Yesterday I read this on a friends facebook pg and it soothed my mind as it took the thoughts out of my head and into words that I could finally understand! Ann is an amazing creative real woman who I admire and to be honest I stopped reading her blog posts in my "hard" because I couldn't quite go there. So when I read the following words I wept like a baby, as if someone had thrown the door to my heart wide open and gale force winds came rushing in!
“There’s only one address anyone lives at and it’s always a duplex: Joy and pain always co-habit every season of life. Accept them both and keep company with the joy while the pain does it’s necessary renovations.” ~Ann Voskamp
I want to be intentional and real! I have even considered starting a blog, just for me, a place where there is no judgement of my ideals, struggles or passions. No one will be there to critique my misspellings in life!
But as you would expect from me, I am here with everything on my sleeve, as Josh encouraged me to!
I called this blog Quilted Feathers, a patchwork of days, for a reason and it's here that I hope you settle up with a tissue or a cup of hawt cawfee and enjoy the sights and sounds of my everyday, Again!
So here it is, jan 3rd and I am sort of , kind of beginning to see a glimpse of glittery hope. This hope was lost in the shuffle for quite some time. Almost 2 yrs of a very dry hard season left me speechless with only an utterance of choking on my tears. I found out fairly quickly that your body can only endure so much and then it collapses! Uh, I mean, really collapses! As in out right, Zero tolerance or grace or cognitive reasoning not to mention not a whole lot of joy.
I won't go into the hardship of my season because I want to spare you the horror of the "hard!" Instead I want to offer you a glimpse of my learning and growth, the burnt yellow turning newly green, beauty from ashes. I am in no means in the clear, out of the woods, sitting beside streams of life at the moment but I feel that freedom is close. My head is beginning to see things the way I am designed to not the way I have learned to! Interesting, eh?
Let's get back to the phrase that inspired me to come back into my blog in the first place. “There’s only one address anyone lives at and it’s always a duplex: Joy and pain always co-habit every season of life. Accept them both and keep company with the joy while the pain does it’s necessary renovations.”
The strongest words in the whole thing was the little bit about "Accept them both and keep company with joy while pain does its necessary renovations!" Believe it or not, as much as I sing out loud about not fighting the current in life and learning to swim in the wild surf, I had thrown out all of my own ideas on the "hard". I forgot how to dance and leap and swim in the tides with the undercurrent grabbing at my toes! I was, still am, much like Job, who could encourage the broken but had a hard time on his own knees! I suppose I had a moment of clarity as I read this piece. Clarity that indeed pain herself can make renovations, making something new, turning junk into art, an old house into a masterpiece! Instead of seeing a renovation, a grace going on, I saw my "pain" breaking me into a bazillion pieces and shaking my core and watching her deconstruct me totally! She in fact has been doing renovations, how insanely beautiful!
This is the first step into writing again, bare with me as I spout off, add my 2 cents and come back again when time allows. My children decided that instead of 2 hr naps today they will call 45minutes good. For this I choose JOY!
“There’s only one address anyone lives at and it’s always a duplex: Joy and pain always co-habit every season of life. Accept them both and keep company with the joy while the pain does it’s necessary renovations.” ~Ann Voskamp
I want to be intentional and real! I have even considered starting a blog, just for me, a place where there is no judgement of my ideals, struggles or passions. No one will be there to critique my misspellings in life!
But as you would expect from me, I am here with everything on my sleeve, as Josh encouraged me to!
I called this blog Quilted Feathers, a patchwork of days, for a reason and it's here that I hope you settle up with a tissue or a cup of hawt cawfee and enjoy the sights and sounds of my everyday, Again!
So here it is, jan 3rd and I am sort of , kind of beginning to see a glimpse of glittery hope. This hope was lost in the shuffle for quite some time. Almost 2 yrs of a very dry hard season left me speechless with only an utterance of choking on my tears. I found out fairly quickly that your body can only endure so much and then it collapses! Uh, I mean, really collapses! As in out right, Zero tolerance or grace or cognitive reasoning not to mention not a whole lot of joy.
I won't go into the hardship of my season because I want to spare you the horror of the "hard!" Instead I want to offer you a glimpse of my learning and growth, the burnt yellow turning newly green, beauty from ashes. I am in no means in the clear, out of the woods, sitting beside streams of life at the moment but I feel that freedom is close. My head is beginning to see things the way I am designed to not the way I have learned to! Interesting, eh?
Let's get back to the phrase that inspired me to come back into my blog in the first place. “There’s only one address anyone lives at and it’s always a duplex: Joy and pain always co-habit every season of life. Accept them both and keep company with the joy while the pain does it’s necessary renovations.”
The strongest words in the whole thing was the little bit about "Accept them both and keep company with joy while pain does its necessary renovations!" Believe it or not, as much as I sing out loud about not fighting the current in life and learning to swim in the wild surf, I had thrown out all of my own ideas on the "hard". I forgot how to dance and leap and swim in the tides with the undercurrent grabbing at my toes! I was, still am, much like Job, who could encourage the broken but had a hard time on his own knees! I suppose I had a moment of clarity as I read this piece. Clarity that indeed pain herself can make renovations, making something new, turning junk into art, an old house into a masterpiece! Instead of seeing a renovation, a grace going on, I saw my "pain" breaking me into a bazillion pieces and shaking my core and watching her deconstruct me totally! She in fact has been doing renovations, how insanely beautiful!
This is the first step into writing again, bare with me as I spout off, add my 2 cents and come back again when time allows. My children decided that instead of 2 hr naps today they will call 45minutes good. For this I choose JOY!
