Five

Five weeks.  Five beautiful girls.  A family of five plus five.

It's been five weeks. It seems like a breath and a year all at the same time.  We've shared tears, laughter, pain, frustration and even mean words.  We've shared bathrooms, meals, germs (numbers 4 & 5 currently fevering and puking at the moment), prayers and dreams.

It feels hard most days.  Like sometimes the pain that has been absorbed by these girls is enough to break us all.  Like the end couldn't possibly be here soon enough but will inevitably be here way too soon.  How could we ever go back to 'normal' now that we know what it could be like?

Our home is alive.  And there is not a single square inch that isn't being fully utilized.  Some of them over utilized : )

We have had so many laughs.  So many games.  So much fun and mud and dust and sprinkles.

And then there are the tears and the hard things that threaten to break me at the core of who I am.  The inmost being that screams out in sheer surrender...........but can only proceed through the fiery smoke because of our Savior.  The one who called us to this battlefield in the first place.

We can't fix anything. We can't change anything.  We can't even make small repairs.  But we can love, we can nourish, we can celebrate, we can worship, and we can listen.  Above all things that I am learning it is how to listen.  Not with my ears, but my heart.

And for that I am so thankful.  I have done a horrible job of pressing in and listening with my brain all of these years but not truly allowing my heart to hear.  The Holy Spirit is working in me and I am trying my best to shut down 'me' and listen only to what it is saying.  To hear with my heart and not with my ears.

Press in.  And press on.  That is what I am going to do today.  And laundry, because I always have laundry these days.