I haven’t posted in over a month and I will post about that shortly, but man this I couldn’t pass up. My friend, @Java4Two outdid herself for making me ‘bust a gut’ (pun, so seriously intended)!
From my friends at Firepit Friday Media Group… I was able to participate in this amazing talk by The Scary Guy. It is 28 minutes long, but it is worth it. For folks who have young kids, older kids, single, married, young and old can benefit from this video. CC and Cynthia invited The Scary Guy to Nashville to speak to a group about his mission. The Scary Guy has a new effort for the elimination of ANGER, HATE, VIOLENCE, & DEATH! At 6ft tall and tattooed from head to toe … The Scary Guy is quite possibly the most powerful Agent For Change on the planet today! The Power to Create World Peace Lives Within Each and Everyone of Us.
The reason they won Best New Artist Dove Award. These guys are amazing. From the debut album, “Over and Underneath,” now available in stores and online. For more information, please visit TenthAvenueNorth.com or MySpace.com/tenthavenuenorth
UNCONDITIONAL – Not contingent upon ANY condition(s)
CONDITION – Circumstances that must exist or be realized before something else is possible or permitted.
*** No circumstance must exist or be realized before LOVE is possible***
Love, unconditional love. Real UNCONDITIONAL love. It’s such a hard concept to even wrap one’s mind around. Especially if the one you love is hurting you. I remember my dad telling me once that love is not a feeling, it is a choice. And in my marriage I made a choice to love him and to stay. But in reality it was not a choice to love it was a calculated resolve just to endure. Even in the end I said I would not divorce him, but I made my love and my marriage contingent upon his willingness to get help for a problem he didn’t recognize. And he filed. Then one day about 8 months later, Gail Hyatt sent out a tweet about loving your enemy. See it’s easy to love someone who is loving you back. But what about those that don’t?
I attended Rolling Hills Community Church this past Sunday. Thanks to Chad Jarnagin’s invite. And the message was the last in a series on love. The opening video is what got to me. It was of a girl who was speaking on how hard it was for her to love freely without hesitation, without reserve. To give from the heart not just to those who are asking for help but joyfully giving something that is precious to us at random. It is for all of us to do this isn’t it? But what would happen if we did? What would happen if we even just tried? A little bit.
See, we were created BY LOVE, WITH LOVE, TO LOVE. It is God’s intention for us to LOVE EXTRAVAGANTLY! (Borrowing from the sermon here! Thanks Pastor Jeff!) That’s it. Pure & simple. I love that idea so much, that I just have to repeat it.
WE ARE TO LOVE EXTRAVAGANTLY!
I’m such a word geek, so please bear with me. Words have meaning, they have power and influence and all too often they are taken too lightly. So I love (haha) to dive into a word’s meaning and synonyms to really get a feel for the power behind a word. And look at the word extravagantly and what it means and represents:
Extravagantly -freely, without restriction, at will, candidly, deliberately, fancy-free, intentionally, openly, plainly, purposely, spontaneously, voluntarily, without hindrance, without prompting, without reserve, without restraint, without urging.
Pure and simple, right. But it’s not simple because we are human and we have been taught by other humans. It’s hard to let go of the unspoken values we were raised with and the baggage of the past that weighs our hearts down. But it is possible with Christ in our lives. Challenging but possible. I often say that my father was the best example of Christ’s love for us that I have ever known. That is because he loved me unconditionally. Even in the bad times. Even when I was making his life hell (there were a few of those). He rarely raised his voice. He knew how to see the difference between a rebellious daughter acting out and his little girl who was really hurting and confused by life and love. So even in the bad times that’s who he loved and who he reached out to hold.
I have never in my life loved like that. Truly, never loved like that. My love has always come with conditions, with limitations and with reserve. I will love you…
- IF you love me back
- IF you love me the way I want you to
- IF you believe as I believe
- IF you give me what I want
- IF you constantly prove it to me, over and over and over again.
I have been loving the wrong way most of my life. There are exceptions to that of course, I love my parents and siblings and kids. Especially my kids. But there have been more times than not that I have not acted like I loved my parents and sisters unconditionally. And yes, I have always loved them. But I have not shown them that love. I have not acted on that love. What they have seen, as others have in my life, is my list of conditions. My demands. I’ve held my love hostage and negotiated it’s release based on what I would get out of it. Subconsciously of course. It was never with intentional selfishness or malice, yet it happened.
There has been one friend in my life that I have loved without condition. I’ve written about her before, my friend Michele. We actually talked about this tonight. She jokingly tells her daughters that we are the girlfriend version of soul mates. And that is based upon the fact that regardless of what the other one is doing or what they are dealing with, between us there is no judgment, there is only friendship and love. That’s hard to come by because even the best of girlfriends have it out at times.
This phenomena of unconditional love occurred for me a few weeks ago out of the blue with another friend, of the male variety. We were in a sensitive situation where I felt betrayed, hurt in some way. But in reality I wasn’t. He is one individual who has been nothing but straight up honest and transparent with me from day one. So after some consideration of the circumstances I realized that what I was feeling was mine. I owned it. It was all of that baggage and resentments that I had carried around for years, especially when it comes to men. All of my IFs, so to speak. And then came a pivotal moment, a moment that I had to chose to either hang on to my insecurity and fear or let them go and just love freely. Love Extravagantly.
And I did! I’m not sure how or why it came over me, but I finally got it. I made the choice to love without hesitation or restraint. Nor was with the rose-colored glasses of romantic love that skews all things. It was just love. And it was a choice. Can I tell you the weight of the world lifted off my heart in that one moment. And it was clear to me without question how insanely freeing it was to feel pure unconditional love. WOW! I can’t describe it. But I finally got it at age 40. This is what it means, this is what it feels like.
This is how Christ loves us! Unconditionally, without reservation or limits or conditions. He loves us with all of our flaws and mistakes and years of wrong doing. He loves us like this. And we are to love like this. It is hard. But it is possible. We are to love each other, friend or foe, like this. Not just the our friends and our families. Not just the people who are easy to love. Not just the ones that make us happy. Not just the ones who love us back. Not just the ones who believe as we believe. But everyone.
It is what we were created to do. This is what we all deserve to receive in life. To be loved like this. This is also what we all are responsible to give in life. To love like this. Everyone. Extravagantly.
Larry & Cheryl practice renewing their wedding vows…for all eternity?!
The piece below is from a writing exercise I completed a couple months ago. My writing group went out to Radnor Lake, hiked a bit and then we were charged with finding a place to hunker down and get creative. Some painted, some took pictures. I wrote by the creek on a bench. That is where I found my inspiration for this….
Creek at Radnor Lake
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. – Henry David Thoreau
Listening to the rush of the water is soothing. Its chilly embrace washes over my spirit. Nourishing it with its restorative properties. Bathing it in its cleansing power. Awakening my soul with a gentle reminder to live fully and greet each day with renewed strength and vitality.
It reminds me of the canoeing trips of my youth. You know the ones with the church youth group that were planned from the beginning of the year. Everyone was so excited for July to come, especially if it was your first time. Or the trips with the wild and crazy friends that wanted to party more than float. Those trips were all very different primarily because of the people who accompanied you. But there was something consistent about them too. The river.
Regardless of the river you chose, you could count on it to bring you something unique around each bend. Of course this is the point right? It is about the twists and turns, the calming pools and breath-taking rapids. That is the reason we go. To experience this range of emotions from peace to surprise to fear. And regardless of how close someone came to tragedy, and there were a few close calls, we went back every year.
At least I did. Because that is the core of who I am. I am the girl that enjoys teetering on the edge. I’m not a life long thrill seeker. I’m not an outdoor adventurist. I’m not an extreme sports enthusiast. But I am the girl who has been booked and finger printed because I went a little too far. I am typically the good girl. Not gone bad, but certainly not followed the straight and narrow path either.
Maybe that is why I am so drawn to water. To its ability to pull you down to its darkest depths and fill your head only with white noise silence and the beat of your own heart until your lungs burn. And then, only when you are ready, it releases you allowing the gasp relief of fresh air and brightening stream of sunlight. It gives you back to the world in a spontaneous rebirth, a renewal ritual that you chose to invoke. Yes, that is why I am drawn to the water. Because I choose to feel those moments as a purification of the mind, body and soul.
For me water is a life source. And the river is life. And lIfe is fluid. It ebbs and flows with change and growth and love and loss. Thus the reason that healing is not linear. LIfe is not linear. It brings us a new challenge, a new opportunity and sometimes new hurts around each bend. It is always changing as we are always changing.
We are in this body of water called life, but we are also of it. Made of it. A part of it. We cannot separate ourselves from it. Because we are responsible for it too. We choose key life sources or the inputs to our life. Whether it mentally, physically, emotionally or spiritually, we feed these areas of our life with the choices we make in relationships, physical exercise, education, etc. The inputs to our life effects how we live, who we love, decisions we make, how we view ourselves and even our relationship with God. These are the internal forces that we can control. But there are external forces as well. The things we cannot control that also impact our life, but they will have either more of less of an impact depending on the inputs we have chosen.
As one could imagine it is these two sets of elements that determine our output to the world. Like tributaries that feed the river, what we bring in to our life feeds our whole being and changes us in either a positive or negative way.
I was perusing the web the other day, specifically Meet Up, looking for a running group or volunteer group to join and I saw an interesting trend. It is the Dumbing Down of the Decades. Or at least that’s what I’ll call it. We’ve all heard 40 is the new 30. Well for those of my readers who are 40, you’ve probably heard it. Those younger or older may have heard something similar about your specific decade. Well, I ran across a group called the 30 is the new 20 and I’ve seen 50 is the new 40.
This so perplexed me. And it got me to thinking. Well, if 50 is the new 40, which is really the new 30, which is oh so like 20, then that would possibly explain the 20 year olds living with their parents and the 30 year olds acting like they’ve just got out of college. We are all getting younger as we age. By the time I hit 50 it will be the new 20. Well, at least here’s hoping!
Let’s take a look at my grandparents generation. I wrote about it HERE. Surviving the great depression, thrust in to war at a young age, doing what has to be done to survive and then provide. These guys were in their late teens and early 20’s providing for families, going off to war. And we’re not talking about volunteers and the National Guard, we’re talking about our country of men. They had to grow up fast and furious or die. It certainly changes perspective on where you are and what you are doing in life.
It seems as time and technology have progressed, we have regressed as a whole. Not in all cases, but in general. Or maybe only in part, I’m not sure.
Or has it always been this way? Doesn’t each generation view the up and coming generation through a lens of semi-shaded scepticism about their level of maturity and responsibility and seriousness? Have I just reached that age when I’m the one who is doubting the next generation behind me?
What do you think?
My Loves
The feeling of panic creeped in as the day progressed. I tried my best to shove it down and ignore it. But it reared it’s ugly head with a vengeful force as I grabbed the keys off the counter top and got in to my car to go pick my kids.
Thoughts flooded my brain and my heart all at the same time and I couldn’t stop them from coming. Like a dam releasing water, the alarm had been sounded so you know it’s coming but you have no control over it whatsoever. ‘I don’t want to go. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be a mom. I don’t want to what…..? What is wrong with me? How can I feel this way after all we have been through? I’m horrible. This is so bad.’ Rewind. Repeat.
Seriously, I wasn’t sure who was driving to pick up the kids from preschool. I didn’t know her. The woman behind the wheel hysterically crying with an aching pit in her stomach that grew as the miles between her car and the preschool shrank. Yet, those were my hands on the wheel. And those were my swollen empty eyes staring back at me in the rear view mirror. Looking at me as a stranger would, with disgust and disdain.
Of course, there had been days before when certain thoughts flashed in to my head. ‘I don’t want to do this RIGHT NOW. I don’t want to have to be a mom TODAY.’ Those are typical right? Most moms feel this way at some point. Maybe it’s postpartum or sleep deprivation or raising a teenage daughter that triggers them. They are normal and on occasion may come or go. But this time was different.
The thoughts did not have qualifiers attached to them, such as: right now, today, in these circumstances. No, they were distinct with no end point. It seemed pretty cut and dry. I don’t want to be a mom. Plain and simple. And it was that simplicity that scared the hell out of me and brought me to hot burning tears I had not felt for a while.
Doing the only thing I knew to do I reached out to my best friend and fellow mom, Michele. As a mother of 4 whose oldest is 22, she’s done it all. I often rely on her for mom advice. I was so relieved to hear her say hello and I immediately poured my heart out. The beauty of a friend like Michele is the honesty that permeates our friendship. She knows all my secrets and can take anything I dish out regardless how ugly it may be. And she still loves me anyway. It is one of the true friendships I have that is completely non-judgmental.
I tell you all this so you will know that I held nothing back, didn’t sugar coat it or glaze over it as a mere venting session. No, this was I am in major trouble and I don’t know how to handle this. And her response, “Amy, that’s normal. I’ve done the same thing.” What? This was not the response I was expecting at all. Seriously? Maybe I didn’t explain myself well enough. I was just coming back from vacation. I had been gone for 6 days and didn’t want to go pick up my kids. I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t miss them. That’s far from normal.
But apparently not far from normal given my circumstances according to my friend and my life coach. As a single mom, my life revolves around them. I’m the sole caregiver. I’ve discussed it here many times before that it can be hard and lonely and frustrating. Especially knowing that their father is gallivanting all over Europe with his new girlfriend living a life of leisurely freedom. Please know before you send the hate mail that I do realize my life comes with amazing good times and many rewards that he will never know. But although we’ve hit a great stride in our new life, it is still quite lonely at times. As my coach put it, it is a life of deprivation. Not always, not completely, but in general.
I had just went from a life of deprivation to the extreme opposite on vacation: a life of abundance. My holiday entailed complete freedom with adult friends and activities to pick and choose at will. I had anything I wanted and no one required a single thing from me. WOW! Talk about a stark contrast in life. Here I was walking back in to deprivation and all that it entailed. No wonder I was having a moment of panic.
Michele told me to forget about it, get over the guilt, dry my eyes and go in to get my kids. So I did. And you know what happened. The minute I saw them running up to me yelling, “Mama, Mama!”, my heart filled and I was back. Back to my life of deprivation and thankful for it. Thankful for them. Their smiles, their eyes, their hearts and little hands. Oh every ounce of it was so precious.
I guess sometimes it’s hard to make a transition especially in extremes. Like going from Antarctica to the Sarah Desert, it requires a degree of mental preparation and transition time. I analyzed the thoughts and feeling too much through the lens of mommy guilt and the impact was exponential. My self-confidence and my love for them was falsely shaken by ME.
Reality is I love being their mom. I’m a good mom. I’m a hip mom. And I’m proud of that. I had just forgotten it for a moment.
Little Blue Eyes
Blue Eyes Too!
While I always figured that my kids would be cute, I also renounced the idea of being a stage mom. But I gotta say… my son is not only cute, he’s an entertainer. He’s outgoing and very expressive. He enjoys singing and is jealous his sister gets to take dance lessons. He’s a little JT wanna be! So please use this link and vote for my blue eye’d charmer so his talents don’t go to waste! LOL!
Emma has been born in the wrong decade. She is really a hippy from the 60’s who wants to dance and spread love to everyone. She’s a bit more shy at times. But once you get her going watch out! She’s smart, quick witted, more daring of the two and so beautiful! Not just on the outside but on the inside too. She has such a warm spirit! You can choose the same link below to get to Emma.
Thanks for your votes!!!
Hey! I’m coming a bit late to the party but that is my style. Not making a grand entrance but just tend to run a little late to everything in general. 
I attended the Nashville Ultimate Blog Party In Real Life 2009 on Monday night (yes, I was late to it too!) And it was so cool to meet people in the area that are blogging and doing the kid thing. Even though many of us are strangers, the mommy blog connects us so we just ‘get it’.
About Me…
Well, here’s a summary of my first post from a year ago….
o Who Am I? I’m just a girl, clinging to the age of 39, getting divorced w/ 2.5 YO twins. Many people don’t think of a 39 YO female as a girl, but I mean girl versus – mother, woman, mentor, nurturer, etc. Oh, don’t get me wrong I am all those things too and then some. The part of me that goes beyond being Jacob & Emma’s Mommy (JEMS). And that’s who’s writing this blog. Someone once told me I had a lot of energy in my writing, so much to say. And you all are the lucky ones who get to read it all, if you choose.
I have two miracle babies, literally the product of God’s ability to answer prayers & grant those of us who deserve so little the most amazing things… Jacob & Emma Grace were born at 27 weeks. If there is ever a doubt as to whether or not God still performs miracles in this day & age, rest assured it is true because I look at two of them each & every day!
This is what I don’t know…
- I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up…
- I don’t know if I will be alone forever or love again…
- I don’t know if I really know Christ as I should…
- I don’t know if I will ever get it right…
- I don’t know how to write a blog, or really just write…
- I don’t know how I’m going to support 2 kids…
- I don’t know if there is life Beyond JEMS!…
- I don’t know what I will write about tomorrow…
Here’s what I do know…
- I know I want to write, paint, learn, love & grow everyday and recapture passions that have been oppressed for too long.
- I know that the man department will be what God wants it to be; this time He’s choosing
- I know that I want to know Christ better
- I know that I will fail and succeed over and over again and that’s ok
- I know that I will constantly use spell check and grammar check & still not get it right
- I know that I will find a way to support my family. I’m a pretty smart girl – MBA in Global Mgt & all.
- I know that I will make a life Beyond JEMS!
- I know that whatever it is…. I will definitely write tomorrow….
Will you come along with me to see what I write & discover this girl’s life Beyond JEMS!?
And where am I a year later? Well, the list hasn’t changed much! All of these things are still true. It’s all a process. Life.
A few things have definitely changed though. I started a business Beyond Creatives – Web Design, Social Media & Small Biz Consulting. My niche is most small companies that can’t or won’t spend money on big marketing firms. My fundamental belief is at a minimum everyone needs at least a professional looking landing page to establish your business. So I help them understand the web opportunities and work within their budget to make it happen. It’s been fun! I’m not making big bucks, but I’m helping people take their business to the next level at a price they can afford. It’s gratifying to know I’m teaching & helping.
The second thing that’s changed is that I am now getting comfortable with the term “writer”. I used to shy away from it because I didn’t think I had the skillset or talent. But after multiple rounds of positive feedback, I’m beginning to believe it. I joined the Nashville Writers Group and am loving it. The crazy writing exercises, meeting published authors and lay dreamers like myself; I love all of it!
Well, I really should name this blog Sybil because it’s just all over the place: my spiritual journey, techy stuff, kid stuff, divorce stuff, single mom stuff, career stuff and running stuff. You’ll find a little bit of it here and there. Regardless of how you got here, I hope you find something that makes you laugh or cry before you leave!
I’m looking forward to getting to know you! Send me a link in the comments to your blog and I’ll share some link love and stop by for a visit.
