What a week.
What a collection of posts – nearly 200 hundred delicious confections.
What a feast.
Thank you for sharing. Thank you for reading. Thank you for encouraging so many. For my part, I’m so grateful to each one of you for being part of this space, this community, these voices.
We swap stories here. We read life together.
That is a wonder that what I write way past my bedtime is what you often read way past yours. And that in the middle we find encouragement and comfort. That we are connected by this wild and wonderful lifeline of words.
I will keep writing them next year. Maybe slower sometimes – stopping to read more books than I write words on a screen. I want to get better at listening before I write. But I will keep coming back here after I’ve tucked Micah in for the umpteenth time and patted Jackson’s head again, and given Zoe that pacifier that I both loathe and love.
I will write because words are how I make sense of my world.
Thank you for sitting beside me as I read my life out loud.
You are the lovely stuff. And sweet Katy, I’m so delighted to tell you that you won the God’s Heart for You necklace – I’ve emailed with the details.
OK, on to the last Five Minute Friday of 2011. Who knew it would last this long, since I threw it out there in January? Amazing, you all are!
Won’t you join me?
1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. Most important: visit, comment, encourage the person before you.
OK, are you ready? Give me your best five minutes on:
Open…
GO
I lie face down here in the entry way to the new year.
I lie face down and breathe in this old spaghetti stained carpet and the hopes and dreams and forts and battles of boys. Midnight and everyone in bed and me having finished off the last of the fudge and a book that is helping make me brave. So I get up and spread out on the floor and open my heart and hopes and wild wishes and big, big dreams to you Father.
I pray them out loud. As loud as one can mumble into a carpet. I build this ebenezer with words so that come April I will remember. I will remember that I asked and no matter the outcome I will know you have answered.
Walk me into the new year.
Walk me into your will and your creativity and your courage.
Walk me out of time and into a sense of your bigness, your other-ness, your alternate endings within endings that make everything but a beginning.
Open my mind bigger – show me how you parenthetical my everything with your everything and how you still rejoice over me with singing while I sleep. Open these four walls and these boys and this daughter and our wedding rings to your imagination.
May we dream new dreams.
May we ask and not be surprised when we receive.
May we dance with abandon before you and be willing to become much more foolish than we’re comfortable with.
STOP
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I love this post. I love the photo of your sweet, sweet girl (she’s getting SO big!). I love your commitment to being open to all that the Father will usher in to your life this year and I love the way you encourage us in our own words. I am so thankful for you, your blog, and Five Minute Friday.
Thank you for sharing your family, your home and your life with us! Many blessings to you this next year and make sure you share your “Must Reads” with us.
Robin
This is my favorite new years’ post yet! As always, you’re real, authentic, loving, honest, and embracing. I will be re-reading this many times over as my own prayer for the new year.
Looks like Zoe has got her some sweet kissable cheeks. Lovely post from her lovely mama. Grateful that you share your stories…they help me walk through my own.
I am working on similar goals, prayers and habits to bring me closer to my Father. And I love this post, especially your last line, “May we dance with abandon before you and be willing to become much more foolish than we’re comfortable with.” – May we be so completely submerged in a life-changing relationship with Jesus!
Hello! This is my first linking up with 5 minutes, and what fun it was! Hope you get to stop by for a visit as you can. …. what a beautiful thing to have spaghetti stained carpet, and YES to be willing to become much more foolish than we’re comfortable with- makes life much more enjoyable. Thanks & Blessings :)
Lisa-Jo, I think you are a great mentor to all of us. For a tireless generous spirit that wants to follow Jesus more than anything else. I know being a parent of young children is challenging, yet you find enough overflow to give to us consistently. Thank you and blessings for a healthy and prosperous new year!
“may we ask and not be surprised when we receive…”
i love those words and have prayed them many times – just now have spent some time meditating on that prayer, talking to God about it and i think there’s two perspectives:
1) this human one, where we want to be so trustingly confident in God’s ability to give and care for us, we don’t want it to take us by surprise, and
2) the heavenly parent perspective, who loves to surpass the wildest imaginations and dreams of those ones He treasures.
thinking on those two thoughts has thrown wide open my perspective as we walk into what is sure to be a challenging, but God-filled new year!
enjoy these five minute fridays. thank you, lisa-jo. hoping with expectation that you receive God’s richest blessings and that courage to dance with abandon before your Lord!
I absolutely love this.
“show me how you parenthetical my everything with your everything ”
Words. Love it. Looking forward to joining you for 5 minute Fridays.
Hi, I goofed a bit on this and did the linky link as I thought we were supposed to write on your page. So you are linked to my blog (which is not officially started!) without a 5 minute post. Sorry. I couldn’t figure out how to delete my link. :-)
Happy New Year Lisa-Jo! I didn’t get a chance to post but “OPEN” is the word that God has been impressing on me so I was so happy when I saw your prompt…I want to be open like Mary, as I read and prayed over her story and Jesus’ birth this past month. Thanks for sharing what God is doing in your life :) Blessings full of HIS love on you and yours this year.