Author: sarahmarie

Lover of coffee, fair trade, and community. Imperfect seeker of the fullness of life (John 10;10). Believer in eating together.

From a Middle Aged Married Woman

sarahmarie

Let’s have coffee together.

I’ve often dreamed of my home as a safe place. It is a place where steaming cups of coffee or a beautiful meal or near silence, if that is what is needed, are abundantly available.

I imagine that I am the kind of woman who nurtures this kind of environment. Sometimes the entryway is scattered with nearly innumerable shoes, and sometimes the pairs are few. Always, the presence of the owner(s) of the shoes is held with care and intention.

I have been married for 15 years. This alone doesn’t make me any kind of expert on being married, of course, but I think it’s safe to say I’ve learned a few things about relationships. I want to share them. I don’t know why we keep trying to do things on our own because it hasn’t worked well so far.

If you come to my home for coffee or a meal, I will want to hear how you are doing, when (if!) you’re ready to share it. Wherever you are in the relational spectrum, I want to hear about the good and the hard. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the telling of the good seems to expand the experience in our beings and the telling of the hard in a safe environment brings healing.

If you are not married, I will tell you that you don’t need to get married to become more of who you really are. What you need is deep human connection. You need people who love you as you are, who have the hard conversations. It’s what we all need.

At 16 years old, I latched onto news about Jesus being a shepherd who came to bring life to the full. I picture “life to the full” as arms-open-wide kind of living, loosening our grasp on the things we hold so tightly, breathing crisp, clean our deep into our lungs, being the best expressed version of the person we were created to be.
This life to the full is what I’ve wanted since then, what I’m still pursuing, and what I want for more people.

I need to warn you that the pursuit of “life to the full” requires bravery. It requires letting people in and having hard conversations and making room for things to be different, in our marriage and in our relationships.

Sometimes our hearts will be broken. One of the ideas that has carried me through is “make room for things to be different.”

This includes in ourselves. We are some of the hardest people to forgive sometimes, but Loved One, you’ve got to give yourself a chance to be different. Change, for me, has taken longer than I’d like, but less time than standing still.

While you’re at it, I’ll add one more piece of advice, if you have room for it- gossip isn’t helping you or any of your relationships. A few times in my marriage, I have called my mother to tell her about a difficult time I was having. She listened and she was compassionate, but she also pointed out how my husband might feel. She was right, and that was exactly what I needed to hear.


The friends that back you up no matter what? Let me just say it again because I love you- I absolutely believe the best kind of relationships love us where we’re at, no matter what, and they’re also willing to have the hard conversations.

Evie on her 7th birthday.

sarahmarie

Today is my niece’s 7th birthday.
I cried the first time I held her.
Postnatal hormones and all that.
But also, it seems like the One Who Made Us, made us from the same cloth.

She tells me she has regrets about a girl she didn’t spend enough time with when she was four.
But you probably learned from that, didn’t you? I say. You’ve got to learn to forgive yourself.
Just practice.
I know because these are lessons my own spirit needs.

Let’s chat some more, she says.
What did you want when you turned 7?
What was Selah’s birth like?
Is there anything you want to chat about right now, Aunt Sarah?
I just want to chat a little bit more.

My daughter calls her to join the fun in the pool.
Not yet. Evie has more questions.

I love her.
Her curiosity.
The way she feels so deeply.
The way if I give her a moment to settle, she’ll say something like, that just really bothered me.

I understand completely, Evie P.
I’m so glad I get to be your Aunt Sarah
So I can tell you,
You are a fantastic person to be.

Distraction in a Beautiful Moment

sarahmarie

Recently, I received a group text from my husband, Avoider of Group Texts. When the man I married decides that sending a group text is worth the potential for continual responses, I know it’s going to be a good one.

The text was a picture of him, me, and a group of our friends. Those friends held sacred space for each other during a tough season in our lives. They buoyed me for a time and helped me learn a little more about what it is to be a true friend. In the picture, all of us had gathered together around a long table after being separated by miles and time. We were about to share a meal and enjoy each other’s company, one of my very favorite things to do.

That picture also held something else that isn’t obvious to the casual observer: I was absolutely stressed over the actual eating of the meal.

The food served at the restaurant we met at was the thoughtful kind that I love to see. The meat came from very local animals that had lived their lives eating the food that works for their bodies, spending most of their time doing what animals naturally do. The bread was probably locally baked, and the produce was probably locally grown.

When a person tries to address needs that can’t be addressed with the right diet, the “right diet,” can’t meet those needs. It is a thief .” I looked at the menu offerings and decided they didn’t match the exact “eating plan” that I had deemed the “best way of eating for me.”

I was surrounded with two beautiful children, some of the dearest friends I no longer got to see very often, and I spent so much energy on how I could possibly navigate the meal and feel good about it.

The picture my husband sent captured a table full of people who gave me a soft place to land during a time when I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed. Back then, when I didn’t know how to make friends because letting people in was terrifying, these people offered me real, up close and personal friendship.

I have many more stories like this one- otherwise perfectly lovely memories tainted by my desire to eat the perfect meal, to eat only the “right” things (the “right” things, by the way, changed depending on who I had been listening to and what food ideas I had been reading). I know now that what I really wanted when I stressed over the exact foods I allowed into my body was control and peace.

Maybe you know the feeling of being painfully distracted from a beautiful moment. Maybe for you, the distraction is something else like how you look compared to other people, or when you’re going to get your next drink or your next cigarette, or something else.

The good news is, this isn’t how our story has to end.

The Messiness of Heaven

sarahmarie

A little girl lays down to sleep and leans over to hug the Jesus she’s heard so much about. The faith and imagination in children is strong, and it doesn’t occur to her that this is too silly or socially unacceptable for her to be doing.

A few years earlier, she scolds women older than her own mother who are smothering her newborn baby brother and, the way she sees it, causing his distress. This is unlike her usual behavior, but her need to take care of her people pushes through her fear just enough to let the words come through and burn the memory in her mind.

It’s a glimpse of the fire that burns, low and slow, under her quiet people-pleasing disposition.

The little girl does what seems right to ease the workload of her parents- sinks full of too much soap and breakfasts covered in chocolate chips and marachino cherries at first. 

She micromanages games and candy trades with her siblings so everything seems fair in her eyes. Shepherds them to her bed during times of distress. Scolds the youngest when he doesn’t pitch in “enough.”

She is driven to make sure her people are taken care of, achieve approval of who she is, and make the world right again.

There is something in the heart of the little girl who knows. Things are not as they should be, but they will be. It’s heaven set in her heart, but she doesn’t know it yet.

As she gets older, she picks up kindling and drops them into her heart where they add to the fire she didn’t start.

The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. 

She wants that.

Your kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven. 

On earth, too. His kingdom is for now, too, not something that exists somewhere outside of her reach.

And on she goes as she walks, the fire building until it comes out of her in words-outbursts and desperation. The old, rotten and poorly built pieces in her are being burned away while new constructs are being put up.  It’s a mess, really.

Healthy Holidays

sarahmarie

Try as I might, I cannot pry my emotions, spirit, mind, and heart apart.  I want to address each separately, and truthfully, ignore some altogether, but all the components that make up ME affect each other, whether I like it or not.

When I’ve had a tough week emotionally, I’m going to need a nap on Sunday.

When I’ve been ignoring that I even have a spirit, I’m going to find it hard to resist eating all the food I don’t actually enjoy.

This is always true, but exacerbated over the holidays with added festivities, expectations, and food everywhere.

I want to live healthy, whole, and free over this season.

Not living perfectly.

Not perpetually resisting the sweets I pass by every day, only to run out of willpower and dive in, head first.

But living with care for who I am physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Even during what tends to be a busier season.

Healthy, whole, and free. I want it for me, and I want it for as many people as possible.