Welcome to Litsy!

Following the shepherd.

There is so much falling right now, and so much more rising. But here‘s the good news: it gets easier the more we do it. Our brain requires itself to problem solve, and it doesn‘t just change us; it changes us so that we can be part of changing the world around us.

While I don‘t believe everything happens for a reason, I do believe that everything comes with an invitation. When we learn to rise, we get to show others how to rise, too.

A vibe for what 2024 was like on the last day of the year.

All of life is in the interim, and if we‘re honest and tender with ourselves, if the armor is off and the castle has crumpled, we feel the ache of the meantime. Our permanent records are a mess of marks and offenses, and we are laid bare to the ache of what‘s coming.

When it comes right down to it, of course, it‘s always been in the interim. We‘ve always been in the middle space, the yearning and the groaning.

It seeps in like smoke or vapor even when we‘ve barred the door against any last minute changes, and it moves us to different countries and different emotional territories and different ways of living. Life with God is a daring dream, full of flashes and last minute exits and generally all the things we‘ve said we‘ll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope.

Everything is interim. Everything is a path or preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is. Life is like that, of course, twisty and surprising. But life with God is like that exponentially. We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we‘re not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard.

We won‘t arrive. But we can become. And that‘s the most hopeful thing I can think of.

Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It‘s about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that His spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn‘t have predicted.

We tell Gods story as we live and discover our own. We know that God is a storyteller. And I don‘t know if there‘s anything better in the world than when we lay ourselves wide open and let His story become our story, when we screw up our fist and our courage and start to tell the truest, best stories we know, which are always God‘s stories.

Every life tells a story, through words and actions and choices, through our homes and our children, through our clothes and dishes and perfume. We each play a character in a grand drama, and every stage direction matters. We tell our stories, and we let God‘s story be told through our stories, we hide and we seek, and we lose ourselves in the best possible way, and find things around us and inside ourselves that we never expected.

The riskiest things always yield the best, most beautiful things.

What gives me hope is the belief that God will be faithful, because he has been faithful before, to me and the people around me. I need the reminders. Just because I have forgotten how to see doesn‘t mean it isn‘t there. His goodness is there. His promises have been kept. All I need to do is see.

Because once you start seeing the faithfulness and the hope, you see it everywhere, like pennies. And little by little, here and there, you realize that all of life is littered with bright copper coins, that all of life is woven with bits and stories of God‘s goodness.

Each one of our lives is shot through, threaded in and out with God‘s provision, his grace, his protection, but on the average day, we notice it about as much as we really notice gravity.

When you travel, and when you read, you are not actually alone, but rather surrounded by other worlds entirely, the footsteps and phrases of whole other lives keeping you company as you go.

Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then it‘s something else, but if it‘s really love, really friendship, it‘s a little scary around the edges.

We have to give something up in order to get friendship like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they‘ll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us.

True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourselves.

Here‘s something I‘ve learned the hard way: what we do everyday matters far more than what we do once in a while. The daily routines and rhythms that we build to scaffold our days do more to shape who we become than the grand gestures of once-in-a-while ever could.
Especially when we‘re in the middle of transformation of any kind, it‘s the things we do every day that build a meaningful support along the way.

We‘re nearly at the end of the year and I‘m just diving into my first book….

And while I would and sort of do feel shame over that, it‘s appropriate that the book came from Shauna.
Her words have always been deeply meaningful to me & met me right where I‘m at when I needed them.

I‘m expecting that this little book of bite sized thoughts will be no different & leave their mark just as Shauna‘s other books have done for me at the perfect time.