No Skin Off My Nose...

Just wanted to give you a little snapshot from our life this past week. Little Man fell down in the yard on a toy and completely ripped the skin off his nose (it was very nasty):

But he's tough. See that Superman bandaid and that awesome tat? Um, yeah - he can take it, he may be "widdol", but he's a man. He took it a lot better than I would have.

And it's not slowing him down a bit:

I swannee, he's like the Timex Kid - he takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. Thankfully (as you can tell in this picture) it's healing rather quickly. But for the rest of his life anyone who looks at our vacation pictures from this year is going to ask, "Wow, you were cute - but why do you like always have chocolate on your nose?"

Anyway, we are on vacation this week, so who knows what my posts will be like. Maybe I'll just post a snapshot here and there like this one! I guess we'll just see how the week goes!

For now, though - I'm off to the pool....

-Samantha (my signature pic is on my other computer....)

He's Said It Once, And He'll Say It Again (Thankfully...)

Alright, alright, alright - quit your beggin’. Here’s the ice story. (I’m just kidding, no one’s really begging, I just like to pretend that I have this huge following that just hangs on my every word…). I promise this one will actually have some spiritual content.

My boys and I drove into a storm last Sunday on the way home from She Speaks in North Carolina. It wasn’t even raining at first - the sky was just dark and there was some lightening. It was really no big deal. I was keeping an eye on the outside thermometer, and when it leveled off after dropping a couple of degrees, I thought we had driven through the worst of it. Boy was I wrong.

Little Man was asleep at this point, and Big Brother had been watching a movie, but one particularly bright flash of lightening caught his attention and he began to get worried. Being the big mouthed mama that I am, I quickly said, “It’s OK - I don’t even think it’s going to rain...”

Then the bottom dropped out of the sky. Score points for mom on the reliability scale.

I slowed down as the rain sped up, and then something changed. The rain got fatter, and fatter, and I found myself thinking, What the….hail? (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist that one).

Praise God we were right at the exit for a rest stop. I pulled off and glanced back at the thermometer - the temperature had now dropped a good 15 degrees. To add to it, the wind was really whipping and the sky didn’t look so good. Now I was getting scared.

Big Brother and I could barely even hear each other over the sound of the hail as I tried to comfort him. I crouched away from the windows, and tried to explain a ton of ice falling from the sky in the most fascinating way I could think of. After a minute or two, I decided to send a text to my husband for support.

I erased the exact text I sent him, but I’m pretty sure it went like this: “We’re stuck in Catawba in a bad storm - lots of hail. Really scared.”

This is the exact text he sent back:
“Hope all passes.”

Hope all passes? Was he serious? Here I was with our terrified five year old (and our oblivious, sweetly sleeping two year old), watching any second for Toto or that freaky lady on the bike to come sailing by, and he hoped it would pass? I guess I was going for Oh my gosh, are you ok? Or even, Do you think it’s a tornado? But no! I just got “hmmmm…hope it all passes” (for you Tommy Boy fans out there, that sounded a lot like “hmmm….he seems like a nice guy” in my head).

A couple of days later he asked me if I couldn’t have just driven really slowly through the storm to make time (such a man thing to think about - death vs. making good time). I asked if he was kidding, but he obviously wasn’t. Then I mentioned in my best “duh” voice that the hail could have cracked the windshield if I kept driving.

Do you know what he said?

“There was hail?”

Um, yeah, Dude - totally told you that. I seem to remember saying there was “lots” of hail. How did he miss that? Did he just not read the text or what?

And then it hit me. How many times has God told me something just as clearly and yet I miss the biggest part of what He’s trying to say?

His Word clearly tells me that He loves me, yet I’m shocked when I hear Him whisper it to my heart. The Bible plainly states that I’m forgiven and whole, but it’s news to my self-abused emotions every time He has to scrape me up off the ground after I fall.

I wanted so much to berate my husband for having “selective reading” to go along with his “selective hearing” and “selective memory” (come on ladies - someone testify with me here). Instead I found myself applying the Proverbs 31 Ministry Team’s motto of “grace, grace, grace” to him and myself.

I’m learning to see all the ways God tells me I’m loved and forgiven in His Word, but I wonder what other big things I’ve missed. I’ll be working on that now, praying that He will open my eyes to all He has to say to me each time I pick up His Word. And I think while I’m at it, I’ll go ahead and ask Him to help my husband read every letter of those texts we pay so much for every month.

I mean, seriously, “There was hail?”

******

Sorry about the long posts lately - I guess I've just had a lot to say! Hey, if you want to see yet another totally horrible picture of me, jump over to my friend Emily's blog at Chatting At The Sky.

The One About The Yoga Pants

OK, so I promised in the last post about She Speaks that I would make good on the yoga pants and ice, so here it is.

Saturday night was pretty emotionally intense (as you could probably gather from the last post), so a few of us decide after the last session to hang out and chill a little before we called it a night [all my 331 girls - where da party at?]. We’re all planning on meeting in one room, but I want to run by my room and check on my roommate, who, as it turns out, was being smart and responsible and trying to get some sleep. Me? Not so much. Yes, I had to drive 5 hours home the next day, but whatever, right?

OK, so go there with me. Once in my room, I find myself faced with a dilemma. It’s late, and I’m quite tired at this point of the “business casual” outfit I’ve been wearing all day (I don’t even know if it was really “business casual”, that’s just what the registration letter said we had to wear, so I was pretending. Those of you who have known me for a while would have been proud - it actually involved a hint of a really girly shade of purple). I want to change, but I didn’t pack anything un-business casual. So what do I do?

If you guessed “put on your lamest-looking, too-short-for-your-unshaven-legs, faded black yoga pants you brought to sleep in”, you totally win. Oh, and top those babies off with my ancient $4.99 baseball shirt from Goody’s and I’m rockin’ - a total vision of splendor. All I have to do now is make it from my room all the way down to the third floor without anyone seeing me.

So I ride the elevator down and when I get off, I take a right instead of a left (or vice versa) and have to walk all the way around the third floor (which, by the way, openly encircles the lobby area). The embarrassment already rising, I turn the corner and who do I run into? Lysa “the big cheese” (lowercase letters because I know she’d hate being called that when Jesus is really The Big Cheese) TerKeurst, still dressed in her gorgeous, way nicer than business casual clothes, with her hair still perfectly coiffed. Fabulous.

Now it might be good for me to pause here and mention to those of you who aren’t familiar with Proverbs 31 Ministries that Lysa is the president of the organization (and if you are one of the ones who didn’t know that, you then you owe it to yourself to jump over to www.proverbs31.org and get an education). This was my second year at She Speaks now, and while in the past Lysa and I have sat at the same table at least once, sat next to each other twice (different tables, but still next to each other), and even stood inches from each other while talking to other people, we had never met up to this point. I’d met a lot of people at P31, but not Lysa. Now I finally had the chance to say hi and what am I wearing? Not anything even remotely business casual. If I was going for first impressions, this was certainly going to leave one.

So I suck it up and introduce myself. Oh no, wait - that’s the Samantha that isn’t ridiculously embarrassed in these kinds of situations. No, instead, normal freak-out me takes over and I duck my head, speed up, and attempt to use her youngest child as a buffer between us (she was helping mom remove some chairs from their suite…which in retrospect I could have offered to do for her since the chairs weighed about as much as she did).

While in this act of avoiding the one person I had been trying to meet all weekend like she was an exboyfriend I wished I could forget I ever dated, I’m looking down at the ground and practically run into another member of the P31 speaker team. I can’t tell you how grateful I was that it turned out to be someone I already knew pretty well, and that she was in her pjs too! We took one look at each other and had to laugh. Then she pointed out that at least I had on my cute new tennis shoes…

So there you have it - my embarrassing moment in the yoga pants (the ones that I’m seriously consider burning just in case I might ever think about taking them as my only alternative clothing to someplace like that again). Never did get to meet Lysa, by the way – I met her amazing assistant (who I’m very glad to have met), but not her. God has used her in huge ways more than once to absolutely change my life, and I couldn’t even get up the guts to say hi. Yep, I’m amazing.

Well that covers the pants, but it took up a lot of space to tell it with enough flare to merit a “story”, so the ice will have to wait. Sorry (but not so sorry about getting so much mileage out of this…).

But before I checkout of this post, I have a little something for all my 331 girls. It seems that more people than just the kids in our youth group think I look and act like Ellen Page, the girl from Juno. Seriously, I’ve heard it enough now that I think if I were creating a new blog it might be called “Juno at 30”. So I’ve decided to just own it. E-Free, this one’s especially for you:

juno morph - http://www.morpheussoftware.net/

Made with Morpheus Photo Morpher.
View comments & animations at Morpheus Galleries.

She Speaks...and She Doubts

Ok, as promised, here it is: the low-down on what happened for me this weekend at She Speaks. I hope somehow I can squeeze that whole experience into a post without writing a novella. We’ll see.

So the whole thing started off a little weird for me this year. Last year when I drove the five hours by myself, I was so excited to be going that the whole trip seemed to take about 30 minutes. This year, though, I was attacked with a severe case of the “what am I doing”s. I felt every minute of that 5 hours, wondering most of the time why in the world I was even going to the conference. I can’t really say why, but I just wasn’t feeling confident about being there.

Then things got weirder. I swear to you I heard a cat meowing in my van. The vehicle had been in the body shop the week before, and I just knew I had a rogue stowaway from the junkyard. I heard it three times before I turned the radio off and started calling for it. It was at this point - while I’m driving down the interstate going 70 mph and saying “here kitty, kitty, kitty…” - that I realized the sound I heard must have been on the Focus on the Family broadcast I had been listening to. Great. Now I was heading to a conference I wasn’t sure I had any business going to, and I was talking to animals that didn’t exist. Awesome.

As it turns out, though, the feelings I had during that eternal five hour trip would become a theme for my whole weekend. God had a thing or two to show me about just how much my life is shackled by doubt and fear. And I don’t think He’s done relating the message, even this as I type this.

The hits started coming from the moment of the first general session. As Lysa TerKeurst was speaking, I was convicted about just how disobedient I’ve been lately. Last year the Lord clearly spoke to me and set me on a journey of saying “yes” to His calling to speak and write. I did great with that for a while, and then we got to the part of the story where He had to ask me to die to something I had dreamed for my life, but that He didn’t have in the plans (just like Lysa herself had said would happen in her book “What Happens When Women Walk in Faith”).

I hadn’t realized it until Lysa was talking, but the very moment I heard “no”, I quit saying yes and started pouting. Sure, I finished up the things He had already asked me to do by that point, but then I put my fingers in my ears like a child and quit listening to further instructions. All because I didn’t like hearing no. All because hearing no about something I cared about so much made me doubt God’s good intentions for my life and His love for my heart. So there you have major conviction #1 for the weekend.

Things from that point on started to look up a little. My roommate was a perfect match (and to think I was worried), and the feedback I got from my speaker evaluation group was - to say the least - insanely encouraging. I definitely felt like I was being affirmed in my ability to be an affective speaker. Maybe I “belonged” at this conference after all. But apparently something was still lurking in my heart. Susanne, the member of the Proverbs 31 speaker team who evaluated me, certainly could see it.

Fast-forward to the general session Saturday night. Guess what Renee Swope talked about? Doubt (did you really think it would be anything else?). He said a lot of great things through her, and she ended our time by asking us to write down the doubts and lies in our hearts on a piece of paper that was slightly larger than a postcard. As she prayed, things started to surface in my heart. Ugly things. Things that hurt and made me cry as they grew like fat vines, wrapping around my heart and gouging me with their thorns. It felt like they were choking what little faith I had stored up in my soul.

I felt warned by those lies. It was as if they were saying, “We’ve been here for a really long time, and if you even try to get rid of us now, you’ll regret it.” The contents of my own heart were bullying me. I felt owned and trapped - encased by fear and doubt and helpless to really do anything about it. I wanted to leave and forget it all, but I stayed in that room and forced myself to cry out to God for help. Then I filled up just about every inch of space on that card with the lies I’ve been believing for the past 30 years.

As I wrote each lie, I knew I would hear Jesus telling me they weren’t true - if only my ears could pick out His voice over the snarling, hissing chants in my mind. But it was like I just couldn’t get a fix on the truth. I knew God didn’t believe those things about me, but I couldn’t help but realize that everything I can see in the world tells me all those lies are real. So I began asking God to help me see beyond my eyes.

I left that card at the altar (after some major spiritual wrestling), and picked up another one printed with a promise from His word that I am chosen and appointed. I wish I could say that all those vines magically disappeared at that point, but the hard truth is that they didn’t. They did wither quite a bit, but I’m still wrestling. I want so much to be free from those doubts and lies, and I believe that one day I will be. For now though, I’m just going to have to listen even harder for His voice.

His word to me this morning has become a new gripping point on this upward climb to rise above the junk I’ve been believing all this time: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). It may take some time and a few dislocated joints in my spirit as I wrestle free, but the Truth will be known in my heart. I can’t wait to feel the wind on my face as I run down His path unhindered by these fears! Blessed be that day!

Well, that’s the window into the things He began working on in my heart this weekend. Some of you who caught my teaser from yesterday are probably wondering what in the world that all has to do with yoga pants and ice. I figured since this has already been a little long-winded (the understatement of the year and definitely not how we were taught to blog this weekend), I would make you wait for the lighter side of She Speaks until the next post. See you then!

Post-It Note on the Weekend

Hey all! I just got in from the She Speaks conference, and it was awesome! (Welcome, by the way, if you are one of my new friends from the weekend stopping in to say hey!) I can't wait to post (I know all you old regulars - that's a change of pace from lately, huh?) For now, though, I'm truly, truly exhausted and have to get ready for bed since Big Brother has school tomorrow morning and we have to be up early. I hate it because I have so much I want to share, but I really can't keep my eyes open long enough to post, and I want to pay attention to what I'm writing anyway!

I'll give you a little teaser, though: parts of this weekend involved a major heart conviction, a non-existant cat, an unbelievably fashionable pair of yoga pants, and a lot of ice.

Hmmm.... what the world?!?! You'll just have to come back tomorrow and find out....

I'm out for now - I just hope I make it to the bed before I fall asleep...

Back From the Beach and Moving Forward

I’m back! The beach was great! I didn’t get burnt or eaten by the shark we saw (no kidding – it was less than half a football field from my friend Laurie), and I had an amazing time just relaxing in the sand.

I have to admit, though, that things didn’t go so well back on the home front. While I was soaking up rays and floating in tide pools, the youngest boy was back here making trouble for Dad. On the first day he redecorated our bedroom with Vicks Vapor Rub during nap time. The next day he changed the color of his shirt and Darth Vader’s (life-sized, mind you) helmet with the contents of his diaper – and not the yellow contents.

And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, Daddy had a wreck in the van. No one was hurt and the kids weren’t with him, thankfully, but it’s definitely going to put a dent in that tax return. All of this happened, by the way, by Tuesday. So I figured I should come home early with the crew that would be driving back Thursday. I didn’t want to risk anything else happening, or he might not let me go next year!

So now I’m home, the kids are in North Carolina visiting grandparents, and the van’s in the body shop. I still have two days left to get ready for She Speaks (the writers’ and speakers’ conference I’m going to this weekend), and I think I might just make it in time. But preparing for this conference has made me think about some things.

I have come to realize, for one thing, that I like making people laugh. Not that I want to be a stand up comedienne or anything, but I love to be able to throw out that well-timed comment here and there that brings a chuckle to the room. I think that’s what has made getting ready for this speaker’s conference so difficult.

I have to have two presentations ready: one three minute presentation about my life story (please – we can’t even get through Kindergarten in three minutes), and one five minute presentation that teaches a passage of scripture (with a captivating intro, references and full ending that wraps it up before I’m cut off at the five minute mark). There just simply isn’t time in either presentation to be as funny as I like to be, and it’s killing me!

I’m trying to put a humorous spin in here and there, but it's just tough with such a short talk. I feel a little like I’m not going to be speaking in my usual manner, but I think it will be good for me all the same. I just can’t believe it’s happening this Friday! Yikes!

So, yes, here I am again to give an excuse as to why I’m slacking on the blog. But hopefully things really will calm down after this conference. We’ll see. I am taking a couple of seminars on blogging while I’m there, so maybe this whole thing will get a facelift when I get back. Don’t you wish!

Anyway, send a prayer my way for safety in traveling and for a good conference. And if you think about it, pray that I’ll get along well with my roommate…I’m not too crazy about this random roommate selection stuff, but who knows? Maybe we’ll be made for each other. With any luck I’ll at least be able to make her laugh…

This Rabbit's Ears Just Got Better

Sorry I’ve been conspicuously absent from the ‘net lately – I don’t even know which excuse to use this time. Am I a slacker? Is the summer schedule throwing me for a loop? Or is it answer c: Answers A and B are equally true. When in doubt, pick ‘em all.

So I just got out of the tub where I thought it would be a good idea to shave before the Forestry Service came and performed a controlled burn to keep the growth from spreading to other areas (like, say, the neighbor’s yard). But I ran out of shave gel after the first leg. Couldn’t yell at the husband at this fine hour of the night (who is, by the way, too engrossed in the NBA finals to even pretend to hear me), so what did I do? That’s right – I used his shave gel. Great. Now half of me smells like a man. But what are you going to do?

I mentioned that my husband is watching the NBA finals, and some of you who know us all too well are thinking, On TV? In his own home? What, did they finally get cable? And the answer would, of course, be no. But we did get a nifty gift from the government.

It seems that in 2009 they are going to start broadcasting television signals in digital format only (whoever “they” are and whatever that means…). So I went on line and found a government site that said if your TV doesn’t pick up digital signals on it’s own, they will pay $40 (in the form of a gift card) towards you getting a converter box for your antenna. I signed up for two.

The cards came in the mail (they looked like credit cards and came with all these restrictions about stores and product numbers and stuff like that), and they promptly sat on my counter for more than a month. Then over Memorial Day weekend, we decided we should cash them in. After all, the season finale of Lost was coming up and it would be oh so nice to see Jack’s face without the squiggles and snow, and missing the horizontal line that travels up the screen every few seconds.

So we got what we needed, brought it home and hooked it up. Let me tell you something – the government finally got something right. We went from two snowy channels (you had to watch football and track the game by where the teams went on the field – you couldn’t actually see the ball…), to 10 or 12 crystal clear channels that make it look like we pay somebody every month to send us a signal. It’s awesome! Sure we now pretty much have the antenna in the kitchen (we get the best reception in there), but we can see Jack in all his glory, and football season is going to be a lot less confusing in the fall. And all for the discounted one-time price of $19.99. Amazing. Now if they can only come up with some kind of cash converter for the gas pump…

Anyway, as you can tell, I’m in a strange rambling mood tonight. But I wanted to post something to let you know I’m still alive, and to let you know that I won’t be around for a little while (I know – shocker). I’m actually going to the beach for a week with my Bible study (woo-hoo!). So pray for my boys as they “rough it” without mom, and pray that I take in all the rest I can get before the summer gets even crazier.

I’ll see you back here when I get home. (Unless, of course, I’m still a slacker after the beach. But what are the chances of that happening…?)