Category: Family

Lifting Up Family

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ Leave a comment


Lord give me eyes to spot the unique in each one

the what makes them yours

the masterpieces that they are
the original design  marked on each by your hands
the shades of beauty in each life
the breaks and tears needing healing and hope
Lord, and ears to hear
the unspoken cries of their hearts
the quiet need unsaid
the burden kept wrapped in pain
the joy longing to be shared
the small wonderings of the heart crippled by fear
the musings of their minds
the poetic in their voices
the music in their laughter
cherishing, honoring, loving, and nurturing
family
knowing you love them
trusting you with them
thanking you for them
this precious family

When You Simply Can’t Believe What You Just Heard— That Was Then And This is Now

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 5 Comments

Its in moments like these that Momma writers write.  That choke with emotion and rip and tear at the heart with a splendid mix of joy and well, joy.

Because we were just here.  This place of lap sitters and all three fit and we could cozy all up in one green rocker.  This is where we were. We lived in this place for a season.  Of small and growing.  This world of teddies and double strollers, cheerioed floors.

This place of babble and missing teeth and a cookie in the hand solved all the worlds problems, if just for a minute. Of primitive glorious childrens art taped to frig, framed and hung, propped and celebrated.

And now we are someplace else.  We’ve done life for such a long time now, as family.  Our launching pad into life is sending out and its painful joy.  Today we are two colleges a day in the mailbox people.  One for her and one for him.  Or it seems that way and that’s what matters.

And today she is leaving home to drive to a big city and I’m breathless with anxiety about the leaving home at all.  A new zipcode is a new zipcode.  There are bridges to drive over.  The ones she did a school project on in sixth grade.  Now hurrying out the door bag in hand to go over the bridge to a far away land.  The city where I met her father– the Patient One.  Its too fast.  And its too soon.

But punctuating this moment, this blur of time in a tidal wave of what happened to the green rocking chair lap moments, middle son calls out to her, wait.

Door cracked, sunny day cool air rushing in, words between these two, twelve months apart come sweetly up the stairs and waft into my need.

He slows her down.  He hugs her tender and big brother gentle covers her small frame and my bulging heart.  ” Remember, God then Family.”  And I ask him why he said it.  His reply, “Because momma that’s what you always say to us.”

Time, you are a funny thing.  You race.  You slow.  You creep.  You blur fact.  You deliver good.

So recently a friend shared this parental covering and I had recently, so recently covered mine with this.  This admonition to remember whose they are in all they say and do.  And he picked up the parental mantle and chose to wear it at that moment.

Some how I now know that words are heard, words are penetrating, words matter a lot.

These two walk tandem through my world now and sixteen and seventeen cross-over prom and friends and college queries.

She’s off to a city with an international airport just for the night.  Just to explore and experience life, as she should.  My pain and my grieving fade in the background as I shout to her, I am so worried and I don’t like this at all.

I have barely recovered from my momma trauma when he announces he’s headed off to the river with a friend.  These tandem teenage moments  knock me like a second wave knocks down swimmers in the surf as they barely recover from one crushing blow. Doomed by fatigue from wrestling  the undertow and incoming waves.  Their combined force is power and it is might. Staggering to get up and recover, only to be sent face down into the grit of sand and sea. Spinning wildly under the cruel crush of water and wave. Pairs of life moments.  Waves of emotion.

And hours earlier its prom fittings and giggles on the coach.  My lap empty.  But my heart full. Plans for tuxedo fittings and color matching kick youth out of the way.  The now is a bully and she is here.  She kicks baby toy memories out of her way.

Phone calls to set up college visits hang in the air as that refrigerator door taunts my past.  They were just piled up on that Easter day with diapers and missing teeth and white knuckling graham crackers. Time teases.  Memory sweeps in with her blurring of years.  Baby ducklings, swingsets and trampolines take their place in another time and place.  College applications, SATS and campus tours push and shove their way.  Childish toys are retired.  Summer jobs elbow their way to the frontline of life.  And prom.  Two proms.

Long gowns replace smocked dresses. And its all as it should be. My heart will catch up one day to this day.

But for now I know that words were heard.  Words of love, of discipline, of teaching and encouragement.  Cautionary tales were told and penetrated the heart and the head. Words that strengthened and supported and walked us to this point. Words that undergirded and called out to build character and trust and faith. Words that told of Jesus.

All because middle child said, wait, then hugged , then said, don’t forget “God, then Family.” In love, with love, because he was loved.

Small Important Things

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ Leave a comment

 1 Peter 3:8-12- Summing up: Be agreeable, be sympathetic, be loving, be compassionate, be humble.  That goes for all of you, no exceptions  No retaliation.  No sharp-tongued sarcasm.  Instead, bless- that’s your job, to bless.  You’ll be a blessing and also get a blessing.  Whoever wants to embrace life and see the day fill up with good, Here’s what you do:  Say nothing evil or hurtful;  Snub evil and cultivate good; run after peace for all you’re worth.

Feet, bare.  Feet, tender hit sand then shell, beach walking on this glorious day. This Easter Monday day all wrapped in bluesky canopy. Canyons of solitude soak in the soul.  Calm pierces gentle this time of solace and quiet therapy.

Registering the hot, the hard, the sharp, the rough.  Tender feet.  TENDER.  And my thoughts do a mind drift, off untethered on a mile long stretch of beach.  Drift over sand dune, dip and dive over windswept island, small with welcome written all over her.  Alone in this beauty.  Alone as I catch up to myself , and with myself.

And I step on a small beach twig.  There among the sharpest of broken shell shards lie twigs that break my stride with pain.

And I wonder how so often the smallest and most unexpected things that come my way bear the biggest pain.

How a word or phrase or look can rob joy and break beautiful in half.  Shatter the happy into broken. Stain the laughter with tears.  How does the sensitivity to all make sensitivity itself a vehicle for pain.

In the tender places of the heart, is tough the opposite of tender.

Does ignore shield the soft places of the insides from hurt.

Will vulnerable always catch the unintended slight, not sent out by design to harm or wound.

I walk.  I ponder.  I wrestle.

Shrimpers nets  drag the water for the one intended goal of copious amounts of glorious shrimp,  but the unintended fills the nets as well.  The unintended get caught in the nets and mingle with the bounty.  Litter the boat deck ,waiting to be returned to the sea as waste and refuse.  Weighing down the fragile netting are unwanted sea treasures.  The nets become receptacles of all.  Pick through save.  Pick through discard. The trash takes up room intended for treasure.

David writes in Psalm 139, “God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.  I’m an open book to you; even from a distance you know what I’m thinking.  You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight.   You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too- your reassuring presence, coming and going.  This is too much, too wonderful– I can’t take it all in!”

And David continues in Psalm 139, “Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb.  I thank you, High-God you’re breathtaking!  Body and soul, I am marvelously made!  I worship in adoration–what a creation!”

“Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you.   The days of of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.”

The nets take it all in and release that which has no value, which will burden the nets with added weight.  The weight  which rips and tears at the fabric, requiring stitching sewing and repairing before being let out again.

Repairing the damage.  Stitching the holes, the holes in the receiver  of all in a sea of life. The Blessings and that which needs throwing back.  That which requires casting aside and over and away.

And I know that one small word can bring blessing and encouragement. One small phrase can build up, restore hope, lead to healing.

And one word can cut and bruise and sting.

How I have wounded and stung with a glance my eyes.  How quickly words have shot out without carrying gentle and kind and tender with them.

I wince at the moments of calluous and misspoken moments.  Where opportunity to bless and encourage were missed.

Where I was the twig.  Where I did not run after peace.  Where I was the broken shard of shell hurting the heel of a brother or sister in Christ,  or child, or husband, or stranger or friend.

I have been the stinging word deliverer.  I have been the messenger of hurt.  I have delivered words that lead to tears.

The tender and sensitive that God wove in me have slept and remained idle while I placed hurt at the threshold of another life.  Intended , unintended delivered nonetheless.  My small has been their large.  My flippant has been their signficant.

New mercy mornings bring His Grace, His Mercy, His Love and new found energy to run after peace.

And the nets go out.  The words go out.  The hearts go out.

Return with abundance by His hand. Fill and heal. Tender mercies new each day. Give Grace and tenderness to gently deliver to all we  touch in our always wonderful sometimes messy often tender-hearted lives.

Running hard after the Peace.

Let’s Go Out To The Porch

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 2 Comments

We disuss this piled in family time.  Time with families.

We plan, we mothers directors of the play, contemplating our moves of time, like pieces of chess.

And we lift up this pilgrimmage to the porch where memories of babies and children and heart talks seep into the boards like the battleship gray stain.

Life is marked here.  This porch.  This memory repository for us.

Why do we long to go there.  What is this siren’s song calling us to come.  The breeze off the waterway calms and soothes and rustles up the past.  It stirs the heart to release here in this place.  Dump burden, dump worry here.  Its a sanctuary for pain.

Is it the sleeping porch knows how to rest the mind and the spirt.  Bibles stack here and start days here.

The palms billow like sails and whisper their rustling sound to the burdened soul, the tired soul.

She has seen weddings and witnessed crashing in of conversation.  This porch, like the matriarch tested through trials and tears.  She has wiped them, caught them.

We know to carve out time here, we momma planners.  We memory holders and keepers can tell stories of belly laughs, wicker rockers crazy rocking and generations piled up on laps while the world stopped here.  Stopped for us.  To catch up with ourselves.  To catch up with each other.  To fill the storehouses of life with story.

And we know that the giver of all good things, Father God, has more for us.  He always does.  So we carve out time and make time.  To start scavenger hunts here, to dye Easter Eggs with grown and semi-grown children.

Time to generation huddle.  To brush off the day in story.  The fish caught, the shells found, the sun burn worn like battle wounds of days battling the surf, the sea, the salt. The dinner bell rings and we feast on food and more.  We feast on life.

And we know as mommas that stories linger and die to be told.  The ones of love and life.  Dragonflies frenzied pace win the title of fastest moving creature as we linger.  And stars may fall or stars may stay pinned to the sky.  Either way we witness.

We pick story out of black dark night and early morning still.  We rockers and readers and dwellers in His word.

We launch boats into the sea with children here.  We welcome home the ones caught in the storms that blew in, from the sea, from this life.  We embrace them on the return.

The porch calls us to come here.

She calls to the weary to rest.

The joyful to celebrate.

The Glad of Heart to testify.

The discouraged to find encouragement,

The sea-seeker to delight in the salt of life.

We long for this respite place.  This stage set for living.  This place where laps are filled with friends or children, doubled up and rocking.

Where laps hold babies and bearded off-spring of the womb too.  The never too olds to call for mommas.

The laps hold promise and encouragement.  They hold tender touch of word and hand.

This porch for us says come to me.  And talk of Him.  And all He’s done.  And all He’ll do.

And bring your baskets, your eggs, your treasures.  But prepare your hearts for the more than they could ever hold.

Let’s go out to the porch this day.