Life, Books, and the Blog
We are in full swing of my favorite season and soaking up everything summer has to offer, bug bites and all. Saturdays are for the river with hot dogs and watermelon on repeat. Life is bustling as usual with all sorts of work to put my hands to and I’m thankful to God for the ability to do it.
For those of you who don’t know me well, I thought it may be helpful to give you a snapshot of the person popping into your inbox from time to time. I am a pastor’s wife in a small town in West Virginia. I am originally from Kentucky and lived there for 26 years. I met my husband and we lived in Louisville for a year before moving to Richmond, VA. We were apart of a wonderful church called Remnant for many years before they sent us out to start a church in my husband’s hometown. We have lived here for six years and are about to celebrate five years as a church this week! I have two teenage daughters that we have had the privilege of homeschooling from the very beginning.
Life is full with many God-given responsibilities, duties, and priorities. I take seriously the different kinds of work he has given me to do and to the best of my ability try to keep first things first. I spend my days making our home the main priority, a base of operations so to speak. Making my home a priority is about people primarily, and the first people I care about, love, and focus on are my husband and daughters. This looks like a variety of things in the details from day to day and in different seasons. Lately, in these later years of child-rearing, it is a lot of discussions about everything pertaining to life. It is character-building and learning to slowly let go as they learn to internalize all that we’ve instilled throughout the years. It is teaching teenagers to drive and cook full meals. It’s chauffeuring them to horse riding lessons and watching them compete at the local Saddle Club. It’s helping them start little businesses and teaching them how to take responsibility and work hard. It’s listening to them talk through Latin concepts while drilling them with vocabulary on notecards. It’s watching them bypass you as they are understanding Logic and reading books you’ve never read but probably should have by this point in life. It’s walking them through sibling squabbles and bad attitudes and trying not to sin yourself in how you respond. It’s helping them navigate friendship, helping them discern all the information coming at them through books, tv, and music, and helping them be wise with their time and resources. At any given moment you could find our family splitting and stacking firewood, reading aloud and maybe the occasional board game. If you see me playing a board game just know that it was a grand act of love on my part. :) You would find teenagers drawing or crocheting, baking and selling cookies, taking care of their animals or those in the neighborhood. You would find us very slowly trying to figure out our landscape and making attempts at gardening. You may find us running in an open field with our dog or “ice skating” on a nearby pond in the dead of winter. There are not enough words to describe all that is involved in raising children, as you mothers know full well.
Life is also full of hospitality. It’s fun, fast, and full of chaos. Hospitality is a Christian duty and we have people over regularly for all sorts of needs and reasons. We host one of our church’s small groups weekly and have people from the church over for dinner, old and new. We meet new people from all walks of life and have neighbors become friends. Hospitality has been a source of great celebration as well as opportunities to “weep with those who weep” in the midst of great sufffering. It has been an opportunity for biblical counseling in marriage, parenting, and many others issues. Hospitality is a lot of work and requires a lot of time and resources, but boy do I love it. Sure, our things get broken, fingerprints at times have covered our walls and windows (cue dark paint colors), and drinks and food get spilled and smeared. You name it, it has happened. Ricky, my husband, says that when hospitality starts getting crazy, that’s when you know good things are happening. :) But in the midst of it, friends become family, lives get transformed by the Gospel, and people grow in Christ, their lives getting put back together as God originally designed them to be. God uses our meager efforts and works through our shortcomings as we seek to be faithful to him.
When I’m not teaching my daughters and doing all the mom things, cooking, cleaning, having people over, serving in the church, etc., I squeeze in time to read or listen to books, mostly about Christian growth. I also clean AirBnbs occasionally to make some extra cash for our family, sometimes by myself, sometimes with the girls. I like to walk with my Great Dane in the woods and sit with my husband on our hill next to a fire after a long week.
Life is full of good work and God’s blessings and I’m thankful. With all of that said, I scaled back this year on the blog and instead of posting once-month, I write and post in those little moments of time I can squeeze in. I have not had a lot of brain space lately, because it’s being taken up with many other things. If the idea strikes and I have the bandwidth to write, you’ll see me pop in from time to time in your inbox or on social media. Also, I hope to have a new guest writer soon and can’t wait for you to hear from her.
An idea I had recently involves occasionally posting about books I’m reading, quoting memorable passages. I’ve said before that I started reading books on Christian growth when I was 16 and I have never looked back. I love getting good resources into the hands of women. I have once or twice entertained the idea of running a library from my home. :) The idea hasn’t made it past the ‘that would be cool’ stage, so in the meantime, I will sometimes use this space to hopefully persuade you to get some of these books and dive in!
I will leave you with a quote from a book I’m currently listening to. This book has surprised me. When I began listening I thought I would be getting tips and tricks on cleaning and organizing. No doubt those are embedded throughout, but what I didn’t expect are the exhortations to get our minds, hearts, and emotions in order and how to accomplish it. What an unexpected and honestly delightful and refreshing addition to a book on organization!
“Much of our unhappiness and negativity arises from not taking our thoughts captive, as Scripture commands. We allow any grumblings that enter our heads to take up residence. We call these thoughts and feelings authentic and real because they happen to us. These default responses demand to be stars in our story, shaping our perception of reality. However, just because a thought or feeling comes naturally, does not automatically make it worth our attention or necessary to our story. We need to ask, are these thoughts true? If we want truth to become increasingly authentic in our lives then we will have to take control of the thoughts we allow to have air time in our head. That which we repeat we will become. So let’s take charge and repeat truth to ourselves. Let’s not entertain complaining, whining, discouraging, or lying thoughts.”
-Mystie Winckler, Simplified Organization: Learn to Love What Must Be Done
The only thing that I would add is we can’t discern truth without the Word of God, the Bible. Out of all the good books and resources out there, the only one we truly need is the Bible. Make that the priority over and above any other book or resource you go to and if you need further encouragement to get started, here's one of my first posts I wrote on this topic.
Happy reading!
Book Recommendations:
Simplified Organization: Learn to Love What Must Be Done by Mystie Winckler