What's the Plott?

I have been in my new position at the  church for nine months. Actually, we are rolling into month ten now. In those nine months, I have attended staff meetings, leadership calls, meetings with my pastor, First Sundays, every Wednesday night, office-mode Wednesday days, special events, planning meetings, youth meetings, parent meetings, and probably meetings about meetings. And somehow, through all of that, I have never noticed that some of these meetings apparently have an actual pattern. My pastor mentioned recently that one meeting falls on a certain Wednesday of the month and another falls on another Wednesday. And I just looked at him like… Since when? 😂 Apparently, since always. I have just never picked up on it. For nine months, those meetings have lived somewhere on my radar.  I knew they existed.  I knew they would eventually happen.  I knew someone would text, call, email, or say, “Hey, don’t forget…”  And then I would show up. But I had never actuall...

This weekend, I argued over cardboard boxes. Not metaphorical cardboard boxes.  Actual cardboard boxes.  A pile that needed to be broken down and moved outside.  They had been sitting there long enough that everyone had seen them.  And somehow, instead of just dealing with them, the boxes became a whole story. The fact was simple: There are cardboard boxes that need to be broken down. It doesn't matter where they come from, who they belonged to, what was in them before... they are empty now and are trash.  That is it. But then came the assumptions.  Someone else is going to do it.  It is someone else’s job.  The job must be harder than it looks.  There must not be room by the trash cans or someone would have already moved them.  And then the assumptions turned into a story.  Everyone is irritated that the boxes are there.  Everyone is expecting me to move them. Everyone is blaming me.  I refuse to be the only one who cares...

As a boy-mom, one of the things I appreciate about Boy Scouts is the way it slowly hands responsibility back to the boys. There are adults nearby, of course.  Responsible adults.  Attentive adults.  Adults who are absolutely paying attention.  But they are not hovering over every decision. The boys are learning to lead one another, manage themselves, make choices, and sometimes live with the consequences of those choices. Which sounds wonderful in theory. Until your child makes a choice you really wish he had made differently. (Enter Wyatt into my story!) This summer at camp, Wyatt had an opportunity to complete his swimming check. Now, this is an annual requirement. Wyatt can swim. That is not the issue.  He has grown up around water.  He swims in pools.  He spends time in the ocean.  He grew up on the Edisto River.  He is comfortable enough in a kayak that I do not spend every second imagining disaster when he is on the water.  Bu...

This morning, I had a cowboy hat consultation. Which is exactly the kind of moment that makes me revisit how I got here and why this sentence makes sense in my life and probably not everyone else’s. 😂  But there we were — talking through hat shapes and Western wear and what works for the purpose today versus what worked then - when we wore them all the time. As the conversation lingered in my mind longer than the text thread, the thoughts turned into something deeper. A recognition of a former part of myself.  This conversation was superficially about cowboy hats... but it became about identity and wanting to belong. For me, it was about the strange familiarity of knowing something from an older version of myself and discovering that she is still in there. Every once in a while, I pull my Lucchese boots out of the closet and put on a cowgirl hat and my old Western things, and something shifts. I do not feel like I am dressing up. It feels more like a memory.  There was a...

There is a line in the MercyMe song “God With Us” that I keep coming back to this week... “Such a tiny offering…”  Sometimes when this happens, I just need to be still and let the lyrics sit with me and ask God to reveal himself in the repeated phrase.   About a week ago, Peter mentioned that the hummingbirds were back looking for their feeders.  And I immediately felt a little guilty b ecause I had not put the feeders out this year. Historically, we have hummingbirds twice a year, and my porch used to be full of them. There was a time when we had thirty or more hummingbirds buzzing around with absolutely no regard for our human presence.  And it was magical. That was back in the season when I had babies on the porch.  Every afternoon, in the middle of the chaos of raising children, I would find peace sitting outside while they played with sand tables and water tables and whatever else kept little hands busy. I would sit there and watch the hummingbirds com...