Guest Post- Going Fast

My fellow blogging sister, Sarah Markley at The Best Days of My Life is starting a series called 100 Joys.  I love this series...her challenge: in the month of December, choose Joy, and then write about it.  Every Monday we'll link up and share with one another.  I love the idea, and already find myself loving the posts...but this one in particular spoke to me today.  There is something joyful about the wind in your hair, zooming through life fast...and yet sometimes fast can be scary, or overwhelming or just plain too much.  God is calling me to slow down and quiet...to solitude, but I like fast! This post really spoke to me, I hope that it will to you as well.  I will be linking up with posts on Joy...won't you join us?

I’m teaching myself to run again. After about 1 and a half years of struggling to find motivation to get up and run {11}

to

catch

the

sunrise,

I’m doing it again. I’m lacing up shoes that need to see miles and hiding cold hands inside the sleeves of a sweatshirt. And running. I’m not racing for speed or checking off boxes on a to-do list. But I’m running because that’s me. And I’ve lost some of me over the past few years.

Here I am again. In my athletic shoes. Waiting to go fast.

One or two days a week I watch my oldest daughter ride a horse. She’s strong and sure and she’s already fast. Already, at roller-coaster-loving eight-years-old, she’s fast. It’s the speed, I think, that she likes. {12}

And she pauses in the corner of the arena, for a minute, between speed bursts and pats his neck.

You’re doing great, she whispers to him. And I think what she means is Thank you for being you. It satisfies me that she’s doing something she loves. And she’s doing it well. Sometimes I don’t take the time to “be proud” of her. But this afternoon I do. I watch. I listen. And I love her by thinking about the WHO of her. {13}

I called Chad on the phone in the middle of the day.

“The stress is literally strangling me, ” I said to him.

“What can I do to help?” is usually not what he asks but this time it was different.

I just let out a long sigh. There was no joy in this kind of fast. If I can only get the rhythm down between moving too fast or not fast enough then things might. just. work. I’m moving too fast, I felt. The list is getting longer and not shorter, I now have to swipe the page down to see all of it.

So I take a couple or three hours in the morning while the girls are at school, with my laptop and Jack Johnson in my ears and sitting with a cup. {14}

Quiet.

Still.

I’m allowing the slowness of life to refill me and not the stress to fix its hands around my neck. Finding the slow in a busy month {busier than I would have ever chosen} is helping my attitude. It’s beginning to help me see what is important. These joys, so far, are changing me. {15}

Have you been changed by JOY?

This a post in the 100 Joys project we are doing this month. Get ready to link up your posts on Monday and get the badge in my sidebar. Look for joy. Find it beneath your fingers.

Guest Post- Joy the Color of Fireflies

My sweet friend, Holley Gerth, who blogs her heart at Heart to Heart with Holley, has a way of making my heart sing, "Amen, Sister!" with her words.  I want to share some of them with you today! If they make yours sing too, won't you go leave her a comment on here or over at her bloggy home.

Joy the Color of Fireflies

The sky is inky blue, a swirl of dark and light. Day and night do a slow dance before the moon rises high above the trees. The music we can't hear beckons the fireflies from their hiding places. One by one they appear, little lights twinkling against the backdrop of an early summer evening.

I first caught fireflies as a girl of seven or so. Taking my brother and I to the porch, my grandmother handed us a mason jar. "Be gentle," I'm sure she told us.

Then she watched and smiled from the edge of the flowerbed in a wheelchair.(She had polio at age 29, younger than I am now.)

I don't know where these creatures live, what they do in the winter, why they come again...but I do know each one is like a bright and beautiful memory floating through the air.

And, because of this, I still catch those flickers of brightness even though childhood has long gone. I place them (gently, yes) into jars, water bottles, whatever I can find. When I have twenty or so I let them go and watch the homemade fireworks display.

Saturday I did this for the first time of the season. Our dear friends, Sean and Kim, were there. We sat on the patio and as the fireflies appeared, I begged my guests to go with me. Sean joined the chase while Mark and Kim watched from the patio at our crazy zig-zags across the yard.

In my firefly moments I feel more alive, happy, and closer to heaven than I do almost any other time all year. It's as if everything that's sweet, good, and right is made real in tiny flashes of light as I think of my Grandma and all she taught me of joy.

In the hospital after being told she would never walk again, her pastor said,"Frances, you can choose to let this make you bitter or better." She would tell me again and again with a twinkle in her eyes, "I chose better."

My Nana knew joy, like a firefly, flits about you. But if you are serious about it, you must pursue it. And she knew joy, like a firefly, often comes surrounded by darkness. Perhaps that is what makes it so brilliant and beautiful.

Yes, on the porch beneath a summer sky I still sense my grandmother's smile. And as the last lingering firefly disappears into the night I smile too...knowing I'm sure to find it (and joy) another summer evening or, when least expected, it will once more find me.

What's a little thing that brings you joy?