When New Year Comes Anyway

January 1, 2014September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

I really didn’t mean to walk away. My post list is full of unfinished drafts and my journal scratched with ideas for posts that would have been witty or simple or just words used to fill a space that I thought needed me.

But sometimes that everyday living needs us more. After I wrapped production on A Christmas Carol December 15, I needed a few days to decompress. I treated myself to library books and rest times while Amelia bounced on the bed beside me and watched My Little Pony. I made an attempt to catch up on the laundry and I pinned dozens of projects I know I’m not likely to ever do.

I savored a few days of just being a mom, just being a wife, and not allowing myself to succumb to all the invisible pressures I felt whenever I looked online.

But the more days that slipped by, the more I didn’t know how to come back. Did anyone really want an update of how we’d spent our holiday with the Lysol can in one hand and the unfinished shopping list in the other? Besides, I might write a post people tell me they enjoy but I’m not getting shares or likes or ratings worthy of a Google AdSense payout, so is it really worth my time right now?

I found myself sinking under the weight of have-to the longer I lingered offline. I have to blog about the play. I have to blog about Madelynne’s field trip. I have to blog about getting ready for Christmas and I have to talk about the comedy of errors that was our attempt at a gathering with my extended family.

Then that day was past and suddenly the New Year was steamrolling toward me and I need to write about my one word. I need to choose a word. I need to recap the year. I need to….

I need to be exactly where I am. This first morning of this shiny New Year I am sitting vigil in a hospice facility by the bedside of my 85 year old grandfather. The timeline keeps changing. What we thought would be only hours have stretched to days and the descent toward comes rapidly slow.

So I am here. Trading shifts with my sisters and holding his hand and my grandmothers. Helping choose dresses and suits. Looking over obituary paperwork and watching the weather because half the family is northeast and the storm is coming.

But so is the light. No doubt it will be brighter than any New Year’s Eve fireworks display or Christmas tree or effect I saw on the stage. No doubt it will be worth waiting for.

So I am not going to drown myself in a non-existent list of have-to. I am simply going to begin again. May your New Year be blessed with the sacred moments of love and may you find your faith in promises that are stronger than any mankind could ever make.

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. 4 And you know the way to where I am going.” (John 14:1-4, ESV)

Christmas Carol: Sneak Peek

December 5, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

And that’s as far as I got taking pictures the other night before the director in me took over and tried to scribble notes faster than ghosts fly on Christmas Eve.

But this is how I’ve been embracing my creative these past few weeks. Instead of writing my own life, I’ve been endeavoring to bring fiction to life in such a way that it makes people want to embrace their neighbor and be a blessing.

Then this morning we read our daily advent devotion with Ann Voskamp’s The Greatest Gift, and these words leapt off the page to me:

You will be experienced as a blessing–
to the extent you have first experienced yourself as blessed.

That’s just it. So often I don’t see myself as blessed and then I go out and try to bless others with a heart that is empty. But when I am loved–when I am acknowledged and shown compassion–how much greater is my capacity to share that with others.

Over and over, I have been helped by others in the past few weeks. People I barely know and people I love dearly have given of their time, talent, and efforts to help me see this commitment through. Which means the end result is not only spectacular….

it is a blessing. To me. To you.

A Christmas Carol: Scrooge and Marley by Israel Horovitz runs Dec. 6-8 and 12-15 at the Habersham Community Theater if you’d like to join us.

motherhood

When Drowning is How You Become New Again

November 21, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

Sometime in the recent past the tub toys took over my jetted bathtub and I succumbed fully to motherhood of four. Sometime in the very recent past we realized that not all four of them can fit in the tub together anymore, and shampoo bottles migrated back down the hall to the bath with a shower, but the toys have stayed.

And despite our good intentions and our purchasing of turtle shaped scoops and plastic open weave baskets and shrimp boat captains that don’t absorb water, the toys cover the bottom of the tub and sit in dirty bathwater that someone forgot to drain, and sometimes there’s slime underneath the ducky until I huff and puff and scrape everything up and begin to squeeze those squishy toys that delight toddlers and disgruntle mothers.

Flecks of grime and probable mold and general nastiness comes out the bellies of pink polka dot ducks and big blue whales and I wonder for the thousandth time why I bother. But I fill the tub again with hot water and a healthy dose of vinegar, if I’m feeling green, but bleach when I’m feeling done. I leave the room for minutes or hours, and sometimes it’s evening again before I remember the drowning mass of plastic aquatic life.

There’s another round of squeezing and the sucking in of water that is laced with cleanser in a valiant effort to save them all. Some don’t make it, and I am relieved when I can let go and just toss away and accept that they’ll never notice among all the rest that only a few are missing. The water swirls in layers of grime, and I wash it down and rinse again and again waiting for the flood of new.

This ritual of motherhood, this gross and dirty and weary bending and squeezing and rinsing time becomes a sacred moment as I watch the filth disappear and the water stream out clean.

What mom hasn’t felt like she’s drowning at some time in the midst of motherhood and all it gives and takes? What woman hasn’t tried at some point to salvage it all, only to throw up her hands and admit defeat to some things that just have to be thrown away? What mama hasn’t placed a summer-loved toddler in a tub and marveled at how the dirtier that water becomes the cleaner it means her baby is? We drain and rinse and repeat and in the drowning of the water over eyelashes and ears and bright red tugboats, something soiled becomes new again.

But because we never seem to really get it–this beauty in the mess, this glory in the grime–we’ll do it again and again and again tomorrow and the next day and the next for many more to come…

and those who’ve already passed this journey will tell us that someday we’ll long for the rinse and repeat days of motherhood when it was the drowning in someone else that made us new.

amelia · Friday Five

Tree {Five Minute Friday}

November 15, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

It’s Friday and though I’ve been missing the online connections with one of my favorite communities (#fmfparty on twitter–see you there?), I found my release today in five unscripted, unedited, un-analyzed moments of writing. Writers (and we’re all that) link it up over at Lisa Jo’s and show off your five minutes with a prompt most suiting to the golden days of fall:

Tree

It sits beside our driveway all gnarled branches and crisp leaves and probably a bit too close to the road for me to be letting them play.

But they climb it with the reckless abandon of childhood and when I lean out the glass door to call a child I’m invariably told she’s in the tree. Her hair is streaming down her back and her feet are bare a scant week before Thanksgiving in falling Georgia temps and she’s climbing her tree.

She waits in it when friends are expected and she hides in it when she’s been reprimanded for too much My Little Pony and not enough respect. She climbs it nimbly and ably and with far more comfort in her own limbs than I’ve ever had in mine.

She’s at home in that tree. It’s hers and she’s laid claim to a Bradford pear tree that’s out of line with the others but just perfect for her nearly four year old legs and toes to grasp hold of. It’s hers but she’ll share and she’ll call to me to come climb with her and I’ll wonder if the branches will groan under the weight of my 33 years and self-consciousness like they never have for the sweet simple release I see in my daughter.

Home

How to Open Yourself to Real Hospitality

November 11, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

They bounded into the parked car yesterday spilling Bibles and coloring sheets and discarded headbands onto seats and the floorboards and they were squealing and giggling and talking all on top of one another.

“Can we invite the pastor’s family over for lunch? Can we, can we please?”

Little eyes and wide stares and bated breaths of anticipation hung over the back of my driver’s seat and my husband just shrugged his shoulders and put the decision all back on mine.

“Ummm….I guess so…” I trailed off thinking of the unswept floor and the finger printed door and the sink full of bowls and sticky plates I had thought were alright to leave this morning.

They scrambled back out the side doors and hurdled back across the front lawn in the shadow of the cross to find the pastor and ask. Joshua followed and I sat down and wondered what I had just done.

There was teriyaki chicken in the crockpot and it was nothing special. I was going to microwave vegetables and reheat rice and gracious knows, there probably wasn’t enough sweet tea.

But I said yes.

I said yes because I’m tired of saying that our tiny house isn’t big enough or fancy enough or just plain enough.

I’m over teaching my girls that something has to be perfect before it can be appreciated.

I don’t want to just preach hospitality; I want to really live it.

Which means I have to open the front door. I have to resist the urge to apologize for the toys and the bikes and the incessant trails of leaf bits that follow the wake of my four children. I have to embrace the now and stop waiting for some pin-perfect future that involves an actual dining area and enough seating for when a family of six invites over a family of six.

I thought I was doing that with Friday night pizza. I’ve made that our night to have company. That’s our night to rotate through our circles of friends and our circles we’d like to know better, so we can embrace fellowship and build relationships.

We’d just had friends over this past Friday for the first time in a month and all our kids piled in the back bedrooms and made elaborate haunted houses we were forced to pause conversation for and tour.

It was loud and chaotic and made me think that we should probably put a hold on Friday nights during the winter when it’s too dark for them to take the crazy outside.

Because once again, I’m trying to fit a life into a ready-made expectation that’s just not feasible for the beautiful mess I’ve been given.

But it doesn’t ever occur to my kids that our house isn’t big enough or clean enough or that I might not be able to stretch that meal.

I told them I want to be more like Jesus, so I guess they just figured teriyaki chicken can be multiplied like loaves and fishes. I guess they figured Jesus didn’t worry if someone’s home had a separate dining room or an eat-in kitchen; He just came anyway.

And isn’t spontaneity always the truest form of hospitality? It’s not all fancy soaps and monogrammed towels and three-course meals on perfectly mismatched china.

Sometimes it’s paper plates and homemade pizza and clinging babies and magic cookie bars brought to share.

Sometimes it’s just saying yes when reason says no and opening the door and being real.

It’s saying “welcome to our home, we’re glad you’re here” and not apologizing for the life that’s spilled out all over the living room rug and the bathroom counters because that life is who you are and these people come to be with your people, not to be with your house.

So I said yes. It was wonderful and freeing and enlightening.

I think, from now on, there will be a little extra in that crockpot each week, but the sink will probably still be hosting dishes, and there’s really no hope for the floors.

How are you opening up yourself or your home to hospitality this holiday season?