Practicing Righteousness

This is Slothy. He is my son’s baby. 

If you know my son, you can see the irony in this sloth being his baby. 😂

My son has never done anything in slow motion! A young chimpanzee may have been a better stuffed animal for him to love. He’s my wild child, he climbs and hangs on all things, he breaks most things that he touches. He’s unbelievably curious and more impulsive than anyone you’ve ever met.

Sometimes I’m so busy chasing him and correcting him, that I forget to tell him how proud he makes me.

And our kids need to know how proud we are of them, and how blessed we are for them to be ours. They need to know that we notice them when they’re acting up as much as we notice them when they’re doing amazing things!

He dressed Slothy this morning and rocked him to sleep, y’all. How precious, right?? Some days he practices being gentle with Slothy to help himself learn to be more gentle with his baby sister, and that melts my heart. He does that on his own, and that makes me so proud. I need to do a better job making sure he knows I see him practicing good habits and gentleness.

A couple of years ago I memorized part of 1 John 2&3 with a student. Here’s a little piece of what we memorized:

“If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” 1 John 2:29-3:1a

Watching my kid practice gentleness this morning reminded me of this passage.

We are God’s children, y’all. How much time do we spend practicing righteousness? Practicing loving Him? Practicing actions and words and thoughts that show Him how grateful we are for His sacrifice? When we do these things our Father is glorified and pleased with the work his Spirit is accomplishing in our sanctification.

This is why I created Everyday Mercies… so that I would have a tangible tool to help me practice righteousness.

What does that look like?

Memorizing scripture, practicing it daily. Being in His Word, forming habits that honor Him and grow my understanding of Him. Being in daily prayer and praise over my family and friends. Loving and investing in others, practicing active listening when they share their hearts. Planning and practicing giving, both financially and in service.

I don’t believe in picking something up and becoming an instant all-star. I believe in practice and forming habits. The more my son practices gentleness, the more gentle he will become. And the more I practice righteousness, the more like Jesus I will become.

Christians, Jesus loves us, we know this. His Word tells us this very clearly. His Word also tells us that our faith is dead without works… (James 2:14-17) Why? Because when we live in a way that doesn’t show the world our love and gratitude for what Jesus did for us on the cross, our lives look a lot like the lives of non-Christians, and our faith looks faithless. When we’re not in the Word, regularly practicing living like Jesus, we’re not growing. That’s why it matters. That’s why when we are children of God, we practice righteousness.

What are some ways you’re practicing righteousness? How do you see your kids practicing living like Jesus?

depression and pregnancy

My kid has been crying for half an hour because he misses Joe. Joe was our dog… Joe died five years ago, long before my son was born… but his sister mentioned Joe yesterday, and now my son’s life is ruined.

He misses Joe.

This makes absolutely no sense to me… why does this child miss a dog he never knew so much that he would sob for half an hour? To me, right now, he looks and sounds completely irrational… but he’s clearly devastated. In his mind, the loss of this dog he never got to play with is fresh and extremely painful. And while I may not understand, I’m gonna let him grieve. I’m gonna let him cry as long and as loud as he needs to. I’m gonna hug him, rock him, and comfort him… and maybe eventually we’ll get to the root of what’s really bothering him.

Or maybe we won’t, and that’s ok too. He’s going to be ok. He’s going to make it through this and we are all going to be ok. I don’t need to know why he’s grieving tonight. I just need to love him and see him through it.

I’m a firm believer in letting my children feel, and teaching them healthy ways to experience and show emotion. Maybe that’s because I’m a super emotional person and I feel deeply. I like to cry every day, and when I don’t I start to feel a little unhealthy.

But sometimes those tears are not the healthy kind. Sometimes they come, and they don’t stop. Sometimes they need to be explored, because they make no sense, and nobody understands. Not. Even. Me.

Those are the days I feel like my son in his meltdown tonight… crying over nonsense. But I’m not as kind to myself as I am to my son. Instead of nurturing my unexplainable grief, I tell myself to “STOP! You’re being completely irrational. Stop crying, get off the couch, and get yourself together.”

May I share something vulnerable? I’ve been waiting for the right time to get this out… I’m feeling healthy today and I think that time is now. We need to talk about depression… and pregnancy.

For about eleven months I’ve been crying over “nonsense.” I’ve been depressed, I’ve been anxious, I’ve been to therapy, and I’ve been on medicine. I don’t know why there have been so many days I haven’t been able to peel myself off of the couch, or why I make lots of plans but work very hard to cancel them no matter how much I WANT to keep them.. There have been moments I have cried so hard that I couldn’t speak or breathe. For months after I found out I was pregnant last summer I shamed myself for these feelings. I felt guilty for being so sad when there was a new life growing inside of me. I felt literally insane sobbing in the church bathroom for absolutely no reason, while my kids sat in the service without me. I felt like a neglectful parent when my kids were running around eating candy and breaking things in the house but all I could do was sit at the table weeping, doing everything in my power to just breathe in and breathe out.

The morning I took the pregnancy test shocked me to my core. Chris was asleep. I turned the TV on for my son, and I wept. And I kept weeping for eight months.

I did NOT want a baby. We were not ready for another baby, and I was not all about changing diapers for three more years. In the months following the test, when I spent time around babies I was annoyed by their spit up and neediness. I didn’t want to hold babies or look at babies. When I was at home I cried on the couch and when I was not home, I couldn’t wait to get back home to my couch and kleenex. I was scared of complications and life with a newborn. There were moments I felt a tinge of joy sneaking in, but those moments were quickly overshadowed and stolen away by anger, fear, terror, and dread. My smiles were replaced with tears, and my glimpses of joy were few and far between.

And I felt SO gross for not wanting the baby God was knitting together inside of me. I felt like a disaster of a mom, a truly horrendous human.

And I felt alone.
Surely nobody understood what I was going through or felt the way I was feeling.

You know what though? I don’t think I was alone… in fact I know I wasn’t. I just think we’re not talking about it, and that needs to change right now.

I told my doctor and she wrote a prescription. I was so hesitant and scared, but I knew I had to try to get on top of this before the baby came. She reminded me that medicine and therapy work best together, so I called a therapist, and THAT is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I did it, and I told her all my horrible thoughts and feelings, and you know what? She told me I’m not a disaster of a mom or a truly horrendous human. She validated my feelings, and explored them with me. And after I talked to her, it became so much easier to talk to my husband, to friends, to family.

And the more I talked, the less alone I felt.
Crying and sharing my grief, I found compassionate and knowing hearts who had been where I was.
Weeping in the church bathroom, I looked up and saw faces surrounding me, listening, holding me, praying over me.
Stuck on the couch crying for months, I heard my phone ding time and time again and read sweet texts from friends, sending scripture and prayers.
Feeling neglectful as a wife and mom, I checked my email to find a message from a friend asking if the church could bring us dinner every week.
Sitting at my dining room table, mid-anxiety attack, I made a phone call to a friend. All I could get out was a sobbing breathe, and that friend was on her way to hold me tight, pray, and take care of my children, the broken glass, and my heart’s deep brokenness.

Friends, in the moments I felt most alone, God opened my eyes to reveal how surrounded I was by His love and the relationships He’s given me.

Sometimes I still go back to that place of unexplainable sadness and depression, but I’m much kinder to myself these days.

And mama, if you’re feeling these feelings, I hope you will be kind to yourself too. I pray you know that you’re not alone, you are not a disaster of a mom or a truly horrendous human.  Medicine doesn’t mean you’re spiritually weak, and therapy doesn’t mean you’re not a strong woman with a strong Force leading you onward. You are going through something hard, you may need a little help to get to the other side, and that’s ok. Don’t hold onto it so tightly. Share, feel, pray, receive love from those around you, and make sure you let the tears flow when they need to.

You’ve got this, mama.
Wait… that’s not entirely correct.
HE’S got this... and because He’s holding your heart, you’ve got this too.

After all was said and done, my guy gets to see Joe in his room every day, and I get to look at the precious little bundle on the right. Keep walking mama, it will be worth it.

dining room chairs and children, y'all

Quick little tutorial post because I discovered the most amazing thing this week!

How to transform my (eight) dining room chairs in four steps, half an hour, and all for about $45! …and give new life to my kitchen/dining room!

LOOK!

Isn’t it amazing what several years of raising children does to the nice things we (used to) have?

Anyway… here’s how you can reclaim some of the nice things in your life!

1 • Check our these chair covers on Amazon! Lots of options, but these had the most color choices, and the prettiest texture!

2 • Wish you had white chairs so you could order peacock blue… (maybe that’s just me)

3 • Wait by your mailbox for two days.

4 • Find your husband’s screwdriver, remove seats, SLIP ON COVER, tie a couple bows, screw seat back on. And voila!

All in the length of time it took to cook BBQ chicken in my instant pot!

Seriously, look at these beauties!

Best part? I can slip these covers off anytime and throw them in the wash! Like tonight, after one of them got these delicious BBQ spots all over it. 🤦‍♀️ #hadtogowithbeige

Here’s the info!

FYI, that’s an Amazon Affiliate link. That means if you click on it and buy some of these beauties (or anything else after you click on it, actually) I’ll make a tiny commission to help my hubby feed our family! Thanks for your support and for keeping up with our lives and shenanigans!

shattered expectations

I had a baby a couple of months ago…

I guess I couldn’t have possibly known what to expect that day… but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go in with some pretty solid expectations.

I expected to have an hour to bond with my brand new baby immediately after her birth. That’s something I didn’t get to experience with either of my first two babies, and something I felt was especially important for me to experience with this baby.

Why?

Because the eight months prior to her birth were ruled by depression, anxiety, fear, dread, and terror.

You see… Six years ago, my daughter was fresh out of seven weeks in the NICU and I had decided and fully expected never to be pregnant again.

Our family grew through foster care and adoption a couple of years later, and that’s how I expected our family to continue to grow, but due to certain circumstances, I knew that would be in the distant future. One year ago I reluctantly made a phone call to our social worker and, through tears, explained why we weren’t in a place to add another child to our family, even temporarily, and that we needed to close our home until the Lord called us back. I needed and expected more time to work through some issues within our family of four.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found out we were pregnant just a few months later.

Now swap my “surprise” with depression, anxiety, fear, dread, and terror, and you can see why I felt I especially needed that bonding time with this surprise baby, and why the image I expected after her birth was one of myself weeping with joy, the depression and anxiety peeling away as the doctor lay her on my chest, where she would stay forever.

Instead, I got to lay my eyes on her for a quick second before she was whisked off to the NICU, where my husband and my mother got to learn her hair and eye color, long fingers and toes, birth marks, little whimpers… all while I was stuck in a hospital bed unable to move or feel my legs, learn her precious details, or bond with her.

It broke me. Her four days in the NICU broke me in ways that my first daughter’s seven week stay in the NICU couldn’t touch.

But as the days since have passed, I’ve realized it wasn’t the surprise pregnancy, the fear, anxiety, depression, terror, dread, or even her quick NICU stay that broke me… it was my expectations. And they did more than break me. They shattered me.

They shattered me into one thousand shards of unrecognizable mess.

My expectations set me up for disappointment, failure, and ultimately eight months of some of the deepest depression that I’ve had to endure.

Expectations are the mind’s ugly way of trying to control the outcome of our circumstances, and trusting that nothing will be ok if those expectations are not met.

The result of expecting so much is darkness, doubt, and questioning the very God who set us on our journey with a specific outcome in mind.

And for me, when my expectations were shattered, I was shattered too.

But what I’m learning on this journey is that God shatters our expectations, and He does it in order to bring Himself glory and mold us into His image, rebuilding something better than anything we could have expected or even imagined, and reminding us along the way that He works all of these things together for the good of those who love Him. (Romans 8:28)

...and that means going into life with total trust for all the things He does in our lives. To walking into the unknown with zero expectations, blindly trusting that He knows what He’s doing, and not being so forgetful of how He’s known all along.

And of course He knows. He created us, He wrote our stories, He loves us more than we know how to love, and He desires His best for us.

Remember - He teaches us to pray, “Thy will be done,” and not, “may my expectations be met.”

You know, if our expectations were always met, we would miss out on some pretty amazing surprises. I wish I could share all of the ways He shattered my expectations and surprised me with so much better in the first days of our daughter’s life... but for now I’ll just share this sweetest surprise of all... and I wouldn’t trade her for the world!

Friends, will you join me in praying that our faith and our trust in the Writer of our stories would be strengthened even when our expectations are shattered - that our eyes will be open and in awe of His rebuilding work - and that we won’t be so forgetful the next time things don’t turn out quite the way we expected? He is so good, He will not disappoint!

**thank you to Alli Cheatwood Photography and the amazing Isabel Yarborough and Carolyn Simpson for the beautiful photos of our Edie**