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That moment when I ask God to scoot over so I can squeeze in next to Him....

I hesitated sharing this, for no other reason except that I was scared. Having spent so many years running from being super spiritual and unapproachable, I am coming to terms with the very special ways God speaks to my heart. Sometimes I feel the nudge to share and when I don't, I steal from God the opportunity to speak and be heard in my life, my relevant stories. So here it goes.

The following exchange happened one morning a couple of weeks ago, while I was making oatmeal for my boys. Fresh out of time in the Word it looked a lot more like Father singing over me and me singing back to Him but for this, I will just tell it as a story. I think the weight of what He shared with me will echo in your hearts too. At least I hope so.

I hear a whisper. Its my name and it blows through the trees. I start to run, because I know who it is that calls me. I run in and out of trees around corners until I catch a glimpse of Him. Just after the trees open up, into a field sitting on a horizon, I see Him sitting there, on the edge of something. I am immediately nervous and quiet and my heart starts pounding as I walk slower and slower toward the silhouette. He is casually parked in the grass, with broad shoulders His arms drape over His knees in front of His chest. I sit next to Him, dwarfed by His shadow. I don't feel insignificant, just small. He smiles but his eyes are steady as He looks straight out into a vast horizon in front of us. Without looking away He says "I want you to close your eyes. And dream." I am quick to do it, because dreaming is my favorite, and I imagine that sitting here, in closeness with Him that I will see things I have never seen. I giggle like a kid on Christmas and squeeze my eyes shut. My joy quickly turns to grief. I am distraught.  When I close my eyes, my mind races past all of the good things, straight to a far corner of my heart and a closed door. I know what's in there. It is full of lies and insecurity and all of the reasons I am not cut out for greatness. The door swings open with no warning and the words hit me in the face as they are loosed. I can't describe the feeling except that I can only imagine that getting caught in a swarm of bats making a hasty escape would feel exactly this awful. My eyes are still closed and I feel a tear break through and roll down my cheek. I cannot see the dreams for all of the terrible words. 
It is in this moment that I feel the weight of His hand on my back and a whisper.

"No. Think of Me."

It is impossible to think about God without thinking about the way He thinks of me. I walk through the door and find a room muraled in dreams. Beautiful. Colorful. Truthful. There are no lies here.

Hope is believing. It is knowing where our help comes from. Hope for me is a position of the heart. But hope for my Dad is simpler. I wish and dream and believe. He does. When God hopes over me, He speaks it into being. When He does, all of the lies take flight.

[Jeremiah 29:11] For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. ♥

Always on the defense

Have you ever been blindly sucked in by your kids? I'm talking about those moments when all sweetness and selfless getting along with siblings takes over. I zone out for a second, like a sheep to the slaughter house, or worse- like deepwater prey drawn into the gorgeousness of a tiny light in a dark place and then BOOM. Gnarly teeth and "Good feeling gone."

It is in these moments that I despise parenting the most. It's true. Sure, the constant arguing and lack of personal space get uncomfortable, but nothing stings as much as a seemingly magical moment gone awry. I think every parent EVER understands this. Each of us has a rolodex of memories that leave a little to be desired- the special dinner turned toddler freak out, the quality time vacation turned family bonding cotastrophe, quick errands turned three-hour whine fest. It is one of the threads that binds us together.

These moments, all lined up without any of the awesomeness in between can seem like a recipe for crazy, and maybe they are. But these moments also make us. More importantly these moments make our kids. More accurately, our reactions to these moments make our kids. Have you ever stopped to wonder why we find such tiny mishaps so troubling? I know exactly why they get under my skin. It always always always has to do with me. When my idea of how things were supposed to go down gets all messed up, I get all bent out of shape. It goes against what I deeply believe about my life, that it's all about me. Ugh. There, I said it. This is one of those times where Paul's confusing dialogue about doing things that he doesn't want to do and not doing what he does want to do comes into play in my own life. Every single time my kids bust up my dream world with their nonsense I am reminded that the very thing that I am trying to steer them from is what is alive and thriving in my own heart. "Stop fighting. Share. Don't be selfish. Speak kindly. Be pleasant with one another."

My boys will always follow my example before they hear my advice. Until I begin to examine my own motivation, take captive my own thoughts, release my mind to God's transformation, and mirror my heart to the heart of my Jesus, I will continue walking away from these encounters with an ache in my spirit.

Inventory your reactions and learn something about yourself today.

These little people are the leaders of the tomorrow. The way we lead them is shaping the way they will lead others. Youch.

Keep the change... no wait.

Have you ever made a change, a huge God-said-it-beyond-a-shadow-of doubt change and then freaked out? Yeah... that.

Homeschooling. It is the most misunderstood thing on the planet, by those that scoff and love alike. I have a handful of friends that still believe that homeschoolers are nerdy and unsocialized and wear strange clothes. I have another set of friends that think "your husband must makes loads of money if you can afford to stay home and do that." Then there's the friends that smile and nod on the outside but on the inside they think I am overprotective and only homeschool because I am worried about peer pressure or sex education. And then there's a whole group of folks that think they totally get "why" I homeschool. Truth is, probably none of them do.

If I am completely honest, I have to admit that I am simply doing what I was told. Obedience. It goes a long way these days. My heart does break for the moral decline of our society and in turn our schools. I do hate watching our kids slip through the cracks barely making it through their school years, jaded and not thriving. But my position is not mine to defend. I heard the Lord loud and clear on this issue. I have to be the one to pour my heart and soul into my kids 24/7. I have to do it because He asked me to. There are lessons to be learned here for me and for them. I am learning to trust God's heart, His character, even when I can't make sense of it in my own mind. That's my heart on the good days.

What about the hard days? What about the days when I think I will go crazy if I have to do one more retrace of my steps just to remember where I put down the last locate-able eraser in the house? What about the days when I want to walk down two blocks to the elementary school and tearfully beg them to accept my children back? What about the days when one of the kids finds me in the kitchen scooping Nutella from the jar with my finger because all available spoons are in the sink and washing one would just be too much? What about the days when I just want to quit?

I don't resent the hard days. I can't. I do not like them, but they are vital. Why?? Because it is on these days that I press in hard to Jesus and lean on Him completely. It is on these days that I know for certain that I am blazing a trail that is God-inspired and not Bekah-inspired. If it were my own convictions, my own plan, that put me here it would be easy to quit. But the faithful nudging of my Dad keeps me focused.

Nothing amazing comes easy. Nothing. So, yes, maybe once a week I fill the shoes of awesome homeschool mom that has it all together, if I'm lucky. The rest of the time I am just a tool. And I am ok with that. I need to be used. In fact, I was made for it. And so were you.

Hope this finds you embracing usefulness and everyday graces. Happy Wednesday.

Color me happy.

I have been overhearing conversations lately about the way I dress. I am not joking. I have literally walked up on or turned around and found folks talking about my color choices atleast 4 times in the last two weeks. That would be enough to make some women retreat to hiding. It has been in response to yellow shorts and coral stripes and teal pop Toms and coral skinnies, turquoise tank tops, plaid button ups, and big rose stud earings... a few of my favorite things. This isn't a post about insecurity or gossip or comparison. This is not a post about what-not-to-wear. In actuality not a single person has said anything ugly. It has been more "How are you wearing that and pulling it off??  It doesn't match at all." Either way I am actually compelled to share the madness behind the shift in my own heart. I pray it is liberating for someone.

If you have been around for some time and know the me of even 5 years ago, then the process may have been so gradual that you didn't notice. But if I were to show you a comparison in photos, I think people would be surprised.
I used to be neutral obsessed. My closet looked like a brown paint sample strip. I even sorted my clothes by color and they basically ranged from white/khaki to dark espresso/ black. All of the walls in our house were coffee shades. And our furniture was khaki and dark espresso. Brown made me comfortable. I lived by the rule "stick with neutrals and accent with color." It is a great rule, but I often limited my color accents to barely shades of green and blue.

[Insert disclaimer: if you love neutrals, this isnt an attack against you, just an observation of myself.]

I was playing it safe. There is a crazy comfort in what you've always known, what comes natural. But then there's those things that call to us from deep inside- wishes, hopes, dreams, fresh perspective. Those things are color for me. Freedom is color. Jesus is color. God's presence is color. For me, as I started really chasing God, loving Him in the quiet and stillness and also the hurried craziness of life, I started seeing the colorful reality of the everyday.

I am a quilter, a lazy self-taught one, but I love it. I love it for the colors. I had a friend tell me "I don't get quilts. I don't get the patterns and the mixed matched colors." Gasp. I realized that all the things she disliked were all the things that I loved.

It was in that moment that I saw the weight and reality of what God was working in my heart. As I pray for more creativity and more vision and more Holy Spirit goodness, I get louder and crazier and more colorful. And it's ok. Because I am not afraid of color anymore. Today I wear lots of color, and our home is full of all the colors that make us happy. There's hardly a brown thing in sight, and we love it.

I am free. I refuse to play it safe. After all, the only safe I need is Jesus.

Hope this finds you changing and embracing. Happy Tuesday.

Crepe Myrtle Envy

I have a little bit of a plant fetish. I get crazy excited about bushes and blooms and grass. I am the Blankenship grounds keeper. So it should come as no surprise that when we bought this doosie of a house with all its ailments, I was pumped about one thing: the crepe myrtles in the front yard. There are three of them. I awaited their blooms like it was Christmas morning and prayed hard for bright fuchsia. Dream come true.

I will be totally honest and say that I do not love the three trees equally. The big one is my favorite. It is full and gorgeous. Its trunks are thick and smooth. Its blooms are an amazing shade of dark pink. It is tall. It is full grown, perfectly established.

And then there's my second favorite. It is equally as tall but the trunks are thin and it looks weak. It's blooms are bright pink with white edges so it pales in comparison to its sister plant. This tree is also plagued with poison ivy. I have to cut it away weekly or it starts to choke the life out of it. I blame the nuisance for the sparceness of its branches. It struggles.

My least favorite tree is the one that the previous owners saw fit to cut down completely. In the Spring it started to sprout up in the middle of the grass and I mowed it flat again. I continued doing so for months, until now. We stopped getting rain. The grass got crunchy and I feared the harsh pruning would kill the grass completely and so I let it rest. In three short weeks my crepe myrtle stump became a thriving bush. Today I mowed the grass. Today I looked at that bush and decided it was time to let it live.

Sometimes there are beautiful parts of us that get trampled, mowed over, reduced to lifeless stumps- memories of former passions and gifts. We look at those things with a tiny realization of what they could be but it is but a faint hope compared to the seemingly obvious reality that it is already dead, that it is too late. But God gazes on those parts of us with dreams and hopes and purpose. When the time is right He nudges us with a sweet whisper "It is time to let this live again." And all we have to do is stop cutting. All we have to do is let it grow.

I pray this finds you unearthing old passions, new creativity, real hope. It is time.

[2 Timothy 1:6-7] ♥

Listen closely.

There are sounds that make my heart giddy. Most of them are things that no one else would get particularly excited about.

Jere's belly laugh tickling my ears from the back room where he is sleeping. Legos hitting the hardwood like hail stones as the entire bin gets dumped out. Late night TV overshadowed by little boys talking to their daddy in the living room while I tidy the kitchen. Wind rustling through trees and bushes under a dark uncertain sky. The first ten minutes of a rainstorm as the droplets change from sporadic splashes to rhythmic waves. The dishwasher humming at the end of a long day. The quiet ticking of the clock in the living room. The jingle of keys coupled with the jiggle of the front door knob. The pitter patter of feet in the hallway. The relentless opening and shutting of the back door on hot summer days. A guitar tuning in progress. The hum of my sewing machine. The clank of bluejean snaps hitting the inside of the dryer as it tumbles.

Every one of these everyday sounds speaks my heart. Tiny moments of quiet clarity that break up the chaos and noise of life. I hear God's faithfulness in each one. I am reminded that the very smallest details of our lives are at the forefront of Father's heart. And that the faint whispers of His kids bring Him the same kind of joy.

"The Lord your God in your midst, The Mighty One will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing."
[Zephaniah 3:17] <3

Happy. Quiet. Monday.