A Beautiful Mosaic

courage to confront courage to ignore courage to fight when i don't want to anymore courage to pray courage to believe courage to give when you may not recieve courage to be firm courage to rise above courage to find more reasons to love this courage i need this courage to live the life You have called me to breathe and to give and this courage i know can only come from You and so i realize again i am nothing without You.

the silence has been long, I know, and I have definitely missed blogging!  here is a bit of what has been going on in our lives in the last month as form of an update and also explanation for my silence: -we ended January and began Feburary with two consecutive SUPER SHIFTS (our long week + weekend shift that we do once a month).  we normally don't schedule these back to back and will try our best to avoid doing it again, but it was necessary this time and kept me away from my computer on the weekends and found me sleeping whenever I could catch a free moment.  -we also ended January by counting 16 youth who we had worked with in our home during that month.  as several of our long-term girls had transitioned out for various reasons over the last few months, we had several short-term girls come in and it was a rotating door for awhile until we reached this record high.  it gave us the opportunity to know and work with a wide variety of girls and be educa...

I had never seen bags that size under my own eyes.  The complete exhaustion that was so utter in fact that it left me sleepless when I laid my head down for that long-awaited 5pm nap on Friday came after our January "Super-Shift," which is the delightful time once a month when we work our full shift + the shift our alternate usually works.  We get a few preceding days off before this starts to "amp up" for the experience, which always seems a little backwards.  These are great shifts in that they give you long stretches of time with the girls to really establish relationships, structure, etc., but because of the 24/7 nature of our work, they are also completely exhausting to the whole self...especially when they include extraordinary circumstances.  This was one such shift.  We welcomed a sibling set of 4 sisters the night we went on shift and spent two full days trying to in addition to assimilate them into our home, get their school enrollments ...

my prayer today for you, for me, for the girls at Barton.

I was making a quick trip to the public library with one of our older girls to check out an ACT-prep book and ended up having to wait for a few brief minutes as she perused another aisle of interest.  The tiny "new book" rack caught my eye.  I quickly picked up a memoir that looked somewhat interesting since I have developed a strange fascination with this genre over the years, and I checked it out.  Little did I know what the book was until I got home...or how much the story had to say to me. It was "A Stolen Life" by Jaycee Dugard.  Maybe you remember her.  The girl that was rescued from living in the tent community in her kidnappers' backyard for 18 years.  Definitely not a book I recommend to very many as she holds back no stops in telling her story and it can be incredibly graphic in the first half.  However, I believe I was meant to read this book, and I am really glad I did. Jaycee's life and childhood were literally snatched awa...

Experiential lessons learned lately that have turned into daily reminders for myself: Take  interest and joy  in the child. We recenly had a girl tell us upon our return from time off that she needed us to read and explain a letter to her.  The letter had very positive news in it.  We read it together and rejoiced greatly together over the news, having a big rah-rah fest.  Later, we found out she had already read and had the letter explained to her days before.  Evidently, it was important to her to share that moment with us and have someone take the same interest and joy in her life.  It's easy for me to forget how important this is. Refuse to condemn potential in light of behavior . A girl who is more comfortable with being bad than being good can finally find peace with doing right.  A girl who pushes you away every time you try to care can indeed learn how to form relationships and bonds.  A girl who acts out may be look...

It has been most recently that I have been able to define and pen what seems to be the task at hand for Michael and I right now in Arkansas.  In other words, here are the reasons we are here.  Here is what keeps us motivated and moving day to day and in the end, provides the pathway to fulfillment in this work: It is my most important task right now to help girls who do not even believe in the existence of love to see and experience love so that they can begin to fathom the heart of God. It is also a vital task to allow those who have had no time to be a child to experience childhood anew...to provide the freedom, space, and inspiration to embrace the innocence of play, glee, and simplicity. They are daily tasks to provide a sense family or belonging, to process life, to encourage hearts, to listen to stories, to teach new skills, and to be careful to live in all ways to the glory of God. Pray for us in these tasks...that God will continue to...