DelightStruck

"For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice." - T.S. Eliot. I've been pondering my word of the year for 2020 with my trusty coffee cup in hand. Contentment keeps rising to the top. Last year was conquer. I recall a previous year being create. I think I might have a thing for words beginning with C. We'll see if the trend continues next year. I always ponder the definition of the word before I settle 100% on it. I mull it around, pray about it and discern if it's where the Holy Spirit leading me. Contentment  -  /kənˈtentmənt/ noun a state of happiness and satisfaction Yes, indeed, contentment is the word for 2020! Looking back, little did I realize what conquer would bring my way in 2019. It was a perfectly placed word for so many reasons. I learned so much about about myself in 2019, and oh did I conquer quite a few things. I conquered turning 40! I was finally honest with myself...

My Dad wasn't the kind of cute Father's Day memes or quaint Norman Rockwell paintings. He wasn't the greatest at all. There were times I hated him and many times I didn't understand him, but sprinkled in all that, there were times he made me smile - truly grin. To those out there with baggage and scars from those growing up years - I see you. I understand you. Days like today can be hard, if you only focus on the hard, the bad, the sad or what you missed. Instead, I have something for you to ponder. Find a happy moment, a single moment that makes you smile so very big and let the rest go. You're only hurting yourself by hanging on to all of the negative so tightly. Focus on a single joy. Mine - hot fudge nutty nutty. In the last few years I've finally come to clearly realize that my Dad wasn’t capable of being the man his wife needed him to be, nor his children. He was broken in so many ways and flawed like ALL of us. He was human. Sometimes I think we ...

So my friend Mary is pretty chill. She's never self-seeking - actually she's pretty selfless. She's kind of quiet and always gives things considerable thought. She's seen amazing things in her life and endured incredible hardships and losses too. She was even a teen mom before MTV made it cool. She's grieved the lost of a child too. Even with those life experiences, she's always cheerful. I don't know how she does it. She's ever the encouraging and the most loving friend too. And get this! She prays for me - like all the time - almost like she has nothing better to do. Plus, she's happy to give a mama a gentle reality check in the most effective ways. So this past Tuesday I was being a total sh**. I was in a complete mood, and I was letting everyday life get to me in the worst way. We've had a lot going on in our life this last year. Possibly I was due for a full ugly meltdown, but it could have been more graceful. This particular day, I kind o...

Oh how I love a good book. I always have. This latest book I read in THREE days. Now that's not too common for me unless it's Debbie Macomber or Nora Roberts novel, which those, I can finish in a weekend just by reading in the evenings. I usually have several books (both fiction and non-fiction) on my nightstand, and I'm somewhere in the middle of each. Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan was one I just couldn't put down! It was on the local library's recommended reads shelf one day and as I passed, I grabbed it. I have a love affair with the saints of the church, so anything that incorporates them intrigues me. The next hint that this book was totally for me - a picture of the Miraculous Medal was on the inside cover. Mary's my girl. Within the first few pages I was hooked. I fell in love with the novel's Irish Catholic sisters, Nora and Theresa. And yes my beloved saints of the church made multiple appearances in such beautiful everyd...

Do you ever feel like there is a monster inside of you? Maybe it's turmoil. Maybe it's a toxic inner voice that won't be quiet. Maybe it's anger. Maybe it's sadness. Maybe it's anxiety. Hey, it's spring, maybe it's the Mucinex mascot in there. Ha! I think each person's monster is different, and sometimes it's a whole troop of them in there. This week I was pondering my monsters. The one that reminds me I lack perfection - that I've messed up and beats me up for every little non-perfect thing. The one that gets easily irritated when overtired, hot, stressed or hangry. The one that can be curt sometimes. The one that overeats to soothe. The one that is conflicted and second guesses. The one that worries too much. I think the monsters that have been bothering me the most of late are the last two. The one that worries too much. The one that feels disheartened. The one that is conflicted. The one that feels confused. Why are you sad, O my...

On this Good Friday I'm talking gratitude, hope and humility. To muddle through is to cope, manage or make do despite lack of expertise. I feel like that right there defines my last year as we've navigated affording insulin and care for our type one diabetic, Coach Man. Given our less than ideal health insurance and the high costs of diabetic care, it's been a lot of muddling through. Doing the best I (we) can. Reading up, educating myself, working our booties off, looking for resources and using my (our) voice. Something interesting occurred to me as we still stand waist deep in the muddling through. Get this... I'm grateful for the journey. Yes, gratitude in the muddling through. Not sure Coach Man would agree with me 100% (well... he is the one that has to stick himself daily with needles), but God's working on him. I can feel it. (To read more about our family's type one diabetic story click here .) I can hear you saying it. Really? How can she be g...

Friends, I'm introducing a little something new to my Faith Friday series. Once a month, I'll be hosting a guest writer to share their faith journey, and let us meet them in the raw of everyday, in the joy, the heartache and the struggles. Today is Elaine Carr. She's a kindred spirit and such a light to so many. She also owns Macaroni Kid Indianapolis-Indy Loop In and Macaroni Kid Hamilton County . Grab a warm cup of coffee or tea, sit a bit and take in all Elaine has to share. She Has A Front Row Seat to All The Joy It was four weeks ago that I crept into my youngest daughter’s bedroom to check on her and kiss her, as she slept. She awoke for a minute and asked where I was going; I responded, “I’m going to Riley for the night with a couple friends from church.” She sat up for a moment and asked, “Oh, is Camrynne going to Heaven now?” I told her that yes, Camrynne will be going to Heaven very soon. A huge smile crept over her first-grade face, her eyes lit up, and she...

Did you know Louisa May Alcott didn't really want to write for girls? She had a lucrative pulp fiction career, when an editor on her publishing team pushed her to dabble. She begrudgingly agreed to write Little Women . She notes that she didn't know what to write, so she wrote about her sisters and herself. Meg is actually her sister Anna, Beth is her sister Lizzie, and Amy is based on her sister May. Louisa May based Jo on herself. Aren't you glad she dabbled? I fell in love with all the delightstruck of the March sisters and the tale of Little Women long ago. My mother loved it and introduced the beautiful piece of literature to my sisters and me. She read to us until we could read to ourselves. I could read it over and over again and never bore of its contents. I love the various movie adaptations just as much. Sometimes I think when we write what we know and let bits and pieces of the real authentic us shine through, it can't help but resonate with people. Of...

I've long loved the quiet pondering that the season of Lent encourages. As a child the giving something up was difficult, but there was a lesson in it. I loved putting my little girl change into the rice bowl cardboard box and turning it, heavy and full, in at the end of Lent. My love of Lent has grown to something of beauty in my adulthood, and with that in mind, here's three things I think every mama needs this Lent. Blessed Is She Food for thought. I love the daily devotionals that are tied to scripture readings. They're written by women just like you and me. Women who are willing to be real and raw. Best of all, they just arrive in your inbox daily. A quick read, or dive in more on the website with a click of a button. Quiet, Prayer and a Journal There is beauty in quiet and listening more than you talk. This Lent listen to the world around you - the birds chirping, the laughter of kids getting off the school bus, the chime of church bells, mowers starting...

It never goes away entirely. Sometimes waves of grief slowly lap at the shoreline, and sometimes they seem to overtake you like a storm is a-brewin' at sea. This February has been one of those months for me. The waves are mammoth and angry. I've been in a bit of a funk and melancholy. Coach Man and I had a fight about... get this - my birthday. Of all things. Who fights about that? It's a bit of a milestone birthday this year, and I'm not in the mood to party. Not because I'm in denial of the number of years, but because I so miss my mama, and I'd prefer for this February to pass by quietly. It's so not fair that she's not here for this specific year, and for all the other milestones that come and go. She left us in 2013. Six years this month. Grief ebbs and flows, but it never leaves. And you never quite know what will trigger it. I will forever miss her. Yes, I smile at the legacy of love she's left behind, I weave pieces of her into my li...

Do you ever step back to think about the facade that you present to the world? How the outward layer of yourself day in and day out comes off to others. Are you an open book or more of a carefully crafted masquerade? This world we live in is very good at nurturing facades. The facade of wealth. The facade of power. The facade of success. The facade of perfection. The facade of happiness. The facade of a heroism. The facade of a flawless marriage and perfect kids. And oh so many more facades. It's easy to put on these various pretenses, but when the facade cracks and the real oozes out, what then? A facade built of smoke and mirrors is exhausting to keep up and will eventually crack. Do you frantically spackle like Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her or finally let your stuffing hang out like The Velveteen Rabbit ? Why are so many of us so afraid of taking off the masks? Of living in the real? Why do we want to hide our true self? I think the easy answer is ...

Yep, I've been called Pollyanna a time or two. I do tend to be cheerful and optimistic most of the time. It's just me, always has been. My sister teases me calling me ever the cheerleader, full of sunshine. Now don't get me wrong. I am human and do have bad days (okay sometimes weeks) from time to time. I'm just as imperfect as the next person. Plus I'm not naive - I know there is evil in this world. I just choose to lean into love, look for the good and... try to be the good. This past Sunday one of the readings was from Corinthians 13. I adore Corinthians 12 - 13. It talks of the gifts of the spirit and then dives into love and what it is and isn't. My favorite part is 13:4-7. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated. It does not dishonor others, it does not seek its own interests, it is not easily angered, it does not rejoice over wrongdoings, but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always tr...

Things just got real, peeps. Okay they've been real for quite some time, but dang, they just got really real. I was trying to be adult-like and make sure we had the proper level of life insurance for our family, as the big 40 rolls in this month. Guess what? I got rejected - yep, rejected due to my weight/build. No talking to my doctor, no taking my stats and testing my blood and pee. They decided purely on weight and build. Hmmm... okay God, it was amusing last week when you gave me fresh content for my planned Faith Friday series on hard things , but this week I was pretty sure I had the cycle of defeat topic covered. Guess not. So I'm short. I'm not petite and dainty. I'm short and a plus mama. I can remember being an average weight in my youth years, but that pretty much ended when I hit adolescence. Past 12, it was ALWAYS a struggle. Looking back, it was probably tied to the imbalanced hormones and insulin resistance of PCOS, plus the intense cravings for carb...

Long ago I used to tip toe around the hard things in fear, collapse in a puddle of tears or hide in the comfort of my bed. I am the baby of nine children. Growing up the spoiled brat I was often was, I hated the hard things. I wanted them to disappear and someone else take care of them for me. I let the hard things take me under every single time. Somewhere over the years I figured out that it didn't have to be that way and EVERYONE has hard things. Go figure? So this past Wednesday was a day full of hard things. I must have needed some fresh, hot off the press, content for this blog, eh? I woke up with a migraine and was scheduled to be a panelist at a mentoring SCORE workshop on marketing. I coffee-ed up (which is a way better saying than cowboy up, by the way peeps), found the Excedrin extra strength and off I went into the crazy January rain. As I drove to the workshop my passenger side windshield wiper flew off. Good grief - at least not my driver side one. Made it through t...

Last year a good friend gave me a devotional called Embraced by Lysa TerKeurst. I picked it up a few times in 2018, but I've really been diving into it this year with purpose. My favorite thing is to bring it along with me to the chapel at church and ponder in the quiet with Jesus. This past week I dove into a section that touched on the rhythm of rush and how we lose sight of the best version of ourselves when we get sucked into the busy busy rush of life. Yep. We have to slow the rhythm of rush in our lives so the best of who we are can emerge.   - Lysa TerKeurst So where does all the rush come from? Mine comes from running my own freelance business, weekly client meetings, kids to run to school, sports and other activities, a husband who coaches in addition to his day job, groups at church, keeping our house running smoothly, keeping up with friends and family and somewhere in all of that finding time for self-care and a prayer life. What is at the center of your b...

As a writer, I adore words. I always have, even as a little girl. They're like old friends to me. My 2019 word of the year is conquer, along with two supporting words - contemplate and celebrate. The three together may seem random and odd, but to me they all go hand in hand with the growth I have in mind for this year. 2018 was a year full of hard things. No worse than any other people's hard things, but still hard things. We moved, a new job for Coach Man, new schools for the hooligans, navigating a new high deductible insurance plan that does not cover insulin for the type 1 diabetic in the family (#insulin4all - but we'll chat that in another blog, because oh do I have some things to say), a health discovery for one of the kiddos and a major medical issue for Coach Man right before Christmas. It was definitely a year that kept us on our toes, but also a year filled with joy as we tackled the hurdles head on and with purpose. Well, we are a football family, so tack...