Category: reflections

Friday Five · motherhood · one word 365 · reflections

What’s Been Crowding My Heart (Five Minute Friday)

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

It’s Five Minute Friday, and that’s about all the time I have for this blog right now. I’ll tell you why below.

Prompt is crowd:

There are thousands of texts on a group text message on my about to kill itself iphone 3 because I have five sisters and a sister-in-law and we know no restraint.

There’s about 180 pages of word vomit in a document on my computer and I’m trying to finish and maybe suck it up and let someone actually read it before I go this conference in May and try not to throw up when I meet with agents.

There’s a new season of MOPS on the horizon and new leadership and I’m trying to give advice while letting go of control.

There’s four little sets of toes and swirly hair and tickling fingers in my bed on Saturday mornings and their daddy is just grateful we took the plunge and set up the king size before he got knocked to the floor.

I’ve been tagging and selling and working consignment, redecorating the living room, making tomato sauce from scratch, and strategizing marketing plans for the CSA for the past two weeks.  Baby boy has eczema and I want to write and submit some articles (or maybe rewrite what’s already there?) and should I try an ebook and daylight savings is kicking me to the curb, y’all.

Life’s a little crowded right now. Even when I’ve let go of some responsibility, I’ve found more to fill it with and less time to be here, in this community, and I don’t know, maybe that’s okay?

Maybe I’m feeling crowded because I’m still failing to recognize my season. 

It doesn’t have to be everything right now. It doesn’t have to be now or never. It doesn’t have to be a missed opportunity if I choose to wait.

Sometimes, the crowd has to thin out a bit so we can really see where we’re going. 


Margin Mom · reflections · writing

So Where Do I Go From Here?

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment
{reflections on Allume, MomCon, and 31 Days}
It was the most jam-packed, kid-juggling, carry-on hauling, coffee-chugging month of the year. Seriously, December’s going to have nothing on October.  At least we’ll all be in the same state the whole month.
In the 31 days of October, I wrote 31 posts about embracing the idea of Living Local.  Confession: eight of those days were spent pretty far from my local. 
I went with my amazing leadership team for my local MOPS group to MomCon 2013 in Kansas City from October 17-20.  Then I turned right around and repacked my suitcase and headed up I-85 to spend four days in a hotel with women I only know online.  From October 24-27 I attended the Allume Conference. 
But just prior to my leaving for two back-to-back weekends without my family, my husband flew to Philadelphia to spend a week at a national conference for CDFI companies. (Don’t know what that is? Read this post.)
And while all this was going on, we found ourselves heavily involved in the production of The Masquerade, a walk-through drama, that took place at our church last week and involved very late nights and a lot of bacon. (We were going for realism in the morning scene.)
I don’t tell you all this to make myself sound like superwoman because I most definitely am not. I tell you this because I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons in the last month about my honest capacity as a 
….wife.
….mother.
….writer.
….servant.
My resounding takeaway from all that I’ve experienced sitting at the feet of amazing Christian women and sitting on my own bathroom floor streaming tears?
I have to create more space in my life.
I need space to listen.
I need space to create.
I need space to enjoy.
When I am running from one good thing to the next I’m getting filled, but I’m maxing out my capacity to use that good to encourage others. 
And that’s what I most want to do. I want to encourage moms to believe what they do matters. I want to encourage women to believe they are enough because Jesus believed them to be so. I want to encourage girls to evade the trap of comparison that will rob life of its joy. 
I want to be right here at this time and in this space for a purpose that is greater than me.  I want to love my neighbor despite the dirty laundry and social divide. 
I believe these two things are what God is calling me to beyond my first call as wife and mother. So over the next several weeks, I’ll be wrapping a few projects and turning my focus toward this.

It’s something I tried to do over the summer when I wrote about my search for margin, but it wasn’t time.  I still had commitments that I wanted to honor and that God is blessing.

But, now, I’m turning a corner.

I might be pretty quiet in this space from time to time while I finish some other work I’ve started, but it’s a rest that is long overdue. 
If you’d like to leave me a comment and tell me what’s filled you beyond capacity, I’d love to know I’m not the only one learning to stand strong and say “no.” 
For a list of influencers who’ve impacted my life in the past month click here. 
reflections · writing

My Favorites from Allume and MomCon 2013

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

Sarah Markley helped me find my voice.

Sarah Mae challenged me to seek God’s face and be honest about capacity.

The Nester and her husband shared practical advice and the importance of purpose.

Emily Freeman (sister of the Nester) told me that God has a time ready for me to read her book.

Lisa Jo Baker reminded me that I don’t have to be “just a mom.”

Ann Voskamp showed me what it looks like to be a conduit for the Holy Spirit.

Jennie Allen made me want to jump and down and holler “Amen!”

Jen Hatmaker ruined my life in the best of ways. Safe and happy isn’t always the answer.

Beth Moore just shone the joy of Jesus.

Shauna Niequest was honest and captivating and made me stop thinking “must be nice.”

But the women who really loved on me and are helping me learn focus are my blogging sisters and MOPS team who shared a hotel room, meals, sweet tea, strong coffee, airplane reads, and late nights with me during the past month. Thank you sweet friends. I’m afraid to list you all for fear I’d leave someone out!

faith · Friday Five · motherhood · reflections

Mercy {five minute friday}

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

IFive Minute Fridayt’s Friday and that means it’s time to write for five minutes, no editing, no backtracking, no overthinking (I broke all these rules this week). Lisa-Jo provides a prompt and in this community, we write, and then we encourage one another. So link it up, friends, and share the love because “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” E.B White via Lisa Jo.

This week’s prompt is….

Mercy

You know it doesn’t always have to be as big as a home in Kenya.  That’s amazing and beautiful and makes me want to get on a plane tomorrow–

but I can’t.

Because it’s here too.  In the small and the everyday and the ordinary.  It’s in the open invitation to lunch so that everyone feels included and it’s in the understanding smiles you exchange without words to the mother who had the screaming toddler on the playground.  It’s in the hands of the friend who took my tray one night at McDonald’s when I was seven months pregnant and three kids in already and so overwhelmed that a single milk spill unraveled my control.

I’ve found it in the quiet words of the secretary when she doesn’t chastise me for calling for the third time in a row to change pickup arrangements.  Sometimes it swings loudly and shrieks joy and “Look at me, mommy!” after a morning of tempers and strong wills.  I think it’s given in the simple, like the times we choose to know or speak or ask rather than assume or complain or judge.

Unfortunately we who claim to know Christ can give it least.  We forget we were once all women at the well or thieves on the cross begging for someone to give us water that will truly quench our thirst.  We take it for granted and we forget to give it away.

“Do justice, LOVE mercy, walk humbly with your God…” ~Micah 6:8

It’s an act, a verb, a command this love mercy is.

It’s what happens when we get past our version of what should be and start living with and loving on the version that is.  Wrapping ourselves in the safe bubble wrap of But, I’m praying for her isn’t always enough. Sometimes people need the apology they don’t deserve and the hug that isn’t forced and the kinship that isn’t fake and the home that saves their babies.

Sometimes we forget how incredible it can be to show a little mercy.

*********************************************************************************

Confession: I almost didn’t write a post today.  I tried and failed last night and if I’d been speaking I’d have said it was because my tongue was thick and clumsy and couldn’t form words, but I was writing so instead it was my fingers that couldn’t seem to find that magic moment with my brain to put what my heart was singing down into coherent sentences and imagery.  So I gave up and went to bed and tried again this morning and gave up again.  Then I went about my day and waited for God to speak. He did to me, and I hope he did to you too.

One of the reasons I was so finger-tied is because today’s prompt was written by Alia, who is one of my new favorite people.  Between the praise I got from her and Lisa Jo last week, I figured I could retire from blogsphere a pretty happy little writer.  I wanted to do justice to her words and to this cause because loving on and supporting new mothers from anywhere and from any walk of life is so near and dear to my heart.  It’s why I coordinate MOPS; it’s why I’ll be pleading again for more workers because today in Chic-fil-a I didn’t invite moms because we don’t have the space for their children.  That’s an awful feeling, to know someone might need the resources you have but there’s no way to offer them without more physical or financial support.  I know most of you can’t come over my way and rock babies on Friday mornings, but you can click here and read about Mercy House and the amazing good it’s providing these mothers who are our sisters in motherhood.

And if you’ve been stalking Alia and me on twitter, you can find the recipe for fried okra right over here.  

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Friday Five · reflections

Worship {Five Minute Friday}

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

IFive Minute Fridayt’s Friday and that means it’s time to write for five minutes, no editing, no backtracking, no overthinking. Lisa-Jo provides a prompt and in this community we write and then we encourage one another.  So link it up, friends, and share the love.

This week’s prompt is….

Worship

Churches aren’t perfect.  They’re made up of messy, broken, difficult, cantankerous, controlling people who have all been amazingly forgiven.

Forgiveness is the song of the church.  It’s the hymn that’s sung over and over by a great God who is bigger than us because He can forgive so much more readily, so much more easily, so much more forgetfully than we ever can.

Church is supposed to be the place you come when you have no where else to go.  The place where we can be raw and real and so much less than perfect.  The place you need after the Sunday morning meltdowns over shoes and hairbows or the sanctuary you crave after chaos and confusion have had their reign everywhere else.

But the church itself?  That’s not worship. That’s a place that feeds worship and communion and fellowship.

But worship…that can happen when you aren’t even looking for it because He’s always looking for you.

I’ve gone to church my whole life and been in many different settings from mountainside chapels to stained glassed steeples.

But in May I sat and held a friend while she cried from the depths of her soul and there was nothing to be said except to invoke the name of Jesus.  It didn’t look like worship.

But it was.

Always, always, that is worship at its truest.  The call to Christ and the forgiveness of sins that tears down the veil.

May you experience it today when you need it most.