Get out of Jail free Card

Yesterday was not my best day. I let my kids watch "bonus" screen time while I cried over my kitchen sink. After two weeks of me calling and badgering them after I realized that a SIGNIFICANT portion of our photos and videos were inexplicably missing from our cloud drive, an Amazon representative spent and hour on the phone with me "letting me down easy" that I would never, ever see all the pictures and videos from October 2015-May 2016 again. Sure, it would have taken me hitting the delete button like 10 different times to delete a solid 700 pictures, but apparently it had to be me ( or someone else who has access to our pictures), and not Amazon, because they just don't do that.

Bottomline: Hilary should take note, if she wants to store top-secret secure documents and then delete them so that NO ONE CAN GET THEM BACK then she should be using the Amazon Cloud. *eye roll*

This left me crying into my pillow and eating the biggest bowl of Two Cookies Bluebell ( new favorite! Why hasn't someone combined cookies n' cream and cookie dough ice-cream before?!!) because this is not my favorite week anyway...this is the week when we look back and shake are heads that its really been 4 years since we were fighting for Tabitha and Priscilla's lives....August 25 2012 is the day we lost Priscilla. Today is hard for me even now.  Sure, four years distance has made it easier, but its still a little weighty. And I think it would be easy to just wallow a bit. I think that's fair, right?!

But I read something this morning,in Acts 16:25, that really reminded me what an opportunity these moments bring, it says:

" At midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing praises to God, and the prisoners were listening to them." 

Paul and Silas had been thrown in prison, without trial, after preaching the gospel, they really didn't know what was going to happen to them and yet there they were praising God, and the other prisoners were listening.  

I so often take advantage of my "midnight" moments and get a good wallow in ( see: facebook status from last night), but I'm missing opportunities there, sure its not wrong for me to cry about things that are hard, but what an incredible testimony of Paul and Silas! What an audience they had there in the prison as all the other prisoners listened. Because, they were not alone in the prison!!!! I think, so often, when I'm having my cry-over-the-kitchen-sink moments,  I feel so very very alone, but in reality I can't tell you how many people have told me similar stories of losing all their pictures, all their journal entries from a certain important period, their Journaling Bible with their letters to their unborn and new babies....story after story! The truth is, NONE of us are alone in our struggles, we are SURROUNDED by people struggling. 

And then there are the harder things, like losing a child, that seem almost insurmountable, but we can be assured that we aren't alone in those heart aches either! Maybe the heart ache looks different, or has a different story, but the bottom-line is that NONE of us are alone at midnight. NONE of us are alone in prison. 

The difference is that I have the Hope of Jesus in my midnight moments. I have the Hope of Jesus in my prison moments. I should not keep that to myself! 

I am sorry for being a bit on the "woe is me" side yesterday, but today I want to share my story, my struggle ( because it is still a struggle! Its not all roses!), but most importantly I want to share my HOPE and my God. Because there are other prisoners in here with me. 

WHAT NOW?!?!

This past weekend we headed to Nacogdoches for Ransom's birthday celebration with family. While we were there, I sat down for coffee with my friend Esther who had taken on the job of doing a grammar edit of my book. Essentially I had given it to her in a hot mess of runon sentences and an over use of ALL CAPS and she had returned it to me covered in a sea of green ink (so kind of her not to use red. It might have killed me.)

As it turned out, I do not really write with punctuation in mind at all. I know this doesn't surprise you in the least since you all read this blog and it is never well edited either. But, I was an English Major and I DO ( see?!?! I can't stop it!!!) actually know how to write a proper sentence. The thing is, every time I tried to edit my book for myself I would get caught up in the weeds of making some sentence sound better. It was horrible. I could NOT get it done. NOT EVEN A LITTLE. Besides, it took another person doing an intervention to make me take out all those ALL CAPS. Because apparently I like to YELL AT PEOPLE in written form.

IT'S MY THING, OK!?!

Annnnyway, so there we sat, and as I passed her a big ol' fat check it really hit me that this can not just be a trifle that I'm doing as a cute little hobby in my spare time any more. For one thing, you just don't invest this much time or now-money, without it holding a little bit more weight than that.

It's an awful feeling, because now its starting to hit that once again I've gotten myself into one of those "rejection" type situations. You know, like apply for college or deciding to cast all caution to the wind and date that cute boy with good hair, or submit your resume for that job you really want- all those things are now happily in my past. Right where I want them to be, because I do not enjoy rejection. It didn't help that at that moment when I realized how serious this was all becoming- Esther asked me casually "Just what made you decide to write this book, anyway?!"

In that moment I wanted to run away, crying "I don't knoooooooowwww!" But instead I think I smiled and said, "Because God told me to!" -which is entirely true...I never would have started this endeavor if I hadn't heard it quite so clearly. And yet. And yet, now that I'm here, 3 years in...wondering where I'm going to go once I put all these corrections into my digital copy. Thinking that the response I get from second person (other than myself) to read it through is "Why did you write this!?"- well...sigh....isn't probably a great start.
I have a feeling this whole "book business" is going to be a Personal Growth Endeavor. Which I hate.  

So, the bottom-line is: This fall I should be ready to start looking for a book agent and that is a nightmare of a thought.