My faithful helper came back this year after I gave her every out. I am so grateful! To have someone—a very very competent someone—to share wrapping duties with is a joy, but it’s more than that… It’s the tradition of caffeine-fueled wrapping while watching Elf, and it’s the conversation we get to have while we cut paper and apply gift tags. Even when life gets busy for both of us, we get to have this time together. I can’t tell what fills my spirit more: Rebecca’s willingness to give up her time to help me or her willingness to give up her time to talk with me. What I can say is that this name-friend’s generosity is the best. Love you, Bec!

Cutest ugly (but still adorable) Christmas sweater—and turtleneck—model ever. :D

First he walked down the street, found a pile of leftover snow and kicked it. And when we were still weren’t done chatting he flopped in the neighbor’s yard, much like the Santa Claus who is refused air by day but by night stands alert next to the lit reindeer. When I saw the light glowing around him I ran fast for my camera and begged him to stay in place. And he did. Because he’s that kind of kid.

I once worked alongside a woman who was tough. In an office building full of warm and empathetic individuals, she stood out as a person who wasn’t interested in chitchat, didn’t smile very often, and certainly didn’t seem to care if you were the latest student-worker in a long line of uninteresting student workers. She was not, shall we say, nurturing whatsoever and her reputation preceded her.

I was nervous every single time I had to approach her desk and ask her a question. As a person who excelled in the “getting people to like me” category (I could say a few thing about my idolization of likability now), I wasn’t used to interacting with personalities like this one. After I got over my initial surprise at her lack of warmth, I decided something: I was going to work hard to win her over. Putting my own feelings aside was not the norm for me—and still isn’t—but I recognized something in my early 20’s and it was that I was going to have to work on this relationship over time. There was an obstacle—her—and there was a hurdle to get over, and I was determined to conquer this challenge.

In conquering the challenge, I learned a huge lesson in relating to people. Not everyone is a warm fuzzy person! Some people have tough exteriors borne of hard circumstances and others have natural bends towards introversion. Whatever the reason, people are people and will behave differently and that has nothing to do with their motivations, interests, and, hopefully, my relationship with them. This woman became a friend to me during my years of working in this environment, and she is still my best example of powering through what initially felt like a hard situation. I have fond memories of her now.

I confess that I don’t want for my daughter to go through hard times. I want to bubble wrap her, ensuring she has a soft heart towards the world and protecting her from the cruelty I’ve seen. I want to wrap my kindness around her to deflect the unkind words that come in her direction. I want to lay pillows at her feet to protect her from inevitable falls. I want to open her eyes to rainbows and flowers and sunsets without her having to witness the heavy winds and tornados and, yes, the floods. At some level I understand Helicopter Moms. The desire to protect and want the very best for our progeny is strong. With privilege, power, and influence, some of us will stop at nothing to push our children into the future that we think is best, along the route that we think is best, and you better believe we’re going to deflect those hard times we see coming a mile away.

But oh, that’s not the way to go. Not at all.

Even while I was typing about sunshine versus storms, I couldn’t help but notice that sunshine means little unless you’ve been through the longest winter on record and you lost track of warmth and light and were moved to a hopeless place in your heart. Isn’t spring all the more sweet after a hard winter? Each bud on the tree now sings praise to its Maker, and your heart is moved to do the same. Spring isn’t nearly as interesting without the hard crust of snow and layers of salt and the same winter boots pulled on day after day. It is this contrast of lovely versus unlovely that awakens us to the blessings we have.

Our pastor said something in a sermon months ago about hoping that his kids will suffer. Okay okay, it’s so out-of-context here that it’s not fair, and yet, suffering is absolutely part of this human experience. I can tell quite quickly whether a fellow adult has ever suffered based on their compassion and empathy for another suffering human. We don’t mature without have the hard edges rounded off, and oftentimes that rounding happens in the toughest of moments. Every scrape of a knee and fall from a tree leads to a child figuring out her boundaries. The mistakes made in adolescence lead to knowing one’s limits. The stupidity of early adulthood leads to important life lessons.

I can’t be a Helicopter Mom any more than I can sprout wings and fly south when the first snows begin to fly. While everything within me yearns to protect my growing child, I do not believe she is best served by being bubble wrapped and protected from the difficulties of this world. If I remove her from every hard situation—which I physically cannot do—how will she learn her limits? How will she rebound and be bolstered internally when the external world is hard to understand? How will she learn rely on God, who is always present and available to her?

Many kids I know have already been through a lot by the time they hit middle school. I think of those who’ve been adopted—whether in infancy or in later years—and I know they’ve experienced a level of trauma completely unknown by those of us who have been raised by our biological parents. I think of the children I’ve spent time with through the foster care system, and though others may never know of their struggles, I know of the addictions, the lack of parental consistency, the unsafe dwelling places, the abuse and the near-constant neglect may of them have faced by the time they started kindergarten. And kids who aren’t in foster or adoptive homes? Still, life can get hard. The death of a parent, divorce, remarriage, sexual molestation, cross-country moves, bullying at school and home, unkind teachers and coaches, and financial difficulties can all shake up a person from the outside, while from the inside there’s a variety of developmental delays, physical disabilities, and mental illnesses that plague children.

However, the human heart is amazingly resilient. I saw this in the eyes of my students during my student-teaching days and I see it now in my child and in her friends and in my friends’ children. Despite hard things, the human spirit wants to succeed, and it doesn’t want to succeed because a Helicopter Mom removed all difficulties. No! We overcome the difficulties. We make changes. We rebound with encouraging words and encouraging examples and we don’t take for granted the people around us that offer a “You struggle with that? ME TOO!”

So on days (weeks, months, years!) when I feel like protecting my kid, I’ll try to reflect on how much stronger she’s grown in every area that matters in these past 14 years of life. I see her grow in smarts, in empathy, in artistic skills, in relating to animals, and in her faith in a God she can’t see but Who exists and is true and good. I will try to look back at those adorable baby pictures and crazy toddler antics and reflect on the joy she’s brought me and so many others in her world. Perhaps the hardships of this life serve as grit to clean the dirt off of the windows of our souls. May it allow the lights within each of us to shine brighter and brighter as we grow.

I spend most of the year dreaming of travel and planning, simultaneously, a dream trip as well as the next actual trip. So then it always takes me aback when it’s time to pack and I start feeling a sense of dread about the whole endeavor. I get nervous about the unknowns, I am unsure of exactly what clothing items will be appropriate, and I question the wisdom of the whole affair. Basically, I go from Adventure Lover to total and complete Hobbit. I look around my home and wonder why I’d ever leave it. But then the magic comes back to me as soon as the horizon opens up and I am driving or flying to new places. Inspiration hits. Words start coming back to me, I wish for a camera in my hand, and the sweetness of it all floods in. This last week was precisely what I wrote above—that common mixture of excitement, dread, and fulfillment once more.

This trip, however, involved my entire family and as we drove west on I-80 I’d say we felt a bit like a speedier version of a turtle or a snail—we had everything we needed with us. No man was left behind, and we carried all we wanted in our family car. As the resident Travel Dreamer, I’m the one that usually goes while the others stay, but not this time. We were all together. And since we were all together, we were a mishmash of relational issues, all entangled in the relatively small square footage of our Nissan Altima.

Road trips are an interesting thing, aren’t they? There’s this imaginary family we all have in mind who all hear the call of the open road and somehow they look cool pursuing it. But friends, I don’t know that actual family. Reality looks much more like a thousand personalities, moods, wishes, irritations, attitudes, and opinions crammed into a small space. One person has to pee while another never wants to stop. Another can’t sit ONE MORE MINUTE on her road-weary bottom and wants utter silence in the vehicle while the others are up for a dance party at 75mph. One thinks it’s entertaining to regale the car with how very much she loves the scenery while another is loudly eating the entire canister of Pringles in one sitting. Mom is focused on obsessively throwing out trash at every single pit stop while Dad is annoyed the Horse Lovers of Colorado have decided to parade down Main Street right this very moment as he’s trying to leave town. Family road trips might be about togetherness, but I think they’re a test. During the bulk of the year families can spread out a little bit more, but on a road trip, it’s work-it-out time. The good, bad, and the ugly all come out and you’re forced to deal with it all. It’s healthy, even though it’s not always pretty. The next time you’re tempted to wish you looked like that uber cool traveling family, don’t. I promise you such a thing doesn’t exist because in real life there’s always someone who has to stop and use the restroom. In real life, there’s chip crumbs all over the once-clean car seats. But potty breaks and crumbs can’t dissuade you from making memories. So in the car you go. And last week that’s what we did. From Lincoln to Denver to Estes Park and back to Lincoln once more. And I’m so so happy we made these memories together.

I walked into the Morehead household and found Clara in the kitchen slicing up a strawberry snack for a younger friend. This girl has a big heart, a helper’s heart, and it was truly endearing—say nothing of empowering, knife skillz, hello!—to watch her work. She was prepared for my camera and gave me a beautiful smile before taking the bowl of berries out to the living room.

One of the Bradley kids asked me yesterday why I had my camera with me. It was more of a “why not” scenario actually, as the truth of the matter is, if you don’t have your camera, you certainly won’t get the shot. Gorgeous, sunny summer days and uninhibited children mean I should be carrying my camera.

We’ve been hosting more friends at our house lately—I think this has to do with me having more margin in my life, which means I feel more at ease with long conversations over meals—and guess what I don’t do when I host? Get out my camera. It’s like I can either serve up a pan of brownies OR snap pictures but I absolutely can’t do both. This is a little sad because we’ve had lots of cute kids at our place in the past month. So maybe I need to drop the hostess schtick and start snapping instead? Very possible. Photography is my happy place, and these kids I’m around are growing fast.

As a kid I moved around quite a bit. My family shifted around the country as my dad responded to job offers, and we landed in Lincoln, Nebraska, just in time for me to start junior high. So much of who I am and how I view the world has been shaped by these moves. I honed my skills of empathy as a I grew, in large part because I was often the new girl in the classroom. I began to read people more clearly, to figure out who they were and who I was in comparison (which, yes, has a downside as well!). I also developed a nice acquaintance with cities and geographies across the United States.

Aside from one year on Lookout Mountain and three more in St. Louis during my college years, I’ve remained in Lincoln for the rest of my life. For so many years we were the ones who left for new adventures, but for much of my adult life, I’ve become the one who stayed. Eventually I even moved back into the zip code of my teen years—which really threw me for a loop. The longest house I ever lived in was the first one I shared with Jeremy, though I bet we’ll break that record with our current address.

I’ve stayed.

And others, dear to me, have left.

The grief connected to others leaving is a slow-burn kind of grief. My life doesn’t change drastically when a loved one departs Lincoln. My little family unit remains stable. Our address, occupation, schools, and church stay constant. Meanwhile the friends are dealing with a tumult of changes, some that go quickly and others that move slowly. Perhaps it’s a bad job situation, or even a long interview process that leads to a job offer. With some girlfriends I’ve spent years praying for God to reveal the next step. The sadness in my heart is a delayed one, like a knife cutting painfully slow. There’s not much to cry about at first, there’s just the day after day of it all—the long unveiling of future plans. Houses get sold. Moving trucks are filled. And then there’s simply an empty hole where an entire family used to be. But I keep driving my kid to the same school—now minus a beloved friend—and on Sundays we keep showing up to the same place of worship—minus a beloved friend.

I often text or email or message with the words, “I miss you,” but surely that gets tiresome to the ones who have moved on. My sentiment is 100% true, but I wonder if they don’t know what to say to it anymore. Do they feel responsible for the missing part? Are they so busy trying to create a new life in a new city that dwelling on us left behind feels exhausting? I suspect yes on both counts. But even saying “I miss you” doesn’t feel like enough. The bonds we’ve created together have to become elastic in order for us both to survive. Time will tell whether the friendship will be sustained long-distance or whether it’s best to let the other move on to other relationships that inevitably require time and energy.

I am not the kind to easily let these bonds go.

I miss our friends with an intensity that sometimes surprises me. After years of finding comfort in these relationships, I often feel like a boat cut loose from the dock, only without purpose and direction for awhile. The friend who was quick and witty, direct with her words and love, who could handle my worst at any moment of any day has moved away. The one whose heart matched mine and had a gift for affirming others has gone on to bless a different community. The one who mentored me during the hardest years of life has left, and the one who nurtured my early marriage and raised babies alongside me now lives states away. More dear ones are moving on to new adventures very soon, and their departures leave another hole in our world.

As much as I grieve these losses and as much as I hate to say goodbye to these incredible people, my rational mind knows that the goodness in their characters is being spread much like dandelion’s seeds that blow in the wind. Wherever they go they will find new people and they will bless them amazingly. It helps to believe in a sovereign God who actually cares about the movements of our days. Though I feel terrible being left behind, I know that God has called them to new locations to do new things. And you know what? He has planted me here, to do things both new and old. I know that God cares for His children and allows these hard times to grow and stretch us, to make us more like Himself, to cause us to depend on Christ. So while my friends depend on Him as they start new adventures, I can cry and still depend on Him right here in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is doing a new thing… and sometimes staying steadfast and relying on Him is one of the hardest things to do.

Some of you may not know that I partner with my dear friend Maralee to photograph images she can use for her blog. Maralee advocates for children and covers a variety of topics including foster care, adoption, infertility and much more. I’m in a stage of life (hello, seminary!) where I’m shooting less so I enjoy getting an “assignment” from Maralee from time to time. (To be honest, Maralee has combed through my archives so many times she knows my blog far better than I do.) Yesterday I ended up retrieving six wool balls from my dryer and positioning an almost-unused dusting mitt in order to provide images for her post on Norwex.

I should add that I adore Norwex. I’ve been using their Envirocloth and window cloth faithfully for a few years now, and so far it’s meant that MANY of my cleaning products are sitting high on a shelf collecting dust. That’s a win for me and—guess what?!—now I can clean them with my handy-dandy dusting mitt. I hosted a Norwex party recently with the stated goal of earning myself a mop. I did earn it and haven’t even used it yet… ‘cuz that’s how I roll sometimes. I haven’t swept the floor either, so there.

If you’re interested in Norwex, you can buy items through Maralee.