Knock Knock. Who's there?

I’ve missed all of my blog friends. I’ve missed y’all a lot actually, but I took a much needed break. You know how it is? Two years and a half years of sneak peeks into my life had taken a toll. Plus we’ve had so much going on, and truly I haven’t known where to start this latest entry. But, it’s like seeing a friend’s name come up on caller id and not answering because you know the call is going to take a little bit more time than you have at that moment…then it’s five years later and if you’d just answered it five years ago and taken that extra fifteen minutes then you wouldn’t have had so much to talk about after all. All of that to say, I’m just going to jump in and recap.

First, let me wrap up the trial from the last post. It was hard on me emotionally. We convicted him of Felony Murder because he actually committed the crime according to the evidence presented. Still, even knowing everything I know now, I still can’t help but think to myself that he was so young I’m not really sure he understood what it all meant – how taking a life isn’t really all that cool and going to adult man prison at 18 or 19 probably sucks worse than any degree of bad his out of prison life might have been. Seeing a mother grieve the loss of her only child and knowing the only joy that she’ll find in the future is that the person who did it might suffer too, well...that is hard as well. Selfishly I'm still mourning the loss of my innocence. I realize that sounds stupid, but at 33 there is so little innocence left, you know? I catch myself thinking about weighty matters that I have no control over and kind of grieving over them. It’s weird and I can’t really elaborate more than this. This is now a part of who I am.


Now, for something more fun.

Mason’s been hired as the new Youth Director at our church!

I know…I know, where did this come from? I don’t tell y’all everything…good grief. A girl has to have some secrets.

We’re working as a team with it, like we do everything in life. Mason works at the church, I organize Mason, and Clare comes along and interjects joy..joy..joy! It’s just what we do – Team Boyd. I wish I had two days to tell you everything, but I don’t. Here is the rundown. We started volunteering with the Youth in August and were scared because we had no idea what we were getting into, but we knew we wanted in. The first month was actually pretty brutal. We were right; we really didn’t know what we were doing, and the kids looked at us and interacted with us like we were aliens. Thank goodness everyone who was already involved (parents, preachers, volunteers) stood with us to help show us the way. The second month was less brutal. We were still right, we really didn’t know what we were doing, but we were getting the hang of it and we still had our amazing parents, preachers and volunteers (oh, don’t let me forget to mention our amazing kids…we finally knew all of their names by the beginning of month two - ha!). Also, we bought a book to help us figure out what to do! Ha! The third month was when we figured out we wanted to do this forever. I think it was one of our morning coffee sessions late in October when I first said to Mason, “if we’d had had a boy I would have wanted him to be like so-and-so, but so-and-so is so amazing and I hope Clare is like so-and-so” It suddenly clicked that in a way they were our children, too! All of these babies, they were a part of our life now too! What a honor. Of course they each had their own fabulous families, but they were now a part of our own family conversations. They were in our morning prayers. We missed the ones who didn’t show up on Wednesday or Sunday nights. We got excited about birthdays. We wanted to go to their events to be proud of them with their parents and families. We wanted to get to know them to find out what they liked and what they didn’t like – how to reach them. We wanted to talk to them and not talk at them. We wanted to find fun ways to get them to open up and feel safe with us. We wanted to equip them with biblical principles to help them weather the week’s storms. We feel personally responsible for teaching them to respect others and love others and share with others. WOW! It’s huge, it’s enormous, it’s humbling. It’s exactly what we do with Clare, and it comes from the same place.

We’re realistic though, we know Who is in charge and Who is leading this…all of this to God’s glory. So now we’re here. Yay! I wish I could see the reaction on some people’s faces when they find this out, I would get a good chuckle out of it. Dana, I’m a long way from those bright Sunday afternoon’s on the front porch honey. It’s good to see in my very own situation the ability God has to wash one’s soul clean and to refurbish a life.

There are other things, but you'll just have to wait for the next entry. This one is long enough. Let the blogging begin (again). It's certainly the right time for it!


Aside
I used to shy away from talking about God or church in my blog a whole lot because I didn’t want to run anyone off who might have been hurt in God’s name or hurt by the collective church or hurt by religion in general. I also didn’t want to be associated with the negative stigma of fundamentalist beliefs, which all people in church are labeled with it seems. My fear was that all of my lovely readers would be unable to separate me from that. I apologize to you in advance for this. Let me assure you that you can still come to my blog and expect to see many non-church things because I don’t live at church; however, you can also expect to see the veil lifted off of my absolute wonder and gratitude at God’s inner workings in my life because He lives in me and these kinds of things just pour out of me now. I understand that many people believe differently than I do and I will always try honor and respect that as best as I can. You have my words!