I am unsurprised that when we closed the door to babies a few years ago, desires grew beyond my home responsibilities.

I was out of survival mode.

Keeping six young kids fed, rested, and safe was easily a full-time job and a couple of part-time jobs combined in harder seasons.

While life is still full, this is mostly my choice and no longer filled up with meeting the most basic survival needs.

I quickly tossed a book into my suitcase.

It was not from my seminary reading stack but a Christmas gift I had been slowly reading over the last few months.

I didn’t expect much reading time on our five-day family getaway to the mountains for my fortieth birthday, so a book with just a few chapters left was realistic.

As one of those odd people who rarely leave a book half-baked, I was determined to finish it for the sweet taste of accomplishment more than revelation.

‘Revelation’ sounds dramatic, but that is often my experience when words and God collide.

A few weeks before, I had been complaining that God seemed distant—he wasn’t speaking to me in the usual wordy ways.

During a little break on our trip, I turned to the final chapter in The Right Kind of Confidence and read the chapter title, “Deeply Rooted Confidence.”

As emails arrived in my inbox at the start of this new year, it was amusing and a bit overwhelming that one after the other, they asked to steal the sacred time my family enjoys on Saturday mornings.

Four sacred Sabbath Saturday mornings in a row could be gone just like that!

I was relieved when I brought this concern to my husband, and we narrowed it down to one meeting that was mandatory and released the others from our calendar, typing “skip” beside each one in our Google calendar.

This past Saturday, we enjoyed our usual slow, extra special Saturday breakfast where Benj and the kids make some kind of delicious baking, usually topped with berries, syrup and whipped cream, and then piled into our minivan for one of our “experience” Christmas gifts.

We cross-country skid in the beautiful winter snow for the rest of the day.

Like never before, I am reminded that the Holy Spirit is drawing us into sacred rhythms of life if only we would listen.

The demands of this modern world leave little opportunity to be still, let alone quiet.

It is comforting to know that throughout biblical and church history, in what may have been simpler times, practices of silence and solitude were as necessary as they are for busy individuals, especially Christian leaders, today.

Jesus pursued these spaces for himself and his disciples, leaving no question that Christ-followers must execute them.

For many years, my jogging stroller contraption was my ticket to any sense of “silence” and “solitude.”

Those words are in quotation marks because this setting is not the true definition of either. I had to keep my expectations low, so I didn't get frustrated by inevitable interruptions.

Hours were not flying by when I had six children eight years and under, but I had it pretty good.

My babies slept in a separate room within days of being born, and most of them consistently slept through the night within a few months, though my last one pushed the envelope here.

Still, there was always the possibility of an interruption (or more) on any given night—a reality of six young children.

There was no one to put me to bed while my husband was away on a backpacking trip this summer, so there I was at 11 PM eating the chocolate almonds he left under my pillow and scrolling through homeschool videos on YouTube:

Do I have enough planned for this next school year?

I could try this curriculum…

We really should learn another language…

Why not beautify our cursive writing?

Pause. Breathe. Remember, Charlene.

Be With Me

I'm leaving my wonderful husband and six kids at home in a few weeks and flying to join my mom and siblings at a cottage by a lake for several days.

I have been revisiting our home systems to ensure things go smoothly while I'm away, and this practical blog post will share some of my thoughts and practices on meals, chores and the big one, laundry!

I link to resources and previous posts on these topics as well.

When home systems flow, they facilitate physical, mental and emotional space for the more soulful parts of living, like relating and creating!

Here are my Top 3 Home Systems:

Around the new year last year, I was on a video call with two lifelong friends, sharing that it felt depressing to look at 2022.

We sat with our tears, knowing that outside of a miracle for my dad, who was battling acute blood cancer, a funeral was inevitable in the next year.

Death became a brutal reality by Easter weekend.

Still, 2022 was a full year of living for the rest of us. It's what my dad would have wanted.

And now it is time again, for reflection and anticipation—in this space between celebrating the birth of Jesus and the beginning of a new year!

Hidden away in our storage room is a massive bin of time capsules. These are my journals consisting of messy writing, desperate prayers, and useless details, along with my dated day planners holding menial tasks, including which days I washed my hair—thank you dry shampoo!

But they also chart a path through the terrain of a heart growing from a child to a woman and a wife to a mother.

These bound pages tucked away as keepsakes are intricate maps revealing struggles and successes.

Last weekend sixty beautiful ladies sat physically distanced across our church sanctuary to take in IF:Gathering. This women’s conference is simulcasted into thousands of homes and gathering spaces across the globe every year.

We were challenged to hope and trust in the Lord through all the ‘even if’ places in our hearts.

It was like I was in my teens again, taking in a missions or youth conference where the message to pursue personal revival, and live with an urgency to share Christ and disciple our generation reverberated.