That 430 am wakeup was a wild one. I woke from a dream that I had a little girl rounding out our current family of boys where I reign as queen.
Frankly, I LOVE having boys. I have an amazing dad and two brilliant brothers; I am an athlete and have coached for years; I am married to a fantastic man and I feel as if I have always been wired more like a dude. I really love men and have a heart for them to be respected and honored and raised to be humble and kind and strong leaders. But there is something about wanting my sweet husband to be a girl-daddy, for my young boys to know what it would be to care for a young woman and protect a sister, for me to have a daughter that I might pour into to be strong and wise and humble and respectful and a leader in her own right, knowing that mistakes are a given, grace is non-negotiable, hope is assured and love always wins.
Right on the tails of that dream came the vision for the blog, which is admittedly a different sort of birth-story. To be honest, the thought to write, to document the schizophrenia that is my brain, has been percolating for some time. But I always felt overwhelmed. I tried a family blog once upon a time which promptly died out; I started a twitter account but never posted a tweet. Now the pressure of the first tweet being epic is far too great and frankly, I just can’t handle managing any more social media. Keeping up on FB Is hard enough and I am reading Hands Free Mama which makes me want to burn every screen and to do list in my life to really grasp what matters {her insights and challenges are life changing for any season, man or woman, btw}.That said, the thought of learning how to host and design a blog and actually keeping it up felt overwhelmingly like a monstrous roadblock.
So that morning at 5am with an entire camp asleep, I stood alone on a stage in a room called Big Squawka, looking out over the Princess Louisa inlet, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and prayed to the living God who has met with me time and time again in that room, “what do you have for me? I have this stirring in me that I am to write, that I am to do something with all these words you have given me, yet the very logistics seem to big and overwhelming.” He responded with a peace deep in my spirit. A quiet that caused me to open my hands and sink down to the floor and be still for some time.
I prayed that morning for a lot of other things: I praised God for the way he had met me and every girl in my cabin that weekend, for the ways he had sustained me as I taught and led seminars and walked alongside some incredible young student leaders I get to do life with throughout the year; I prayed over every chair where later that morning, before heading back to the Pacific Northwest, 300 campers would sit and hear the final encouragement and charge from the speaker, my dear friend and brother Clint, who happened to have just won the Superbowl.
For hours, I sat and stood and talked and listened and sang and wept. It was the sweetest of mornings with Jesus.
And just hours later, the craziest of things happened. The campers were off to board the “Princess” for the 3 hour boat ride that would take them back to the mainland. Only a few people were left in camp when another woman popped her head in the door to say goodbye and yelled out, “when you start your blog, I want to read it!”, to which Daniel, our most wonderfully humble and kind and technologically gifted “sound guy”, hopped out from behind the sound booth {mind you, we were 3 of the 5 people left scattered behind} and followed with “if you want to start writing, I will build it for you…. Just start writing so you have a bunch of posts queued up and you won’t feel overwhelmed about keeping up with the content to keep it fresh.”
WHAT?!?!? In a few sentences, he answered the two most pressing hindrances in me moving forward! We sat for an hour as he asked questions and patiently fleshed out my heart, my style, spoke encouragement and the craziest affirmations that could only be inspired by a God who knows my whole heart and was giving me a swift and comical butt kicking to make obedience joyful and easy.
And so I have been writing…
I feel pregnant with ideas and have pages of post titles and possibilities. And almost 3 months to the day, back at Malibu, the place where it all began, Daniel and I had coffee and decided on a name, bought a domain and started designing what has now launched as “The Tethering Place”.
Oh, and I started a $20 tab for him at the coffee shop to clean out my email inbox for me so I don’t feel so overwhelmed by technology. What a guy.
THE TETHERING PLACE 