Several years ago, Jen Hatmaker’s Worst End of School Year Mom Ever made the rounds, describing the desperate limp toward the finish line that many parents experience. More recently, the Holderness family produced a video about “Maycember,” illustrating the feeling that parents have at this time of year – just as busy as Christmas, without the lights and the peppy music.
My mom texted a picture to all seven of us kids at the end of August after Nathan, my youngest brother and twenty years my junior, left for his freshman year of college. “In the first week of empty nesting we found an empty nest!” she wrote.
As you make your plans for summer study or travel, for camps and play dates, consider making some time for summer formation as well. After all, your kids (at least) might have some extra time, and what better opportunity to grow in the knowledge and love of God?!
I’m not quite sure when eating as a family of six turned into a contact sport, but I work to convince my daughters to drop the mob mentality each evening. Elbows are thrown, insults may be hurled, and by the end, someone is crying.Usually, it’s not me.
Earlier this year, I met a friend for a remarkable lunch. A relatively new church goer, she had heard a sermon on the beatitudes and wanted to speak with me about whether we Christians were really serious about trying to live that out.
On a recent Sunday in church, our priest quoted someone who once said, “Yesterday is the heaviest weight you can carry today.” He made sure to repeat the line for emphasis.As I let the quoted words settle, my mind wandered to my yesterday’s morning.
Jesus with gray hair? That’s not an image I’d ever imagined, not until my six-year-old granddaughter created one.
A few weeks ago it was “Poem in Your Pocket Day” at my kindergartener’s school. This is a day when each student is asked to bring a poem to school to share with her classmates.
Sometimes I get into a parenting funk. Or really, a life funk. One of those seasons when there are too many demands on time and energy, too many nights punctuated by sleepless children, too many ills in the world reminding us that the kingdom of God is still super not yet here.
Eleven years ago, Marvel took a huge risk. They attempted a blockbuster film about a beloved, though not strikingly popular superhero, starring an actor who was a troubled darling of small cinema in the middle of an upswing following imprisonment and rehab.