on how to love our families this summer (and feature posts from this week's final link-up)

it's really quite simple, and it comes to me as we walk through long grass,the boys ahead.

my mother-in-law, beside me, and every once in awhile she stops and hugs me, like i've just returned from overseas. i only live a few blocks away but it's been awhile since i've visited: just me. amongst the grain bins and long grass and wooden fences.

later we drink coffee and she makes cinnamon rolls while the boys dump toys cars on the carpet and eat suckers and raid oma's cupboards for her crackers.

she rolls the dough and her skin is flour and we all are being created, daily, even as we're dying, i realize. we become something new every time we make something. we re-make ourselves, and this is what it means to be one with God: to always be becoming.

and even now, as i sit and seem to be doing nothing, i am letting peace do its work on me. i am being molded under the fingers of rest. i am becoming holy.

something about the summer says, hush. it's a lullaby the lilac bushes sing to the morning doves to the evening larks to the willows. it's the song that only the quiet can hear, the ones desiring to know God more than they desire to fill their wallets, and summer is one long sabbath. a chance to worship by doing nothing.

oma can't stop hugging me and thanking me for coming, with no agenda, with no husband, just me and the boys. and even though it felt like i was doing nothing, i was in fact, giving her everything. my time. and isn't this all God wants of us, too?

(in light of this, friends, i won't be blogging as regularly this summer, but i will still be posting... just whenever the mood strikes me. i want to breathe in these babies before they grow into men. aiden already isn't letting me pick him up anymore. it's tragic. i'm not sure when that happened but i keep picking him up anyways. love you.)

*each week we feature posts from the imperfect prose link-up which particularly inspired, challenged, or moved us. this week's are:

joy by old ollie

conversations about getting old by kath @ listening space

risk: a poem by jenni mullinix

where the wild things exist by misty

life lessons at the laundromat by bristol at diligent leaves

sometimes we need that first love by kateri