A few weeks ago I mentioned that I’d been working on finger knitting, and it was a fun little crafty project that was super cheap and made me feel like I’d accomplished something. I’d seen a scarf at Kohl’s for like $20 but didn’t want to pay $20 for a scarf even though I really liked it. So when I got the idea to do something different (via an instragram by the Nester and a tutorial by Gussy Sews) I was excited to go in a different direction.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you love bacon, dislike cleaning, and sometimes tend to make things more complicated than they already are.
I’m not the only one? Good.
So I read through this Gussy tutorial which said this would probably take me about ten minutes to figure out. I followed the instructions and studied the pictures, but still something didn’t seem quite right.
I managed to stay calm and never said anything like I’ve got half a PhD, surely I can finger knit a dang scarf! Look at all these kids doing it on youtube! What the heck is my problem?
You can decide whether or not you believe me.
But eventually I realized seeing it in action would probably help a lot more. I’m better at watching than listening, I admit it.
So I found this other tutorial on youtube, which varied slightly in instruction. You start out at your pinky with Gussy, at your pointer with this other gal, (I might have that backwards) but everything else is basically the same.
Being the persnickety gal that I am, I also discovered that if I didn’t push the string all the way down my fingers each time — if I only pushed it down about halfway — the weave would look tighter and a little less sloppy. And that made me happy.
This is the youtube video:
And here’s the final product:
Â
I love gray these days.
I made a couple of necklaces like Gussy’s to figure it out, and then I knitted and knitted and knitted to make a super long scarf and then tied the beginning to the end. I wanted to be able to loop it over my head seven or eight times to stack it up, because I wanted it to be poofy. And maybe diminish my double chin, by association.
Since I was writing this out for you I thought I should maybe measure it to see how long it is, just so I could tell you. And then I laughed. The reason I can wrap this thing around seven or eight times is because it’s 23 feet long.
Yes, 23 feet. 7ish metres for my peeps who’re rocking the metric system.
But I did it in a few hours — maybe four hours, one evening. While watching Elf.
Please let me know if you decide to try it. Total cost for the project? An evening of my time, ten minutes of the Hubs’ time before he said he wouldn’t help me figure it out, and about $1’s worth of yarn from Walmart. I bought the locally made in Washington, North Kakalaki yarn even though it was a dollar more. Worth it.
In closing, do you like my scarf, do you think I’m a nerd and want to send me $20 to get the one at Kohls? 😉
That was a really long title. But I just couldn’t leave any of it out. For the past week or ten, I’ve been talking about a few different things. I’ve been talking about faith, thankfulness, and how lots of Australians seem to visit this site but don’t comment.
I’ve also spoken about parenting. And if you’re the observant kind, you’ve probably noticed that I feel like I’m struggling in it. It’s everybody’s story, perhaps, but right now it’s mine.
The older one is cheeky and I lack the energy to reel him in.
The younger one is teething and, well, not sleeping in a manner conducive to me getting reasonable amounts of sleep many nights.
{This morning’s pajama dance party with DJ Jazzy Tank.}
And somehow in the back of my mind, thoughts from posts like this one or this one, are whispering in my ear: You’re not savoring enough! You’re not enjoying enough! You’re not smiling and laughing and taking snapshots with your mind enough!
Exactly as this brilliant woman described it in an article in the Huffington Post, the well-meaning voices of ladies who were once in this stage are echoing these exclamations: It goes by so fast! Enjoy every minute! Are you loving every. single. minute. of mothering? You should! Cuz it’ll be gone before you know it!
But at the end of many-a-day, just like Melton described it in her article, I am often just glad my boys are asleep with all of their fingers and toes still attached to their bodies.
The truth is, the goal of enjoying every. single. moment. of parenting can leave you feeling like you’ve fallen off a wagon you never knew how to ride.
And why, oh why, even after realizing it before, does it suddenly occur to me: I feel like I’m failing because I’m using the wrong measuring stick.
Enjoy. Every. Last. Stinking. Minute. is not a reasonable expectation. Not for marriage. Not for motherhood. Not for just about anything except a roller coaster ride or a brief video on youtube.
It’s only natural that the peaks and troughs will come — the lower the troughs, the higher the peaks feel.
I’ve been doing a bit of informal research as to how Christians feel about dating. Specifically, I’ve been asking why does Christian dating often feel so awkward? (Feel free to comment with your opinions — anonymously, if necessary!)
One of the common threads I’ve seen has everything to do with expectations. Expectations on the part of brothers and sisters in the Church that feel entitled to know every. last. stinking. detail. about a couple’s relationship as it unfolds. Expectations on the part of the girl or the guy that the one the Lord has for me will be like this and like this and like this but not like this or this or that or that or that.
There are often mutually unrealized expectations about how a relationship should unfold, and that sure does seem to make things messy.
It is a necessary part of life, our beautiful ability to think about what we’re thinking about. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to think about it a little more. I think.
Sewiously, there is great value in taking the time to ask if you’re feeling guilty about something you’ve done or left undone, when the only person you’d ever expect to achieve that goal is you. Are you expecting yourself to be an everything home-cooked, always under budget, kids always tidy, smiling through every circumstance, always on time, don’t worry I’ve got it together Mamacita?
Is that a Reasonable, Realistic goal? For this season of your life? In these circumstances?
If you are the kind of person who wants to beat yourself up for sinning and falling short, even though you know it’s forgiven and long-gone and the Lord has removed it as far as the East is from the West, you are probably the kind of person that has high expectations for yourself. And that’s not always a good thing.
Leave some room for Grace!
In addition to a little introspection, it ain’t a bad idea to put your hand on your chin like the Thinker and consider the expectations you’ve set for who other people are, who they should be, and what they should be doing.
Do you mayhaps have unrealistic expectations for your spouse? Your best friend? Your second cousin’s third grade teacher? Your pastor?
Are you hanging up an unfair measuring stick for you, or somebody else?
A friend of mine read the article I linked to above and said she felt like God had lifted a weight off her shoulders when she read it. Why? Because she’s probably like me. I’m freaked out by the fact that the childhood of our children goes by very quickly, and I’m often worried that I’m going to have regrets at the end of it because I didn’t hold on to enough. Somehow.
I needed someone to say: It is okay not to enjoy every minute of it. Yes, some of it is just plain hard. Just savor the good stuff. Enjoy what you can when you can. And everything’s gonna be alright… everything gonna be alright hey… no woman no cry… hey no woman… no..
Sorry I’m back.
Give your expectations a little thought when you get a second. It might take a load off your back, or somebody else’s — I {hesistantly} expect it’ll be a healthy exercise for you, too.
I‘ve been meaning to tell you about a couple of things. But I get distracted and forget a lot. Only having the opportunity to finish your sentence about half the time is one of the things I’ve noticed motherhood…
Sorry, what was I talking about?
Anyway, we got some good news. Remember these?
The Eighteen Boxes more accurately described as fifteen boxes, two bikes and a guitar that were packed up from our place in Gordon’s Bay on the 28th of June in the year of our Lord two thousand and eleven?
Yeah, those.
They might actually be on their way here.
What? you ask. You don’t have your stuff yet?
No, I reply. We don’t. Thanks for asking. When you ship your things from one continent to another in a shared container, the shippers have to wait for the container to fill up before it’ll be loaded on a ship and hit the water.
But our stuff may have finally hit the water. Hopefully just in the figurative sense. We have a tracking number and can follow the vessel across the ocean and everything.
Nifty, huh?
I am struggling to remember what’s in those boxes, except I’ve especially been missing the Bible Thomas Nelson Publishers sent me when my old one’s Genesis made an Exodus.
And the boys clothes that may or may not fit by the time they get here. And I don’t have any dress pants right now. Because I shipped them all because I hadn’t lost enough weight to fit in them yet last June.
So our things could arrive in February. And golly, gee whillikers, that would be swell.
In more recent occurrences, I wrote a few new articles at Signposts. I usually try to mention that here in case you’re interested in clicking over. Do you click over? I haven’t learned how to follow links and figure that out yet so I’d love to know.
This one talks about whether disability is always a burden, and mentions some great thoughts by Amy Julia Becker who wrote this book right here which I think will be really good. If I get my hands on it.
This one talks about things that are close to the heart of God. Which by necessity means they should be close to ours, too, right?
And this one contains a story about a Theology & Disability Conference I went to in Holland (I shared the Amsterdam photos on this Travelling Tuesday) and a special young lady I met there. And other stuff from the Bible which is worth pondering, mayhaps.
I was also thinking of mentioning that part of the reason you haven’t seen a lot of these lately…
by the Hubs… and all of these being taken just before we left SA…)
{and maybe after mentioning it in the survey you’re feeling like this about that,}
well, it’s because HH’s lappytop (as they are called in the Collie household) is not doing so well, and it basically takes him a full hour to edit about 8 photos. Yup, sixty minutes. Eight photos. Eight. And, as he would put it, that “does his head in.”
So we’re prayerfully contemplating purchasing a new Mac.
And if’n and when’n we do, you are likely to see the lekker Hero Hubs photo quotient increase exponentially.
I apologize the Tank will be close to eleven months before you see the ten month photos. But you understand, right?
One last anecdote will make this random compilation complete, methinks.
We let the Bear have a cupcake a couple days ago, and he was talking about it being in his tummy afterwards. I’d asked if he wanted to share some with his brother and he explained that he couldn’t because it was already in his tummy.
Today, it is in my tummy, he said.
We laughed and said, and tomorrow, it will be poopy! (Poopy had previously been a part of the conversation. Promise.)
He looked puzzled for a while and then got a very sad and unpleasant look on his face and with great emotion replied,
But I don’t wan’ a poopy cupcake.
Ba-da-bop, ka-CHOW. Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week.
Hope your brain isn’t feeling as fried as mine this Thursday afternoon.
xCC
P.S. I think this might be the most links I’ve ever put in one post. I just thought you should know. And here’s one more just for fun. If you follow that link and don’t smile, you are officially a robot. Or from Mars. Or both. I’ve loved it since college. The first time around.
The year was 2007. The Hubs and I were not yet ‘the Hubs and I.’ We lived in Edinburgh, Scotland and were preparing for our June wedding in North Carolina. He still came-a-calling to hang out with me in a cute little place off Leith Walk I shared with some lovely girlfriends, the last place that would be “mine” and not “ours.”
For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favour and honour;
No good thing does He withhold from those whose walk is blameless. {Ps. 84:11}
In the months between our January engagement and our June wedding, we decided to look for a flat to buy. {Translation: apartment. Just in case.} We’d both been renting in different parts of the city, but liked the idea of settling down, “finding a place of our own.” Hopefully somewhere central so we could have lots of friends over. The housing market was on the up and up — it seemed like a great investment.
Here’s some context.
Quite different from how the property markets work in the US and South Africa, Scotland works on an “offers over” system. This means people might list their two bedroom Edinburgh flat for “offers over £99,000,” and then people will make their best guess at what they’re willing to pay over that amount. You don’t know what anyone else is bidding, so you’re kind of making a blind guess as to what you think other interested buyers might bid. But you’re hoping not to out-bid the others by £10,000 because that would just be a waste, now wouldn’t it?
When property was moving hot and fast in the spring of ’07, £99,000 flats were going for £127,000 and then some.
Which seemed ridonkulous.
We didn’t enter the process lightly — with much prayer and much thought we were cautiously taking steps in this direction, trusting the Lord would light up the path for us. I was full of hope we could buy a place to stop paying someone else’s mortgage and start paying our own.
As HH-to-be and I viewed flat after flat after flat, we became very aware of a couple of things:
1. People were making ridiculous offers. We could not believe how much one bedroom flats were going for in parts of town that I would say could “go either way.” “Hello Hooligans, on the way to the football (US readers: soccer) stadium at the bottom of Easter Road!”
2. We could not make ridiculous offers. We just weren’t going to. We weren’t willing to risk going upside down on a flat that we couldn’t afford. We were going to make a reasonable choice, and stay well inside our budget. And we weren’t going to let even that one awesome flat we viewed in this crazy building that I think was first built as a printing press and the converted change our minds.
Although I personally could’ve been swayed.
3. The old saying that what goes up must come down is still true.
Okay that was three things.
Anyway, we were in the middle of a viewing — I think a second viewing — of a place we were particularly fond of when the penny dropped. Maybe it was a half-penny. Or two pence.
HH-to-be was chatting with the current owner, I was marveling at the classic choice of red and white baroque-patterned wallpaper and how the afternoon sun on an Edinburgh spring day cast a delicate luster over the hardwood floors through a nearby skylight.
It was the first time we were really starting to think … this could be it, praying the Lord would make it clear and hoping hoping hoping … and the owner’s phone rang. With an offer. Easily a couple thousand pounds over what we were willing to pay.
And that was that.
As we walked to the car, HH-to-be spoke some words of wisdom: I think the Lord has made it clear for us. And from that day forward, we looked for places to rent. Well actually we looked for places to let, because that’s what you say when you’re looking for a place in the UK.
And “To Let” signs sit outside buildings all over the city and riding past on the bus I always wished I could get out and spray paint an ‘i’ in the middle. Just for fun.
Once or twice.
We found the first place we called “our place” not long before I was off to the US to prepare for our wedding. We returned as hubs and wife and moved into “our place” where we fed lots of friends from a tiny kitchen (you could literally stand in one spot and reach everything) and watched episodes of Lost from iTunes on my Macbook, propped on an ottoman in front of our tiny couch.
We were there three months before we headed to the States to raise support for HH to be a full time staff member at our church.
We were there three months (in the States) when we discovered the Bear was on his way into the world. Surprise and Merry Christmas, the Lord seemed to say.
We returned from our time in the States, me six months pregnant, and we rented a flat that was everything we hoped for and then some.
And the Bear was perhaps just three months old when we started to realize living life spread across three continents wasn’t going to work. For our family.
The family we didn’t even know was coming when it was spring in Edinburgh and we were looking for flats.
Before his first birthday, two months after our first anniversary, we were on our way to South Africa, with a stop in the States thrown in for good measure.
It was only two brief years after we would’ve bought a lovely flat in Edinburgh.
A new season and a new country were ahead of us.
And I’m not sure how that would’ve been possible — I am very certain it would’ve been messy — if we were servicing a mortgage on a flat in Edinburgh. In a market in a slump. And trying to raise support for life and ministry in South Africa, thousands of miles away.
I look back, thankful, we listened to that still small voice and didn’t push in a direction we weren’t supposed to go.
The Sermon in a Nutshell: Remember God’s goodness today. Remember that He sees the end from the beginning. Even when we’re in the middle, and all we see is red and white wallpaper and hardwood floors.
It’s Sunday afternoon, but I don’t feel holy. The Christmas decorations are still up. Managing the kids has left my weekend to-do list virtually untouched.
I feel behind on a job that never finishes.
I speak harshly, I am frustrated. My impatience shines through, tone, mood, words, actions.
And then these words speak Truth to me again: Suddenly, they’re saying it’s all grace.
The baby finally naps thirty minutes. Asleep in my arms. Two teeth stretching gums, waiting for breakthrough.
He wakes in a flurry of upset, I don a coat, switching him from one hip to the other, slip his coat on his little arms, hood over his head.
He loves outside.
Put that baby in the wagon and pull him around the neighborhood…he’ll look excited enough to jump out.
The Hubs is in the backyard pulling weeds. He’s been at it for hours. Long, strong vines that have had years to spread, unhindered. Who knows how deep their root system goes, how these interconnected spider webs move, slowly and silently, to quietly crush their hosts, slowly strangling life.
He has hacked in one section, plans to attack them as high as he can reach. They’ve creeped up a tree.
“Will they kill that tree?” I ask quietly.
“They already are,” he says. “But if I cut off their roots here, hopefully they’ll die. They’re too strong and thick for me to pull them down now.”
Back inside I ponder what to do with this little one, this one who just wants to be held.
I’m selfish. I want to do what I want to do. I forget all of this is gift.
I go to the bathroom. He sits on the floor in front of me. Wants to stand up, reach his little fists into the water. I sigh while I manage to prevent that from happening.
I wonder for a while at this heart of mine, I think about my own weeds.
An ancient whisper from Job comes into my mind…the man who’d lost everything in a day or two, and exclaimed “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” His wife encouraged a bitter response, but he replied:
“You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and not adversity?” {Job. 2:10}
Indeed.
My displeasure with some small aspect of my circumstances — when I refuse to see it from the right perspective — becomes a creeping weed. It edges up, up, up, starts circling and squeezing my heart.
That question from the snake in the garden, “Did God really say…” arrives in many forms. Asks if He does really love us when we don’t find things working out the way we think they should.
The thing is, the adversity, rightly seen, is a gift, too. There is beauty on the other side of the trial — like the pain and suffering of the crucifixion, our forgiveness.
Our redemption flowed from adversity.
His pain bought our peace.
And the challenges of life that get me uncomfortable are the very things that bring me to my knees, to His feet.
But forget the trial is rightly received as gift and you misunderstand the Giver, and the weeds creep up, waiting to strangle, ready to sap life thin and thirsty, dry.
Sometimes breakthrough is the victory you sense and savor when the trial is over.
But sometimes, breakthrough is the ability to say, like Paul:
Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” {Phil. 4: 11 – 13}
Breakthrough comes when you, in the trial, are able to praise His goodness, declare His greatness — find contentment in every circumstance.
Sometimes breakthrough is the victory we experience in the trial — when we are able to trust God afresh. Lean on His goodness. And the ‘all things’ we celebrate being able to do isn’t so much related to human feats of great effort, phenomenal accomplishments made by ordinary people — the incredible all things we can do through the strength of Christ have ever so much more to do with our ability to thrive under pressure…with joy.
To endure the trial and trust it will birth redemption, even if we don’t see it yet. Isn’t that breakthrough? Faith that is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we don’t yet see?
Breakthrough is laying hold of the weeds that have laid hold of your heart, repenting and renewing your mind — hacking away at them with the Truth, refusing to let them strangle out the Life that flows from abiding in the Vine under the shadow of His wings.
Breakthrough is finding the ability to embrace your own human shortcomings, knowing these weaknesses are the space where His strength is made perfect.
A week and a day later, I’m here finishing these thoughts that started a Sunday ago when I was troubled by the trial. Those two tiny teeth have poked through those tender gums. Our nights are getting easier, I am not so tired in the day.
But the breakthrough came before the trial ended, when I tuned my heart to the keys of trust and thankful.
Parenthood, and all of life, is full of challenge, heartache, trial. But what glory there is to behold when we can lift our hands in the midst of the hard and the messy, and give praise.
The Lord, our God! He is indeed so good. Even when we can’t yet see the redemption, we can trust that we will.
And right there — the faith in the furnace — there’s the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for.
I create resources to help people find deeper, more meaningful relationships with God through pursuing, pondering, and prayer. The "Shop" link above will take you to the home of many of the lovely resources I’ve created to help you keep walking one day deeper with Jesus.
which I think will be really good. If I get my hands on it.
speak Truth to me again: Suddenly, they’re saying it’s all grace.
I create resources to help people find deeper, more meaningful relationships with God through pursuing, pondering, and prayer. The "Shop" link above will take you to the home of many of the lovely resources I’ve created to help you keep walking one day deeper with Jesus.