I blame Francis Chan.

And Amber in Honduras.

And all the other selfless souls so unlike me.

I most definitely blame Jen Hatmaker.

Inevitably, there are times in our lives when something is moving.  It is undeniable.  We are caught off guard, swept up in the moment.

We are stilled.

I’ve had a few of them in my life.  One came in 1999, when I was dating the wrong sort of everything.  One came when I had Grayson, my first child.  One came when marriage actually got hard & I had to search for love to give outside of myself.  Another came riding in the back of a dilapidated truck driving in the fume-filled air of Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  Sitting under mountains of wrapping paper one Christmas day, one such moment came along that promted the writing of this very blog.

And so they’ve come.  Knocked me over at hello and filled me with purpose and vision and conviction (and sometimes shame) that I didn’t know I had.  Some such moments led me to homeschool this year.

Through much failure & wrong-seeking, I’ve made my peace with the God who created us all, knowing it is simply not the wind that moves me so.  He is at the center of those moments and while I expect them to come,  they surprise and startle me still.

After I wrote about  how there’s no room for needing Him until we want for something, I was humbled and amazed at your responses through emails and messages.  The beautiful, restored souls of mama after mama & even a few dads shared with us their triumphs and their struggles.

Writing about having too much & wanting a simpler life for my family was one such moment.  But reading your comments & emails was another entirely.  Reading my friends’ story slowly morph from housekeeping to purposeful homemaking is another.

It could all be coincidence.  It could be that it’s January & we’re all in the mood to organize.

It could be a fluke.

But my wretched heart knows better.  It recognizes the swift hands of the Savior as it’s been scooped up time and time again.

For whatever reason, the Father is humbling many of us before Him.  I am on my knees, barely breathing, wondering just how He’ll use us.

We, too, like Ashley & so many others are simplifying.  Removing the clutter and unnecessary gives me some of that margin I’m fighting so hard for.  In food, clothes, junk, decor–just stuff–we are paring down.

It is a beautifully painful process.  Loading wasted clothes into bags humbles me and moves me to tears of guilt and shame.  And yet, the process is beautiful–freeing & exhilarating.

Perfect?  Well, you know what I think about perfection.

Closer to serving Him instead of serving ourselves?  Just a little bit.

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Matt and I sat in worship this weekend, bowled over by the Message & the Praise.  I literally bit a chunk out of my cheek to keep from crying throughout the entire service.  Our speaker, Buddy Bell, spoke about how many of us spend most of our lives sucked into the game of Trivial Pursuit, rather than pursuit of the Father.  We are surrounded with stuff, comforted by stuff, inspired by stuff, and changed by our stuff.

I’m curious to see what He’s up to.  Seems like many of us are on the same page.

Do you feel it too?

One of those moments is about to knock our socks off.

I can hardly wait.