Create

Posted on January 10, 2013 by melissafed

The light pools on the ground beneath the pine trees.

Fog moves quickly, sudden.

I can feel its depths, wonder where the bottom is. The top?

It is easy to get lost in.

I reach my fingers up into the sky, there is no end in sight.

The air is thick, dense. I wonder if one can actually breathe this…my chest starts to ache.

The snow is falling so gentle from the dark sky, we can’t even feel it on our faces.

We capture crystals on our fingers, try to count the prism facets before it melts over us.

Beauty can be hard to hold.

We visited a friend yesterday and as we walked down her driveway we watched a garage collapse. The tiny bits of snow building into something too heavy to be held up by flimsy structures.

And I wonder, how many miniscule pieces of beauty does it take for us to crush something?

Like oppression for example. Or injustice.

I don’t know. But I think I want to find out.

I think, perhaps, that might be the point.

Linking this post with the Imperfect Prose community…Hi friends!

This post partially inspired by Shane Claibornes beautiful, inspiring, life-giving HOPES for 2013. LOVE THIS.

And friends…PURSUIT JUSTICE is coming…JOIN US!

Lego Bombs and Other Domestic Catastrophes

Posted on January 4, 2013 by melissafed

A five-minute free write on the prompt “Opportunity” with Lisa Jo Baker and the Five Minute Friday crew

I almost missed it. Opportunities for wonder and beauty can be sneaky like that…

Christmas exploded in our house with all the intensity of an atomic bomb made entirely of lego and playmobile miniatures. There was also the Pumpkin Soup Catastrophe of New Years day in which the entire pot erupted over my stove, floor and up to my microwave. There was a need for some pretty serious mop up. I thought about calling in the national guard, a not for profit rehabilitation team…something. Instead I spent the last two days on the offensive, stealth attacks on the toy room, chemical weaponry on the kitchen. I was nearly complete yesterday afternoon, just needed to vacuum and mop but somehow mini lego bombs kept exploding under my feet (literally) and I was getting frustrated.

The man said he would take the kids outside so I could finish and so I was helping get the gear on when I remembered what year it is. This year, for me, is the year of NOW. A year to embrace the moment I am in, of trying to live them fully and attentively, of noticing beauty and not trying to rush to the next thing.

I could have missed it. The trees laden with liquid diamonds, frozen onto their limbs. The sky so blue in made my eyes sting with all the beauty. The cold of the day intense enough for our uncovered faces to remember we are alive. The forest herself quiet in reverence of the Beauty Maker. My daughter squealing, my son playing tricks, my husband tossing his head back with a deep belly laugh.

This year? I’m not going to miss it…

2013 Word of The Year

Posted on January 1, 2013 by melissafed

NOW

Oftentimes I suspend myself between two nearly fictional worlds. I move into the past, the ways I failed, the people I hurt, the chances I didn’t take. Or, I settle into some mythical future. As if I could predict what is to come. As if planning my response to an imaginary tragedy will help me to avoid it.

I keep waiting for something in some ways, always rushing to the next thing. I rush the day I am in trying to get there, even though I don’t know at all what could be in store. Maybe it will be worse? I rush bedtime so that I can hustle off to….where?

This year, my 35th on the planet of earth, I want to live in the NOW. I want to be FULLY engaged in the life I have today. There doesn’t feel like there is time to waste in the ‘becoming’, my life is NOW. Tomorrow may not even come, and today is the only true story.

NOW….My kids, I want to press into them, 6 and 4 is magic and I don’t want to miss any of it. I will enjoy them in each moment.

NOW…I feel Gods not so subtle invitations back into the ministry fray that he pulled me out of (I did not kick or scream). I am planning yes to any NOW he puts before me.

NOW…is the time to learn how to love my husband with the kind of love that frees him, builds him. None of us is promised every tomorrow with these loved ones as they are now. How can we love them better?

NOW…I will call myself explorer of this life. I will look for opportunities to chase the dreams long placed in my heart. NOW I will open doors, pick up my pen, write it down. That mythical perfect writing day is not coming, I will make room NOW.

NOW…I will notice the days, count them, consecrate them. I will live them with intention knowing that this, here, TODAY, is my life. I will fully live it.

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know I am brilliant at starting things. I just never seem to finish them, so no resolutions for me, just the declaration to fully live the life I have NOW (also since I am turning 35, I am going to lose 35 lbs, read 35 books, spend 35% less time on the computer and exercise 35% more…jokes, jokes).

Print found here (for sale): http://www.etsy.com/listing/106223362/quote-poster-print-this-is-the-time-the

Joining with One Word 365…pop over and have a read:

2012: Life and Blogging Year in Review

Posted on December 28, 2012 by melissafed

2012 was a good year for us. It began with our feet on an island in the middle of the Nile in Uganda,

it will end with those same friends on our own Canadian soil. In between we learned, we grew and adventured more than our fair share.

Some of us learned all the sounds that a vowel can make and our little girl softened around the edges, gained some logic and burned off her three-year old rage. Our church launched a church service, my work launched a research study.

Here are some other 2012 Feddersen stats:

In between I wrote it out here. Some of the favorite posts of the year are here:

More people than ever before or since joined us on our journey with World Vision to Kenya.

People seemed to really get excited when I am excessively open and write letters on marriage, mothering, or being a teenager.

A modified Mother Theresa quote

And the most read post of the year, was the only one ever pinned to Pinterest including a printable I made. It is sort of unfortunate on account as it isn’t my favorite writing. Ah well.

I really appreciate you who spend your precious time with me here. Look forward to getting to know you this coming year. Leave a comment, let me know you stopped by? What was the highlight of your 2012?

Country Chronicles: Christmas at the Ranch

Posted on December 27, 2012 by melissafed

I don’t know if there is a more magical time at Christmas than when your children are 6 and 4. We’ve had the most wonderful season. December was full of adventure, memory making and entirely too much sugar. A few of the highlights?

We begin to get ready for Jesus’s Birthday December 1st. We set the countdown calender, wrap 24 books (one for each night of advent) and even (the first saturday of the month) grab our tree with some of the dear friends.

Other highlights of the month were:

Nightly stories under the tree:

Ninja bread men…

Christmas pagents…

Epic sledding (O beat everyone, all the time. He is so fast we had to get him a helmet and goggles. He thinks they make him go faster so, double win).

Cousin sleepover/girls night out:

Christmas was good at our cabin in the wood.

Of stables, hearts and other bloody messes…

Posted on December 23, 2012 by melissafed

Oh God,

When I think of the Christmas story, where I see myself in it, I imagine myself the stable. It is a working place Lord, this heart of mine. It isn’t a place where one sits down in quiet often enough, it backs up with the muck. You know it. This heart here, it is bound to wander. Wander out into the cold of night, to leave all the peace and heat inside.
Oh Lord. How you surprised that place! Who could expect to find you there? Shouldn’t we find you in the palace somewhere? But no. You set yourself in the middle of the mess, you choose that to be the place to bend yourself to earth. How could you Lord? Live in this heart? Knowing the back and forth it sways, the extra paths it takes. The detours it chooses over your best. Still. You bend into it. You CHOOSE it. You believe it to be the only true. The stripped away of pretense. The illusions shook out. The heart, at its bloodiest, the stable at its rankest, these you choose. I still cannot fathom it. The sinner at the rocks of the bottom, the heart that looks more like the mire. You choose it. You make it home. You create it and over and over you move into it. My boy he asks me about what is BAD and I tell him the WHOLE world is Yours, You make it…and yet…everything in it we can twist into sin. All the very best gifts you gave us, we can figure a way to contort it into something that looks more like death than life. We break it till it little resembles your purpose for it. Our worst offense Lord is what we do with the hearts you give us. Allow them to twist and shape shift into nightmares and shadow, the absence of any light.

Still. Here I wait for your surprise. For you to shock and astound and arrive. Here, this heart, that stable, the vacant and broken these you choose to embody. You Lord. YOU.

And these.

God. Be with us still.

Emmanuel. In this WEARY world.

Of Blue Hair and Bullets

Posted on December 15, 2012 by melissafed

My boy, he shouts down the hallway, thirty minutes past his bedtime “MOMMMY! Come cuddle me!” and this day of all days I say “YES” and I walk fast down these old plank floors. This day I near run. These days might be short you know, we’ve got no guarantees.

When I arrive in his room he is cuddled under the blankets I think, “Oh no, is he scared? Did he hear the video I just watched?”. I bend, touch his back. Only… Wait. That is a pillow. He has wrapped his body pillow in his favorite blanket and he is hidden in the corner. He bursts out laughing when he hears me make the discovery. So we laugh. I pull this little light into my chest, it seems the only way to honour those that have been snuffed out.

We had a pack of girls in our home the other night. There was near twenty of them wearing hoodies all black, their hair swooped across their left eye. They talked about how they barely go to school, how their dad died, how their friends are mean to them. They stood in my house and all the broken felt like cracks in my universe. These babies looking like women, tiny flames to be fanned, extinguished, or ignited.

I made them hot chocolate and I sat beside them, I looked into their eyes. I hugged a couple as they left. They asked if they could move in. I laughed with them, smoothed her blue-green hair as she threw herself into my arms. I felt the warmth and heat she produced, knew how easily it could shift to raging fire, the kind of flame that burns things down, turns lives into ash.

I thought about them today. And the twenty year old man in Connecticut. I know. I thought about the babies too, and their mammas, but I must confess, I thought most about him.

How did our community fail him so? His own brain? The chemicals that keeps it all together…what went so wrong? What accelerant was thrown over his young body that made him a threat to the world instead of a light to it? The thing about this world is that it is all choked full of beautiful things that can be twisted into horror and we would like to think that if we sit in our warm houses pouring our heat over our own kids that we will keep them safe. I don’t think that is the whole story.

All I know is, there are kids standing on the edge of raging fires Those who’ve been pushed by a community spinning too fast, being too self obsessed. Those from generation after generation of men who live like infernos.

We need to find a way to keep them all warm…

Pray with me?

The whole meaning of the Christian community lies in offering a space in which we wait for what we have already seen. Christian community is the place where we keep the flame alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that there is a spiritual power in us that allows us to live in this world without being seduced constantly by despair, lostness, and darkness.

That is how we dare to say that God is a God of love even when we see hatred all around us. That is why we can claim that God is a God of life even when we see death and destruction and agony all around us. We say it together. We affirm it in one another. Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment—that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life.

-Henri Nouwen in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (quote posted by Suzannah yesterday)

A late link up with my friend Emily

Broken Hallelujah

Posted on December 9, 2012 by melissafed

I’m sitting on the bathroom floor. My boy is sitting in front of me. His brown eyes are like saucers with the fear, all round and huge.He whimpers some, cries a little, coughs a lot. Nobody told either one of us that six-year olds should still be getting croup-like-illnesses and yet he does. Coughs that just won’t end. So we sit and even though I am a nurse, I don’t know much else to do but breath deep of the steam, sip on cough syrup and warm apple juice. I hold him some, rock a little, fight with his now long legs that don’t fit where my baby should. I whisper “I love yous” and brush my lips on his sweaty brow.

Mostly I just sit near him.

And it reminds me of the Broken Hallelujah. How, I cry it out all the time. My dependence, my desire for Him to draw near, to join me on the bathroom floor, the sick-bed, the broken heart. And I could tell you of my broken all night long. How I’ve battled fear, waged war with food and my body, how I’m all messed up by duty and expectation and the pursuit of that which I most clearly am not. Yes. If you’ve ever read here you know all about my broken…I don’t have much time for the perfect.

And I don’t have answers for you either. How the God who sits down on the floor with us can leave us there, wounded, weeping in pain. There are some hurting ones in my life right now for whom I am on the hunt for magic bullets, miracle waters, potions of all kinds. I don’t like the broken parts of life. I don’t know why a good God lets us suffer like we sometimes do. I really don’t get it.

But then.

I feel it when my son curls into and around me. How he calls for me the moment I leave the room. How he is searching only for the WITH him. This time of year, when the scandal in the stable strikes me each year harder. The BIG whys. The GOD WITH US. The one who broke down walls of time and space and heaven and earth for us to be able to say “HALLELUJAH, GOD IS WITH US”. In us. With us.

WITH US.

Hallelujah.

I know you are broken-hearted too. And the secret is kind of out….we all are. None of us escapes this place with the beating heart all in one piece. I hate to be the one to tell you, but this world, this side of glory, will tear you in half completely, maybe more than once.

Will you join us on the bathroom floor, gazing into eyes of love, pulling our limbs in tight, quieting our fear in His promises? I don’t think the story is quite done.

Linking with Prodigal Magazine & She Loves Magazine; synchroblogs on what it means to be broken and redeemed.

Country Chronicles: Pieces of Memory

Posted on December 5, 2012 by melissafed

Our kids are four and six. I am acutely aware that the shards of memory they are forming will someday meld together into the lens they will see the world through. And so…

Tonight after dinner, the four of us piled into our orange amphibious vehicle. We took the trail that leads to the secret cabin our neighbor built. I am starting to recognize the shadows that the moon tosses across our path. I don’t jump when they shift like I once did. The shapes of the trees that fall across the trail as we move deeper into the woods, my hair blown wild, I hold my daughter tight. It smells like pine, sounds like stellar jays, I feel safe and wild at the same time.

Will you tell them, if they ask, that we really did venture out in the dead of night? That there was a small white truck with a light on the roof? That we did one day, all four of us, climb on a quad and go for a trek. That…no…sorry E you were not really driving. All those tiny bits of memory will carry our quirky legacy.

We pull out at our favorite place, where the trees all part and the valley opens up and we can catch a glimpse of far and away. The waxing moon holds the sky wide open, the clouds moving fast across it, the city lights miniscule below. Orion’s Belt takes its place low on horizon, we sit for a moment and watch the things that shift, the clouds. The stars that hold still, we count them, all our lucky ones.

We gaze up together, whisper wonder; I thank God, out loud.
I hope they remember the stars someday, my arms on them, Jesus all around. I hope when they feel wind on their faces; they remember freedom, wonder, worship.

Linking up with Emily Wierenga and the happy she is back Emily Freeman…

Country Chronicles: These days…

Posted on November 24, 2012 by melissafed

Oh Hi! Where have you been? I know…I know…It is me that has been MIA, right mom? Sister? Today is the day I return your calls. SORRY.

*RIGHT NOW: I’ve been working a bit too much this week. So this morning the kids and I are cuddled up in blankets, books, and now they are watching “Frosty the Snowman”. The perfect Saturday morning. I have missed them this week and I am excited to have them all to myself this weekend. *BEST RECENT INVENTION: O has hung a rope from the loft and is swinging on it…non-stop. He got blisters and so now he wears green gardening gloves and camo water shoes…nothing else. I made him put a t-shirt on for a photo the other day though. I’m not sure that anything else in the history of our home has gotten more use than this rope swing, this last week. *The BEST thing in my kitchen lately has been this salmon marinade. I make a lot and then I marinade the salmon, broil it till it flakes off a fork. Then I make a simple salad, throw the salmon on it and add the dressing (unused marinade). Joel eats absurd amounts…did you catch that? JOEL EATS ABSURD AMOUNTS (translation? make this salad…your ~~carnivore~~ man will like it).

*I’ve started Christmas preparations over here. A touch of decorating (much more to come) and started to do some planning. A few traditions we do?

Our advent calendar is ‘event based’. That is, we put in something special to do each day. I was so excited to find these printable event ideas as sometimes it takes me days to think of all 24 events. This gives me a nice start to which I can add our personalized things (like the Living Nativity!!!).

I am also wrapping Christmas books today. We had exactly the right number in the Christmas decorations box so now we will wrap them up so that the kids can open a new one each night in December (idea stolen from pinterest…of course).

* We are of the strong belief that we don’t have nearly enough celebrations, festivals, holidays. So we started a new one last weekend. “Ranch-o-versary” celebrates when we moved up into the woods two years ago. All who currently or have ever lived in our basement suite were invited…and we expect them to be here for it every year until we are all dead. We are a little skinny on the traditions so far, but fondue with the Switchback family seemed to work out pretty well.

* Speaking of the Ranch…look what the boys have been working on! A rink. We need a bit more snow and for the temperature to drop a little before we can start flooding, but hope to have it up and ready to roll for the Aylard arrival home from Uganda!

Anyways…how has your week been? Best adventures? How are you spending this glorious Saturday???