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Dear Friend Who Doesn’t Like Mother’s Day,

by with 2 Comments BlogFaithFamily

Dear Friend Who Doesn’t Like Mother’s Day,

The greeting card aisle is going to be packed this week at the grocery store- dozen of folks swarmed around to find just the right words to stick in an envelope. It’s coming Sunday: Mother’s Day. This is the day we set aside to celebrate moms and all they mean to us.  Seventy-five percent of all the flower sales in the U.S. each year happen THIS weekend.  That’s a lot of roses, ya’ll.    For many moms and their children this is a beautiful day filled with family and flowers, good food and gifts.  We will smile and thank our families and share a meal, and it will be restful. I anticipate it will be that way for me. But this is far from reality for many.

Because sometimes there are no words and no bouquets.

For some Mother’s Day can be a brutal-reminder kind of day. The day that points out to a woman all the holes, the tattered places, the loss. There is a vacant seat at the table, an empty mailbox, or a painful place in our hearts.

Because this broken world can mean wayward children and less-than-perfect relationships.  Often there is no card that can be purchased that says just the right thing from a daughter who carries too much pain and distance between herself and her mom.  Or Sunday might be a day that a daughter just sits with memories of her mother, lost from this world because of cancer, a lifetime cut way too short.

Or maybe a mother sits surrounded by photographs hung on the walls of her children, her table empty, no visitors to welcome. Maybe she’s lost a child to death or to a prodigal path.  Maybe there’s just silence these days.  Maybe she has given up that she will ever hug them again.

These are not Hallmark moments.

So to all the moms or daughters who feel a little broken this Mother’s Day… I see you.  This Sunday might be a time of mending for you, or it might just be a day to sit with the feelings.  I don’t know. I  only know that I have  a little gift for you, to remind you that regardless of your circumstances, you are beloved.

I created these reminders for myself: 18 scriptures printed on a page that speak truth to me.  I  framed them, right there here where I can see them daily.

They contain words like:

You are loved.  You are beautiful. You are special.  You are cared for. 

Words from a Father who knew that we would need them. Words just maybe for such a time as this- a day that comes with mixed feelings and lonely places.

So to moms or daughters that find this weekend hard, these are for you.  I’d send you roses and daisies from my yard too if I could. You are not alone.

You can download the below printable here.

 

Happy Mother’s Day.

 

 

 

 

 

Em

Striking Truth

by with One Comment BlogCommunityFaith

If there’s anything I’ve learned about the life of a creative entrepenuer, it it this: it is hard and exhausting, overwhelming, exhilarating, and beautiful.

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As I glance around the circle of strong, beautiful women He has surrounded me with, I am reminded that he first thing God did is CREATE. Maybe that’s why satan goes so relentlessly after anything that uses creativity to further God’s kingdom.

That’s my theory, anyway.

We each fight demons, obstacles, and challenges in our callings.
I’ve been blessed to meet visionaries, entrepreneurs and creative types all across the country. We lift each other up and share a knowing looks at conferences:  nods of “yes, me too” and encouraging texts that read “it’s hard, keep going.”

Sometimes I vox a friend with these simple words: keep believing in the Truth.

I first met Emily Dean in Nebraska a year ago. We were both speaking at a conference. On the second day, my mother and I sat in the front row of Emily’s breakout session, mesmerized. Her outward beauty was obvious. But her gentle demeanor, broad smile, and message that spoke deep truth were the things that resonated the most.

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Emily reminded me of a slightly older version of my own daughter: A wise soul and a girl who had a story that could have been written in pain, but she was choosing every minute to write it for good. There is a certain light about a girl who knows who she really is at her core,  the child of a king.

Emily’s words that day came from a place of deep truth.  At the age of twenty, Emily spoke with more wisdom than most women twice her age. She knew she was beloved, but it hadn’t been an easy lesson.

She shared of her rise as a singer, actress, and model. How she had walked the hallways of high rises in some of the most sought-after modeling agencies in the world and still felt empty. I leaned close as she described what it felt like to be sized up and compared for roles and photo shoots, to be publicly criticized for any tiny physical flaw, any trait portraying anything less than “perfect”.

The modeling world left no area off limits for criticism of a woman’s body, and the messaging had taken a toll. It’s ironic to me that an industry that becomes the measuring stick for all of us about the perfect body, hair, makeup, smile, leaves in its wake insecure, fragile girls.

Like any story of redemption, slowly something inside Em changed during those modeling days. Slowly at first, and increasingly over time, all the places that were supposed to be filled by her rise in the industry felt hollow.

Emily began a quest to find everlasting peace, and as she did, she knew that the message spoken deep to her own soul was one desperately needed by other women.  Much like me and “Beloved”, she took the name given to her:  her middle name, Varee, and re-framed it in the light of truth.

Her business, Verity Varee, which means “to strike truth” was born a few years later.

I watched a version of  this video the first time we met, and it nearly brought me to tears, the beauty and honesty of it:

 

The next time I met Emily was at the Winsome Retreat, against the backdrop of the Allegheny mountains, in a quiet retreat center at a conference run by her mother and my dear friend Kim Hyland.

 

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This time my daughter traveled with me. Seeing her eyes light up when hearing the truths in Emily’s story and mission is something I will never forget.   Emily’s love of fashion and her deep belief in inner AND outer beauty was refreshing.  They talked late into the night over hot tea, interspersing fashion trends with the gritty real-life struggles of being a young girl in a world that screams “you are not enough.”

 

Em and Shelby

I think Emily and her team are onto something,
What if we could get this message of true beauty out to every teenage girl who feels alone in her insecurity? What if we could put it into the hands of every young mom who stares at her  “Instagram” feed and feels like she just can’t measure up?  And just what if, middle-aged women like me could re-discover themselves by seeing the details of our own beauty in the wrinkled lines staring back from the  mirror and in another woman’s story?

What if we could reveal truth together, one story at a time?

I believe we can.  I believe in Emily and her team.  Mostly, I believe in God’s message being spoken through them.

So I’m asking you to join me. It’s a bold ask, and not one that I do often.

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Renee’s  “reveal” as captured by Verity Varee team

So dream with me:  What if Verity Varee could reach all  generations of  women with this:  YOU are more than enough.  YOU are beautiful: with makeup, without makeup.  YOU are unique.  Let the lens of God filter all the flaws you see.
Here’s what I’m asking:
1. Pray for my sweet friend Emily and her team. Pop over to their FB or Instagram feed and follow along. Post a prayer there. Encourage.  Cheer. Visit their website (swoon!)
2. Contribute to Verity Varee’s Kick-starter fund. The money raised here will go directly toward the publishing of VV’s first printed book of reveals, getting the true story of beauty into more hands, and this important message into more hearts.  Together we can see women through a photography lens that captures what God sees.

 

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Together we can see ourselves in each others stories. We can be women who cheer.

Let’s be women who strike truth into our sisters’ hearts.

Contribute to the Kickstarter here. 

Thanks for dreaming with us,

Amy

 

 

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The Stage of Letting Go That Might Kill You (or make you grow)

by with No Comment BlogParenting

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The girl that I have known before she took her first breath is preparing to leave.

She is nearly eighteen and preparing for college and my sophomore boy is taller than me, carrying bravery around like his battered backpack. They are both braver than me most days.

The thick-panes of my upstairs bedroom window frame the bare tree as I think about this season. From my view just one red leaf is still hanging on in the late day sun.

It is late autumn and the leaves have all turned crimson and gold.  Some accepted change before others. It’s a wide, glorious display before the winter snow piles high over them and they become nothing but compost for spring flowers. This one tree seems stubborn.

That single crimson leaf seems ready to let go, veined and wrinkled.

I wonder why that leaf is holding on when there are so many are there on the ground, waiting to cushion her fall. The autumn outside my window swirls like the emotions in this mama’s heart and there is no denying this season.

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I know that all of these changes will make me grow, just like that tree. Another ring will form this year. But I’m not quite ready.

Read the rest here…

(I’ve got a guest-post over at my friend Tammy’s this week…join me there?)

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The Priceless Things

by with 15 Comments BlogFaithHaiti

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I received my grandmother’s diamond earrings two Christmases ago.  My mother had carefully wrapped them with a note and handed the package to me to me as the very last gift of that evening that we celebrated with family.  Grandma had passed away the year before and she had worn the earrings until her hands buckled too much with arthritis to put them in.  My mother had worn them for the past decade.

I cried when I opened the black box and read the note.

I trembled when I put the shining diamonds in my ears.

They were expensive, but not because they were worth a great deal of money.  They were worth a great deal of history.  They were a legacy. They were part of my story and now I got to carry them with me every day.

I rarely take those earrings off. They are a shining bit of my story.

I learned something important on that winter evening two years ago: Jewels are priceless not because of their dollar amount, but  because of their story.

And I’m learning this lesson more and more each day.

I’ve been dying to tell you something and TODAY is the day that I finally do.

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I’ve joined the team at Vi Bella Jewelry Company as The Director of Marketing and Partnership Development.

This basically means I get to tell beautiful stories and share the true value of jewelry that is made by artisans in Haiti, Mexico, and right here in the U.S. Jewelry that changes people’s lives and hearts.

I also get to travel to Iowa pretty frequently and work with the amazing team at the home office there.

I will get to laugh late into the night with friends I have made in the Midwest, on soil that belonged to my grandmother, and a state where much of my family still calls home.

I may speak some at conferences  and will surely work from home a lot in my yoga pants drinking too much coffee with my cat staring at me from across the room. I’ll be doing lots of Google hangouts and conference calls.

It will also mean that our family is praying about going to Haiti.  And wondering how that might happen.  And how we might look into the eyes of the people’s  stories I have been called to tell.  And that my heart is sure to break in a thousand new ways because He has called me to a mission that is HIS.  To a people that are HIS.  To a new place.

And so I’m just going to be straight-up real about this.  It’s scary and exciting and thrilling and terrifying.  And peaceful.  It’s mostly peaceful. With intermittent panic.

But I know one thing for sure:  if this Blue Jean Girl stands for anything in these quaking boots of mine, it’s that stories matter.  And that every jewel in HIS crown is priceless. And the fact that I get to tell some stories of jewels in His crown is humbling.

I’d love for you to Join the Story with me.

We are adopting a focus this year at Vi Bella~ recording at least 3 beautiful things each day in an informal journal.  Here’s a printable that was beautifully done by  Anna Kate of AnnaKOriginals. if you want to come along with us.  We’d love to remember beauty together.

Pray?  Hold my hand?  Celebrate? And just maybe think about stepping into something in YOUR life that may be beautiful and scary, too…

Much love,

Blue Jean Girl

The printable from Anna Kate at AnnaKOriginals:   click here

 

ps.  YES~ the Beloved Shop and this blog will keep going.  I’ve got help behind the scenes and we are excited about new product and goodness coming later this week~ so stay tuned!

If you haven’t heard of Vi Bella, you can learn more in these places.

Lydia Lee

 

Lydia Lee’s post today~~ (gosh I love this girl and CAN NOT wait for a pajama party with her again next week!) Her family has been integral in the work that has been done in Haiti.

Jennifer Lee,who has been a long-time advocate and spokesperson for Vi Bella recently spearheaded a fundraiser that is doing some incredible, redemptive work. Read about it HERE.

Or watch the ViBella video here:

 

 

 

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The Meaning in the Mess

by with 3 Comments BlogFaith

 

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I’m honored to have Jessica over here sharing today.  Jess is an in-real-life friend.  She preaches at my church, listens when I lose it a bit, and speaks truth back into my heart and the hearts of others.  She has a quick sense of humor and a way of making you feel like you have been heard and understood.  I’m so blessed to have her in my life.

Jess is a gifted writer and speaker, and I know that her words here will touch you deeply.

 

The Meaning in the Mess    by Jessica Bolyard


We decorated our house for Christmas yesterday. On one hand, I was ready. Seeing everyone else’s decorations and lights and trees caused some holiday-induced envy, and it was time, after all. Christmas is just a few weeks away.

If I had really been in control of things, though, it wouldn’t have happened quite yet….or at least not in quite the same way. You see, our house is still in disrepair from our run-in with termites this past summer. The room is pretty much back to normal, save for a few missing pictures on the walls and incomplete window treatments waiting for the paint to dry just a little bit more. The furniture is where it’s supposed to be, and we’re not tripping over step ladders or paint cans any more.

What isn’t quite right, though, is the floor. Carpet torn and concrete slab exposed, it’s not the picture-perfect floor it was or will be once the laminate goes in over the next couple of weeks.

I know it’s not that big a deal. There are much worse things we could be dealing with, but it still bothers me far more than it should. When I was a little girl, decorating for Christmas was a production that took over every room of the house, and by the time the last box was emptied and stuffed back into the attic, our everyday clutter had been replaced by a winter wonderland that could have graced the pages of Southern Living or Better Homes & Gardens. For those few weeks in December, as candles shone from darkened windows and colorful nativities found homes on bookshelves and Mom’s impressive collection of ceramic Santas watched us from atop the entertainment center, it was as though we were in someone else’s house. It was beautiful and perfect and a real place of childlike wonderment.

So in recent years, as I have risen to the position of Chief Decorator of my own little family, it has been my joy to transform our home into a Christmas fantasyland. We don’t have the decorations of years and years of collecting, but when the Christmas decorations come out, I always like to think that something special comes over our house. It becomes different. More cozy, somehow. More welcoming and hospitable. Really, it becomes more of what I want it to be the other eleven months of the year.

With our floor incomplete, though, the magic of the transformation was somewhat lost. I didn’t want to put the tree up or bring out the stockings and wreaths until the floor was in. I wanted to wait until it was perfect.

I wanted Christmas to wait until I was ready.

But sometime yesterday it occurred to me that Christmas is not a story of perfect beauty and perfect timing. Rather, Christmas is a story of beauty in the middle of a mess….of timing that is still perfect even when it seems all wrong.

Because Christmas isn’t about picture-perfect decorations, or even about creating wonder in a child’s eyes. Christmas is about majesty birthed in a manger….about faith materialized in filth. Christmas is about a baby boy in a barn. Stars and shepherds…starlit journeys.

Christmas isn’t about our beautiful perfection.
Christmas is about unattainable perfection and impossible grace. About beauty that comes to redeem brokenness. About light that enters into and destroys bitter darkness.

It’s not about perfect brand new floors and evergreen branches against freshly painted walls, and it’s not about hearts that are in perfect condition.

If the Christmas season waited until things were perfect, it would never come.
And if Jesus had expected things to be perfect when He got here, there would have been no reason to come.
And if Mary’s labor pains waited until the world was ready to receive her boy child, we would be awaiting our Savior still.

So as I sat on a cold cement slab and strung lights from an old and crumbling artificial tree, I think somehow I understood this whole thing better than ever. I think the wonderment finally caught up with me.

Because…..Christmas isn’t something we create. It isn’t special because we do so much to make it beautiful.

Christmas is special because it makes us beautiful.

Christ – that baby Messiah in a manger on a straw-covered dirt floor – doesn’t expect perfection. He doesn’t expect a perfect laminate floor for his birthday celebration. No, He is a Messiah who perfects expectation….stirring something in our messy and unprepared hearts that hopes and longs for a time when everything will be beautiful and perfect and better than we could ever have planned.

 

Jessica is a writer and speaker with a passion for connecting the hearts of women with the heart of the God who adores them. Through her own relationship with the Lord, she has come to appreciate the subtle ways He lovingly draws us into intimacy with Himself in the most otherwise ordinary moments of life. Jessica lives with her husband and daughter in Georgia, and on the ideal Saturday afternoon, she can be found curled up with a blanket, an iced coffee, a good book, and her ferociously purring cat.

 

You can follow along with her words here.  Jessica also connects with folks on Facebook and Twitter.

I’m grateful for Jessica and her heart as part of the #ReclaimingBeauty  #ViBella Series.
If you’d like to be part of the story of redemption for women in Haiti, Mexico, and right here in the United States, please link arms with us!

Below is a little snippet of an article that recently appeared in Equanimity Magazine

Equanimity- Holiday Gift Guide 2014 68

Click here to learn more about being an Ambassador for HIM!

 

 

 

 

 

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Reclaimed Wood

by with One Comment BlogFaithFeaturedGood Friday

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When I was 9 years old I fell.

I landed belly down on rough, weathered wood. Palms, wrists, elbows, stomach, knees. My lanky body turned red with fresh pain.

My brothers and I were at the family farm in Iowa. One of our favorite games was running the lengths of the rugged wooden feed troughs which our grandfather used to feed the cattle. There seemed to be dozens of them, positioned end-to-end. To run the length of them we had to jump from one to the other and that’s when I tripped as I  chased my brothers who were just ahead. I felt my foot catch something.  I fell helplessly forward, arms outstretched as if somehow that would save me from injury.

I arose sliver-covered and crying in my shorts and halter top in the heat of the day.

My brothers ran to help. The cattle were unmoved, barely raising their eyes to the calamity.  Somehow I stumbled to the farmhouse on my own and I don’t remember how I covered the several hundred yards to grandma’s front door.  Grandpa found his best tweezers and began the slow processing of removing the offending slivers one at a time.  It seemed to take hours.

Rugged toothpicks littered my body. I will never forget it.

My grandparents and parents dosed me up on Tylenol and coated me with soothing ointment. Grandpa tried to extract the shards only because it made me feel better that he was doing something to help.   In reality only the largest ones could be removed. Those hurt but it was the little ones that couldn’t be removed and were left behind that hurt more. I suppose they worked their way out of the scabby places over time.  Our young bodies are resilient like that.

Oddly enough this memory comes back to me every Easter…because I feel tired and beaten up during Holy Week. My Lenten promises are running dry and I am in desperate need of redemption….ready for cleansing. Ready for somebody to remove the slivers of all my falls.

————-

When Jesus first arrived he was placed in a discarded wooden feed trough that had been relegated to a small barn. On rugged wood. Slivers everywhere.
His earthly life ended as it had begun,  lain upon rugged wood, nailed to a splintery rugged cross.

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He got all slivered-up messy for us. From beginning to end.

Why crucifixion? The cross was historically designed to relegate people to fear, a death sentence that existed hundreds of years before Christ endured His own. Its brutality kept Rome’s subjects under control, for nobody would willingly choose to end their life that way.

In the bible wide swaths of time are often given a blip of a verse.   Dozens of generations are mentioned in one chapter. But on this Friday that we call GOOD…….we get an hour-by-hour account. History crawls to an slow, anguishing pace.  We are forced to look at the great cruelty of the slow dying God chose for his son as it plays out in vivid detail.  Jesus stumbles up a hill to death and then crawls onto the device constructed for it. Does anyone besides me want to shield their eyes and hearts a bit when reading about it all?

We can’t yet  glimpse the good news.  The next story where he turns that messy instrument of pain, punishment, fear, and death around. We don’t know yet that He redefined its meaning into a Redemptive, Reclaimed Rescue.

God whispers: “That messy manger where only livestock came for food? I sent Him to make it holy. Those planks of wood that represented fear? He crawled onto them because He loves you. Both are now reclaimed and beautiful.”

How I dis-grace it all. Fling it off like it’s mine to reject. Except on Good Friday when I remember again that His cross was an instrument of death. I sure have toned it down a notch (or a thousand.) I use the cross as home décor. A pretty adornment above the fireplace. A diamond-set charm for around my neck. I have forgotten. I think Ann Voskamp calls it “spiritual amnesia.” I walk around as if I don’t have shards under my spiritual skin.

This Holy Week I approach the shadow of the cross in my ripped jeans, splinters still working themselves out from under my skin.  Because only in the shadow of Jesus’ rugged cross can they be removed.  And I ponder the slivers I still carry: unforgiveness, doubt, pain, fear. The splinters that make me feel deserted, isolated, forgotten, insignificant, abandoned, afraid, unworthy and forgotten.

And then the shadow of the cross reminds me that In Christ we are: spoken for, claimed, cleansed, adopted, adored, healed and remembered. By name, beloved.

What I realize as I stare at it fully is this:   When I forgive someone or lay down a habit or witness the death of some piece of my life….it is 1/1millionth of what Jesus experienced on that wood. Which invokes prayer. And incomprehensible gratitude.

Because the truth about these blue jeans we are wearing? We are all bankrupt, bruised, barren, beside ourselves, betrayed, and betrayers. I start to remember that He strained under all all of those slivers because He loves me.  He could leave them there but He gave Himself up so that they can be removed.

And I reflect. Do I willingly crawl into any circumstance with sacrificial love? Do I willingly  strain under any load? Because I should when I acknowledge that it was we who were all loaded on his back that day.
I try to move towards reclaimed wood. But I fail.

Jesus’ last thoughts hanging with him on that cross? The men stationed to his left and his right. Criminals. . .like us.
Jesus prays for salvation harder than He has ever prayed for anything. He sweats with pleading to God.
His last cries are for us. The wooden structure has done His earthly body in.

And then it is finished. 

And we sit in the stillness of Saturday, waiting for the miracle.