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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....
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Upside Down World

She scratched it in her sprawling cursive on a long to-do list she left for me on the counter. I typed out four condensed pages of the way God got hold of Mom’s heart and how He flipped her snow globe over and all the pieces went swirling ‘round, everything tipped upside down. I’m home alone whispering “wow” because I see it clearer now. I was born in perfect timing – Mom showed me the world upside down.
            
The world said faith and works paved the road to heaven, motherhood displayed weakness, and that God was not love. God said faith opened heaven’s gates, motherhood was the strength of daily death to selfishness, and that God loved with sweat, blood and nail prints in His hands. Maybe the elderly man who said we were “backwards” was right. Mom taught me to run backward in a world that runs forward to hopelessness. God spun her unhappy soul until she was spinning wild with joy. He was gracious enough to catch my little hand on the hem of her skirts and take me for the ride until I was ready to choose to do the same crazy backward twirl.
            
That’s how it works. God’s grace touches one life, which touches another and another. Sometimes no one even really notices and sometimes they’re twenty years old when they finally start to see points in the plot, God pouring His grace in between every line. 


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