Your broken pieces.

Your awkward parts.

Your jagged, learned-it-the-hard-way edges.

Those pieces of yourself that you offer us, that you melt down into words and shape into stained glass truth for us to hold up to the light of our computer screens, fill us with wonder.

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There is nothing mundane in the magenta shades of your life.

In the cathedral of womanhood, marriage, and motherhood when I am kneeled over in despair at my small life, at my many failings, at my worry I look up and see your truth shining golden, pink, blue and orange streaming in through the windows above me. The colors of your life warm me. They illuminate this space. They remind me that we do not journey alone.

Did you know? Did you know that in the quiet dark we applaud your life and the Artist that lights it in all its broken beauty?

Do not doubt that what you share transcends how long it takes you to actually type it out.

Your story takes on a life of its own as soon as I read it.

Your story speaks into my story.

Your story helps me decipher my own.

Keeping spilling your light in this place, my sister. Keep piecing together the broken parts of your journey for Him to light and me to marvel at.

You are the most beautiful in all your broken glory.

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That’s why we spend Friday’s writing. One prompt, just 5 minutes, a community of nearly 300 writers. All the details for how to join are over here.

And today the writing prompt is PAINT.

Go

She always starts with just one paint brush. She doesn’t end there. I can tell it pains her to have to limit herself. But she does, out of respect for me. She knows I’m not going to be a fan of the mess. But she pulls me in – her gravity irresistible. How she needs to feel the colors. The purple under her nails. How she needs two full palms of pink before she lets go the little sigh that’s been bottled up inside her.

She’s all magenta and I’m all caught in the storm of creativity that isn’t interested in printed pictures of Dora but wants instead to go where there are no lines. Both hands, sometimes up to her elbows.

She paints. And I watch her. It’s getting all over the table and there’s nothing I can do about it. Well, there probably is but I’m past caring. I’m just watching her watch the red mix with the white and seeing it change color and kaleidiscope into something new, fresh, hers. There are her fingerprints across the bench and a trail of color down the one side of her sweatpants and her left cheek where she keeps brushing back her hair.

Art isn’t messy, it’s necessity.

A three-year-old reminds me. Paint brushes long forgotten she’s lovingly leaning into the paper now and her whole body has become the brush and she paints from the inside out. All this wonder and joy spilling out onto the construction paper that used to be boring. Nothing wasted. Nothing left out or left over she spills every last drop and lovingly traces it into circles and spirals and tells me this is her heart and that there is my face and we’re all abloom with spring.

Right there at the fifteen year old dining room table mess. All this ordinary glory.

Stop.

PS: So many of you have ordered this book that Amazon can’t keep up. They’re flat sold out and busy restocking. But you can still find my own broken and tenderly pieced back together story over here at Barnes & Noble or even better at Givington’s over here who will make a donation with every sale to the Maubane Community Center that moms from all over the world are building together for 250 orphans in South Africa!

And guess what? The audio book that I recorded myself with my own confused South African accent is now available on Audible over here and iTunes over here! You can get a sneak peek at how the first chapter sounds by clicking over here.

Finally, next week I can’t wait to share a surprise we’ve been cooking up for surprising some of the mothers in your life in time for Mother’s Day. #SecretsAreHardToKeep #SurprisedByMotherhood #Squuueeeeeee!