chatting at the sky

I have spent the last week cleaning my house like a woman gone mad. Evidently while I have been busy with my nose in my laptop over the past seven months, the toys in this house have been silently staging a takeover. Seriously, where did all this stuff come from? I open a drawer and Barbies and Pollys pop out with their bendy arms and scraggly hair and All. Those. Shoes. Needless to say, there has been a lot of organizing going on, and I couldn’t be more content.

In other news, I have arrived in Charlotte for the She Speaks conference, the sweet place where this whole thing began. I’ve been going over my notes for my session, trying to remember everything I will surely forget. The nerves are waiting giddy just beneath the surface. I’m trying to keep them calm, but every now and then they burst up and turn my stomach. It helps to remind myself that the women attending my session will be lovely and gracious. I know that because the women who attend She Speaks are always lovely and gracious. Here’s to hoping there wasn’t an influx of un-lovely, un-gracious registrants this year.

When we were kids, summer vacation lasted at least two and a half years, didn’t it? The excitement of the last day of school couldn’t be topped. It was as if there were a thousand warm miles of tree-climbing, pool-splashing, Barbie playing days ahead of us.

I think back to those long days and want to remember only carefree, but the truth is my kid days were filled with lots of worry. I worried about school starting back. I worried about tornadoes. I worried about robbers and flat tires and divorce.

The things we practice, we tend to get good at. My worry habit didn’t go away when I grew up. The worries just became more complicated. I learned how Jesus takes care of sparrows and lilies and basically knows everything, but that knowledge seemed to float on the surface, never really dissolving deep into my belief.

That is, until I didn’t have any other choice. Faith is often a last resort when everything else stops working. It’s ugly to admit, but sometimes ugly is the narrow road to true. What did it take for you to believe?