Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Cinderella Mom

If you think Jesus would have come into your home that day and not issued a strong rebuke to the head of household, you are mistaken. These words of condemnation have been haunting me for days now. They aren’t all that different than the soundtrack I play in my head on an almost-daily basis. It’s…

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This is 40

I am nesting. On Saturday I emptied the refrigerator. Last summer’s homemade pickles in their jars. The bread ends that seem to multiply on every shelf. The eggs. The milk. The fruit and veggies. All of it sat on the floor or the counter as I carefully removed the shelves and wiped them down with…

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Beauty on the Backroads {or Why I Changed the Name of my Blog}

I’ve heard that life is like a highway. And it definitely seems like that sometimes. The pace of life swirls around me at dizzying speeds. We’re all so busy. In such a hurry. Always somewhere to be, something else to do. I’m a get-to-the-point, get-there-quick kind of girl. I don’t like to waste time on…

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Valuables

A few weeks ago, a family on our street had their garage broken into. The thief stole a motorcycle and a guitar. Today as we walked home from church, I noticed a sign in their yard for a security system. I thought that seemed a little bit like locking the barn door after the horse is already gone, but I understand why they did it. Sometimes we don’t recognize the value of something until it is taken from us.

I think about purity, and how little it seems to be valued these days. It’s almost laughable to call yourself “pure.” It was in my early college days, too. Those of us who managed to escape high school with some purity intact were pressured into becoming less pure, if you will. I didn’t treasure and protect purity for myself until I’d lost it. And while you can, to some extent, protect what’s left, you never really get back what was lost.

I feel like an “old fogey” when this topic comes up with teens we know. Try to impress on them the value of pure hearts, minds and bodies, and I feel shut out before we’ve even begun to talk. I wonder if it will be the same with my children. Will they want to hear about the mistakes their parents have made and how desperately we want for them to avoid those mistakes?

Where are their examples of purity, anyway? Is there even one “cool” person who could stand as an example of pure living? And I’m not just talking sexual purity, but speech that’s not littered with “f-bombs” and lesser coarseness, humor that’s not based on innuendo, crudeness or at the expense of someone else, and a life that’s based on honesty and integrity.

Have we made those characteristics lame somehow? Do we search in vain for lives that model them? Is this what it’s like to get old?

How do we start over and give purity back its value?

More questions than answers today.

 “Who may ascend the hill of the LORD ? 
  Who may stand in his holy place?

 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, 
 who does not lift up his soul to an idol 
 or swear by what is false.

 He will receive blessing from the LORD 
 and vindication from God his Savior.

Such is the generation of those who seek him, 
who seek your face, O God of Jacob.” (Psalm 24:3-6)

Tuned in

Now that it’s spring and the windows are open, I find myself having to retrain my hearing. Yesterday I was washing dishes while both of the kids were napping and I thought I heard whimpering. I stopped what I was doing to listen more attentively and realized it was the neighbor’s dog. (The neighbors didn’t have a dog last spring, so I imagine this might happen more often.) Minutes before the dog whimpering, I mistook sounds on the radio for a crying baby.

Maybe my hearing is going. Or maybe as a mother my ears are just more tuned to the sound of crying. It’s incredible, really, how I can almost completely ignore the sound of someone else’s crying baby because the baby doesn’t sound like mine but then jump to attention at a sound that isn’t crying but sounds similar.

Am I that in tune to the voice of God?

Sometimes, I forget what He sounds like. So many “voices” compete for our attention and not all of them are bad. Many sound like God but when we stop and tune our ears, we realize it’s something else.

A few weeks ago while reading family devotions, Phil lowered his voice instead of competing with Isabelle’s volume. It worked. She got quieter, too. Maybe that’s why God’s presence is compared to a “gentle whisper” when Elijah meets him at the mouth of the cave. (1 Kings 19:10-11) Maybe God wants us to quiet ourselves in order to hear Him.

When I’m listening for my children’s cries, it’s because I don’t want to delay in responding. How quick do I respond to God when He calls? When I read about Samuel responding first to Eli, then to the Lord (1 Samuel 3:1-10) I imagine him quietly waiting for his master’s command, jumping up when he hears it and running to him to await further instruction.

Whisper. Quiet. Waiting. Listening. These are not the words that describe the world in which we live.

So, I wonder, what are we missing?