The lights are low and I sling my four-year old around my hip like an infant. It might be the last time you know, that she nestles that softest cheek into mine, that I can rock her to the drum beat. She closes her eyes when I do, peeks about when she gets bored.

~

They watch the sun turn pink on the horizon. My four-year old calls me, she knows when the sun is slipping, when we lose it completely. We all come. There is a space between heaven and earth just there on the horizon. It is the shape of an eye. We see God in it.

~

I pop my head back, all I see are pine trees high, star streaked sky.

I breathe deep. Could it be that it is the first time I breathed all day? Of course not. You couldn’t live like that and yet….

~

I smell the gasoline, feel the speed, the tress whip past, I trust you more than I trust myself, and I hold on.

We set a fire, the dog attacks the flame, the flying spark. We sit.

We tuck the kids in. I think about what parts of this will feel like home for them. The stellar jays? The woodpecker? The way camp fires smell a day later?

~

They are fighting again.

It is snowing today. You heard me. Spring break, the man is away and it is snowing… again. The kids have gone rabid and are about one more house day away from someone loosing a hand. And yet, there is beauty here too, when I ignore them long enough, once in a while they compromise, practice empathy, create fantastic adventures. It sounds like Love is growing in their hearts. I see the silhouettes of heroes peeking over their horizons, even when they act more like villans.

~

The kitchen tap drips into the unwashed pot. I scrub the toilets. Match the socks. Revel in these ordinaries.

~

The man is on a service trip with 137 young people this week. My niece is among them, she is gentle and quiet and so sensitive. I am so proud of her bravery, stepping beyond her usual fences, trying new things. When I see her, love glints in her eyes. Courage is rising. I see it, I get it. We are the same in some ways, I want to shout “There are worse things than failing, trust me, and you are making progress in all the right directions. Keep stepping out…that is where LIFE is. Perfectionism is a vice that keeps you from it”.

~

I have been writing. A lot. Not here but elsewhere and I feel flesh on dry bones. I am making sense of senseless things. It might never do anything but fill up a journal with understanding. That is enough.

~

I have a new nephew, born yesterday. Pearl Jam ‘Free’ played on the radio the moment scalpel finished, child emerged. There are some things you just cannot plan.

~

There is no new thing we are living my friends. Just the old with a new bow on it. Just us, swiftly spinning, holding onto life, to faith, hearing birds sing like it is for the first time. Just life, all its mundane and profound wound tightly into one package, longing to be lived to the FULL.

Tell me then, what ordinary moment turned Holy on you today?

Linking with Emily and friends…