This is a story about my deep love for the Peloton bike. 

And also about how truly ridiculous I am capable of being. 

A little bit of backstory: like a few hundred thousand other people, the Peloton was a pandemic purchase for me. But it wasn’t just that. I was 38 weeks pregnant with my sixth baby, Bray, and I had gained a good bit more weight with his pregnancy than any of my others. Like almost double, if you’re wondering. So, sitting on the couch one day, with an achy back and throbbing lady parts, in a moment of I can’t wait to not feel this way anymore I texted my husband at work and told him I think we needed a Peloton. We could use our tax return. I supported my argument by reminding him that we once paid for a YMCA membership that cost around $100 a month for the whole family, and we went roughly one to two times a month. If each 30-minutes on the elliptical cost us $50 then really, the Peloton would be a steal compared to that. He texted back with a thumbs up and before my temporary momentum left me, I ordered the bike. I knew if I thought too much about it, I’d get tired again and DoorDash a Carmel Macchiato to my porch instead. 

Like I said, hundreds of thousands of other people were also ordering their bikes, so we were going to have to wait six to eight weeks for it to arrive, but like I also said, I was 38 weeks pregnant so that felt just about perfect to me. I would have a baby and a few weeks later my get back in shape savior would arrive at our doorstep.

It didn’t totally work out that way. The bike did arrive, and I did of course use it the first day, and it was the hardest twenty minutes of my life. Taking spin classes a decade ago does not prepare you to just hop on a bike again. Plus I didn’t know that a gel bike seat cover would have been a great help and I paid for those twenty minutes down below for days. It was another week or so before I got back on.

I was hit or miss on the bike the first few months. I would try for twice a week, but then I would accidentally go ten days or so without riding. I started mentally calculating the price of each workout with the monthly membership fee I was paying and while it wasn’t the YMCA membership we weren’t using expensive, it was enough to make me feel silly for not riding more. By the Fall of 2021, I was seven months postpartum and needed to stop making excuses for that extra pregnancy weight that was still hanging around, so I started making riding a priority. 

In December, life got really hard, and the bike became the place I went to work some of that pain out. 

That’s another story I would love to tell you sometime, but what I am telling you here is that Peloton keeps track of everything you do: every ride, every output, every personal record. And I started to get addicted to the metrics. They were like my own personal performance reviews: you’re amazing at this Katie, look how much you are improving! You bring so much to this team, Katie, we’re lucky to have you show up on this bike. 

Of course that’s not what they were saying. The truth is the bike was cheaper than therapy and I need a S&%$-ton of therapy, so I rode a lot. 50 rides. 100 rides. 150 rides. I ate up every milestone, giddy like a little girl getting a trophy in front of her parents.

Around mid-May of this year, I looked ahead and realized that if I could finish approximately 32 rides in two weeks, I could get my 200th ride on my 37th birthday. This probably only makes sense if you’ve ever taken a Peloton class, because you know that the instructors take a little time each class to give a shout out to people who are taking the class live that have milestones, like getting to 50 rides or having a birthday. 

Welllll. What do you know, I could potentially have TWO milestones in one day and if that wasn’t going to earn a public shoutout, what would?

I turned into somewhat of a crazy person for the last two weeks in May. 32 rides in 14 days. I got up early and stayed up late and sometimes did three or four rides after the kids went to bed. They weren’t all super long or super hard, but I wanted a shoutout and I was going to get it, so I did what I needed to do to add those rides up. 

The day before my birthday, a Saturday, I took my 199th ride, which tee’d me up perfectly for the 5:00am 30-minute 2010’s Hip Hop class on Sunday morning. That night, Alex took me to my favorite restaurant where I diligently ordered a salad because “I’ve got a big ride in the morning. I’m getting a shoutout.” [insert smug face]. I didn’t have any pizza, lest I feel sluggish in the morning.

Around midnight, something Alex ate turned his stomach over and he rushed to the toilet. He ended up being fine after that, but I have this thing in my old age where I cannot fall back asleep easily once I am woken up. I tossed and turned until around 3:00am, or that was the last time I remember seeing the clock, because I was doing that thing you do when you know you have to wake up early and instead you stress about missing your wake up call so just never really get any rest. At 4:40am, the alarm went off and I felt dead. Absolutely no way I could do a bike ride in 20 minutes. 

BUT YOU ARE GOING TO GET A SHOUTOUT, KATIE! I told myself. You’ve literally been killing yourself to get to this moment. Don’t miss it. Kendall Toole’s class is waiting. I dragged myself to the bike.

Friends, I’m sure Kendall is a lovely person, but she doesn’t care about a stranger’s 200th ride on her 37th birthday. I rode every single one of those 30 minutes waiting for her to tell me I’m doing a good job, and the shoutout never came. 

To add insult to injury, I had told a handful of friends my plan, even invited them to join me on the bike, but I keep company with people who have far more sense than I do and a 4:40am wake up was not in their game plan. But, they did text to ask enthusiastically, “Did you get your shoutout, friend?!” and four or five times I had to say “Sure didn’t.” I was moderately bummed all day.

I’d like you to know that my temporary loss of sense has returned. I don’t do more than one ride a day anymore in order to gain one sentence of approval from someone who can only see my profile name. And, I’m working real hard on not caring so much about the metrics but the other day I went on a ride and THE OUTPUT WASN’T WORKING. I did a whole ride and at the end it said “0”. ZERO. I mildly panicked that people might see that and think I quit the ride or something and then I remember absolutely no one on earth cares. No one. 

I don’t think I need to tell you the lesson here, but I will: Don’t ride for the shoutout. It may never come (plus there is the whole bit in Matthew 6 about not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing and I don’t know if that could be any more clear - the shoutouts aren’t supposed to come). Chasing the applause of others is going to let you down eventually. And then you just look really silly and end up incredibly tired all day and regret not eating the pizza to celebrate your 37th birthday.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at my home church about remembering the gospel. We walked through all the reasons it is so easy to forget who we are in Christ – which is the most important thing about us – and how our lives and culture so easily bend toward distractions, most of which we welcome in as soon as we turn on our phones; others we have less control over but still have to interpret through the lens of scripture and not culture. We camped out for a bit on the Greek word perrisuema, whichmeans “that which is left over or remains.” It comes from Luke 6:45, where Jesus tells us “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil, for out of the ‘perrisuema’ [or overflow] of the heart his mouth speaks.”

 It’s a simple interpretation really: out of that which is left over and remains in our heart, we speak.

And act. And parent. And loveour neighbors and community. Consciously or not, our lives are going to be a reflection of what we are putting in to our hearts and minds. This is a truth that has smacked me in the face more than once as I have reflected on both my daily habits and my lifehabits – the long term, consistent ways I learn and listen. And that includes whoI learn from. So during a day when I have filled my heart with news headlines, contentious comments sections, fear-based click-bait, stories interpreted only through my own confirmation bias, pictures or posts or updates from others that ultimately served only to make me jealous or wrongly opinionated, what is my perriseuma? What is left over? What spills out of me? It only makes sense that contention, fear, more confirmation bias, jealousy, and wrong opinions of others would overflow. 

I have parented from those feelings, and it always ends up with me needing to apologize. (Anyone else ever realize they were irritated with their children not because of anything they did, but because of something you saw on social media that bothered you? Asking for a friend). 

I have tried to live in community from those places, but I have my eyes on myself and not on others, thus comparing and compartmentalizing each of our life circumstances as if they are in competition for most compassion or most celebration.

I have attempted to love my husband well from those places, and usually he gets the cold shoulder and cynicism when he should be getting my respect. 

I have tried to write and create from those places, and then I strive too hard for relevance when I should be striving for glory – God’s, not mine. 

When that which is left over spills out of me, it hasn’t always been good.  

So what is the answer? I’m not one for formulas, and I also don’t want to be known for who or what I preach notto read – much ink has been spilled on that subject already. But because I believe that we need to guard our overflow – what we put in to our hearts and our minds – more than ever these days, I will say that I believe deeply in at least two things.

First, you cannot give too much time to reading your Bible. Cannot. The riches of scripture are unending, and in a lifetime we will never exhaust our search for them. I want to tell you all the historical and scientific reasons you can trust your Bible. I want to tell you about all the people who lost their lives in the pursuit of preserving the Bible for future generations. I want to tell you that we are the luckiest and most privileged generation of Christians in history to have the access and resources that we do. I want to remind you that God’s word is alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword and piercing to the division of joint and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. But mostly, I just want to tell you that God’s word has been the surest anchor of my life, and that I am not the same person I was 15, 10 even 5 years ago because of it. My life is exponentially harder than it was when I started really reading scripture as a 19-year-old, but God is exponentially bigger. Meeting more of Him in His word has been the only thing equipping me for the brokenness of life, for this space between redemption and restoration we live in. If you are going to give your limited time to anything, to reading or listening to any resources, begin with the only perfect one available.   

And second, immersing yourself in truth makes it far easier to discern when something is a few notches to the left or right on that truth. Our pastor always reminds us that if you’re using a compass to get to a destination, a few degrees off when you’re only going half a mile probably won’t keep you from your final destination. But if you are going 100 miles, you’ll end up in the wrong city. If you’re going 1000 miles, you’ll be in the wrong state. If you’re traveling over a lifetime, you may not be anywhere near where you need to be. 

I remember this feeling so clearly in college. I was reading a very popular book at the time, one that many friends in the college ministry I attended were going through. And while some of it was entertaining and there were enough scripture references in it to make the message feel edifying, I could absolutely not shake that something was off. I would never have been able to name it (though 13 years later and knowing this author now I could), but I closed that book and thought, “yeah, not for me.” This was Holy Spirit discernment that I didn’t even know I needed, and it came because God had ignited a love for his word in that same season and because I was there, in truth so often, I understood that the messages in each didn’t feel compatible. 

Today, we hear a lot of “speak your truth,” “you are the captain of your life,” and even “you are enough” messages. Self-help or self-love books are wildly popular and we are jumping in to their messages with two feet. While I believe the motives in each of those have noble purposes, “self-anything” is not the message of scripture. The Bible tells the story of a human raced so flawed by sin that we are blind. We treat each other terribly. We put ourselves first in all circumstances, beginning with our hearts and ending in our actions. We are not enough, and with just a few minutes of honest introspection we know we are not enough. 

When my autistic son is having another moment of total confusion, when we can’t find the exact toy he has his mind on or the church lobby is too crowded or we are headed to the grocery store when he thought we were headed to his grandparents’ house; when I have no idea how to help him, how to assure him of our love, how to keep him from panic, or how on earth I am going to pull his strong body where we need to go while he’s falling to the ground and there are three other children I need to have my eyes on, I know I am not enough for this work.

When an unexpected phone call brought a four-day-old baby girl to our already busy home, and a positive pregnancy test three weeks later brought our “done at three” ideas to a screeching halt and threw me into anxiety and fear, I knew I was not enough to carry it all.  

When I snap at my children for spilling their milk and respond to their unintentional mistake by treating it like a pre-meditated crime, I see how conditional my love can be, and I know I am not enough to model the unconditional love of their heavenly Father.

When I withhold my celebration and happiness for others because I am too busy being jealous of it or wanting it for myself, I know I do not possess enough humility to love others the way I want to be loved in return. 

Daily my life shows me how much I am not enough. The messages that tell me “yes you are, you can do this, you can control your destiny!” are confusing at best and damaging at worst. The message that tells me I need a rescuer, and that I have one in Jesus, that all of life is all for him – that in the midst of autistic meltdowns and parenting failures and jealous moments and the way I have to continually correct my perspective that shows me the world through the myopic lens of my life – the message that looks at my “not enough” in the face and offers a substitute, that is the message I need. That is the truth I want to overflow from me. On our own, we will not ever be enough. With the new heart that Jesus died so that we might have, we have his sufficiency, we have his enough. 

It matters so much which lane we live in, and which message we fill our lives with: my enough or His enough. 

I was 14 days late when I really started to consider the possibility, 18 when it went from possibility to legitimate anxiety, and 21 when I finally went to the dollar store for the test – I always get them at the dollar store. I was with my three-year-old when I threw the little pink and white box in to the cart, along with a few other things we did not need because I don’t know, somehow it feels less awkward for me to buy six random items than to just plop a pregnancy test on the counter and smile at the checker.   

When we got home, I put the shopping bag on the counter and tried to think about other things: the three-week old foster baby in our home, the three other children who were already being such troopers in the midst of a huge and sudden change, and the husband who was pretty darn certain he was done wanting children at three. 

It could all be stress. And newborn sleep. And I haven’t been eating much. It could just all be stress. 

But still, 21 days late? I went to bed that night and prayed for my period. 

The next morning, my prayer still unanswered, Alex headed off to a day-long men’s conference at our church and the four littles and I resumed our typical fall Saturday morning routine. Right around lunchtime, with two of the four down for a nap, I opened the pink and white box. I knew that 22 days late was a lot, but I was still convinced it was my body adjusting to all the things we had just said ‘yes’ to with exactly 60 seconds to make a decision. 

It just cannot be possible, can it? I opened the app that I do all of my monthly tracking on, and I counted everything for the 22nd time. Nope, not possible. I’m going to pee on this little stick and then be exposed for the crazy person I am. There is no way this thing is positive. 

***** 

The truth is, I have always wanted a fourth baby. I was fine with three, and felt full and busy with three, and I loved life with three. But I never truly felt the “I’m done” feeling, even if I thought we were. I had spent much of the last year assuming I would just always wonder what it would have been like to have four kids, and that that feeling was ok. I know a lot of women who are done and will always wonder what one more child would have been like. I also know a lot of women who have never been given the blessing of a positive pregnancy test, or still have empty arms after many. Honestly, I can’t think of a more seemingly “unfair” system than pregnancy, and adding to our family is not ever something I have taken for granted.

But even with my desire for a fourth child, I knew we were not ready for one. Entering the foster care system, especially in the manner that we did, saying yes to a constant shuffle of social workers, visits, court dates, and paperwork confirmed that in one way. My actual reaction when the test was positive confirmed it in another.

I panicked. 

I couldn’t feel happiness or sadness for weeks, just shock. And then I couldn’t feel anything but nausea for another ten weeks, and that didn’t help matters. But mostly, I felt fear. 

Fear that my marriage would be pulled too far.

Fear that my children would be stretched too thin in their own little capacities. 

Fear that I would do something, eat something, take something, be around something that would cause autism in another one of our children.

Fear that our life had crossed from busy to unmanageable, unaffordable… all the “un” words one does not want to describe her life at all.

There is a popular song on Christian radio these days that repeats the line “fear is a liar” in the chorus. As much as I’d like to, I don’t think I agree with that. Fear can indicate something very valid to be concerned about, and it is not necessarily lying to you that proceeding with great caution is a good idea.

But while fear may not be a liar, it is rather bossy, and it fogs up your life so much that you can’t see through it to move forward. 

That’s where I lived for three months, being bossed around by fear – feelings that could have been turned around and taught me about the great care and stewardship we would need to move into this new season with, but instead they stopped me completely. I laid on our couch much of the day, sick and exhausted and pretty much the hardest person to live with, all because I couldn’t find God – I wasn’t even looking for Him – through the hazy fear that laid there with me.

The fog didn’t clear for me until I started to confess it. And started looking for truth again.

*****

We sat around our friend’s living room with our community group, and as we usually do, spent some time catching up with one another. It was the first time I had been at group since we picked up our foster baby and found out we were expecting – almost three months after both of those things had taken place. When it was my turn to share, I started out on the surface, laughing about going from three to four and possibly five kids, about how I would not be going anywhere for the next two years and the amount of laundry I already cannot stay on top of. And the more I spoke, the more the group laughed with me and nodded their heads as I shared, the deeper I went. One feeling, one sentence, one confession at a time. Finally, the two things that had truly been consuming my mind came out of my mouth, and they had little to do with laundry. 

“I am afraid of everything, you guys. Afraid of having another child with special needs. Afraid that our foster baby will have to go back to a situation that might be a tiny bit better but still is impossibly hard to let her go to. And mostly, I am afraid that if any of these things do happen, I’m not going to be able to believe that God is still good.”

It was the last sentence that broke the damn of tears that had been building for months. 

I wonder if fear really has two components: living with the anxiety and what-if scenarios of the thing we fear, and then trying to make sense of God, of what we believe to be true about Him, if that thing does happen. 

I looked down at the sweatshirts sleeves pulled over my hands and now covered in wiped tears and mascara, and I didn’t even have time to say another thing before tissues were in my hand and eight other people were around me and Alex with their hands on our shoulders, praying honest, earnest, sincere prayers for us. The kind of prayers I hadn’t been able to pray for months; the words of truth fear would not let me remember.

God, You are knitting this baby together in Katie’s womb… Psalm 139:13

You placed this little baby girl in this family, at this exact time, knowing exactly what they would be given right after you did… Psalm 139:16

You gave Alex and Katie one another years ago knowing full well what you would equip them to live, even knowing how unequipped they would feel… Philippians 2:13

You know Cannon’s heart and mind perfectly, you have beautiful purposes for his life, and know his parents’ heart for him... John 9:3

You know Harper and Jordi and can perfectly guide their understanding of the family they have who loves them so… Psalm 119:34

And God, You alone are good… Psalm 73:1

I realized as the tears continued to fall down my cheeks that my thoughts had spent all this time replacing “You” with “I” in that prayer. That’s when fear is the thickest and most impossible to see through, when you think everything depends on you. 

***** 

Today, I am 24 weeks pregnant with our third baby boy, an already wild man in my tummy – the final recruit in what we joke is Harper’s crew of soldiers. And we still get to steward, for now, the life of the sweetest baby girl on earth – one who sleeps through the night and spends the entire day smiling and wanting to be near the other kids. 

And I can’t believe we are here. 

It has not been easy to leave fear behind, and it still creeps in often. But our world is not nearly as foggy anymore. My husband fights hard to be an incredible leader for our family, our friends show up to clean our house, and our community still prays urgent, earnest prayers on our behalf. And every day, many times a day, we look at one another and remind ourselves that there is a God, I am not Him. 

Last spring, I gave two talks at a local Women’s Ministry event about speaking gospel language to our children. I truly poured my heart in to the preparation of these talks, made my husband listen to me rehearse them 38 times, and went up to that stage covered in the prayers of others and feeling ready to share. I used my 45-minute time slot to paint a picture of God’s goodness to us in the story of scripture, and gave examples from my own life how my husband and I explain this story to our children. 

As I walked the lobby of the church in between sessions, I looked around at all the women and truly felt like I had said what God asked me to say. When I was back at my table, a woman came from across the room and found me sitting there. “Are you the gal who just shared in that last session?” she asked.

“Yes, I am!” I responded with enthusiasm, honestly ready for her to say how much she enjoyed my talk and took away from it. Instead, she held her hand out and handed me a small piece of paper.

“You mentioned you have a son with autism,” she said with the most matter-of-fact, straight face. “Call this doctor, she can reverse all that, you know. She’s really good with clearing out the brain.”

I respectfully accepted her scribbled note, thanked her, and did my best to control the insecurity sweeping over me. I had another talk to give in 30 minutes, losing my composure was really not an option. So I sat there for a moment, looked down at the words “brain doctor”, and wondered if I was doing anything right at all – in the talk I was giving, but even more so, as a mom.

The mostly well-intentioned suggestions of others are really nothing new. We have been doing this to one another since the beginning of human history; I have without a doubt offered my unmerited thoughts at the worst possible time. When you are on the outside of a situation, it’s easy to think that you are outside of it because of something you know or something you have done, and you want to impart that wisdom to someone who is “in it.” 

A few years ago, when I was the ever-so-wise parent of a basically perfect, healthy, and easy 8-month old daughter, one whom was conceived on accident, I did something incredibly hurtful. I asked a sweet woman, one I did not know very well, who was three and half years in to her infertility struggle if she had tried a certain method to get pregnant. I meant it sincerely; I knew of a few friends who had some success with this particular method. She silently nodded at me, but I could tell there was a change in her countenance. Her kind husband swept in and graciously answered the question; I respect his politeness and protection of his wife more today than I could possibly have then. But over the months that followed, I noticed this person stop interacting with me at all on social media, and I couldn’t understand why. I was sincerely trying to offer something I heard had helped, had it offended her that much?

At the risk of speaking for someone else’s feelings, I can only guess a few years later that not only did my words offend her, they went much deeper. She had a wound I could not possibly empathize with, and I poked at it, aggravating it and sending the pain radiating through her body again; like hitting a bad bruise in the same spot over and over. She had to have wanted to allow the tears welling up behind her eyes to flood out as she yelled at me, “Do you honestly think we haven’t tried that? I have wanted a baby my entire life, we have tried everything!”

At least, that’s how I felt when the stranger handed me the brain doctor’s information.  

And the moments people suggest I follow someone on social media who has cured his or her child’s autism; they only charge $349.99 for their online course! And the times people have asked if I have read about broccoli sprout powder/chlorella/cilantro/frankincense oil/holding therapy. Or the comments like, “God doesn’t want your son to suffer; healing is possible.” 

Being a special needs mom, and having our particular journey include a diagnosis that is mysterious, unpredictable, and so incredibly varied, has brought the questions and suggestions to a level I was completely unprepared for. And over time, the sum of the suggestions takes its toll and every bit of me wants to go to battle to defend my parenting. I want to show the notebook where I have written down everything my son has put in his mouth for the last two years, completely free of gluten and dairy and food dyes. I want to produce the receipts from the specialist because insurance covered none of that, along with the list supplements and of course I tried that essential oil! I want people to see it, all of it.

Because what I hear with each suggestion is this: I am not trying hard enough. I’m not a good mom. 

What my old friend must have heard me say years ago: You are not trying hard enough. You’ll never be a good mom. 

Few things will pierce a gal like the thought that others secretly think she is failing at the one thing she wants to do well. 

The slope to self-justification is a slippery one. And it is all consuming. I can get obsessed with proving my efforts, answering every suggestion, making sure I am understood and my son is accepted, exhausting myself and losing all joy in the process.

Or, I can I heed the words a very wise friend offered to me years ago: “God is your defender, Katie. He’s the only audience that matters.”

Everything – really, every single thing in our lives – changes with an audience of one; and a perfect, sinless, all-powerful and all-knowing audience at that. When I think about the awe that will drip from every part of me when I stand before God at the end of this life, there is nothing in me that cares one bit about defending myself to people. I don’t say that flippantly; there is no “I could care less what you think about me” sentiment here at all, because if it isn’t obvious by now, I care deeply, probably far too much, what people think of me. But stopping to think about what the God who holds the oceans in his hands thinks of me, and thinks of my children, the weight of that grace erases all the justifying I could ever present on my own.  

He thinks so highly of us that he gave up his life. 

In the end, I am only going to answer to Jesus. In the meantime, I am going to steward each day to the best of my ability but I am also going to trust His sovereignty, knowing that He alone has the power and right to give and take away. I don’t pretend to believe I will never make a hurtful comment again, and I fully expect receiving plenty more in my lifetime. We are imperfect people, and the nuances of individual hardship make the words we might offer a very tricky thing to get right. But while I will fail a thousand times to remember this, I am going to keep going back to my Defender; because when I do, more than I want people to see the list of things I am doing to prove I’m a good mom, or a good Christian, or a good anything, I want people to see all that God is doing to capture a heart that would be stone without him, and all the miraculous things we have learned through a journey we would not have chosen but now cannot imagine our lives without. 

Parenting is going to leave all of us speechless at some point: another school shooting that we have to explain, another poor example of once-trusted leadership, another death or sickness or fight that, one at a time, teach and show our children that the world is truly a fallen place.

In our home, some of the harder questions started coming about six months ago, when our 18-month old son surpassed our three-year-old son by a noticeable margin in speech and development. As that margin grew and grew, Harper noticed, too. “Mommy,” she asked matter-of-factly, “Jordi talks and Cannon doesn’t. Why?”

“Well Harper,” I started to explain, “Cannon learns differently than Jordi. Everyone in the whole world learns differently. Some people learn really fast and some people take a bit longer.” And in my typical ‘let’s be positive’ demeanor, I ended with the upside. “Cannon is learning some words though! He’s getting there.”

“Hmm,” she responded, as if that explanation would do for now. But I think we both felt the incompleteness.

It’s not that what I said was untrue – people do all learn at different paces and at different abilities, and it’s so important that Harper understands that at a young age. But why is everything so much harder for Cannon? The why question has had its way with me in the last two years. I’ve cried over it, gotten angry with it, and felt intensely defensive about it. But so much of that – the many things the world might tell me is the reason why Cannon struggles – is not really what I’m talking about.

I’m talking the big why - why does he have to struggle in ways that others his age do not? Why is there pain, disability, sickness, and death in the world at all? Harper may not have been asking at that philosophical level, but she will be soon, whether it be about her brother, her own sin, or something else that she sees, hears, or experiences.

After much searching and reading and praying and talking to people far wiser than me, hoping for an eloquent explanation, for words that would ease the tension I constantly felt, the answer is actually as simple as it has always been: it’s sin. It’s my sin and your sin and our sin, and the fact that at the Fall of Man in Genesis 3, evil came in to the world and everything has been hard since then (Romans 5:12). That is the why.

It turns out that it is as straightforward - and yet lived out as incredibly complicated - as that.

*****

One of the things I’ve learned in five years of parenthood is that children, with their near constant inquisitiveness and very pragmatic questions, actually become our best teachers. If we cannot explain something at the level a five-year-old can understand it, there’s a good chance we don’t have a good grasp on the topic at all. And this is most certainly what God has showed me in the last two years.

I knew about life in a fallen world. We've all seen and experienced the pain that comes from original sin. But I was having an exceptionally hard time finding the words to explain it. And that’s when we went back to the very basics of our faith, the big story of our rescue that God has been writing through all of history - the Biblical Narrative. These four commonly used points became so helpful – it gave me a language for what I have always known but could not find the words for. It reminded me that our small stories truly are written in the scope of God’s big story, and all of our lives can be understood within the arc of these truths.

The Biblical Narrative is the big story of the Bible – a (very short) summary of Genesis to Revelation – and it is a tool that can help you use gospel language with your kids every day. In our home, the conversations often begin with a question or hard topic that we have to explain to our children: Why did Granpda die? Why does my brother have a disability? Why did that friend leave me out? Why do we yell at one another? We frame all of these conversations by starting with creation: God’s perfect plan for the world and how in the beginning everything was good and at peace. Then we talk about the fall, and how sin entering the world changed everything. Sin is why life is hard, sin is why we can be terrible to one another, and sin is why we need a Savior. Then we bring in the good news that Jesus redeemed us, and that is why we can have hope in this world in spite of the sin in our hearts and the hard things that might happen to us. We end with restoration, because God’s Word tells us that the Holy Spirit is still very much at work in the hearts of men and women, boys and girls, all over the world, making us more like him all the time – using our gifts, our success, our weakness and our failures for his glory and pointing us to the day we are ultimately and forever restored in Him.

In his book Parenting, Paul David tripp said this: “Tell the story of the person and work of Jesus to your children again and again and again. Tell them how God could have condemned us all to our foolishness and its results, but instead how he sent his Son so that instead of being condemned, we’d be forgiven and rescued from ourselves. You simply cannot tell this story to your children enough. Talk about how God exercised his power to control history so that at just the right time Jesus would come and extend his sacrificial love to fools who didn’t even recognize his existence. Talk to them about how Wisdom came to rescue fools so that fools would become wise. Start telling this story when they are toddlers and don’t stop telling this story until your young adult children have left your home.” The Biblical Narrative cards are designed to help you do just that. I hope we can tuck them in our Bibles or tape them on our refrigerators, and find every opportunity possible to tell our kids, and tell ourselves in the process, our story of rescue, again and again and again.

Harper had quietly snuck down the stairs earlier than usual, and surprised me with her little voice at the office door. “Hi mommy.”

Startled, I turned around from my chair. “Hi love. Good morning! You’re up early, did you sleep well?”

“I think so,” she said as she rubbed her eyes. With her blanket and stuffy still in her hands, she came and sat on my lap, looking at all that was on the desk in front of us: my Bible, an open computer screen, an assortment of colored pens and stray pieces of paper with all manner of verses and quotes and ideas I’m still trying to organize. Taking it all in, she asked the simplest question. “Mommy, what are you doing?”

*****

“You have to take care of yourself first,” the speech therapist kindly, but firmly, told me. “There are support groups, and they can help you find qualified babysitters if you don’t have someone who can watch your kids while you get out.” She handed me the pamphlet for one of the local gatherings of special needs parents. "You'll be a better mom to all of your kids when you practice some good self care."

“Thank you,” I smiled back. As I glanced down at the information, all still too new and too raw for me to read without tears in my eyes, the theme was clear: We will not have it in us to raise a child with special needs alone. And the resolution to that was being offered right back to me: you have to take care of yourself first.

And you know what, more than a year later, I agree.

*****

When I look back at the first five years of my own motherhood, it’s marked with both incredible memories, and a sufficient amount of fear. I remember holding my 8-day old baby girl when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened, and with so much of the nation, sat on the rocking chair sobbing uncontrollably at even the thought that something like that could happen to a classroom of kindergartners. Cannon was just over a year old when the Syrian refugee crisis finally grabbed our attention, with the image of a little boy’s body washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach. I was weeks away from giving birth to Jordi when the terrorists chose Paris as their target, and there have been countless others since then. I spent many nights awake and anxious and wondering what kind of a world I was raising children in. And all of this was before autism, which brought an entirely new set of anxieties and inconveniences.  

Being a mom has surprised me in so many ways - the highs of irreplaceable joy and lows of sleep-deprived fighting with whoever catches me off guard first. But it is not a stretch for me to say that the most surprising thing it it has shown me is how ugly my heart can be. When fear and frustration and exhaustion and the completely unexplainable descend on my home, the person that has showed up is not the one I am most proud to be. I’m irritable, impatient, arguing with my husband, and oh yes I did yell at my daughter for spilling three cups of water that she was bringing to me on a tray. To serve me. It still hurts to remember that convicting moment.  

So when it came to self-care, it was becoming painfully obvious that a little time away and a pedicure, while wonderful, were going to fall short.

The sirens were going off around me: the fear, the what-ifs, the “how do I talk to my children about this” and the diagnoses –  and it was only then that I started looking for safety.

What motherhood has taught me more than anything else can be summed up in one simple lesson, the same thing that pamphlet the therapist gave me said: I cannot do this alone. The problem with the solutions, with the ‘take care of yourself first’ mentality, is that it encourages escapes, not healing. As wonderful as escapes are (I don’t even need to tell you how much I love a good spa day), they make the surface look pretty, they don’t sustain you from day to day. There isn’t a wrinkle cream, injection, nail polish, aromatherapy, essential oil, or massage strong enough to do what my heart constantly needs: to be examined, and then healed.

God’s Word, however, has an exceptional way of doing both.

Time and life and motherhood and the reality that life is an unpredictable dance of truly beautiful and remarkably hard has taught me that self-care is less about what I do and more about who and what I am consistently with. When God’s Word is churning in my heart before the tasks of the day and three little people ask me to consistently adjust what I had in mind, everything changes. I’m humbled by this work, not inconvenienced by it. I’m heartbroken by the reality of sin and evil in a broken world, not paralyzed by it. I’m patient with autism, not bitter about it. I’m rejoicing about the work God saw fit to give us, not comparing it to the work he gave others.  And I remember that no matter what changes around us, we have “the promise of the unchangeable character of His purpose,” which is to make His name and glory known in all things and to all people. The way I live in this world, with every victory and every challenge, is either going to do that, or it's not. 

And more than anything, I want it to. 

So yes, I had better take care of myself first.

*****

When Harper asked me that simple question, “Mommy, what are you doing?” I thought about the many ways I could answer her: I’m studying the Bible, I’m writing, I’m praying, I'm asking God to show me who He is through this book He left us, or simply that I am just spending time with Jesus. All of those are good answers, and all things I think she would understand. But in that moment, I told her exactly what I was thinking.

“Mommy is just taking care of herself this morning, sweetie.”   

It had been an off morning for Cannon since I got him out of bed. He wanted to be put down but he didn’t want to walk. He kept reaching back for something in his room but got fussy when I turned around to walk back in there. He knew what he needed but I didn’t. He had thoughts and feelings but no words for either of them, and both of us felt the frustration of it.

Cannon, just tell me what you need.

Mama, I want you to name what I need for me.

These are the moments that hurt the most.

We had just thirty minutes before we needed to be out the door and on the road to therapy, but my little man just was not having it. Didn’t want his milk, didn’t want his Thomas trains, certainly didn’t want his siblings all up in his space. It took both me and Alex to get his diaper changed and clothes on, sixty seconds of fending off flailing arms and legs that were not without a side glance and biting comment among the two of us. You hold his arms. I got him! Babe, don’t let his leg go. He’s strong! After the wrestling match Cannon went right back to his corner on the couch and buried his head in his blankets. Then he took his socks off, of course. More wrestling ensued.

These are the moments that hurt the most.

I looked at Alex and said, “He gets more upset when we hold him down, when we force it, so let’s just give him a minute.”

“Well we don’t really have another minute; he needs to get dressed.”

“I know, but...” And I have no further rebuttal. I don’t know what to do, neither does Alex. Autism stumps us a dozen times a day.

These are the moments that hurt the most. When for all of our effort we simply cannot figure out our precious boy, which frustrates and shames us enough to get irritated with one another, and we go back and forth between being ten minutes late but having a calm little boy; and teaching him that being on time is expected of us so he needs to get going, upset or not. The first half an hour of our day and we are nose to nose with the incessant reminders that his life, our life, is not ‘normal.’

Then Harper came over with an apple for Cannon. “Cannon loves apples. This will make him happy.” He threw it back at her, but she was undeterred. “Oh mom, I’ll give him his puzzle, Cannon loves puzzles!” She set it in front of him, and he did not throw it- a step in the right direction.

I patted her little head and said, “Sweet girl, I love your kindness toward Cannon! Is that Jesus in your heart? I think it is.” She proudly beams a smile.

And then right there on the corner of the couch, we prayed for Cannon. Well, Harper prayed for Cannon, with all the childlike faith and precious gratitude one should pray. “Dear God. I thank you for Cannon and I thank you for puzzles. Please help Cannon be happy today. Cannon will have a good day at school. Thank you for school. I pray for Cannon to eat his apple. Amen.”

Let it be.

And as her simple yet beautiful words landed on all of us, I realized something she is still much too young to: God has called us all to this. He has given all of us this. And we will all be different, better, much more dependent on Jesus because of this ‘not normal’ journey. I think those can be the best kind of journey—it all depends on how we look at it. And wether we are truly, unashamedly, from our heads to our toes, thankful for puzzles and apples and school.

Cannon did move toward that puzzle. I’m not sure if he wanted it the whole time, or if it got his mind off of what he could not tell us, but he was happy, and we got his socks back on.

“Look Harper, your prayer helped him!” Another proud smile. I’m learning to believe in prayer right alongside my four-year-old.

These are the moments I love the most, when something like this reminds you that your life is perfectly, most intentionally, being lived out exactly how God wants it to.  

Hard and beautiful. Hurting and healing. The worst and the best. A moment my heart wants to feel pity and then explodes with gratitude immediately after. Impossibly, but absolutely, both.

Sometimes, life is just both.

Soli Deo Gloria. 

I am a words girl. Always have been. I spent many-an-extra-hours in various sympathetic math teachers’ classrooms, laboring with them over how to show my work on math problems that I could never fully wrap my head around the logic of. A geometric proof does what again? Solve for ‘x’ and for ‘y’? It was the ‘y’ that usually did me in. Beyond the simple plus and minus work of numbers, I never grew too comfortable around them. Oh but the words! Give me Native Son and a thesis statement and the freedom to craft thoughts and my mind felt like I was curling up with a soft blanket.

Given my unremarkable (dismal is more appropriate) history with numbers, I am, perhaps, the most shocked of all at how much counting I really do these days. I’m not finding square roots or making whole numbers out of fractions, but it seems like numbers are on my mind quite a lot.

I’m a counter. I count minutes and I count likes. I count children and I count approval. I quantify my day in so many ways—too many— forgetting that what I am often counting does not actually add up to anything real. I count accomplishments and I count failures, hoping that the former has more tallies in the column at 9:00pm. I count what I have based on what I see, and it is pride, and I sometimes count what others have, also based on what I see, and it is comparison. I’m always counting.

Today is the first day of lent: a sacrificial season of the liturgical calendar that holds the space of the 46 days before Easter Sunday. It’s a beautiful season for so many reasons, but one I have stripped of its meaning with the hint of ‘I grew-up Catholic guilt’ that still lingers, coupled with my relentless score-keeping. I’ve spent many a Lenten seasons subtracting: first it was ice cream, then sugar, next social media, and I’ve even gone for all television whatsoever. I’ve been rather crafty when it comes to my numbers during lent—technically Sundays are a respite from the 46-day total, and God knows it is also March Madness so all television besides sports became the rule. I gave up ice cream but made up for it in cookie dough. And sugar—never made it past 48 hours on that one. Add, subtract, put a few tallies in the “good” column, and call it lent; that has far too often been my stride through this season.

It seems I have been missing the point.

The Lenten season is about sacrifice, and it is equally about repentance. But I think above all, it is about getting serious with our own hearts about what we are waiting and counting for.

The arc of this 46 days ends at the cross. We hold the space between now and then with reverence and with an intent to know who God is through sacrifice, but what I am certain I have done wrong in all my counting is relegate the importance of those things to only, or mostly, these 46 days. Lent becomes a talking point or a challenge, a hashtag or something to accomplish, when really all it was ever meant to look like was me on my knees in humility, knowing that all my numbers could never add up to perfect.

But Jesus never asked for perfect, he asked for repentance. And I have so much to repent. The counting, the pride, the comparison, the lack of belief in the face of hard things, the lack of boldness in the face of wrong things. Choosing to scroll rather than open His word, choosing to vent rather than take things to Him in prayer. Making an enemy of my husband while I stand on the mountain of an issue that was only ever meant to be a discussion on how to sweep away the dirt in front of us. I could go on with this; I have to look no further than the day behind me to find my need for repentance. And it is a need far greater than 46 days.

I love lent because of the intentionality it brings, and I am even giving something up if only for the discipline to spend time with Him when I want to turn to that one thing. But mostly, lent is about repentance, sitting with my great need for, praising God that he allows it, learning about its pain and its beauty, about its grip and its freedom. Yes, lent is about repentance because life is about repentance. The arc of our lives ends the same place that lent does, at the foot of the cross. And my heart can hear Jesus leaning in and whispering, “Stick with what you know, Katie. Grab your words and come sit with me, because we have so much to talk about, and nothing to count.”

“And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth… For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” 
John 1:14, 16

“What’s wrong, babe?” my husband gently asked me.

“Nothing.” (Lie. Nothing is almost always a lie.)

“Katie, I can see it all over you. Is something going on?”

“I don’t know. I’m just anxious,” I tell him, as I refuse to stop switching out the washer and dryer and make eye contact with him, like a passive-aggressive reminder that I work hard around here and I want him to notice that.

But he notices my heart. “Ok, what are you anxious about?”

And I know, I absolutely know what I am anxious about. I am anxious about being a mom. I am anxious about my son’s new hitting habit. I am anxious about the minefield of social media. I am anxious about the future. I am anxious about my writing, which I should probably quit. I am anxious that everyone hates me. I am anxious because there is so much to do, and never enough time. I am mad and anxious and my kids are hard and my work is crap and I feel politically and culturally homeless and everyone is yelling at each other and I hate conflict and I just feel so anxious! But that is not what I tell him. “I don’t know why I’m anxious.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” Yes, I do. But I want him to work a little harder.

“Ok, babe. Well I love you, and I’m listening when you are ready.” And then he leaves the laundry room and I stand there with all of my self-justified reasons to be mad, and as I throw the last wet towel into the dryer and slam the door I feel it, the pang of conviction that always comes when I forget all of the most important things.

*****

Grace. It is one of those words heavy with meaning yet thrown around lightly like confetti and unfortunately, it’s impact rarely seems to last much longer. We take it so lightly, this grace thing. We say grace. We ask God for grace. We like grace. But we are also very selfish about grace. We demand it from others when we feel judged and we tend to withhold if from others when we feel wronged. If I am honest, sometimes it feels like I can tend to carry grace around more like a gun ready to defend myself than like a white flag ready to fall to my knees at the reality of how desperate I am without it.

And y’all, I am so very desperate for grace.

This day, this hour, this minute.

The greek work for grace is charis. Isn’t that beautiful? It means “that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness: grace of speech,” and my favorite, “the divine influence upon the heart and its reflection in life, including gratitude.”

…its reflection in life, including gratitude.

I have had a hard time feeling gratitude lately, and much less of a hard time throwing out all of the reasons why I don’t feel it. One needs thirty seconds or less on social media these days to see one or two or three thousand reasons our world does not feel grateful either.

But I realized something about myself a long time ago: when my heart is feeling this anxious, this scared, and this self-centered, it’s actually a sign that I have not been paying attention to Jesus, and a clear indication that I have mistaken myself for the rescuer when I am merely, humbly, and of no merit of my own, the rescued.

And things get real ugly when I get those two things confused.

If I am the rescuer than this all depends on me: my children have to make me look good in pictures and in person or I am failing. My writing has to be good and high on approval every time or it is not worth doing. My precious little boy who understands the world so differently than the rest of us has to learn how to function well and, God-willing, on his own someday, or I have dropped this beautiful special needs assignment God gave me. And must I even mention the social issues I care so deeply about, the women dancing in clubs and selling their bodies, the unborn children who don’t get to live and the children born who are not adequately cared for; the oil pipeline that is unjust and the leadership that makes me crazy and did I mention it all makes me feel homeless?

And really quickly I see nothing to be grateful for, and a big to-do list to be mourning over. Grace has no reflection in my life, and I have no gratitude. Because being a rescuer is hard and don’t people see how hard I am working?!

Don’t people see?

Oh, if you only knew how many of my issues start there.

And yet I know the heartbeat of my anxiety: I forgot that I was rescued, and in that rescue, given grace. And as so beautifully put in the gospel of John and then explained by Matthew Henry: “it is ‘even grace,’ so great a gift, so rich, so invaluable. We have received no less than grace; the goodwill of God toward us and the good work of God in us… All believers receive from Christ’s fullness; the best and greatest saints cannot live without him, and the weakest and most insignificant can live through him. Because we have nothing except what we have received, proud boasting is excluded; and because there is nothing we lack that we cannot receive, our perplexing fears are silenced.”

Nothing we have except what we have received. Nothing we lack that we cannot receive.

I am not a rescuer. I am rescued.

All of us, we are rescued. And that’s grace, even grace!

There is much good work to be done, but we do not do it as rescuers. We ought not to think that highly of ourselves. The good in us is not actually us, but Jesus, but grace. And all I can think to do in response to that is beg him for more of it.

Maybe I feel homeless because this world isn’t home. And I know I feel anxious because I tend to add myself to an equation that needs no addition. But today, may what I say, how I speak, and what I do start here: grace upon grace.

*****

“Hey babe, I’m sorry I used my heart as a reason to be frustrated at you. I just, I just feel anxious and I really do know why, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

And he responds so well. “Can I pray for you?”

I did not always receive that request well, not from my husband. I have spent a long time wanting to be heard and not prayed for, and far too often still default to that, we both do. But not when I know I am rescued, not when I see so clearly my need for grace.

“Yes, I would love that. I need it. Would you pray that every single minute of every single day, God would help me to remember that I’m rescued.” 

Last week marked an almost-forgotten memory for Alex and me. Not because it wasn’t special, it was. And not because we aren’t sentimental people, we are. This memory has just been a little bit buried by the here and now. Six years ago, Alex got down on one knee (during a college football game, because he loves me) and asked me to be his bride. We immediately drove to the mall for “engagement pictures” in the photo booth and did not let go of one another’s hands for the next five hours.

Every newly engaged gal knows what follows next: I stared at my ring at every opportunity. Hands on the steering wheel- look at my ring! On the elliptical- look at my ring! Typing on the computer- look at my ring! It was simple and modest, but I walked around for weeks just knowing that everyone around me must have noticed the new addition to my left hand, and all that it meant for me. I no longer had to pretend that I was buying bridal magazines for a friend. I could actually google wedding venues in the clear view of another person. I could plan, plan, plan and since I had basically been doing so secretly for about six years, this came very naturally. I was in love. We were in love. All we saw was love.

Still, Alex and I were blessed with very wise people around us during our engagement, so we were not living completely in fantasy land. We knew marriage would be hard. We knew we had to prepare more for a lifetime than for a party. We knew keeping God at the center of our lives was the only way to begin our life together. We knew.

But we also didn’t, because we had no idea what it would look like for all of those things to be true.

*****

Becoming parents will change a marriage in profound ways, because the love – and money and space and time— that was divided between two people must be not only be shifted around, but it actually has to grow to make room for a third, or fourth or fifth or sixth person. It’s simple math, really (or is it physics? I’m a words girl, I don’t know). If two things fit comfortably in a set space, when we add more we either have to redefine comfort or find a bigger space; but it’s hard for everything to stay the same without constantly running in to one another.

When Alex and I watched our son develop (I should say not develop) and land in the category of special needs, we were, in essence, handed something that takes up a whole lot of space.     

I can tell you that things get tense easily. So easily it’s scary. We started running in to one another before we knew how to adjust our space. There would be days early on where I thought Cannon was having a great day— good eye contact, looking up at the sound of his name, signing for more— and as I would share my optimism with Alex, if he did not match it, if he didn’t see the same things and feel what I felt, we would instantly be at each other. I would accuse him of being negative and pessimistic, and he would accuse me of not letting him feel what he needed to. And then the roles would reverse a thousand times: I would be feeling so low about Cannon’s progress and Alex would be feeling great about it; then I would think him ignorant and he would think me cynical. A long period of silent treatment usually followed these moments, as we both at different times felt like we had vulnerably shared that we were hopeful only to feel like our hope was batted away by one another.

And when two people can’t hope for something together, it gets all kinds of hard. Doesn’t so much of our pain come from misplaced hope?

But those conversations were, and still are, only the minor players. Permission to speak freely? Forgive the overgeneralization, but I think in general men don’t need to be happy to want to have sex. Women, however, often do. When a mama is just flat out low for months at a time, the bedroom is not exactly the most happening place. And that matters in marriage. It matters so much. Then there’s the budgets that need a major overhaul, the suddenly limited supply of babysitters because not just anyone can handle a little boy who can’t communicate his needs, and the fact that autism is just always on our freaking minds because it has to be: does he want raisins? Are the doors locked? Why is he crying? Are you taking him to therapy today? If we go to the birthday party do you want to shadow Cannon? Is he kicking his crib or hitting his head?

It all just takes up a lot of space.

There’s the general thought floating around out there that 80% of marriages with an autistic child end in divorce. Well, that’s not really true, but special needs absolutely puts a unique stress on marriage. We know it, because we have seen a hundred tiny splinters turn in to actual wedges between us in the last year. Every marriage has those splinters, a special needs marriage just has different ones—maybe more of them, but I don’t know that for sure. We all need guards in our marriages and we all need Jesus. Still, Alex and I looked at the very real evidence that many special needs children end up being raised by single parents at a time, and we said, “No. We do this together. Very imperfectly, but always together.” I don’t know how we could ever do it apart.

We don’t have a formula for navigating our marriage on this journey, but we have one thing that we believe has made all the difference: a burning desire for God’s glory. And that’s really it, that is our answer. So we start there and we end there. Alex led the way on this—this man has put more scripture in his heart and mind in the last six months than in our entire marriage. It’s his oxygen. When he is playing with the kids he constantly stops and says “guys, look at the clouds, did you know the Heavens declare the glory of God!” Sometimes Cannon will look up and sometimes he won’t, but I can tell you it is impossible not to feel held and provided for when you are saying out loud that even “the sky declares His handiwork!” Your eyes immediately find your son and you think “Yes, Cannon, your life declares the glory of God and the way he made you proclaims his handiwork!” God’s word instantly changes the way we see this struggle— as if we are in those moments not fighting it but letting God do what he will in it.

Daily we are finding that when we believe in the perfect ending of this story, God’s story, the same things take a much different shape. Our hope is reoriented to the only thing that can sustain it, the gospel. Autism, while it may make us weary many days, doesn’t loosen our grip on one another, it forces us to grip the cross like our life depends on it—because it does. But friends, I promise you, when we are grabbing hold of Jesus through the access we have to him in his word, He holds us. And then we don’t have to stay in the place of “why would God let Cannon go through this?” because we know: it’s for his glory.

*****

My faith in Jesus, and my marriage to Alex, is not the same as it was six years ago when I was blissfully unaware of the nuances of marriage and parenting and thought picking colors was preparing us for big decisions later on. Today, I realize that I know so much less about anything but desire so much more of Jesus, and that is because God gave us the blessing of our sweet boy. Autism woke me up to God’s redemptive plan, and it forever changed the way I hope my marriage reflects God’s glory. And while I will always have days that I want someone to listen to how hard this can be, or feel bad that it costs so much money, or have sympathy because school and vacations and holidays are always going to look different for us, what I want my life to say far more than anything else is this: “Come and see what God has done: he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man… Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell you what he has done for my soul.”

Alex, I'm so  grateful we get to do this together.