Easter happenings

I have been loving the spring weather. The moody sometimes foggy mornings followed by afternoons of sunshine aren’t bad at all. Then we have even shared in some of the thunderstorms going around. The mornings are cool enough to enjoy a cup of coffee outside on the patio and cooking with the kitchen window open makes me all kinds of happy. Speaking of happiness and spring, I hope your Easter was lovely. Holidays and I have a bit of a fussy relationship sometimes because I am a hundred years old and love traditions. But life is all about learning to grow and tilt (I picked up this expression up from a podcast and love it) into where you are in the present. That being said, I didn’t have a big expectation for Easter because Garrett would be working. It turned out to be absolutely wonderful. Ben and Morghan drove over for a visit and we had the best time. I know they broke hearts when they left Pennsylvania, but it has been so much fun to have them back in Texas. Spending the day with family was an unexpected surprise and Garrett was able to get off work a bit early. Win-win! We had some good laughs and even checked out a bookstore before finishing off the day with the tastiest of treats.  I was sad to see them go but love that we get to see them more.

For a while now I have had a verse on my heart. Once I heard it I knew it was for me and I immediately jotted it down and put it up in the kitchen so I would read it several times a day. The thing about hope is sometimes (maybe always) you have to have faith before you can feel it. So instead of memorizing, I worked this verse into my prayers and believed it to be true.

He brings me into a spacious place, He delivers me because He delights in me. Psalm 18:19

On Good Friday I picked up Garrett from a meeting and we ended up having a heart to heart talk in a CVS parking lot. I love it when life happens like that. There is still a lot of things up in the air but I feel like we caught a glimpse of just how much God is taking care of us. As we talked I felt this insurmountable peace and I realized I felt “that spacious place” opening up inside all the uncertainty. I like to think of trust as a muscle that you have to gradually build. Sometimes it hurts and it’s not always fun, but in the long run the benefit outweighs the discomfort. The past month especially I felt like I was speaking what I knew to be true but didn’t feel quite yet. I don’t mean speaking truth as in saying things like, we will win the lottery and never have another problem. Let’s be real that’s not how it works. “Life is pain, princess, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.” What can you do? Sometimes The Princess Bride shows up and it would be wrong not to quote it.

What I mean is that our words are powerful and I believe we have the ability to speak life or death over our circumstances, more importantly our thoughts. You know, almost like a self-fulfilling prophesy. Obviously there is both good and bad in the world, but we can decide where we want our focus to be. Again, for me, it’s a muscle that I must continually put effort into maintaining. I can choose to focus on all the uncertainty and work myself into a tizzy. And this does happen more times than I would like, but I can also choose to speak what I know to be true over the situation regardless of how I feel. Life is full of births and deaths and sometimes the hardest thing to do is let go. Coming into that spacious place and being reminded of just how much we are loved was really beautiful. It felt symbolic to have such a moment happen on Easter weekend.