Overwhelmed by gratitude

I feel compelled to continue writing into the Easter this year. This blog has been a source of quiet and reflection in an otherwise hectic life and I have been deeply touched by the practice.

I can't help but be overwhelmed by gratitude. My boys came home Wednesday night. I took Thursday off and did nothing else besides be present to them. Friday. they went to school in the morning and we hung out in the afternoon. I was amazed by how much they've grown in the week they were gone. Andrew was speaking in sentences. Eddie had new maturity. Hanging out at home doing the mundane with them was yet another vacation. A vacation to the sacred space of motherhood that I can't begin to express how grateful I am for.

The even more beautiful part was the ability to share the moments and journey with my mom. I don't have any sisters and we moved around quite a bit when I was little, so my mom is my mom, my sister and my childhood best friend. She is the one woman I've had in my life for the long haul. And sharing motherhood with her -- telling stories, laughing at the kids, solving issues, trying to figure out how to best nurture my boys and preparing the house for new baby peanut butter -- is a joy that I don't know if my soul can express in words.

God intends for our calling to be a source of joy. We may get weary in our work. Overwhelmed by uncertainty. Distracted or discouraged. We are human. That is part of the journey. But pursuing the heart of God's call for us and allowing our perspective to be shaped by the Holy Spirit we can find ourselves overwhelmed by joy and gratitude even on the ordinary days.

Easter: I'm Ready...

He has risen indeed, Alleluia!

The greeting of Christians for centuries is nearly always the first words of my heart Easter morning.

This year, we got up in the dark and hurried off back down long country roads to the hills where we greeted the rising sun with the birds, the trees and the green grass. The world always feel so alive on Easter morning. The weather, for as many Easters as I can remember, no matter where I lived has been mild and sunny. Creation is joyful.

My heart sings. The promise of new life, perpetual. I am filled with hope.

As Easter day carried forward, my pensive heart shifted to a ready heart. Ready to greet my children home from their trip to Michigan. Ready to greet my new baby at his birth. Ready to lead my company. Ready to inspire the world to love.

Through the prompting of the Holy Spirit, a plan has been hatching in my mind about how to reorganize my life around the call to mother and nurture. I see opportunities to give both Ulrich and myself more rest and renewal to keep from getting burned out. I see opportunities to work and to mother and allow these roles to co-exist.

Of course, I don't expect life to follow my plan. But in the glory of this Easter morning, my savior offers me the promise of a lighter yolk. Allowing my heart to continually be molded by his gentle Spirit offers the promise of gentle waters and green pastures.

The tomb is empty. God prevails. In faith, we find new life.

Easter Vigil: Defined by love

In the deep dark, we drove the winding country road to the foothills outside of Livermore. Our Easter Vigil this year to be held under the blanket of the night sky.

We came to a turn off and pulled over. Pulling out lawn chairs and a candle, we set up next to the car. We read the readings. We read the Easter proclamation and we stared in wonder at the constellations above us.

Holy Mystery.

Thoughout the day Saturday, we read aloud from the book that I had started on Motherhood. I had wanted to finish it by Easter. As I read, it dawned on me. I have been approaching life the wrong way. I have been trying how to figure out a way to create space for a new baby in my life.

Instead, God is calling me to transform my life around an emerging role that he has for me that is bigger and holier than I initially recognized. One the main message echoing in the book I was reading was permeating your home with Love and letting it be the guiding force behind your daily schedule.

I began to ponder the servant leadership of Christ. What would my life look like if my to-do list was defined by love. If first, I considered the love and care for my children, husband, employees, customers and investors. If instead of orchestrating objectives to be met, I defined myself by the love I offered each day.

I pondered this revelation throughout the day Saturday. I don't know how I might implement it practically in my life, but I was convicted this coming season in my life should be defined by Love.

Good Friday: Surrender

Good Friday.  I started the day a little sour.  The gray sky,  the pain in my body, the somber feeling that lingers in the soul. The day of the cross.

Ulrich and I had made plans to explore the coast in the peninsula so we drove down to Monterrey.  It was still pretty early and the town had not yet fully woken up. We ate breakfast and walked Cannery Row.  I stopped at a overlook of the ocean. Kids were down below playing on the sand and climbing in the rocks.  Behind me, a native American musician set up shop playing drums and a wooden flute.  I stayed there nearly an hour.  Still.

Finally,  we headed back to the car and drove Highway 1 North to Santa Cruz.  We parked downtown.  I was struck by how much you can tell about a town based on the downtown. Monterey was old and sleepy. Santa Cruz was young and liberal. We walked the stretch of downtown, ate a bowl of noodles and headed North again. Another hour on Highway 1 to Half Moon Bay. The views along the highway were stunning,  expansive. 

In the car I read chapters from the book Desperate.  Mediations on motherhood.  More or less quick thoughts on how to survive the struggle of life with young children. I was uplifted.  We stopped at a beach and went for a long walk on a cliff trail.  Maybe 100 feet below was a spanse of perfect sand.  Tiny people walked along the ocean holding hands.  Tiny dogs ran freely,  frolicing as the waves washed in.

We found this cool ledge surrounded by trees,  protected from the wind.  It was a place to rest.  My heart was completely still. 

"It is finished"

I let go of the struggle,  the worry,  the future.  I let go of the pain,  the birth,  the stress.  Rather then dwelling in the agony of the cross,  I found myself at peace with the commitment to obedience.

After the sweat and blood and tears of Gathesemane, Jesus faced the cross with an eery calm.  The world got so worked up around him.  But Jesus was resolved.  The peace of the Spirit dwelled with him in his complete obedience.

On the edge of that cliff,  I found myself embracing the calm. I brought everything to the cross and I left it there. 

It is finished.

Day 38: Staying the course

Our vacation...

So it came to pass that the baby hasn't come. The kids are gone. We said farewells to our staff and we found ourselves free.

Problem.

What kind of vacation can you have when you are 38 and a half weeks pregnant. No hiking, working out, biking, adventures to the wilderness. No wine tasting. No long walks on the beach. Everything hurts and keeps hurting. If I push it, we will be having a baby instead of a vacation so we drove, we ate and we talked.

Talking all day peels back layers and layers of onion. We found ourselves really wrestling with the weight of responsibility. For our kids and for our business. Facing an unknown darkness of doing something the world has never done before, every step feels like inching towards the edge of a cliff in total darkness. You stretch your toes feeling, straining, hoping you find the edge so that you don't just walk off it.

I thought about Jesus. Walking up the hill. Human. Mocked. Abandonned by God. Failed. I thought of moments in my own life when I thought, surely God is calling me to this and then, suddenly at sea I found myself alone with no God in sight. My God, how could you abandon me out here? Jesus shouted it from the cross. I shouted it from a hilltop in Haiti.

But Jesus stayed the course. Jesus clung to a promise of resurrection.

I don't know if our start-up will succeed. I don't know what the right choice is. But I do feel compelled to stay the course. My Easter is out there too. The invisible wind of the Spirit continues to blow. I must trust the mystery, pick up my cross and carry on.

Day 37: Pain

I thought last night might be the night.

After walking around for much of the afternoon, I came home to crash on the couch. Contractions were strong. Intense pressure. I laid there on the couch and breathed through them letting them wash on and over me.

My mother is leaving tomorrow with the kids. It would be incredibly inconvenient to have a baby in the midst of the chaos of them trying to leave.

Pain, life, faith are hard and inconvenient. Left to myself I would rather make my plan and follow it - scheduling baby's arrival for the most convenient moment. It would be nice if God would phone in to the weekly staff meeting and fill us all in on details. Allowing us to schedule births, sickness, and death. It would also be quite a bit much nicer if he could take the struggle out of it as well. Conveniently muting all the hard parts of life and turning up the volume on joy.

We try to do it ourselves. Quickly hush up pain -- take some tylonol, distract ourselves with TV or alcohol. We try to prevent it for our kids. We yell at God in protest against the pain of the world. God, why do you allow it? and for goodness sake, why why why does pain accompany birth and rebirth?

Jesus gathered with his friends for a holiday celebrating freedom, knowing he would be tied in ropes by the end of the night. God is no stranger to pain. It is a holy mystery that I struggle with at the end of every Lent. Why the cross? Why the pain? Why didn't God choose another path for humanity? I think my faith will always wrestle with the gruesomeness of the cross and the beauty and promise of Easter morning. I think it has something to do with ultimate vulnerability creating space within us for love. Jesus became the essence of vulnerability, poured out, broken and abandoned as a testament to the power of God's love.

Day 36: Is it really still snowing?

My kids are leaving tomorrow to go for a week long visit to Grandma's house in Michigan. My facebook feed was filled with lament from over a mid-April midwestern snow. I remember growing up, late snows feeling like the end of the world. Why can't winter be finished? Why can't we just enjoy the warmth and beauty of spring and the hope of summer?

I've never spent Easter without the kids. It feels a little strange to not be with them, but as my mother reminded me, this is not a typical Easter. Our plans are tentative. Maybe we'll have a baby in the quietness of the empty house, or maybe, just maybe, Ulrich and I will sneak away for the weekend and enjoy a few still days without work or kids to be renewed. As I ponder these plans, even though it is just a few short days away both options feel impossibly far from where I am.

Right now, my house is a disaster as we are still trying to clean and re-arrange closets to make room for baby stuff. Contractions wake me up at night and I sit up in the darkness listening to my body and trying to decide if it's time or am I still just doing warm up exercises. Work is in a strange lull waiting on new parts to arrive from the manufacturers and we are all pounding silently away on our computers on important, but not urgent projects. Hoping to be caught up and ready when the next big push arrives.

It is still decidedly Lent, but the smell of Easter is faint in front of us.

In my small world, I feel myself and my life being transformed into something yet unknown to me. The process of transformation still painfully ahead. The ongoing cleaning of my house, the piles of work that continue to line my desk, and the labor and birth of this new little life. For others the dread of winter damping the hope of spring. But somewhere, at the top of the hill new life awaits us all. The beautiful transformation that echos throughout the chapter of John. In this Holy Week may we bow our heads and open our hearts.

Day 35: Staying the course

Palm Sunday.

Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, knowing it is his last journey. The crowds shouted like he was a rockstar, only to turn on him in a few weeks.

I am always struck by this sudden swing of public opinion. I imagine if there were 24 hour news channels broadcasting Jesus's last days, what the news stories would look like that would sway the masses from a hopeful "Let's make Jesus King" to "Kill him."

Knowing the fullness of God's plan, Jesus rode on. He rode on through the "Hosannas." He rode on through the "Crucify hims." He rode on when his best friends deserted and betrayed him. He rode on -- trusting in the unseen, incomprehensible plan of God.

I think the challenge that we face in "riding on" is that God's plans are hidden from us. We use other people way to discern if we are on the right path. Sometimes, we know -- Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa -- that our unpopular path and fight to bring light to the world is a holy call. But more often than not, we are left with uncertainty and self-doubt that makes it hard to know whether or not we really should be staying the course.

Jesus prayed. Hard. In those vulnerable moments, the Spirit came, ministered and fortified him for the journey ahead. For us too, there is a promise that the Spirit will guide us -- provide wisdom and grant us strength to stay the course.

Day 34: Preparation

Nesting is a natural part of pregnancy. The deep, biological desire to prepare a space to welcome a new baby. This time around, my nesting instinct has taken a back seat with all the other life priorities. But finally, this weekend, with my parents around to help, my contractions growing stronger and coming on 38 weeks of pregnancy, it was time to make space in our house for baby Peanut Butter.

It was a bit of opening Pandora's box. One project lead to another and the cascade meant I spent most of the day cleaning out closet after closet, room after room. Everything had to shift. I really had to clean house both to make space for the new one coming and also to smooth the transition for the older boys.

It seems I am always cleaning house at the end of Lent. I fondly remember my first Lent in California. I was single in a small apartment. Ulrich and I were dating. He and I decided to share our Lenten journey that year -- which we had decided to deeply root in Passover -- giving up leaven for the entire lent and eating bitter herbs at every meal.

On the eve of Easter, I remember getting ready to go to bed and looking around my apartment thinking --- I can't greet Jesus this Easter with a messy house. I stopped what I was doing and went on a frantic cleaning binge that lasted till 3 in the morning. Scrubbing every corner of my house. Then, taking a long shower and scrubbing myself until I also shined with the newness of Easter. I covered my tables and furniture with white.

That next beautiful morning. At daybreak, as the sun rose. Ulrich offered me a ring and Jesus invited the two of us on a journey rooted in the promise of Easter morning.

Tomorrow morning marks Palm Sunday. The Holy Week begins. The slow, painful journey to the cross. It is time to clean house. Time to prepare. To open our eyes and hearts to hear the story again. To ponder our own crosses. To let go of our life and fall hard on grace. Easter comes to break the dark places in each of us.

Day 33: Big Decisions

One stressful part of running a start-up is the number of decisions one has to make in a given day. There is no roadmap. No one telling you which path to choose and you become keenly aware of how limited your sight is.

The problem with all these decisions is -- they matter. At least 2-3 times a week, I have to make a decision that costs 10s of thousands of dollars. I think heavily on my responsibility to the people who work for us and the investors who have placed trust in our ability to pull this off. The parable of the 10 talents assumes that you go out and get a return on the master's money.

There is so much temptation to dig a hole and bury the money in the ground. To back away from the challenge. To say, it's just too much. But, God calls us to be bold in our calls. To have faith that the Spirit is with us helping to guide our minds and our visions.

Many days I feel completely unqualified or uninformed to call the shots. I find strength on my knees.

Day 32: A call to motherhood

I am not ready...

Somehow, thinking that this is my 3rd child I didn't think I would really need time to prepare. I've been through labor and newborn sleepless nights. I have onsies, strollers and baby carriers. Since this is a boy I thought, there is nothing new that I need.

Today marks 37 weeks. The day in my pregnancy that Eddie was born. The baby is officially full term and could come any day over the next 5 weeks. Last night as I laid in bed I started thinking through the logistics. We drive a Prius. Over the course of the pregnancy, we've talked about getting a minivan but haven't done it. Now I'm wondering if I'm really going to try to squeeze baby peanut butter in the backseat of the Prius with the other two boys. I looked at the baby carseat.... need a new one. I was walking to the corner store...need a double stroller. I started thinking about labor -- with each of my previous labors I had a clear birth plan that helped me to deal with the pain. I haven't really thought about it and got a bit overwhelmed thinking about all the decisions that I need to make about that.

Truth is. It almost feels like a 1st baby. I really don't know how my life will change and what type of family we will be, what type of mother I'll be. I'm decidedly not ready.

At work, I have the same experience. Everything I've been doing over the last couple months were focused on last weekend's conference. Now what? In many ways, the business is in process of being born. Our product moves ever closer to being ready to sell. We are growing. Hiring. Expanding. I watch this 4th child of mine through its birth process and feel completely unprepared to mother it.

Ulrich reminds me -- its the season of Lent. Not just any Lent but a John Lent. A Lent of transformation. God is walking with me and transforming me into the mother I need to be for my three kids and for this little start-up. Teaching me the lessons of humility, brokenness and grace that I may dance with the Spirit as I take up an ever growing call to mother.

Day 31: My yoke is light...

My mother is a saint.

She came to help with the kids so I could focus on work last week and is staying to support us until after the baby comes. In and of itself, this is a remarkable blessing. But her gift to me extends further. My mother knows me in and out. She knows my boys in and out as well and so, in her coming she has seamlessly created the sense of order and routine that I have been longing to get into place.

I've been a bit overwhelmed by just how much she is propping me up. By how blessed I am by her presence. And when I ask her, is it ok? It feels like too much. She smiles and replies that she's missed us and is glad to be here.

Allowing the people we love to lift us up when we need it is hard. Our human, American selves want to fight back and assert independence. We don't want to put anyone out. We don't want to use anyone up. We want to stand up at the end of the day and say -- I did it, on my own. But in finding the humility to accept the blessings of others, we recognize the work of the Spirit in our lives. We recognize our brokenness and need. We also create space for relationship, love and authentic gratitude.

I feel light and supported by first finding the brokenness to accept that I can't do this on my own. I think this is what Jesus meant when saying -- "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." -- Not that God calls us to easy roads. But rather, by finding the brokenness to accept that we cannot by our own measure be all that God calls us to be, we open ourselves to the Spirit and to the Body to support us in our journey.

Day 30: The fruits of the Spirit

Coming up for air.

The end of last week was a whirlwind. Much as expected I worked very long days, put out many fires and did what I could to keep my body calm so that I wouldn't go into labor.I'm on the other side of that and finally, finally have the space in my mind to reflect and rejuvenate.

Reflecting on the last few days with spiritual eyes I ask myself the question -- Where are the places that needed light? Was I able to be light in those places?

It is times like that, when you are stressed, in "go" mode, and dealing with many stressful relationships that you find out how deeply you have let the Spirit penetrate your soul and how many gifts of the Spirit -- goodness, kindness, patience, self-control -- go out from you. It doesn't take much reflection to for me to realize that I still have much work to do in allowing the important work of the Spirit to supersede my sight-limited vision for what I am to accomplish in a day. I pray that despite myself, the Spirit found opportunities to minister through me and that the Wind continue to blow in and through me that I may find myself more open to the path he sets before me.

Day 23: Drowning

Imagine a 3 day wedding with 2,000 guests and 150 brides. For whatever reason, that is on my plate for the end of the week. Emails keep pouring in with things getting canceled, switched, and people freaking out. As much optimism as I've tried to maintain about this whole thing, I can't help but start to worry that it might be a train wreck -- and I'll be on the first car in.

I look around my house - its a complete mess. I feel like I'm a complete mess.

Covered California, in its absolute glory, lost my birthday and so I've received news that for the moment the expensive insurance plan that I am paying for isn't covering me -- with an impending birth on my mind -- I've sat on hold with various customer service lines for about 5 hours at this point. No closer to resolution.

As luck or maybe Lent would have it, the kids are on spring break so I've been with them constantly trying to tread water but slowly sinking.

Still -- I do not lose hope. I know this present moment will fade. No matter the outcome of any of my current challenges, the Spirit ever guides me. I know that I am where I am supposed to be -- in the middle of my big messy life that God has called me to. I sit down and take a minute to close my eyes and breathe. Letting go our daily concerns. The small things that seem like BIG deals is for whatever reason sooo difficult to do. Praying that God show me the way of patience, peace and grace in the face of stress this week.