All Dried Up

Many Two of you expressed despair mild disappointment over the fact that your Christmas greeting from our home did not include the usual family update. Honestly, I felt I had nothing to say.This year was uneventful, it seems, and in many ways I feel like we're exactly where we were a year ago.  For many reasons this disappoints me.  I had high hopes of a year filled with growth and maybe a little bit of change. But here we are. The same things about myself that frustrated me then, frustrate me now. Vices from years past plague me still. We reside in our tiny house in our mid-sized suburb. It's a whiny, complain-y way to start off 2013, no? I wish I could look back and say I just sucked the life out of 2012.  That was my intention anyway. But I keep getting all caught up in my head, wondering what's God doing?  What does he have in store? And vascillating between waiting for life to start and pleading with it to slow down.
See why I haven't been blogging lately?  Who wants to listen to this?
In the past couple of years, I've been trying to focus my growth in the area of a word with which I feel God supplies me.  The past couple of years it has been surrender.  Again, I wish I could speak to great growth in this area.  It's slow in coming. This year I think God has a couple of things He wants to teach me and our entire family, for that matter.  The first is:
-wait. While I do some whining about how small our house feels and about the fact that life seems to be in a holding pattern (thus, no Christmas update), I sense God asking us to just be patient and stay put. He has us exactly where we are for a reason.
I have also felt a strong pull to the words gratitude and contentment. Because I think a lot of my struggle has to do with not being these things. This especially came to my attention during the most recent Christmas season when, despite my best efforts, I found myself all caught up in the consumeristic b.s. that tends to overshadow the true meaning of the time.
I don't know what 2013 will hold.  But I am entering into it, despite the disappointment of what last year was or wasn't,  with a great sense of hope and peace. That whatever comes our way, whether earth-shattering and new, or steeped in sameness, whether full of life or seemingly dull and dried up (even if that's just my words), God is in it.

Falling Forward

This is the amazing thing about writing, about words. When someone can say what's so exactly filling your heart and your mind.
Like this.