My Black Friday Christmas List

Black Friday is the day after tomorrow. I know this because my mailbox, email inbox, and voice mailbox are full of offers promising to save me all the dollars, on all the things, for all the people, forever and ever amen. I’m exhausted just thinking about all the savings.
To help me sort through it all, I’ve put together a Christmas shopping list. Perhaps you’ll find it useful as well, should you also need help wading through your gift-giving and purchasing processes.
Happy day-before Thanksgiving!

MY BLACK FRIDAY CHRISTMAS LIST:

• Wisdom as I try to better love, nurture, feed, educate, and raise my Littles in a world that values their pocketbooks more than their creativity, their bodies more than their minds, and their contributions more than their ethics.
• Skinny jeans that aren’t jeggings, leggings, or tights; that don’t gap in the back when I bend over, and that don’t have glitter on the back pockets. My butt doesn’t need glitter, thank you very much fashion industry.
• A paid-in-full mortgage on the place I call home.
• Sleep in any form—free from extra children in my bed, late night cries for water, bad dreams, snoring, and random fire-alarm beeping due to low batteries.
• Words at the tip of my tongue when I need them, as opposed to two days later in the middle of the night.
• Grocery carts that don’t flip when being ridden upon by four small children.
• Car seats that buckle and unbuckle themselves.
• A checkbook that balances itself.
• A checkbook that balances.
• Balance.
• Someone to decorate my house like JoAnna Gaines’s house.
• JoAnna Gaines’s house.
• JoAnna Gaines.
• Netflix shows that have a longer than 14-second next-episode countdown, so I can actually work up the willpower to stop. watching. at. 2am.
• Willpower. Of any kind.
• Greater empathy, deeper kindness, expansive generosity, more certain convictions, faith that never wavers, and a love that never fails the people I care about the most.

What’s on your Christmas list? I’d love to know! xo

 

do your job.

Sometimes I wonder how much more. . .
How much more suffering and loss and questions and heavy hearts?
How much more hunger and pain and grief and empty tomorrows?
And then I look around and think, “There’s work to do.”
I’m only one small person. One small voice. I can’t cure any of it, or make it stop, or fix the brokenness. None of us can.
But I can love hard and lean into sadness with those who need me to.
I can hold a hand, lend a shoulder, cry with a friend, make a meal, use my hands, feet, heart, and words in the best way I know to say Love is bigger. Over and over again.

Don’t despair. The story isn’t finished. The walk Home is long, but none of us have to do it alone. Do your job today: Go off script and love someone—anyone—with the sort of kindness that pushes them toward Hope. That’s the only reason we’re here.

#prayforbrussels #andforusall #loveisbigger