys and hear the machine hum and struggle as it raced to keep up. I watched in awe as the long, curly rolls of adding machine tape spilled over the edge of her desk and onto the floor. How could one person enter so many numbers in one day? When I got older, I helped Mama with some of the filing and bookkeeping work. Back then, I wanted to be an entrepreneur just like Mama.
When it wasn’t tax season, Mama could be quite a night owl. She’d curl up on the burnt orange sofa in the den and speed read through romance and mystery novels long after tucking me and my brother into bed. That’s also when she’d sneak some chocolate from the kitchen. You could say chocolate was her weakness, but I’d say it was also her strength. Mama baked — mostly from scratch — the best chocolate desserts I’ve ever eaten! Chocolate pies, chocolate cheesecake, chocolate cookies, chocolate cake, and brownies — just to name a few. Her baking motto: “If it isn’t chocolate, why bother?” Spending time in the kitchen with Mama is probably my favorite childhood memory. I always got to lick the beaters.
No doubt the best smell of home was something chocolate baking in Mama’s oven. And the best sound of home was Mama’s fingertips gliding along the piano keys. I loved to hear her play. One of my favorites that I always begged her to play was “Grandma’s Feather Bed” by John Denver. Another favorite was the “The Baby Elephant Walk” by Henry Mancini.
While her long, slender fingers were made to play piano, Mama did not have a green thumb. Even though she grew up on a farm, she claimed she had a “black thumb” and she kindly passed that along to me, too. But even with a black thumb, Mama managed to grow lots of tomatoes every summer, and her flowerbed usually overflowed with Impatiens. My favorite, though, was the a lilac bush, and the tulips that lined the big front porch. Outside my bedroom window was the crooked tree. It was so crooked, my brother and I could almost walk as we climbed up into it. Around the crooked tree is where Mama planted the iris bulbs she dug up from her grandma’s farm in western Oklahoma. Mama loved those irises. They were shades of purple and blue. Blue was her favorite color.
The spring before Mama died was especially stormy, even by Oklahoma standards. During one severe thunderstorm, lightning struck that crooked tree and destroyed it. Daddy hauled off the tree, and that left the irises looking lonely and awkward and misplaced.
After she died, I decided Mama was the crooked tree — a lovely but imperfect person that I had adored and had tried so hard to please. I was the irises left behind, wondering where the center of my life went, feeling lonely and insecure and out-of-place. A daughter without a mother.
But praise be to God! He uses loss. He uses affliction. He uses pain. I’m here to testify that God used Mama’s death. He used it to draw me into a deeper relationship with Jesus, the One perfect person worthy of centering my life around, worthy of my trying hard to please. In Him I find my security and my direction in life. To Him I belong.
“God sometimes washes His children’s eyes with tears so that they may read aright His providences and His commandments.” – unknown
Mama was so very precious to me, and I miss her in more ways that I can ever count up on an adding machine, much less blog about here. She is so much a part of who I am today. I thank God for the years that I had with her, and I thank Him for being so faithful in the many hard years since losing Mama. God truly has shown Himself as the Great Provider. He cares for me and loves me, even more than Mama did. And He knows me, even better than she did. He knit me together in her womb, and He numbered all our days — hers and mine — the days we’d have together and the days apart.
God also has given me two beautiful daughters, who constantly remind me of Mama in so many special little ways — including the dancing blue eyes and the contagious, rollicking laugh.
Thank You, God, for knowing just how to comfort us in our loss and give us peace beyond our understanding. Thanks for being the perfect center of our lives.
And thanks for blessing me with Mama.
Homeschooling — that’s what I having been doing with my daughters since birth, though I didn’t really realize it in those early years. Yes, I considered myself a stay-at-home mom, but I never thought of myself as a homeschool mom until much later. Even so, in those early years, we spent hours playing with playdough, baking together, digging in a makeshift sensory tub, going on field trips, coloring, pretending, making up stories and reading, reading, reading all sorts of children’s books. It was very challenging many days, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Taking my oldest to preschool when she was almost 5, on the other hand, felt very unnatural. Yes, she had a wonderful time there and made friends. Yes, we both liked her teacher and the teacher’s assistant very much. But I just never had a peace about sending here there, especially after the terrible asthma episode she had that fall. She constantly needed breathing treatments and was still too young to use an inhaler. How I fretted each morning, trying to fit breathing treatments into the already tight morning routine. Then every time I kissed her goodbye, I wondered what her oxygen level was and whether her lungs were working well. Yes I prayed, but I also worried a lot.
In retrospect, I can say that God spoke to me that preschool year. Through my daughter’s asthma and the trials we faced, God showed me that He was calling our family to do something different. He showed me that — at least for now — homeschooling is an opportunity for Him to reveal Himself to our family and display His glory, power and strength.
In her book Discerning the Voice of God, author Priscilla Shirer says,
“When you face two options and each seems to please God, consider the one that displays God’s glory, power and strength. This makes room for God to reveal Himself to you and show Himself through you. God wants us to see the wondrous things He will accomplish in us. Don’t be fearful about the hard road He may ask you to take. Be encouraged and excited about seeing His divine, supernatural activity in and through you… God’s voice commands the option that will display His power. He desires to show Himself strong in you and will encourage you to do things that require trust and faith.”
In deciding to homeschool, I came across many, many reasons why it would be a good fit for our family. But this one is paramount — that God’s power could be displayed through homeschooling. For me, it requires much trust and faith to educate my kids. Since I don’t have a background in teaching, God really has to show Himself strong in our homeschool. And He does. Even in planning the little details, as you may recall in this post about orchestrating the swans. God is faithful to equip me and encourage me and do it also!
So, whether you are contemplating homeschooling or contemplating some other hard road, may you listen closely to God’s voice and allow Him to display His incomparably great power in your life!
When Michael and I got married nearly 14 years ago, we had dozens of tulips but we didn’t have a single flower girl in the ceremony. We just didn’t know any young girls of the proper age to assign that role, except one whose family wasn’t able to attend the event. So I felt a little sad not having a flower girl in my wedding, but it was just as well. God’s desire was to bless us far beyond getting someone else’s a little girl all dressed up to toss out a few petals and fidget for the rest of a 45-minute ceremony.
Yes, God’s blessed us far beyond our wildest imaginations. Today we have two flower girls, and cumulatively they have blessed us with 11 years worth of all things flowery, dressy and girly — and I have a feeling there are still many more years of that to come.
Since they were wee little ones, hardly able to walk, our daughters have been our flower girls, pondering many a petal and sniffing each bloom thoughtfully.
Linnea always has been the chief flower sniffer among us.
When she was small, Linnea demanded to sniff any real or fake flower within a 5-mile radius.
She gladly helped me plant Impatiens in the backyard, and she sniffed them plenty, too.
Just a few weeks ago, she confirmed that this lily smelled quite lovely indeed.
Now Laurel, on the other hand, always has been the chief caretaker of the flowers.
She’s always eager to relieve the Impatiens of their endless thirst.
And she’s always quick on the draw with a watering can.
Even the petunias wave in delight when Laurel comes share her sprinkles.
I’m sure my daughters’ flower sniffing and watering obsessions have nothing to do with the fact that both their names are also the names of flowers (Linnea is the national flower of Sweden, and the Mountain Laurel is the state flower of Pennsylvania and Connecticut.)
I’m sure it has more to do with the fact that God created in them a need to behold and connect with something beautiful, a need for Him. Flowers are His creation, His handiwork. And right now God’s handiwork is blooming all over the countryside, beautifully showing us just a glimpse of our Creator’s indescribable glory.
In Oregon earlier this month, the girls found flowers on a little nature walk we took in Lake Oswego.
Our stroll took us along part of this avenue of blooming crab apple trees.
Also, if you read this earlier post, you may recall the magnolia tree I mentioned was almost done blooming in the courtyard when we visited Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland. The blooms looked like this:
And beneath the tree, the girls scrambled to collect fistfuls of fallen blooms.
Surely by now you can imagine why we just had to take our flower girls to the tulip festival in Oregon.
With tulips in nearly every color of the rainbow, the festival was truly a tulip-lover’s paradise, a botanical feast for the eyes.
It wasn’t easy, but somehow our flower girls victoriously overcame the temptation to pick the tulips. We did buy a lovely bouquet of tulips for my aunt, which helped us not feel so empty-handed. I kept longing to bring some of the tulips home with us, but instead I brought home another treasure: this picture of our flower girls admiring the tulips.
I love that they are equipped with rubber boots and raincoats beneath a bright blue, sunshiny sky. The path was muddy and bumpy, and they splashed through dozens of puddles along the way. But the beauty around them made it all worthwhile.
I also love that this picture offers so much perspective on life. If I focus too much on my own two boots and the muddy trial I’m walking through, I get bogged down and discouraged. But if I look upward, I see the rain is over and gone. I see the Son shining down on me, lighting my path.
And if I look out beyond my path, I see fields of precious people, flowers quickly fading. They are here today, but many will be gone tomorrow. Some are ripe for harvest. Some have already turned toward the Light. Others will turn to Him eventually. And still others will never turn toward the Light of the World, Jesus. That’s a godly perspective of which I need to be constantly reminded. When I see those around me as flowers quickly fading — here today and gone tomorrow — I treat them differently. I am more loving, more patient, more heart-broken, and more passionate about sharing my faith in Christ Jesus.
So, because I love this picture and because I love our precious flower girls, and yes, because I love tulips — in case I left any doubt about that — the tulip festival leaves big shoes to fill on our next nature walk!
Wouldn’t you agree?
You’ve read about Goliath and maybe even Jack and the Beanstalk. Tucked safely inside a storybook is indeed a wonderful place to keep a giant. But did you know there are bigger giants lurking around your homeschool?
They aren’t often named, but giant pitfalls do threaten our homeschool families, says Rachael Carman, a homeschool mother and an author and speaker for Apologia Educational Ministries.
In some families, these giants take the form of unrealistic expectations, over-spending, over-scheduling, or isolation. In others, the giants are making family an idol, having a tendency to judge, being overly dependent on authority and control, or striving to convince everyone else that they should homeschool, too. Still countless other giants threaten to steal the abundant life Jesus offers us.
“There are giants in the land,” Carman says. “But God is bigger.”
So whatever giant you face, don’t minimize it. Take it on in the name of the Lord. And be sure you give that giant a name!
“Acknowledge them. Write them down. Lay them before the Lord,” Carman says. “Acknowledge the giants, and then when God slays them, celebrate what God can do.”
God doesn’t want us just to survive homeschooling, she says. He intends for us to soar beyond survival. He wants us to love Him, love each other, and learn something. What’s more, He wants us to pass it on – not because homeschooling is the answer, but because Jesus is the answer.
Carman says we are called to total satisfaction – an abundant life that is beyond what we could ask or imagine. We are also called to faithfulness.
“God is going to walk with you when you put your hope in the Lord,” Carman says.
Likewise, Isaiah 40:29-31 says: “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
Carman offers four sure-fire tactics for taking on these giants in our homes.
1. Set your mind on God’s word. Meditate on it and memorize it.
2. Fix your eyes on heaven. Imagine heaven and press on toward it, she says, just as Paul talks about in Philippians 3:13-14.
3. “We are in a battle and not at a tea party,” she says. “Fight! Use the shield! It is not your imagination; you are being shot at!”
The word of God is the sword of the Spirit, and that sword is heavy. You must build up your muscles in order to use it well, she says.
“The only real word of encouragement comes from the word of God,” she says.
Stand firm and suit up for battle. Carman points to Ephesians 6:10-17, the passage which details the full armor of God.
4. Train your mind to think on the things listed in Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
*Note: Rachael Carman spoke at the Hearts-at-Home Conference in Rochester, MN, last fall.
These are words to ponder.
God has led me to the first chapter of Ephesians this week and — as He would have it — the passage I am focusing on is the same one that Pastor John Piper (Desiring God/Bethlehem Baptist) preached from on Easter. He titles his sermon The Immeasurable Greatness of His Power Toward Us.
Ephesians 1 is also the topic of this Daily Reflection post over at The High Calling of Our Daily Work.
May the eyes of our hearts be truly sharpened to spiritual reality so that we may know this resurrection power now.
Also, homeschool moms will find more words to ponder in this post: Homeschooling with Grace.
Jesus is risen! Happy Easter with love from my family to yours!
If you recall this post from a while ago, you already know that our family is sponsoring Dawit, a little boy at Kind Hearts Orphanage near Addis Abba, Ethiopia. We just recently received the March 2010 newsletter from Kind Hearts, and it was full of wonderful pictures and encouraging news of how the children there are being fed spiritually and physically through the sponsorship program coordinated by Children’s HopeChest.
In the newsletter, Ato. Wendimagegnehu Mecha, the executive director of Kind Hearts, says, “Children’s HopeChest is a guide in a time of crisis and a gift from God. Our hope flourishes through this organization. We are grateful for your support and we require further assistance to ensure the proper survival and holistic development of the children. Thank you.”
There’s much work yet to do, more children will be enrolling at Kind Hearts soon, and Children’s HopeChest is currently developing another location with nearly 100 children that will need sponsors. If you would like to sponsor a child, please contact Karen Wistrom at kjwistrom@yahoo.com.
For more about Kind Hearts, I encourage you to follow this blog by Karen Wistrom at Family From Afar, or download the Kind Hearts newsletter PDF by clicking here: Kind Hearts Newsletter March 2010.
Thanks for your consideration. May God bless you!
I’m knee-deep into a feature story I’m writing this week before Holy Week, but my brain needs a quick break from all things beef-retail-related. So I thought I’d escape by sharing some random thoughts about Easter.
I love Easter, and one tradition we added a few years ago is telling the passion story with the help of resurrection eggs from ChristianBook.com. (With a little work, you can also make your own.) Our daughters really look forward to opening each egg. I took the eggs to church last year and opened them with my Pre-K/K Sunday School class, and they also were captivated by what was inside.
A few weeks ago I purchased a new Easter book called The Sparrow’s Easter Song, which we’ve already read a few times. It’s a wonderfully written and illustrated story about a sparrow who witnesses Jesus’s death and resurrection and tells all the other animals about it.
Another favorite Easter book just for kids is The Parable of the Lily by Liz Curtiz Higgs. It paints a beautiful picture of forgiveness and is especially fitting for little girls.
Linnea, Laurel and I are working through a book/music CD called Passion Hymns for a Kid’s Heart to help them learn some of my favorite Easter hymns. This week they’ve been learning “Up From the Grave He Arose,” which has such a lively tune. Hearing it brings me right back to the pews of the Methodist church where I grew up.
I also have a new favorite Easter hymn, one I just learned last year. It’s “Jesus Paid It All,” and I absolutely love this version of it by Kristian Stanfill. You will, too! (Side note: This hymn is not one of those included in the book Passion Hymns for a Kid’s Heart.)
Also, just for fun, check out my cute little snow bunnies in the Good Friday post I wrote two years ago: Whiter Than Snow. They’ve grown so much even since last Easter!
Starlight Writer 
