MomminginMinistry

I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering about the word "holy". What it means to live fully into what we were created for. I honestly don't know how to explain or debate Genesis with you. You might be surprised how many different things can be said about the details of creation even within one denomination. And I'm just not wired to obsess over carbon dating and dinosaur bones. But I do think an awful lot about relationships. And what does the phrase "restoration of creation" really look like? If you are like me and your earliest memories smell like crayons and feel like warm ditto copies straight out of a spiral duplicator of happy giraffes and lions and a sinister snake dangling from the branch of an apple tree, then you probably know all about the creation account. If not, it's found in  Genesis 1 and 2. Sometimes when I read it I'm transported back to those classrooms with the shag carpet in my childhood church and I'm ag...

Moses has food allergies. And not just a few. To date, peanut, tree nut, wheat, dairy, soy, egg, peas, kiwi, seeds, strawberry and mango. He's also tested allergic over the years to some other things. Like coconut. Coconut is the building block of Mo's diet. It's the milk on his cereal, the yogurt in his lunchbox, the ice cream we scoop into his root beer float. And when your weight is still falling below the bottom line of the growth curve at 8 years old, coconut matters. If you want to read more about what happened to coconut, you can read more about it in the post  https://momminginministry.blogspot.com/2018/09/momming-moses.html But, let me just say, the brand of coconut ice cream we buy did some serious messing with our heads when they added pea protein to their recipe. Because, who looks for peas in their ice cream label, right?! Since he DOES test allergic to coconuts, despite eating them often, we decided we still needed to test them before he continued eating t...

Last weekend we ran away to Dewey, Arizona with our family. Getting away wasn't easy. The laundry, the lists, the packing, the laundry, the meal planning. The laundry. And covering Sunday when you're a children's director? Oh, the penciling and erasing and messaging and praying. That not a single volunteer would be up in the middle of the night with a feverish child. And did I mention the laundry? But it was so worth it. The t.v. wasn't working, which was fabulous. We played duplo blocks and fed baby dolls with two gentle hearted boys and three of the sweetest girls imaginable. We ate rustic biscuits with homemade sausage gravy and watched rainbows and sunsets. The kids collected grasshoppers and stomped through mud puddles. And we sat with mom and dad Williams and Doug and Erin and realized that the hundreds of hours spent walking the floor with screaming babies, reading Blue Hat, Green Hat 563 times, driving to church even when we couldn't find matching soc...

Disclaimer.  I've been kind of grumpy lately. Starting something new takes a lot of mental energy and I just haven't got much nerve left. And life is hard! It's hard  trying to figure out where to find the 15-20 hours required for a college course when my life already felt cramped. It's hard  to fill and refill fourteen different kid min volunteer roles each Sunday in a small church.  And still do it well.  Can I say that? It's hard  to care deeply about ten minute reenactment of a scene from A VIDEO GAME my kids played. On days when I feel like the bumps in my brain where I store my higher thinking have been melted flat with a hot iron, it's hard  to use the good-solid parenting skills I've been trained in and KNOW, instead of reacting out of exhaustion, anger and embarrassment. It's hard to turn to my prayer journal instead of my smart phone. It's hard  to bite back hurtful words. It's hard to be a moderate during an election seas...