These ones, though, they’re filled with goodness, and super easy to make, especially if you go meatless, or cook up some extra meat during your meal prep the night before. There’s no real recipe here, because I just filled them with veggies and cheese and a little meat. (But if you must have exacts there are plenty of recipes out there for zucchini boats.) Here’s how we made ‘em.

Half your zucchini. Scoop out the middle. I left a good half inch of zucchini flesh in my boats.
Mix up your filling. I had sauteed some hamburger meat earlier in the day, so I just added onion, fresh spinach, red peppers, tomato, garlic, and the chopped zucchini, along with some grated Parmesan & shredded mozzarella. I think I threw in some sea salt & pepper. I would have added some oregano & basil if I had any. The possibilities are endless, though.
Fill your boats & top them with cheese.
Bake ‘em. I did mine at 350 for a little while, then jacked it up to 375 to get the cheese nice & crisp. They’re done when you can pierce the zucchini. Throw some bread in the oven while you’re at it. Maybe rubbed with olive oil. Better on the grill, but the oven will work, since it’s already hot. (Tin foil underneath to catch any spare oil.)
Leave it in a bit too long because a neighbor stops by to chat.  It will be crunchier, but worth it.Let your kids make sails for their boats. And yours.
Eat. Try to keep your calm when your kids squeal and squirm about the squishiness of zucchini. Come back & apologize if you don’t.
Watch them discover a new food. One of them may decide she likes it. The other may not. Enjoy anyway.

And last night after dinner, the dinner where I slammed my silverware onto the table and said, in my least calm voice, that I need a break, I do walk the neighborhood, alone, to get some perspective and fresh air and mostly a few minutes away.
And there is only one thing that centers my heart, and it comes on mountain hikes and after hard day walks alone, in early morning coffee and quiet, and unexpected graces. And when my heart is weighed down by heaviness for those I love and the everyday heart cries, only love sets right the brokenness and the hunger.

Love is the only lens, the the only healer. Only love.

This post is inspired by Lisa-Jo, who invites me & you to write for five unedited minutes: “On Fridays over here a group of people who love to throw caution to the wind and just write gather to share what five minutes buys them. Just five minutes. Unscripted. Unedited. Real..” -Lisa-Jo  ***This week’s word: PERSPECTIVE.***

When I pull out of the driveway on Friday night, the house is in chaos, and my heart makes a match set.

I know a handful of the beautiful women at the baby shower. It’s mostly family; I suspect everyone but me is related, somehow or another.  But I am happy to be there anyway, to hold somebody else’s content baby, and know my exhausted ones are being blissfully riled up and tucked in by their amazing Dad, and I am here, all by myself. I need to get out more.

The sun sinks behind the barn across the street and it occurs to me that I’ve been to few baby showers so casual, all raw roars of laughter and sweet stories and sangria. Twilight gives way to evening, and as the barely-little girl who’s been kicking dandelions comes in from the field, the large moon dances upward, climbing through branches bearing new life.

And after dessert we file into the living room. A little bag of beads is passed around, each member of the circle threading a colorful orb onto a thread strong enough for a laboring woman to wear in remembrance. With each bead a prayer is spoken: for a healthy baby, for joy to mark the early days, for the delivery to be speedy, or at least feel like it is. All hopes are simple, true, the most necessary elements of birthing a baby and surviving those first few grueling months.

The beads are passed to me and I speak flowery, like I do when I’m nervous, and I wish I hadn’t: my words are earnest, but they hang there a moment,  like a lone overdressed adolescent at a middle school dance. But this circle of women is wide enough to envelope my awkward, to laugh and nod and affirm and keep moving ’round.

On my way home the light of the moon lands, mingles, gets lost in heavy fields blanketed in fog, and a new spring’s worth of peepers raise their song into the heavy air. I think about this business of babies and birthing, and how all of it starts in the first place. A mother becomes what she is because of her willingness to let a miracle grow and expand and exist within her.

At best it begins with love and vulnerability, and it grows, day by day, in womb swelling to make room for new life. We are enlarged and able to sustain wild, beautiful life growing because of a miracle conceived in vulnerability. (Even in adoption, this rings true.)
And as women, isn’t this always our greatest work: to open our very hearts and make room for miracles, to let life grow in the circles we find ourselves, to welcome and nurture? And how we long to be found in those sweet places, to find an arm around our shoulder, a word of truth spoken boldly to our wobbly hearts, the encouragement to press on. 

I am grateful, this near-summer night, to have been enveloped into this circle of laughter and simple heart-cries, speaking life over a beautiful woman, belly swollen with growing miracle. And I think of the mother who carried me well past my due date, and the home she created. And my mind wanders through the faces of all the women who’ve held my heart and created wombs of love, sacred spaces where miraculous could grow into flesh and bone and beating heart.

It’s late when I pull in the driveway and slip through the backdoor, home again. This night, I sleep deep, and wake to pitter patter feet, just slightly more ready to resume the daily litanies of mothering and making, holding and swelling.

While I don’t know for sure where this narrow road will lead me, vocationally or otherwise, it was pure joy to dabble in design and illustration, and to hash out all the details with the lovely Lisa-Jo.

Her words are pure grace for new moms (and not just new moms, I suspect). I’ve been struck with her honesty, her wit, her integrity, her kick-bum (come on, it’s for mothers of young ‘uns) proofreading skills, and mostly just her heart. So head on over and subscribe to her blog,  so you can have a copy sent right to your inbox, post-it notes and all.

I’m sharing the second half of my talk on Hope Springs Eternal that I shared at a local gathering a few weeks ago. For the first half, click here…

Her death, and my inability to handle it, revealed broken places that He yearned to heal, parts of myself I did not know had died, and the opportunity for new life after years of dormancy. Character was developed in the suffering, and the hope I have in Christ has become less of an idea and more of a reality, an “anchor for my soul, firm and secure.” (Hebrews 6.19)

In closing I want to share three gifts I discovered in the midst of those dark days.
I call them gifts because this is less of a three step plan, and more a slow discovery – a story still unfolding, and I’m sure many of you could add to this list, sharing the gifts that birthed hope in your darkest days.

The first of these gifts was (is) discovering the necessity of remaining GROUNDED in the Word.
Nothing breathes hope into us like the  living and active Word of God. It is trustworthy and Spirit-breathed. When we are tossed about by suffering, it is a firm foundation, truth when doubt and fear and our own hearts deceive us.

The word hope is found more in the book of Psalms than any other portion of Scripture, and most often, it is in the context of great struggle, written about with raw honesty.

Psalm 130

¹ Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;
² Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive
to my cry for mercy.

³ If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,
Lord, who could stand?
⁴ But with you there is forgiveness,
so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

⁵ I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
⁶ I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.

⁷ Israel, put your hope in the Lord,
for with the Lord is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.
⁸ He himself will redeem Israel
from all their sins.

Hebrews 10:23 exhorts us to “hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.” Returning to the truth of scripture allows us to measure our present circumstances, both the beautiful and the sin-sick and broken, by the measuring stick of a Great and Loving God, rather than our own emotions.

Sisters, remain grounded in the Scripture. We hear this advice again and again because it is true. Abide in Him, soak in the Word, friends. Return to your first love.
The Second gift was discovering the discipline of cultivating GRATITUDE.
Living a life of gratitude, giving thanks in all things, is a command of scripture. In 1 Thessalonians 5:18 we read “give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (So if you’ve been struggling to discern God’s will for you today, you can check that one off!)

I have been dearly impacted by Ann Voskamp and her book, One Thousand Gifts. In it, she writes about the ability of gratitude to slow down our racing hearts and racing lives, to reset our focus onto the author of life.

I referenced earlier Henri Nouwen’s encouragement to wait patiently, and he too, references the way slowing and seeing God’s goodness even in the midst of suffering births hope. In the same text that I read earlier, he goes on to say that

Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the full, and letting the seeds that are sown in the ground on which we stand grow into strong plants. Waiting patiently always means paying attention to what is happening right before our eyes and seeing there the first rays of God’s glorious coming. -Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

Gratitude, turning in thanks and praise, turns our eyes from our very real and present trials to a very real and present God, the giver of hope, the anchor for our souls.

And lastly, as we remain grounded in the Word, and as we cultivate gratitude,
we discover the third gift: GROWING together in suffering and hope

The experience of walking through this life, in pleasant times and times of suffering, and experiencing the deep abiding presence of Jesus in the midst of it, is one of the profound mysteries of our faith, and one meant to be shared. As we allow others to minister to us in our pain, and as we share our stories of suffering and of hope, we testify to work of Jesus in our lives.  And in Revelation 12:11 we read: “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”

Encouraging and boldly, lovingly speaking truth to each other, as well as sitting quietly and letting a sister work through the messy process of grief and healing, not rushing her to the right answers but letting the Spirit lead: these things build strong bonds and allow us to live out Jesus’ cry in John 17, that we would be one.

I am not suggesting that you must share every detail of every hardship with everyone. But I am suggesting that we are called to bear each others’ burdens, to confess sins to each other, to encourage and exhort each other. And it is difficult to do those things if we are isolated, hiding from vulnerability and from each other.
For those of you whose are in the midst of suffering, would you consider opening your heart to a trusted sister, perhaps someone across the table, or across the room here today? And you, with the story of hope, messy details and all, would you share your story with a younger woman, an older woman? Wrap her under you arm and breathe hope into her weary bones?

As believers, we have the hope of glory as an anchor for our souls. The God who created us loves us, has called us, is making us new, taking our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh, redeeming our bodies and preparing a place for us at His table. Our hope is real, and it is being revealed, on the mountaintops of faith, and in the darkest valleys.

Sisters, we must remain grounded in His Word. We must cultivate gratitude in our hearts. We must grow together in suffering, and in hope.

Tell me, friends, what have you learned about hope in the hard places? What gifts have you discovered in the shadows? I’d love to hear, really.

Spring seems an appropriate time to talk about hope, and after a long snow-less winter, or any kind of winter, really, a day that can start with open windows and the scent of lilac wafting in feels full with promise.

I have known hope as a spring budding, a bird alighting, and I am familiar with hope as a marker of our faith as Christians.  Throughout scripture we are exhorted to put our hope in God (Psalm 42.5), in His word (Psalm 119.74), in His unfailing love (Psalm 147.11).  We are told that Christ in us is the hope of glory (Colossians 1.27) , and that at the end of the day, there is faith, hope and love, love being the greatest of these (I Corinthians 13.13).
But the truth is, the lush beauty of spring, the life pulsing out of the dirt and the blossoms unfurling, they are here, in part, because of the hard cold of winter. The beauty we see now was beneath the soil in stark December. Under the lifeless dirt of February, life was being sustained, and growth is bursting forth now because of the cold, the dark, the quiet.

Dormancy is necessary.

And just like we can’t talk about spring blossoms without the reality of dormancy and germination and pruning and deadheading, we cannot speak of hope without mentioning it’s dark underbelly.

In Romans 8, Paul talks about the hope in which we were saved, the promise of our adoption as children of God, and the redemption of our bodies.  He says: “Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?”

It’s simple logic, and we all know it deep down.
We hope for light because there is darkness.
We hope for more because there is not enough.
We hope for peace because there is conflict, war.
We hope for healing because there is sickness, death.

Hope is only possible against the backdrop of longing, the reality of grief, the heaviness of loss.

Romans 8 goes on to tell us: “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

In Bread for the Journey, Henri Nouwen asks:

How do we wait for God? We wait with patience. But patience does not passivity. Waiting patiently is not like waiting for the bus to come, the rain to stop, or the sun to rise. It is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the full in order to find there the signs of the One we are waiting for. The word patience comes from the Latin patior which means “to suffer”.

Scripture promises that suffering, the underbelly of hope, will be part of our journey.

Romans 5 says that:

Since we have been justified through faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith
into this grace in which we now stand.
And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings
because we know that
suffering produces perseverance;
perseverance, character;
and character, hope.

The suffering itself is a means by which hope is revealed in us.

I have witnessed this in my own heart, the hope growing out of the heartache, in the grief of loosing my sister, and the slow healing.  {Click here  to continue reading…}

Many of you know that two years ago, in the midst of our relocation to my hometown, my oldest sister passed away, unexpectedly and tragically.

Two years have passed and I still struggle with the fact that I will never know the hows and whys of her last moments, only the date her body was discovered, and the finality of her death.   In the months following this loss, in a new home, with two small children and no new church family or close friends nearby, I discovered an ache and a grief I had not known.

I have stood before many of you and spoken and written of God’s goodness, and His love, but in those dark, isolated days following Jeannie’s death it was my own voice that taunted me. All those words and lessons and heart-cries about the God who is always about the work of making new, restoring and redeeming: they blew up in my face.

Because death is pretty final, and there was no redemption story here. And that grated against all my understanding, my deepest hope, the very foundation I’d laid my life upon.

And I made it through the difficult words of well-meaning folks and I made it through the eulogy, and I spoke the truth that seemed to mock me: I said it through tears, that her life was complicated, but Jesus’ relentless love for her was constant. And I longed to believe.

But I spent every night for I don’t know how long, slipping out of bed, so my husband could sleep, only to wake him with my uncontrollable sobbing. Those months were the darkest of my life. Quiet, full of silent ache. I kept it bottled up inside, until I couldn’t keep it up, couldn’t stand the tension of a heart desperately clinging to hope in a God who redeems, and mocking itself for doing so at the same time.

I was curled in a ball in the corner of the upstairs bathroom the night I caved. When I admitted I just couldn’t work it out, that her death and the ache that now lived inside of me was too much to reconcile, I thought my world would split apart.

But, friends, the opposite happened. Not in that moment, and not by any certain magical formula. But months later, I would sit, weeping again, always the tears, and tell a friend how the very redemption that I had shaken my hand at heaven and demanded, a glimmer of that redemption was unfurling right in the midst of my brokenness. The words shocked me as they rolled off my tongue, and rung true to my core…

{Next week I’ll share rest of my little talk: three gifts I discovered during those difficult months, that planted hope in my heart. Read it here.}

*portions of this transcript were originally written & posted on my dear friend Lindsey’s blog. You can check it out here.

And the whole ceiling hung from these here two-by-fours, which lasted a hundred years, suspended by a few scrawny scraps of floorboard: “They must’ve been running low on wood,” he says, when he points them out.
And I try to imagine the builders deliberating about whether to make another run to the lumber yard, or piecemeal it together with the little they had left. Or perhaps there was no deliberation at all, just the fast wielding of hammers and the bead board thrown up to finish the last of the house, to mask the shortage.

And I think about this busy month, the baby shower and the art show and the illustrations and two speaking engagements, the messy house and the slow (very slow) restoration of order. I think about all the creativity and the long talks and the time spent playing tea party and reading chapter books, rather than writing or cleaning. And I think, too, about the moments I snapped instead of offering a kind word, judged instead of listening, gossiped instead of praying, multiplied anxiety instead of gratitude; and this was just in the last few hours.Daily I fail. And daily I grow. And a hundred years ago a builder wove together solid wood and broken scraps, held together with nails hammered deep, to create a porch strong enough to hold ten decades worth of mailmen’s footsteps and lemonade evenings; aching goodbyes and last glances; toddler toes wiggling with anticipated arrivals.

The rain has done damage, and there is warped wood, places gone rotten: but the frame is strong, save the whole ceiling-hanging-from-the-floorboard-thing. And as the porch is dismantled and rebuilt, I take heed that the broken and not-enough often play an important part of the story, and we’re all pieced together with enduring strengths and alarming vulnerabilities. 

I think about my small life, my marriage, my family. And this old house is home for us for now, full of charm and quirks, frustrations and endless projects, er, opportunities.  And we’re all being built, and tonight, I’m hopeful that even the floorboards scrapped together at the end of the day might make something beautiful and lasting in the end.

And if I just posted that little picture with some quote about spring and hope, well, I bet you’d never know that my dining room became an impromptu art studio two months ago, and how life piled up right on top of it, three times over, and nothing’s gone back to where it ought to be.
My husband just texted to see how my day was, how I was, and I told him I was blogging about our messy house instead of cleaning it. Everyday this mess is at the top of my to do list, every night headlining the failure monologue that runs through my head: and now I know why people fall asleep with the TV on, the numbing blue lights emanating into the dark from upstairs windows up and down the street.
And people ask when I find time to paint. Perhaps on the tag under the paintings, right under title and medium, I should list the amount of hours of sleep sacrificed, or the shameful number of mind-numbing Dora episodes consumed by my children.
And my little organizer lines up the shoes that didn’t get put away here in the hallway, and I had just those kind of good intentions when we built the counter in the laundry room, and somewhere under all this stuff there are baskets for sorting bubbles and sidewalk chalk, beads and outgoing mail. Or at least there were a few months ago.
And this is just the physical mess, the places that just need attention and discipline and hard work to be set straight. This doesn’t cover my lofty intentions for Holy Week: the butterscotch bird nests we eeeked out (and promptly consumed) instead of the labor and delight of resurrection gardens from Easters past.

And what of the beautiful Tenebrae service we attended on Good Friday, right before I ran to Target to buy chocolate bunnies and something, anything to fit this “nine-months-to-put-it-on three-years-and-counting-to-loose-it” rubenesque figure (see aforementioned butterscotch nests)? And after all that, of course, came the harsh words that sometimes follow late night shopping, mine and his; you know, the ones about the piles of laundry and the money and the hearts that haven’t been connected so much these last few weeks?
And on Friday afternoon I talked to my sister, the one who lives too far away, who mothers seven children, and she tells it like it is, almost always. And even though she knows wiping babies’ bottoms can be as much a liturgy of the sin-stench that drives us back to Christ as a beautifully crafted Easter service, her kids are sick again, and she’ll miss the Easter hymns sung in the congregation and the simple traditions that sometimes hold us together.

And I only have two kids and I can’t seem to get it together this year, either. And sometimes right now is just plain hard, and it doesn’t seem significant or worth talking about, much less writing about.
But then I think about the pussy willows, and the glimpses we pick up of each others’ lives, of having it all together, and how none of us do, really. And on Saturday I meet a woman at a baby shower, and she tells me that she reads my blog, and how much she loves it, and then she leans closer, and almost whispers words that break my heart: she tells me it makes her feel a little less than, too, and she laughs it off. She reminds me of me.

And I wish she didn’t live so far away and she could stop by to see the mess. And if she knew the way I can be so selfish and demanding to those who love me most, or how I often turn into a twelve year old version of myself when I’m around my family – awkward, insecure, sarcastic, I don’t think she’d feel the same way.

And I wonder what else is lost in translation. And at its worst, I fear all this writing and word weaving just provides an escape from the broken pipes and mundane difficulties for me, and another window of comparison for you, another heap on piles of laundry and shame for us both.
So today, I photograph the mess in my house, and there is no shortage of subject matter, with seventy three images captured in a moment’s stroll over piles of shoes and make shift forts. And to tell you the truth, when I open them on my computer, press the little button that adds light and contrast to the images, I am surprised how bright and beautiful the mess looks on screen in comparison to real life, where the auto-filters of failure and frustration often tint my view, and where the nitty-gritty of scrubbing and ordering is required.

And I would do well to remember the lens that sees most clearly is the one not bound by time and space, not altered by a harsh word or shifting hormones or the blur of comparison and ingratitude. And when we let light dispel our dark corners at the foot of the cross, and when we share our mess with those we walk alongside, share the ugly and the vulnerable, it is then that we find the comfort and courage to live in our wrinkled and stretch-marked skin, the boldness to own our stories, and to put those shoes away for the seven hundred and eleventh time.

And Easter may be over, but we’re all living life in a perpetual Holy Saturday – somewhere smack between the dark reality of this broken mess and the tomb-bursting hope of the resurrection. And some days are full of revelation and beauty unfurling, and others are for scrubbing floors and putting one foot in front of the other. And today is the latter, here, and that’s just what I intend to do right now.

Do you struggle with the mundane of the everyday, with the litany of failures as you lay your head on your pillow, or the clutches of comparison? What helps restore your perspective, helps you put one foot in front of the other and keep walking?

In my mind’s eye I can still see the blue ink on faded loose leaf lines I sketched during some forgotten college lecture: a woman’s body bowed low, clinging desperately to a wooden beam – the cross of Christ.

And while it was not my typical subject, it was not an altogether startling image in the midst of my college experience. With a required minor in Bible and a campus pulsing with passionate conversation and messy spiritual experimentation, I was steeped in the language and lyrics of faith.

But this fictional woman, all crumpled and desperate, I could not get her out of my head. All day, in and out of classes, in graphite and ink, on the margins of three-ring-bound pages, and cafeteria napkins, I worked out the angles of her limbs, the severe arch of her naked feet. I could not shake her, and the more I attempted to do justice to the image blazing in my mind, the more it consumed me.

All my small life I had made blueprints and prototypes in sketches and drawings, and they were my ideas, fleshed out. But it had not occurred to me that doodles and images held the power to shape me, too.

All day she haunted me, this woman, tight fisted, her weary body wrapped right around the cross. She left me no choice.

I had no canvas, just a drawer full of acrylic paint. So I tore the bed sheet right off my lofted twin in that tiny Christie Hall single, and I duct taped it right up on the wall.

And as I wild painted that beam, I reached out my hand and touched the paint, still wet. And I shuddered at the crudeness of the cross.

And I painted His feet. Right onto the cross: it was I who painted them, it was my doing and I had confessed my guilt a million times but never felt the anguish sear my heart, not like that night in my dorm room.

When I painted the nail, I heard the thunder of a hammer.
And when I dipped my brush into crimson paint, and let it bleed down the sheet, seep right through the cotton and onto the wall, it was then that I crumpled, a heap of tears, paint stained and heart-broken.

And I don’t know how long I stayed there, but I do know that when I looked up, at that image, I saw the cross, the feet, the nail, the blood. And I saw the great space I’d left to complete the image. And a voice whispered these words straight to my soul:

Child, you are not meant to paint a woman at the foot of the cross. You are meant to be a woman at the foot of the cross.

That was a decade ago, but I come back to that sheet and those words again and again.

When I long for purpose, and my life feels small and insignificant, I come back, and remember the source of my identity as a child, bought with a price I cannot fathom.

When I long for smallness, and this pulsing life seems too much, I come home to this truth, and I find comfort hiding in the cross of Christ and His greatness.

When my heart is full of judgement, and I am confident I comprehend precisely how the rest of my family, my community, my church, this whole world should function – I come back to these words, and remember there is only one who has the right to judge, and it is certainly not me. And it’s only in the cross that I can love at all.

When I compare myself to others, when I fail, and fail again, I come here and remember that I am being made new.

And you too, friend, are offered new life, a life hid in the cross, a life infused with the hope and power and glory that burst from the tomb just three days later.

Because the ground is level at the foot of the cross, and there is space enough for all who will receive him, here on the canvas of God’s love.

I wake up to birds chirping, and the other night we slept with windows open, and it was fresh air to my soul.

I have a dozen posts in my draft folder, but can’t find words to wrap them up, boldness to hit publish. And I’m not one to be shy, but I’m realizing how much I love to tell finished stories, and how much of this life is untold, in process, right now. Also, my camera battery spent a good two weeks dead, the charger lost under the mountain that has accumulated on our back counter, the out of sight one that seems to draw all inanitmate objects, the random and homeless ones, that dwell with us here.

So today, just this: a lovely little flower, blooming too early to believe its possible.