Just Write {100}

This is (WOW) the 100th installment of Just Write. Please join me in free-writing your (extra)ordinary stories, your memories, your moments. I would love it if you would….

Here’s to 100. *clink clink*

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These were the best fajitas I’ve had in…well, maybe ever. The kids jumped in the trampoline outside, yelling and screaming and bumping into each other on purpose and sweating a lot. Ryan stayed home with an under the weather Elsie who needed bed. Miles rode his scooter, ahead of us and Asher walked with me, behind. He held my hand. He still loves to hold my hand. More and more I want to hold these days and these moments in my hand and keep them for as long as possible because they feel more and more slippery. And then there are other times, in these young years when the whining and waking up over and over and the diapers and all the constant needs make me want the time to keep slipping quickly. I have so much to say about this lately…probably because I’m reading “the gift of an ordinary day”.

We walked around the block, to almost right behind our house, to our neighbor’s home, the ones who made the fantastic fajitas. The kids play so well together and the grown-ups talked long about life and faith, God and religion, parenting and people.

It was good.

It was church with no bells or whistles. Church with thinking out loud and Do you read Manning? How about Yancey? Let’s wonder together how our faith has been molded and what is your coming of age story? Here we are, all right around 40 and what do WE really think for ourselves, believe soul deep? Why? What is freedom and not oppression? What is joy and not saying I’m fine with a smile just to lie because it’s faster?

What do I want? Where do I need to be? Do I really know what love is?

No really. Not like the song, I wanna know what love is….I want you to show me….

(Though that’s a perfectly acceptable place for our minds to go because children of the 80’s…WAVE THOSE LIGHTERS.)

But love….I can say I am in it or that I feel it and know that It is mine and that I belong in it. And then I can feel so unsure of who is right about what and if there is some sort of invisible line one can cross that keeps us from it. Nope, not that. That’s too far. You’ve gone too far.

We just keep talking about this, all evening. It’s another thing I could write a lot about. I think about it a lot. Faith. It’s so simple and so not simple.

Then it is Sunday morning and our other friends come through our door and sit with us, with coffee and eggs and pancakes and we laugh really hard about the ridiculous things that happen to we human folk. We give each other a hard time, lightly. We catch up and our kids get loud together and it’s over coffee and who will get the last piece of bacon after it sits there allowing us to be polite over it.

It has been so dry and we’ve been watching the way the grass is drying up and turning brown. It crunches hard under our feet. We have to keep walking. The rest of the day was filled with more friends and getting together, the busiest weekend we’ve had in a long time. I walked through the grass to the van three or four times.

Then it was Monday and the world slowed down and I kept thinking about the few days before and how full of lovely people they were. I’m grateful that when I think of God I think of being open. I think of really being with people and sticking with them even when they are totally not okay and neither are their choices or the outcomes. Isn’t that what I want in return? To not have it enter my mind that people might leave if I screw up big time? There are just times that are so dry and sometimes we’re living in the light, out in the open, being open. And sometimes we’re not, we’re just not for a thousand reasons or no reason at all. Shadows have come up and over and all around and they don’t seem to allow any rain and then the return of light.

Sometimes we just need to stick around and wait with each other. Change always comes, most often for the best, if we just wait together.

Last night I went to get my forgotten glasses from the minivan. I opened the front door and heard it and smelled it, out there in the dark before I could see it or feel it. The rain. I stood on the porch and held my arms up in it and said, Finally! Oh good! Keep it comin’…

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This is the 100th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to posts, lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in yours so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!