The words won't come easy tonight. Words to mark an amazingly simple day, a day filled with what a lot of other days look like. Errands, meals, kids, diapers, laughing, laundry, yawning... a lot of my regular everydays.

Yet, today is so huge. Huge and overwhelming and amazing and precious.

Tonight I will crawl in bed, exhausted, next to my very best friend who I have been so blessed to share the last 20 years with.

It hardly seems possible that the two children who walked down that aisle so many years ago are the same people raising babies, paying bills, and laughing so hard everyday. I can't believe we have spent more than half my life married.

In many ways it seems like just yesterday we made our vows before God and our family and friends...and in others I can see the lifetime we lived.

Through apartments, houses, the birth of five beautiful children, the death of one of those children, the loss of two of our parents, the joyous friendships we've made, the painful partings with some of those same friends. The mentorship of some amazing families, the learning to stand without them... twenty years takes kids to adult and yet leaves me feeling like I still have so much growth left to do.

To celebrate my wonderful husband wrote an amazing blog that he shared along with fabulous photos that we had taken by Stacee Lianna. I can't say anything better than he did.

When this verse came up on the screen in church Sunday morning two things happened simultaneously...My husband turned to me and said "You need to print that on an index card and tape it to your dashboard or something", and I started to sweat.

Truth be told, I wrote the verse address down (Isaiah 43:18-19) without even fully registering what was happening.

There have been seasons in my life, events where someone is speaking and I know it is a message meant for me. These words ignited something in me and I spent the next twenty minutes taking notes and waiting for the visiting preacher to invite people to pray...afraid I might leap out of my seat and rush the stage uninvited.

Not 18 hours after I wrote my last post, here was a message about destiny, purpose, mandates and assignments. Being not just willing but excited. Knowing that the mundane and ordinary moments are just as, if not more, important than the highlights.

I'm excited.

I'm dreaming.

God is preparing me for something. It might be more laundry, more hours toting kids, more time spent supporting some people I love who are fully walking in their dreams. It might have more frustration...and more waiting. It might still be winter...but my spring is coming and I will get to be used by Him to do something new...because it's already begun.

My oldest daughter is obsessed with re-runs of the show Wife Swap. Obsessed I tell you...and in a the-tv-lives-in-the-living room house, that means I am now watching millions of hours of the show, too. If you are unfamiliar with the plot, I'll break it down for you. The mom from a family that lives life at the very end of one extreme...Like the Fitness BootCamp, Only Organic, Vegan California family...switches with a mom from the other extreme... Like the Southern, Derby Car, Nothing but Fast Food, No Rules family...for two weeks. One week the moms live the lives of the mom they have switched with and the second week they get to change rules. Lots of chaos ensues. Lots of yelling. Kids get annoyed and many judgments are made, and someone usually cries.

Quality TV I tell ya.

Sometimes when we watch I think it wouldn't be so bad to have another mom come in here and give the place a really good scrub. That's the mom I'd get. The one with schedules and spreadsheets and she would not allow the mountain of laundry I am trying not to see right now.

She'd probably get the kids rooms pretty clean too. She'd get in there with a trash bag and vacuum and she'd get everything in it's place. Honestly, even if she was judging me in the process, I'd just be excited it's done.

My girls' room has hit that critical mass where they may need one of those mom interventions. The last time I did it is actually kind of a life defining day for me. That was the day my good friend Stacee introduced me to Stuff Christians Like, and the author I like to pretend is my best friend, Jon Acuff. :)

I laughed hard at the funny quirks in the Christian church that I love so much and I was also amazed at the greater spiritual points he managed to weave in as well...so, of course, I was hooked. SCL became a regular read. Serious Wednesday brought tears to my eyes more than once...and I even called to try and book him to speak at our church!

As often happens when you set out chasing your dream, God changed Jon's path a little and he became not "just an author" but a leader. And not a weird cult leader, but a voice to an entire generation of dreamers. He's reminding people everyday to dream...and then to put some hustle behind those dreams. To sweat, work and own those dreams. And to Start moving!

That passion is contagious and a little scary when you are me. I have been feeling like over and over again, God has been reminding me to dream, To be passionate. To move in my gifts...and yet, I have felt stuck, terrified, empty, alone, and lost.

In the weeks since my mother's death, I have been broken in a whole new place and I think God is dusting off some old dreams and possibly unearthing more. I'm to tired of "trying to do it right", and life seems too short to play around. And I honestly feel like the last two or three years I have been stuck in a pit I dug.

So here I am, stepping out, afraid to dream and filled with hope at the same time.

One of the things I most want to do is write again. Even if no one is reading I feel like I know myself so much more when I commit "words to paper".

Do you have a dream that terrifies you?

In about 10 minutes my house will be quiet. The kids will be in their beds and my husband is out. It will be too quiet to escape my thoughts...and it will be too quiet to distract me from the fact that my mother is still gone...that she passed quietly Tuesday morning and that the last time I will ever see her is just a memory now.

I have spent the last few days on a pre-planned mini road trip that I decided not to miss. It was nice to go, to not think, to step away from the everyday routine that was lacking a daily phone call... to listen to the ocean and feel the wind on my face and try to leave the deep sadness behind.

But at night, in the quiet, I can't escape the emptiness that comes with loss.

And I know when I wake up, it will still be there.

So as much as I am coveting the quiet time tonight, I am also kind of dreading it.

It seems like every blog on the planet has had a New Year's post up this past week, and I guess this one is no exception...although, to be honest, the new year seems like it was *ages* ago.

I'm sure I've talked before about how I don't really *do* resolutions, but this year feels so different.

There are probably about 8 million reasons why...new creative ventures, son in high school, heading into my "late thirties"...but I think the main reason is because I can see one season in my life is coming to a close...the door is swinging shut on this job of mine and it isn't going to reopen.

I am mostly okay with that, but it leaves me feeling a little afraid and wondering how it will all go now. Who I will be and where I will walk now.

Today, I snuggled a fresh and new baby in my arms and she smiled a big baby grin at me and it reminded me, again, that that season of holding my *own* fresh new babies is over. It's gone....and Zoe is growing and changing so much every day, that soon the crib will come down, and it won't go in the garage...it will go away. With the strollers. With the bouncy seats. Even the diapers...soon they will all be parts of stories about "When mine were small...." The small is fading so fast.

And I *love* watching my kids grow. Seeing the maturity in my eldest, the depth of my first girl, the sensitivity of my baby boy and the bucket of sass in Zoe...but with every step, a part of who I was is left behind and I move beyond into something new...that I haven't known for the last 15 years.

So this year I am looking at becoming something else, reviving a different me...it's exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time.

I'm trying to take better care of myself, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

This January is a new beginning.

I imagine it will be messy, and difficult at times, but I also know I will laugh, I will grow, and I will be blessed so I am kind of anxious to get on with it.

I'm not sure why the words are stuck. Why they won't flow.

I keep starting this post and then erasing it, starting a new thought, erasing it again...

I am the worst blogger in the world. I look at my "last post" date and wince...and then I don't even have the courtesy to post my blogs at a reasonable hour.