What do I do when some of the most amazing women on the web decide to get together and talk about how to gather, equip and unleash the next generation of women to live out their purpose? I decide I have to be a part of this.

This February an amazing group of women will be gathering in Austin, Texas to wrestle with hard questions like

If God is real, then what?

The If: Gathering is more than just a conference, it’s a movement. From the website:

There is a restlessness among the next generation of women, who fear more than anything – wasting their lives. We want to harness their hunger and passion by providing space to be equipped to pursue their God-given dreams.

The IF:Gathering is a fresh, deep, honest space for a new generation of women to wrestle with the essential question: IF God is real… THEN what? This 2-day gathering will bring women together to wrestle out how to live out the calling God has placed on our lives.

Each generation has their unique struggles. My mother’s generation struggled with things that I never had to worry about. Should girls be able to play sports? Should women work outside of the home?

And subsequently my daughters’ generation will not have to worry {I hope} about the things that we as thirty-something women are working through. I hope that this gathering will be a launch point to discuss how we equip and create leaders both in our generation of women and come to a place where we can help lead our daughters into places of purpose, grace and humility in the church and in the world.

Will you join me this February 7 and 8 in Austin? Click here for more information.

She’s just trying to live inside her own body. I need to remember that.

Even I, who has inhabited my own body and mind for 38 long and short years, still have my doubts about how to feel more comfortable in my skin. I stare at mirrors in private, behind the locked doors of a bathroom. I poke and pull at my skin and pluck at hairs that grow in wrong places.

Flashes of brilliant living sometimes occur in suburbia. I eat right for a few weeks and I finally feel good in the body I live in. I read the right books and feel like I’ve swum in the river and I feel sharp in my mind. I can write! Yes. For a few days, hours or so I can write. And the words feel like they were meant to be born.

But most of the minutes of my life I have spent trying to make myself feel more free in the sensitive skin I’ve been given.  

And I expect this child, even after only seven years of life, to feel fully formed in who she is.

I cannot.

She’s trying to figure it all out, even more than me.

She’s a whirling dervish behind me as I clean the house.  She falls off chairs and knocks over bottles of soda. She steps on toes and walks into traffic. She runs into old people at the mall.

And I get angry.

“Why can’t you just control your body?” I ask her through clenched teeth.  And then its times like this I remember she’s seven. Just seven. And even I can’t control my own body. I put food into it that shouldn’t be consumed. I forget the second application of sunscreen. I can’t keep my eyes open on a Wednesday afternoon.

I expect so much of her, it seems. To conform to society. To understand people. To live in ways it has taken me almost four decades to learn. And even as I expect it I know it is too much sometimes.

She’s beautiful when she twirls and when she falls and when she runs, even if she’s looking back at me laughing. She’s a captivating human who has been formed exactly like she’s meant to be.

If I want something from her, it shouldn’t be to stop running. It should be to succeed where I have failed: that she will begin, even now to feel fully comforted in who she is. 

I keep having to apologize to people because I’m living in some kind of forgetful fog that feels as thick as the marine layer on a June morning. I’m sorry I didn’t remember. I’m sorry I didn’t fix it. I’m sorry the house looks like a laundry bomb went off in the living room and a fifth-grade back pack exploded in the dining room and that I’m still washing dishes from last Saturday.

And boom, in one fell swoop the children have grown older all of a sudden. Their long legs are even longer and their knees nobbier. Their hands are long and woman-like and they’ve finished another year of school. And there I am looking over a bowl of frozen yogurt at a child who was just yesterday a baby and I don’t remember the middle.

It has been a long time since I’ve felt so worn thin.

But today there is summer grass and yesterday there was summer sand and there is always summer grace for the thinnest of places in my heart.

And summer joy and summer wine and all the hand-holding and watermelon-eating I can handle.

There are goodbyes and hellos and there will be music outside and late nights and a wedding. There will be a wedding!

And the girls will swim and I will jump in with them, and I will write and the river will flow. At least I hope it will.

And if it doesn’t, there is grace. Grace for this season and grace for the next.

I’m on a Deeper Church this morning talking about caring for kids and how the church is supposed to care for the world. Will you join me?

Our Collective Calling

It seems like I care for humans all day long.

I make lunches for humans, I fold the laundry for humans, I flip pancakes on Saturday mornings for humans. As a mother, I’m a human-carer at the very heart.

Mothering is caring for others when they cannot care completely for themselves. We get babies in our arms after nine and a half months of promise and this person, a fully formed human I might add, is completely and utterly helpless. She is dependent upon my best choices, my best care and my best love for her survival.

Now I have two of them. And I care for them a little bit less each day as grow older and older and are more ready for wherever the world will take them.

But my core job, as a mother, is to care-take their lives.

I believe the Church is a mother of sorts. She has been given the world, it’s inhabitants and all that is in it for good care-full stewardship. The earth. The oceans. The widows and the orphans. The broken people and the broken places…. Read More.

“But I don’t want to get my hair wet!”

It’s the summer croon of mothers everywhere. Even my mother said it when we went to the desert hotels in the brilliance of the Augusts of my childhood.

She’d bob in the pool with her arms stretched out like a buoyant ballerina and protect her hair while we splashed in the over-chlorinated lukewarm water. All of this while dads let kids jump from their shoulders like human diving boards. It seems like it’s been the same for centuries.

At some level maybe we want to be like our mothers and at another level we hope we don’t. And then there are some of those parts of us that barrel toward that mother-mirror relentlessly.

Like hair.

Last Sunday my kids swam while I puttered around the backyard putting up the new lights in long swaths against the fences. Chad didn’t want to get in the coldish pool (that still holds a little bit of the spring bite) and would have rather stay topside reading his magazine.

“Please. They’ve been waiting for you to swim for an hour.”

He glared at me. I turned back toward the fence and stretched to reach the next hook. It was late afternoon and we had spent the earlier part of the day in joyous laziness.

I could hear him grumbling as he put away his magazine and scooted back his chair. And then a splash. He had cannon-balled in the deep end and the girls were in full squeal.

That was all it took to send him from grumble to extreme pleasure — jumping in the pool in the late afternoon.

A few minutes later (the lights were taking me longer than I had planned) the girls begged. “Mama. Come in the pool with us!”

My oldest looked at her father, “She probably doesn’t want to get her hair wet.”

I spun around and looked at the three of them. Their wet heads bobbed in the pool.

“I’m okay.” I said. And she was right. I really didn’t want to get my hair wet.

“Aww, come on Mama!” my blonde-headed seven year old in her swim cap and goggles said.

“Maybe next time. “ I said.

My oldest was wounded. “You always say that.”

I guess I did.

They swam, and I finished the lights. And then I didn’t so much make a decision as I just walked around the end of the pool and stepped off the edge. I plunged deep, hair and all, into the cool water.

It was impulsive and I wasn’t a bobbing ballerina like I often am, hanging out near the steps in the shallow end like every mother in the history of colored hair. I was playful, crazy, and unpredictable.

Too much of the time I am the mother-who-doesn’t-get-her-hair wet. I’m the adult who does the homework before she eats her dessert. I’m the fold-the-laundry instead of “screw it all” and watching a movie. Once in awhile, it feels good to just jump.

I never want to get too old to play. To jump off the deep end and play Marco POLO later than we all had planned.

My girls are only this tender age for one summer of their lives. And I only get to be their mom for the same fleeting time. And my husband. These years will go too fast also.

My mother? She got her hair wet about as much as I do. So yes, we become the best part of our mothers, I hope.

So far this summer I’ve swam in the ocean, I’ve been tumbled by a too-big wave, I’ve jumped off the deep end and I’m just getting started.

I want to dig deep. To swim deep. To love deep.

And I want to play.

I’m writing over on (in)courage today.

Blessings for Our Enemies

A few weeks ago on a Monday morning, my husband stepped outside to walk the dog.

Before he got out of the driveway, he abruptly stopped, turned around and raced back inside the house.

“Sarah. Your passenger side window has been shattered. Someone broke into your car overnight.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. There was that one time I parked in a dark parking garage for an early morning session at the gym and someone stole my purse off the seat. My bad. I shouldn’t have left it there.

But this time? Nothing valuable was in my car. I’ve learned my lesson well. But nonetheless, the thief took an old bag that I’m guessing looked like a purse with nothing of consequence inside.

I was more perturbed than I was violated.

Even so, my husband and I traded cars and he took mine into to the auto repair to get my window fixed.

I drove the girls to school in the Prius. As we pulled out of the neighborhood, we talked about what happened.

My seven-year-old: “Mama, why do people steal things?”

Me: “Oh sweetheart, sometimes people steal things because they need money. Or maybe they just were rowdy kids doing things they weren’t supposed to do. I don’t know.”

And I really didn’t know.

My daughter just looked down. Both of my daughters seemed  sad.

My eleven year old spoke up. “Mama. Can we pray for the thief…

Come join me there.

I only got one blog post off last week.

That’s the biggest blogging “failure” I’ve had in pretty much ever. And by ever I mean never.

It’s really not about the blogging, it’s about the writing process and how I work through parts of my own life as a writer. If I didn’t write, I would be hard pressed to think critically about my life.

That said, some times of life I just can’t do it.

I just can’t keep my bedroom tidy (and by tidy I mean jus two piles of laundry rather than seven). Or the bathroom sink clean.

I just can’t keep my kids backpacks free of old mandarin orange mold or their lunch boxes free of pulverized Fritos. I just can’t keep up with the petrified dog poop in the yard. And I can’t write great posts on the Monday-Wednesday-Fridays of life.

There are times when all of our energies move to the places that need to function in order to survive.

It’s like when a major organ is in failure, the body does all it can to send energy to that place to heal a vital thing. Because when the organ fails, the whole person does.

And lately, I feel as if school’s Spring is a vampire sucking all of my life into the nether-regions of homework folders and end-of-the-year book reports. (Jen Hatmaker said it best here.) When all of my good ideas are flying to figure out the best way to attach patches to a Girl Scout uniform FAST (a stapler) and how to use my infinitesimal Spanish vocabulary to communicate with Mario who is making the best tacos in Orange County for me next week, writing well isn’t first on my mind. April and May soccer should be outlawed, book reports should never occur after March and there should never EVER be a dance recital in June.

Of all the 12 months.

It’s all I can do to keep my children fed with something other than leftover Easter candy in the back of the drawer and the dog from escaping every time someone leaves the side gate open (cue running down the middle of the street barefoot).

In times like this, earth-shattering blog posts aren’t going to be written. At least not like I would like them to be.

Maybe it’s all a good lesson for life: That life most of the time doesn’t turn out like we need or want it to. That our perfect vision of how our family or our days will look is just that: a vision. And that God gives us just enough to make it through each day.

In the end, every one of us is just trying to survive well and keep everyone else alive in the process.

So let’s extend grace to the friends that need to peace-out for awhile because their kids are struggling or because they don’t know which end is up with their job. Let’s recognize that it’s okay once in awhile to say buh-bye to blogging/photography/creation/art because the kids need their lunches made and the dog needs to go the vet.

And for me? The ideas will come as my mind settles a little bit as the summer turns over from the spring. I’m not worried. Someone once told me that creativity is a river.  And I believe it.

Parents, we who take our children to church, who pray around the dinner table, who homeschool to provide the best moral and academic education that we can. Don’t be fooled, us who send our children to Christian camp, Christian school, Christian playgroup.

Don’t be fooled, parents like me who pray for our babies and little girls and daughters and women each day, who wear out our knees and our tear ducts in petitions to the Almighty.

Don’t be fooled, those of us who send our sons to mission trips and our daughters to religious colleges. Don’t be taken in, those parents who take our littlest people to service projects on Saturdays and on Sunday afternoons and for weeks in the summer.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is fool-proof.

None of this guarantees anything. We can’t plan their lives. Even if we try.

Talk to any pastor’s kid (me) or mother who has calloused her wringing hands for a child who has walked away and we will tell you that none of this is fool proof.

We know this, don’t we?

But we with little ones hope for the best. {We have to} And we hope that all of this, that we do with them and for them and because of them and despite them, will somehow rub off or rub into their souls. That because of our faith, somehow they will make the right choices.

But we know. Don’t we? We know that each ounce of faith that we have as adults is hard-won. Our faith has come up against the struggles of the world time and again like a wave hitting rocks. Constant. Regardless of the shore. And we are road-weary travelers. Every ounce of this faith is something we’ve battled for.

How do we teach our small people that it is a battle to love Jesus?

And we must also know that our babies, our children, will walk the same journey. That their faith must be chosen every day. If MY faith has to be re-chosen every day, that I must consciously choose Christ each morning, then of course theirs will as well.

None of this, that we do, guarantees a faith-filled child.

So what do we do? We do what parents have always done, but maybe with a little more intentional grace {because we are aware}. We wear out our knees and drag them to serve others because that is what we all are to do regardless of faith or not, and we show them Jesus in our daily lives.

And then carefully, with trembling hearts and shaking hands, we give them back to God. We give their journeys and their questions and their time and their big and small choices back to the one who created them.

And we pray that they choose Jesus every day. Not just once {because anyone can do that} but every day. 

I’ve dropped by to pick something up and she, a mother with one daughter beyond college and one who’s eleven, tells me because she’s been there herself.

“After this they’re women. You know that, right?”

I look over at them: they are already looking like women and acting like them at times too. Eleven is still child, but it is also stretching toward adolescence and adulthood at an alarming rate.

I sigh. A big one. “I know. I mean, I can guess.” I tell her.

The girls run in the yard and around the big tree that shades the front of their house. It’s almost summer and the sun is still high at 5pm.

“And then they’re off.” She’s thinking of her older daughter, I know. “And all we have are the memories of the little girls.”

She smiles. And I’m a little sad as I pack my kids back into the minivan. We have to stop at the market before we go back home so we do.

And maybe this is why I’ll write a little less this summer.

Maybe this is why I’ll hang out on Facebook and Twitter a little less this summer.

Maybe this is why I’ll say “no” to the speaking engagement and the conference this summer.

Because I want to enjoy them. I want to burn these days into my mama-memory. Because she’s right. It all changes {and I’m hoping that in the change and in the journey —- even in the struggle— it will be good} and it is quicker than a blink.

I’ll throw the ball in the yard and cuddle with a pajama-clad seven-year-old on the sofa without my phone. And I’ll jump in the pool even when I don’t want to get my hair wet — because I want to be the mom they remember swimming with and Marco-Polo-ing with rather than the mom tapping away at a keyboard while they frolic.

And hopefully we’ll remember the summer of eleven-and-a-half and seven-and-a-half with fondness.

What’s changing in your life right now? In your family?

For years I squinted at my reflection trying to believe I was beautifully and wonderfully made for the Bible tells me so, and then one day my mother got cancer and I realized, it’s not about how you view yourself. It’s about how you view life.

As women, we suffer from an extreme case of Guilt, and many women believe the guiltier they feel, the better a person they are, but it’s a lie. All it’s doing is preventing us from effectively loving our children. Guilt makes us wallow within, versus allowing us to invest in others.

And sometimes it takes something as hard as cancer to learn what we had in the beginning: An identity defined by something other than the past.

When we believe we are loved, everything around us becomes, as Ann Voskamp says in One Thousand Gifts, grace. A hand-wrapped present from the father of the heavens, and once we start believing this, then, and only then, can we look in the mirror and see someone who deserves that gift.

And it’s in this love that we find our true calling. A calling that rises above weight and numbers and dress sizes. A calling that says we are made in God’s holy image, and what does this mean?

It means, we were created to give God a face.

Maybe this is done in the way you serve a customer at Wendy’s, or through the way you mop floors or fold the laundry, or maybe it’s in the way you splash paint on canvas.

However you do it, you are an extension of God on this earth. You are made to reflect his beauty. I believe that if we were to truly realize the identity we had in Christ, we could move mountains. We could show such extravagant mercy and compassion and gentleness, we would die for one another and to ourselves, while creating masterpieces of music and art and literature because we wouldn’t be.

Instead, he would. God would be, within us.

***

I’m giving away a copy of my new book today, Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy, co-authored by Dr. Dena Cabrera, and foreword by supermodel Emme.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Giving birth produces life in more than one sense. It’s the baby powder, milky-breathed spirit found in the softest limbs you’ve ever felt, and it’s the respect a man feels for his wife as he watches her give up her body for another.

And it’s the deep-rooted soul satisfying feeling of knowing you were born for more than the mirror. That you were born to see the face of God in your child, and to know, you yourself are a miracle.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment in the comment section.