“And now, in one hour’s time, I will be out there again.  I will raise my eyes and look down that corridor; four feet wide, with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.”        -Chariots of Fire


Enough is a shadow that haunts faith, a lingering doubt that whispers fear along the edges of silence. 
Enough is condemnation that hollows a heart, a measurement bred for emptiness that knows fully the weight of lack. 
Enough is the word a mind wrestles to the floor while suffering storms in snarls of thunder that roll discordant sound through thoughts, crashing confusion into rooted trunks. 
And enough is the enemy that assails my home, first creeping into cracks, now howling at the door, but ever besieging what grace has built. 

If you’ve visited this little corner of the web in months past then doubtless you’re aware that I and my wee brave family have undergone some struggles in the past few years.  You’ve also likely observed that I’ve been markedly absent from the blogging arena. 
For months now I’ve grappled with if and how to get back here.  Questions of ability, timing, skill, and legitimacy all contended with the tremendous ache to pour passion into ink and graphite once more.  More than once I tried, casting lines of words that eventually proved incapable of picking up my abandoned threads. 
I got sick.  I waited.  I prayed.  It hurt.  I waited some more. 
There isn’t adequate space or readers’ patience to detail all that’s gone on since I went dark, but in brief the captain and I battled our way through ongoing health issues, pregnancy, stress, and a whole host of related struggles.  Illness wrenched much of my stability away by either removing or significantly reducing the pieces of my identity from hobbies and interests out into the wider depths of responsibility and purpose. 

You’ll have to forgive me a bit of melodrama, but sometimes my inner “Anne with an E” comes out when I write, and in this case I must say that I felt like my hopes had become a graveyard where my dreams came to die.  Doctors weren’t helpful.  I sold my horse.  Energy wilted.  Independence surrendered, and motherly patience fled before the full-body migraine that somehow found me every morning. 
Much of the emotion that erupted could be captured by the turmoil that tumbled out of my prayers when I was pregnant with my second little bear, because when I reached as far into myself as I could stretch I found only into a horrid desolation.  How could I care for a toddler and a new baby when I spent my days piloting the household from the couch and staking out the clock, counting the hours till the captain came home?  How could I continue telling stories when each concept had to fight its way through an intense mental fog without getting lost along the way?  And how could I gracefully bear the weight of pain when I didn’t have the emotional muscle love demanded in order to submit to a life disrupted? 

A week before I was schedule to be induced, baby number two still didn’t have a name.  The captain and I had considered and discarded several, but for some reason my thought came finally to rest on Jesse.  I love names, and these syllables sounded as though they began judiciously and ended bravely (see, there goes my Anne Shirley again!).    
As the season of Advent approached that year, I dwelt often on Isaiah 11:1 where the prophet paints a vision that begins with ashen strokes mourning the fall of King David’s family.  A felled line.  A mighty trunk ruined to a stump.  However, each word following boldly brushes hope into the gap.  From the nearly-dead stump of Jesse springs a shoot of new growth which will bear the fruit of the promised Messiah.  The root of the gospel, Emmanuel.   
God himself was bringing new life from a heap of sadness, because God was bringing himself to the children He loved.  The Law of Moses and the heritage of David’s glory were not sufficient to redeem Israel.  They were not enough.  But the Father poured His perfection into the barrenness of humanity, and as His Word marched on past the resurrection the holy pen continued to exhort believers to remember the sufficiency of His strength. 
I was not enough for Jesse, but my God was, and from the first moment I held my new baby I was touched by a love that defied my brokenness, the kind of strength that surpasses understanding.  God met my need by bringing himself into my not enough.  The days that followed were still crowded by dark, but it was as if someone had turned a night light on, perched on my left shoulder, dancing ever on the thin peripheral of my sight. 


Fast forward to now.  Fingers on the keys.  Eyes despairing at the date of my last post.  Standing in the middle of a story and trying to fight my way out, all the while wondering if it’s even possible to condense the mess of the last few years into a concise and meaningful blog update.  Extend to a bit of patience to me, and I’ll attempt to wrap this up for now.      My health battle remains both painful and present, but slow gains are finally being made.  And the grace of perspective reminds me that there is still a vastness of thanksgiving to be brought before His gates. 
With my publisher in prison for fraud and extortion, my first professional aspirations have been gutted, and for other reasons I am seriously examining my ambition to write at all, but perhaps other hopes will meet me.  
I’m unhorsed for the first time in almost a decade, but the Lord has provided a friend to share her equine blessings with me.  
A posture of submission and death is the painful hallmark of growing, but I have chosen to continue committing my worth and purpose to Christ.  It was His to begin with.
I thank you for returning with me, and I pray that in the months to come we will be well met on this page once again.


The army of “not enough” assembles daily against domesticity, artistry, identity, and against holiness.  And never in my life has the gravity of my inadequacy been so oppressive.  But in all things I am continuing to learn how to say “my soul magnifies the Lord.  Yes, even here.”      And with every fold of submission, the spirit of peace rushes into forgotten spaces.  
That glory, the gold of stillness that stands in all a soul’s gaps and empties himself into the weight of my lack.  

"Out of the stump of David's family will grow a shoot--yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root.”  (Isaiah 11:1) 

All work subject to copyright by the author.  Use by permission only.  2017.  Images via:  ebay.de, Emily Borowski, oh-darling-lets-be-adventurers.tumblr.com, HuffPost, danielwellington.com, flickr.com,