London (my four year old) tells Justin he is “the best daddy in the world.” A lot. Like two or three or four times a day.

Adorable.

A few nights ago he asked her what she meant. He asked, “What does it take to be the best daddy in the world?” (He asks such good questions)

She didn’t think long before sharing the exact requirements. She said,

“You have to be silly.

You have to be courageous.

And you have to love God.”

And that’s it folks: all you need to be a great daddy—better than great—the best daddy in the world. :)

Yesterday, even though I really wanted a salad from Chipotle, I ate lunch at home because I had leftovers in the fridge. And then last night, while I really wanted butternut squash pasta, I ate a salad. Because the greens were on the verge of wilting and the chicken, from a grill-out over the weekend, wouldn’t make it another day.

I thought I would be bummed as I’m not fond of leftovers, but instead I felt excited, like I was changing the world. 

Do you remember when you learned to divide in fourth grade? I do. Then (and now) I loved division, especially long division. My favorite kind of problem would look something like 596,464 divided by 4. I liked how many times you had to come back to that big number, taking it bite by bite until you’d solved it. Solved it—like it was a mystery.

I especially loved the problems, like the one above, with no remainders. 

A remainder is a lonely, messy, leftover with no place and no beauty.

I have this cookie recipe that uses every piece of every ingredient so that I use the egg’s yolk for the batter and the white for the icing, the zest of an orange for the batter and the juice for the icing. It’s so rewarding to use every part, to look at your counter and see no remainders. 

I feel like this is the kind of life to which God calls us, a no remainder life.

I finished Jen Hatmaker’s book 7 yesterday (I’ll talk about it more this week) and the biggest lesson I gleaned was this one—that waste has little place in the Christian life.

Look at the way God redeems suffering, refusing to allow it it to hang messy and alone at the end of the problem. He redeems it, makes good out it, uses the scraps of our pain to make something new and beautiful.

Look at the way God feeds the Israelites in the wilderness, the way each day brings just the right amount of food for that day and that day alone. Look at how God calls us pray even now, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Look at the resurrection. No remainder.

And of course, we can’t help but think of God’s commands about money, His distaste for ill-used wealth, all that extra lying around accumulating dust. I can’t shake that parable about the rich farmer who plans to build more barns and dies in his sleep. It makes me nervous about the stuff in my garage.

It seems God gives us what we need and asks us to use it. He gives us more than we need, turns our attention to his needy children, and asks us to use it, too.

When I looked at my refrigerator yesterday and saw all that food going to waste I felt like a greedy, greedy waster, a girl with sloppy remainders. But using that food, pulling together a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and feeding myself a delicious meal from the blessings I already had, that was beautiful and elegant and, I think, God-pleasing.

I think of Richard Holloway’s words: 

“Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.”

I skyped with my cousin Josh last night, me in little old Round Rock, Texas and Josh in Wuhan, China, a city of 10 million over 7,000 miles away.

I yawned, tired from a long day. He yawned, not yet fully awake for the long day ahead. Today is his birthday. 

Every time I Skype with Josh I smile, smile like an idiot, a wide, goofy grin. Justin talks some. Josh talks a lot. Maybe he’s a little bit lonely. 

Man, I love to hear Josh talk. He tells these beautiful, Spirit-soaked stories. He is a herald of light in a dark, shadowy place. 

I doubt Josh knows how much his stories mean to me, how much it affects me to hear about a girl in China who prayed on her knees in a hospital, a girl ridiculed for her actions, praying for a bleeding man while others laughed. To hear that the bleeding man and his wife asked the praying girl about Jesus because Jesus spilled out onto them while she prayed.

Stories like that move me. They remind me that God’s people are fighting with light and that light is winning.

Sometimes I skip around the Internet and get the impression that no one, not one Christian person, is getting it right. People talk about why they’ve left the church or they rail against all the abuses in the church. I hear Bible class teachers sigh, saying “We have no idea what we’re doing.”

But you know what? I think lots of people are getting it right. Right enough. I hear Josh’s stories and I compare them to my own, the crazy things God’s doing right here in Texas, and I see dawn. I see light and love and victory creeping over the hill. I see broken people, cracked pots, leaking the glory of God all over the place. 

Josh is a cracked vessel. I’m even more cracked than he is.

And yet. 

God is spilling out. He is finding His people. He is winning glory. He is making His world new.

I’ve seen it. I’ve heard eye witness accounts. It’s happening. And I refuse to be so cynical as to miss it.

I’ve been reading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts and I cannot tell you how much I’m loving her. I love her voice. And I love her tough farm girl attitude. But mostly I’m loving her practice of counting blessings, of writing down every good thing, of thanking God, and in thanking Him, seizing the gifts, slowing life, trusting. 

My first night with Ann I read eighty pages, drove to Target and bought window markers. I walked straight to my kitchen upon arriving home and began a list of blessings on the french doors. I’ve been counting them ever since. 

Ann’s list is lovely, ethereal, so… pastoral. She thanks God for colors on soap bubbles and grated cheese in perfect light. Mine is less idyllic.

Today I’ve thanked God for:

The elliptical machine at the Y (soooo much better than a treadmill)

Space, arm-stretching, deep-breath space made possible by mother’s day out

Sandella’s with the reasonable calorie counts beside every tasty menu item

Ice

and

Adele (you know God must love Him some Adele)

I love making these lists because (1) I love making lists, (2) I get to re-live the thing I enjoy as I write it down and (3) I remember that every good gift, even Adele, is from God.

London made a list today, too, including 18 things for which she’s thankful. She made the list in two minutes, shooting blessings at me machine-gun style. She included Rat Flower (her pet rat), her sister, “regular horses that are not pretend,” goats, and her jewelry. To close out the list she said, “I am thankful for my God.”

After we made her list I added something to mine: “Making blessing lists with London.”

Eve and I watched Beauty and the Beast at the discount movie theater tonight wearing uncomfortable black 3-D glasses. She giggled at mine from behind hers.

She said her favorite part was when Beauty danced with the beast and when the beast turned into a human, and I heartily agreed. Everybody loves a resurrection, I thought.

In the next few weeks, Justin will be preaching about resurrection, both the resurrection that takes place when a woman puts her faith in Christ and the subsequent resurrection from physical death. And I couldn’t help but think how well Beauty and the Beast explains what that might look like.

We get the backstory first: The Beast lived in a beautiful castle, became arrogant and made a very bad choice. The result was a fallen world, er, castle.

Everything goes from its perfect state to this weird utilitarian state in which a person stops being who he is and becomes what he does, so that Cogsworth becomes a clock (a partial, certainly incomplete expression of his identity). 

The beast is turned over to the worst parts of himself, the inside being manifested in his outside.

Then the plot starts rolling forward and Belle comes and the beast changes. He realizes he’s been a terrible person/creature and begins behaving not like the beast but like the man into whom he’s growing. He eats with a spoon. He dances a waltz. He loves.

This, the moment when a smiling beast dances circles across a golden ballroom, is the first resurrection. 

At the movie’s close the beast changes fully into a man so that his appearance matches the transformation that’s been happening in his heart. He looks like he did before the fall, back when things were perfect and not broken. And while he’s surely himself, he’s a better self. Belle knows this almost immediately.

That scene at the end of the movie, with the now-human beast and Belle dancing, is one of my favorites because it’s not a completely new scene; it’s a repetition of that first dancing scene. It’s as if that first dance was a precursor to this perfect one, this perfect dance enriched and deepened because it’s happened before. The movie closes with Belle in the same dress and the Beast in the very same suit, the same friends surrounding them as they dance, but this time the dance takes place in broad daylight and everyone is fully him or herself.

So I’m working on a poem, a rhyming poem (!), testing the theory that restraints fuel creativity.

Here lies the fruit of two hours’ labor. Eight lines. 

At eight I swam my river’s breadth

to pass a test, to cross not swept

away by the frigid, chugging flow

of invisible river under toe.

My stroke steady, my arms strong,

I fought the force until ere long

My toes touched sand and proud I dared

Seize with hands and mouth the air.

A good book is either original or fresh. 

I realized that last night reading Marilyn Meberg’s book Constantly Craving—which is a fine book from a wise woman, but not a good book. 

Here’s how I know:

I did not highlight any passages.

I did not pause to reflect.

I did not race to the next page.

I can’t, having read ninety pages today, remember any specific detail, fact, scriptural insight, or story that I might like to share with a friend or dissect in a blog post.

It’s complicated because I didn’t find anything to fault in Constantly Craving. Like I said it is a fine, sturdy, likable book about the human desire for more, more of practically everything. Meberg’s voice is warm but not saccharine sweet. Her handling of the topic shows knowledge and experience.

I liked the cover.

But, looking closely, I realized my problems were two-fold:

It wasn’t original. I’d heard this information before.

It wasn’t fresh. I’d heard this information presented this way before.

Rare is the original book, but not so rare as one might think. Writers do actually stumble upon completely new thoughts, thoughts arrived upon most often by connection (This is true and this is true—just look at what we see when we put them side-by-side!).

More common is the fresh book, an exercise in perspective-shifting in which the author says what we know is true but says it in a way we haven’t heard with words upon which we have yet to overdose. A fresh perspective on even the most obvious of truths warrants a book.

And I suppose that is why I wrote this post—to decide what warrants a book. Because I want to write books and I do not want to write bad books. Or even fine books. 

“Mom, I’ve been thinking, and I decided that, well, sometimes God makes mistakes.”

That’s what my daughter told me from her car seat this morning on the way to school. 

She said it so solemnly—like she was heavy with this “truth” she’d discovered—and so matter-of-factly. It was not a passing thought flitting through her ever-curious mind, but something she’d “been thinking” and “decided.” She was sad but not terribly distraught. Because, to her, God is someone like Daddy and even though it’s hard to understand and not pleasant, Daddies make mistakes sometimes. She said it like she’d say that, that Daddy makes mistakes. 

I talked to her about how sometimes it looks like God’s made a mistake but how He doesn’t really because He’s perfect and because He’s able, and I talked about how we’re just too small to understand God sometimes, no matter how big we get.

And then my mom, sitting beside me in the driver’s seat, asked the obvious question, the one I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked:

“What mistake do you think God made?”

And London said, after only a second or two’s pause, “Well, I think God made a mistake because He hasn’t come back yet to take us to Heaven.”

And the car went silent. And I thought, “Yeah…”

He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

Rev. 22:20

I’ve been working on a project for the past few days. I spent six or seven hours on it Tuesday. And hours yesterday troubleshooting. 

I endured a seriously bad mood.

I sat in the paint aisle at Walmart for thirty minutes late last night, answering questions from customers about brushes and stencils. Apparently sitting on the ground surrounded by tiny paint containers lends a sister some art stuff authority.

After the Walmart run I felt better.

This morning I awoke with new sketches and a new lease on life, ready to fix all my mistakes, armed with new tools and new plan.

But then, in a long logistics discussion with a person in the know, I realized what I’d been planning just wasn’t going to work—not in the time available, not without my own personal carpenter like the ones you get as a designer on Trading Spaces. 

(Oh how I wish I had a personal carpenter!)

So now my big project, for which I have weeped and rejoiced, is—don’t say it!—cancelled.

And I am weepy. 

Because I conceived it and carried it around and bore with its constantly kicking me in the ribs, and now I will have to say goodbye before I’ve even had the chance to birth it. 

I am so melodramatic.

Still, that’s how it feels when a project really wants to be made but doesn’t get made. It’s terrible, rotten, exhausting and sad. Right on the heels of its having been exciting and promising and hope-y.

Yuck. 

Lately I’ve been reading some posts about Easter, a few focusing on our “misplaced priorities”—bunnies and eggs vs Jesus—and I have to tell you I’m quite torn. 

I like the idea of Easter being about Jesus, of observing a sort of Christian Passover. I think it’s beautiful and appropriate. We do have some sense as to the calendar day of Christ’s resurrection (unlike his birth) and, as it coincides so well with the newness of the spring season, I wonder how anybody could not talk about resurrection this coming Sunday. 

But some won’t.

I remember celebrating Easter one year with my family at the breakfast table before worship. We  chowed down on Reese’s chocolate eggs and then dressed in our new Easter clothes and headed to our church where the lesson was on, not surprisingly, the evils of celebrating Easter. The preacher said we had no reason to make this a special day and no evidence that the first century church celebrated Easter. He then laid into Easter baskets.

Which I thought was weird. Because here’s the way I saw it at the time: Either (1) Easter is a religious holiday and as such it should be celebrated in a religious way OR (2) Easter is not a religious holiday and we can do whatever we feel like doing that day (other than talking about the risen Christ). If Easter’s not religious, why did the preacher care about the bunnies?

So that’s where I come from—NO talking about the resurrection on Easter in church (not even a “Low in the Grave” with three verses and one rousing chorus). 

That seems misguided.

Now though, I can see a little myopia in the only-religious perspective, too. Because it’s true we don’t have a celebrate-Easter example from the New Testament church. Easter is a VERY old tradition dating back to the second century, and that makes me like it very much, but (BUT) celebrating Easter (the Christian Passover) is not a holy mandate.

In fact, Paul gets all over some people who try to make the observance of special days or Jewish traditions mandatory attendance. He says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”

Some people say that Easter’s roots are in paganism. But Paul says it’s not a big deal to eat the meat burned in sacrifice to idols, so long as you have a clear conscience and you’re not offending the weak. Is an Easter basket (or a Christmas tree) much different?

I can understand the argument that Easter egg hunts and pictures with baby chicks and white panty hose for toddlers might muddy the Easter waters and I totally agree that we shouldn’t spend a fortune on fancy clothes or gratuitous Easter baskets for our kids, but I feel, too, like whatever we do on Easter is an exercise in liberty, the very liberty Christ died and rose to give.

My husband and I are in the process of figuring out how we’ll observe Easter with our kids. We nixed the candy-filled baskets this year mostly because we think they get too many presents and too much junk food in general. We’re thinking of eating lamb, which I think is very cool and maybe too literal, and we will certainly eat it in the company of others who love us, who we love, and who love Jesus. My girls will wear new (very affordable) dresses because I like to think of this resurrection celebration as a rehearsal for the final resurrection and on that day we’ll all wear shiny, white new clothes. We’ll probably wake up at sunrise and go outside with the girls and a few blankets and drink hot tea (and milk and apple juice) and talk about how great it is that Jesus didn’t stay dead and that we won’t stay dead either.

We will do all of these things on Easter because they have become (and are becoming) our family traditions. I do not expect others to do as I do, but I encourage others to celebrate the day in a way—any way—that glorifies our LIVING God.