Daughter

May life bless you with more laughter than tears

May your journey be filled with deep friendships that weather the tests of time and human brokenness

May you see beauty in unexpected places

May you learn to love extravagantly, embrace the unknown without trepidation and be present for each moment

May you experience grace and extend it to those around you

May you never lose yourself but instead tenaciously embark on the adventure of discovering the person you were created to be

May you raise your face to the sky and feel the warm rays of sunshine and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are loved, that you are beautiful, that you have intrinsic value

Motherhood is so DANG HARD.

I was blessed to be one of those women who had very few pregnancy mood swings. Actually, I should say that my husband was the blessed one. I wreaked very little havoc on our small family pre-birth. Now post-birth was a different story. There were the 2am sob fests on the kitchen floor. There were the 4am sob fests. Scratch that. There were the around-the-clock unexplainable bouts of crying in the first few weeks after Emma was born. I chalk them up to the fact that:

Being up ALL NIGHT is hard.

Nursing is hard.

Trying to soothe a crying infant is hard.

Healing from birth itself is hard.

Figuring out that your WHOLE life just changed FOREVER is hard.

Maybe I’m way out of line. Maybe being a first time Mom comes super easy and very naturally to most women. If so, I am really thankful because I don’t wish those difficult first weeks on any one. I know for me at least, the adjustment was (and lets be honest, still is) way harder than I expected. Have I used the word hard enough yet?

And in spite of the massive amounts of liquid that my tear ducts managed to share with the world, I would not go back to the way things were before. Emma is too precious, too miraculous and the love I feel for her is so unexplainable that I cannot even begin to imagine life without her.

Just don’t ask me if I plan on doing this again. Don’t ask for a really, really long time ok?

About six months ago I showed up at a small, neighborhood church where they were halfway through the service already and I slipped quietly into a seat at the back. Did I really want to be there? Honest answer. No. But you know how I said I’d been getting to know Jesus a little better? Well, He asked that I show up and I decided to listen to His request. Being me, I didn’t think I had to do it cheerfully. Wasn’t showing up enough?

There were probably less than one hundred people in the sanctuary. The pastor asked for interaction from every one throughout his sermon…making me squirm in my seat. Then there was that bit about being pretty late and walking in just as the sermon was starting. And then there was the whole “shake-hands-say-hello” in thirty seconds that I absolutely hate about church. But I kept coming back. I did not sign up to volunteer in childcare. I did not join a Bible study. I did not volunteer to be a greeter, to pass around the offering bags, to weed the flower beds or print off bulletins. I still hit the snooze on Sundays because an 11am service where I can get there in a relaxed manner is way more important than having a full day ahead of me to do what I want with. If church is going to be part of my Sabbath then it cannot be rushed.

I keep attending services at this funky, corner of the block church where there is a substantial biker group, a bunch of recovering addicts, a lovely 90-something lady who loves on my little girl and several dozen families with kids of all ages who show up on Sunday morning and greet me with hugs and sincerity.  I have to resist the urge to volunteer to paint the whole basement and write some Sunday school curriculum and so far I’ve succeeded in not signing up for any activities.

I came back to church because

- Jesus asked me to

- building community can happen here…just like it can happen in my neighborhood

- the church is simply meant to be a gathering place for the broken, the lost, the fallen and not a place where every one “has it together” and I’m one of those broken, lost and fallen folk

- worship is not meant to be solely an individual act, God calls us to corporate worship

- I crave the wisdom of others on their own faith journey

- I need to be reminded weekly of God’s faithfulness

- somewhere in the last two years I recognized that I left the church, in part, for selfish and prideful reasons and I need to let those go

- if I don’t show up in one of those pews who will be the questioning, environmentally conscientious feminist who isn’t afraid to buck tradition that goes to church?

- I started reading Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ and Rob Bell’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

- church isn’t really about me

And then one day, I hit snooze on my alarm clock and stayed in bed until 11am on Sunday.

I stopped going to services because:

- I failed to set personal boundaries and ended up wearing myself too thin with church commitments

- I found more community with my neighbors than I did with fellow church goers

- filling my schedule with more activities left no time for deep friendships

- the leaders of the church were too busy doing whatever leaders do to sit down and have a cup of coffee with me

- church was no longer a place of rest…it was just another entry on my Google calendar

- I wanted to serve others without having an agenda

- I was tired of talking about things like “justice”, “community”, “authenticity” instead of just living them out

- I had a lot of questions about what I believed in and nowhere to wrestle with those

-I was self-centered and insecure

A lot of my memories of Sunday mornings revolve around the mad dash to get out the door on time, the arguments over what was appropriate church attire and the attempts to always get to early service so that there was time left on Sunday for the “fun stuff” before the week began again. I struggled to equate my belief that church was sacred, a place of worship, a tower of refuge with the reality that attending seemed to cause me stress and anxiety and I never felt like I could be my real self there. Although I wasn’t sitting in a pew each week, I didn’t stop tithing and I didn’t cut connections with the church I had been attending.

I simply lost sight of the purpose of church and the heart behind it.

I’ve been chewing on this post for awhile and was inspired to finally hit the Publish button when I read this and this from Rachel Held Evans. I’ll be posting on my own return to church shortly.

Emma Jane Agee was born on January 25, 2012. She weighed 7lbs 14oz and was 21 inches long. We are head-over-heels in love with her. Of course, life as we knew it pre-Emma no longer exists. It’s been a crazy month of adjusting to having a newborn in the house and like all new parents, we have definitely had our ups and downs. Overall, Emma is  sweeter and more perfect than we ever could have imagined.

I call her my bug because she loves to be a snuggle bug and curl up in your arms. She can turn into the smallest little ball of cuteness on your chest and be content to lay there for hours. I know this first hand since we’ve taken to sleeping that way in the middle of the night. What a miracle new life is!