Let Me Tell You. This Is Love…

Last week was my birthday. With it, I turned 29 and began the journey of the last year of my twenties.

Unlike many people, I actually don’t mind growing older. Every year has been better than the last and I don’t expect that cycle to change anytime soon. I don’t have a single qualm about growing older or collecting wrinkles or gray hairs or achy bones. I think it’s a worthwhile exchange to feel more and more at home in my own skin, more and more at home in this world of mine, more and more at home in God's love—which happens without fail each passing year.

So it was that I welcomed this new year of mine with open arms.

As it turns out, I was not the only one.

Typically things around our house are pretty low-key. We didn’t put up a Christmas tree this year. We don’t make a fuss about wearing green on St. Patrick’s day or having a cookout on Memorial Day. We often forget it’s a holiday until late in the day when we’re reminded of it on Facebook.

To me, a day is a day and whether it’s written in red ink on my calendar or not, I see it as one to be enjoyed and embraced and celebrated, even in the smallest of ways.

So I didn’t really expect anything special for this birthday of mine. My husband had to work, so I spent most of it fielding phone calls that serenaded me with the Happy Birthday song and scrolling through post after post on Facebook with well wishes from folks I haven’t talked to in years. My in-laws stopped by with an in-person hug and some cupcakes. In short, I was reminded how many people around me love me. For me, that was enough.

But later in the week, my husband told me that he was going to take me out for my birthday, but it was a surprise. Two years ago, he took me for a surprise trip to Savannah to celebrate my birthday. Last year, he took me on a trip to this romantic frozen-in-time garden estate for no reason other than just for the simple fact that this man likes to deliver a good surprise.

When we got into the car for my surprise celebration, I could not be more surprised or excited when we pulled up to… an antique store. Friends, this is love, for my husband to take me to an antique store to let me ohh and ahh. It’s the one that everytime we drive pass, I creen to see if there’s anything new in the windows and I sing a special song about the store’s name. I'd been dying to pop in for a visit but never seemed to have the time to spare. My husband solved all of that...

After that, he took me to a string of other decorating and home stores to let me browse and dream and curate and drink it all in like a physical Pinterest page. At the end of it, as if the ice cream and scone and mocha and window-shopping weren’t enough, he took me to get my real birthday present—a new kitchen table. (We had to order it so we'll get to pick it up in a couple weeks. Here's what our kitchen looks like until then.)

Does he know me or what?

I think it’s safe to say that 29 is going to be a good year.

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Adventures in Trying New Foods: Brussels Sprouts and Cabbage Update

You know what’s funny? Even after I had January’s experiment of trying out kale successfully knocked out of the way, by the time February had rolled around, I had to literally force myself to pick up that month's food in the grocery store. When I wrote “Brussels sprouts” on my grocery list, I gagged a little.

That’s why I’m glad that I made this goal to try one new food each month. (You can see my original list of all the foods I’m planning on trying throughout the year here.) It’s not much, but it’s the motivation I need to actually do it. Otherwise, I’d still be gagging and sautéing green beans instead of Brussels sprouts or chopping up lettuce instead of kale.

With February, when I was trying out Brussels sprouts, I wanted to ace having them roasted, since that’s one of my favorite ways of preparing veggies. The first time I roasted them (quite simply by halving them and roasting them in a dish with olive oil, salt and pepper), I didn’t give them enough time so they were still tough. The second time, I let them bake a lot longer—almost an hour, I think—until they were crispy out the outside edges and fall-apart-soft on the inside. That was a lot better!

The third attempt I made for the month was a slight variation on the simple approach, which was to drizzle some balsamic vinegar over them once they were roasted and to make a sort of salad with them, mixing in walnuts and raisins, thanks to a recipe I ripped out of a random magazine.

Pretty good!

I’d still like to try to some more adventurous recipes with Brussels sprouts, but before I could, March was here and I was still trying to use up the last of my Brussels sprouts. Then we went out of town for a few days. And you know, other stuff happened, too.

Which meant that I never got around to picking up the cabbage that I was supposed to try for March. I guess that’s real life for you, huh? Sometimes even with the best of intentions we fall a little short.

Regardless, for April, I’m going to try to make up and double-up and try both lentils and cabbage. Think I can make up for lost time? Well, I’ll let you know how that goes in a few weeks. If you have any cabbage or lentil recipes, please let me know! I can always use all the help I can get!

You can read about why I started this goal to try a new food each month (as well as a list of the different foods I aim to try out each month), and you can follow some of the recipes I want to try on my food adventures Pinterest board.

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The History of My Blog and How It's Grown Over the Past Two Years: The Design Edition (Part 3)

In walking through the history of creating and growing my blog, I've looked at the steps I took when I first started it as well as how I went about growing a readership. (Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them.) Today I'll be talking about how I've tweaked the design of my blog and established some branding over time...

By nature, I’m a perfectionist, so I’m always on the lookout for things I can do to improve my blog, even when they’re the smallest of changes, and that facet has been nowhere as evident as in my blog’s design, which has evolved little by little—quite literally—over the past two years.

I’ve redesigned my blog a handful of times, sometimes even right after a previous design. I’ve tried out new templates, new HTML coding, new widgets. I’ve tried completely new designs and then subtle tweaks that a visitor may not even realize has been changed. (You can see some previous designs of this blog here and here.)

The thing is that each change makes the blog a little bit better, a little bit closer to the vision I have in my head, and over time those changes are cumulative to what you see here, today. I’m always on the lookout for these kinds of incremental improvements, and I think that has really streamlined my blog over the years. I’m always willing to try something new and see if it works.

I think that’s one of the elements that has been key to my blog: Always looking for ways to improve my blog, even in the smallest of ways.

(Given that I do a lot of redesigning on the fly, I make sure to save copies of all my old HTML coding, in case something ever happens to my site or if I ever want to revert. I haven’t really needed that, but I tend to err on the side of caution. Learn how to back-up your HTML here.)

I know that HTML coding can be intimidating and while I do have a good working understanding of it—courtesy of an elective class I took in high school—I still don't have a clue what I'm doing most of the time. Instead, I usually spend an absurd amount of time doing online searches for tutorials to walk me through how to hack any given solution. (You can see some of my favorite online tutorials here.)

There's nothing wrong with hiring a company to design your blog for you, and I think that can be a worthwhile investment. But, since I have always approached my blog as a hobby as opposed to a business, I've never wanted to sink much money into it, especially if with enough gumption I can DIY it on my own.

Plus, by doing it on my own, I'm able to tackle issues as I come across them, one at a time, which makes it a lot easier to accomplish.

It took me awhile to get to my current design, complete with the yellow banner, but I think it’s one that I have really embraced. I’ve stuck with that yellow-banner design for more than a year now and have no expectation of changing any time soon. I now think of that yellow banner as a key identifier of the Life Blessons brand.

And I think that’s one of the things that people can neglect when it comes to a blog. The fact is that there are millions of blogs out there, so it’s helpful if you can give readers something memorable to hold on to, so that they can distinguish your blog from all the others out there. For me, I’ve latched on to that simple yellow banner, and extended that color scheme into the simplified color palette that’s used in the links, subtitles and accent colors throughout the blog.

A blog’s brand doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be intentional, thoughtful. I’ve looked for simple ways of infusing that brand into every element of the blog, whether it’s my Facebook page, favicon or font choice.

For example, I recently played around and made an effort to simplify the fonts on my blog, swapping out the font that was in the yellow title banner to something more clean. I then selected a similar font for the subtitle and used that for the headers in the blog’s sidebar. In doing so, I try to keep a limited number of fonts in use throughout the main blog design so that the design feels more seamless; although I do take much more luxury playing around with fonts in the image headers I use for each post.

Things like that may not be noticed by many people (although one kind reader did email me to let me know she noticed!) but I trust that they slowly add up and make a difference in the end!

Next week, I’ll wrap up my story and share about how the content on my blog has evolved over time.

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Learning to Love the Life You Have: What I’ve Been Reading Lately

For some reason, lately I’ve found myself drawn to books on the topic of loving the life you have now, with all its bumps and dips and scratches and imperfections. I suppose it can be all too easy to wish our lives away for something easier, prettier, happier, healthier—the list goes on and on—that we never take the time to appreciate that which sits right before us, right this moment.

But that is not the way I want to live my life.

Instead, I want to take the humble life that God has given me and learn to see—and embrace and appreciate—the glittering gifts that lie in its folds.

So, that has been the guiding force behind the books I’ve been reading lately, and I wanted to share a couple of reviews on some of those books; one of which I was not impressed with (sadly, because, as a writer, I always hate doling out a bad review!) but another that I filled up with page markers and underlines. Here’s more about each of those books:

Grumble Hallelujah by Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira
I have to say that I love a lot about this book, starting with the title itself. So much so that when I was working on a Sunday School lesson that I was teaching recently, I used this book and One Thousand Gifts (you know that’s a tip-top favorite of mine!) as prime fodder for material. Like One Thousand Gifts, Grumble Hallelujah looks at what we do when life doesn’t go the way that we planned and how we deal with this in terms of our faith. Of the two, I still would say that One Thousand Gifts is my hands-down favorite and preferred, but this book is another book in the same vein that is definitely worth reading. (You can read more of my review about One Thousand Gifts here.)

In it, author Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira talks from a place of knowing—she has walked her fair share of suffering in her finances, her marriage, her family life. And as she writes, none of it has disappeared or been tied up with a pretty little bow. No, she’s still in the midst of some of it, dealing with the fall-out. And yet, from that reality, she talks intimately about how she has slowly started the process of learning to love her life, no matter how dark or difficult it might look. And how do you learn to love your life? Well, that’s where the book’s title comes into play.

Loving the life we currently have is rooted in this idea of praising God—even if we have to grumble a Hallelujah. As she says, “I discovered that God welcomed my resigned, crabby, sigh-filled, grumbly hallelujahs. So I needed to learn to mumble it, grumble it, hiss it, or smirk it.”

Throughout the book (which I received, courtesy of Tyndale House Publishers for this review), she spotlights what that looks like in a variety of situations where we need to learn to “let go”—whether it’s of expectations, control, jealousy, or the feeling that you have to have it all together—and how she’s had to walk through each of those issues. Without laying out all her dirty laundry, she is pretty raw and real about her story and the dark places she’s been and how God has walked her through those places. That kind of humility and honesty is one of the things that endeared me most to this book.

Judging from my page markings, it was the first portion of the book that I found most compelling and where I marked page after page, especially the parts in the first chapters where she looks at Biblical examples of folks who “grumble” their hallelujahs to God—not necessarily for their circumstances of suffering but for the simple fact of who God is—and how doing so impacts our faith. She wades into a few subjects that few authors seem to have touched on—such as being willing to grieve the life we don't have—that I felt made this a worthwhile read.

You can find Grumble Hallelujah by Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira on Amazon.

Constantly Craving by Marilyn Meberg
I had high hopes for this book, having used the Amazon search feature to read through a bunch of random interior pages before I selected it from BookSneeze, who provided me with a copy to review. I really thought this was going to be one of my favorite books of the year. but when I actually started reading it, I was pretty disappointed. It’s not that it’s a bad book; I was just hoping for more.

In it, author Marilyn Meberg looks at about a dozen ways that people are often craving “more” from life, whether it’s craving a better romantic relationship, finding more time and respite from busyness, yearning for more meaning in life and a few other of life’s biggies. Of course it should come as no surprise that she reiterates the same thing that Jesus trumpeted here on life, which is that he is the only water that can quench our thirst so that we’re never thirsty again, he is the only Thing that fill us to satisfaction. But she goes deeper and looks at where many of these cravings come from—particularly from our childhood experiences—as well as some very brief insights for how to manage those cravings.

The book is a decent starting place for looking at finding contentment with life, but it seemed rushed and trite and overly simplistic in some parts. I was hoping it would be much more memoir-esque—since the author is in her seventies and has much wisdom to impart! There were many funny snippets from her life sprinkled throughout, but I was eager to see more of a here’s-how-I-walked-this-out aspect that I felt was missing from making this book a truly worthwhile and life-changing read.

You can find  Constantly Craving by Marilyn Meberg on Amazon.

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Why I Stopped Reading Books....

It’s been awhile since I’ve done much reading outside of the Bible.

Every so often, I have do something like that—put aside all the books that are fresh with copyrights and whose authors are still alive and doing book tours. I have to put them aside so that I can better focus my devotions on that one Book that is as old as time but more important than any other book since.

It’s not that the books I’m apt to read are wrong or bad. They’re not. In fact they’re almost all about that one Book, anyway. But that’s the thing. While they may be about that Book, they are not that Book.

That distinction makes all the difference.

Sometimes it can be incredibly helpful and insightful and necessary to sit down with one of those books, which sheds light on what the Lord has written in his own Book. Those books help us grow closer to that Book and learn to love it like the Author always intended. Many books have done that for me.

But as helpful as those books can be, we must not forget the fact that they are not the Book. At some point, we must go to the Book itself to quench our thirsts and to inform our understandings. We can’t always take someone else’s opinion of it. We have to let the Holy Spirit be our guide, rather than another human being.

The first time I realized this was a couple years after I’d become a Christian. I was devouring these sorts of books, ordering them like candy and chewing on them each night before bed and on my lunch break. They were all Christian living titles, which helped me wrap my head around how I ought to, as a Christian, approach things like dating and politics and the environment and my tendency to stress out over the littlest of things.

They were so helpful in helping shape my understanding of how the Bible and God’s teachings fit into this crazy, chaotic world of ours.

But I realized that I was reading them to the detriment of actually reading the Book that they were all quoting from and point toward. And so, I took my first sabbatical from the books of this world and dedicated myself to reading only the Book. The only Book that can wear a capitalized “B” and you know exactly what I’m talking about. That one.

It was at a similar spot where I found myself a few months ago.

As a writer, I’m also a natural-born bibliophile. It was a love of books that was one of the first things that impressed me about the man whom I later married and who brought his own share of paged volumes into the relationship.

So, I’m easily lured to want to read more, to pick up a new book and learn from what it’s author has gleaned and experienced and written down to share with the world. I trust that there’s plenty to be found in those pages that can help me on this journey to know and love and obey this great Author who has written a story that has captured my heart.

But at some point, those books started to lose interest to me. Even as I stared at my bookshelves and saw so many spines that had yet to be read, they held no sway over me.

There were no more divided attentions. It was only the one Book that I wanted to sit down with and read, to turn to, to sit with. And so, I did.

For months, that’s how it went. And I couldn’t be happier—thrilled, really—to realize that. To know that my truest desire was to sit down with this Book rather than any other book, written by any other hand. I stand in awe, knowing truly how many times I prayed for that kind of heart and desire.

Sure there are still days when I have to make myself sit down with my Bible. There are days I’d rather be working on a craft or lounging on the couch rather than hunkered over this age-old tome. But my heart is understanding how much more I need this Book than any other, and it considers all others second to this One.

I’ve recently dipped my toes back into the reading-other-books-outside-the-Bible waters and made my way through some new books—some of which were worth the time and some of which weren’t. I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts on a couple of those books later this week, but for now, it’s a reminder to me why I choose to keep my focus on that one Book, because it is the one that can never disappoint:

“But if you keep looking steadily into God’s perfect law—the law that sets you free—and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, God will bless you for doing it.” (James 1:25)

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Learning to Write About the Day-to-Day Things In My Life

It’s a funny thing, being a writer. Because it’s never as simple a task as the title would make it seem.

Just like a doctor has a specialty, there are different niches for each person who takes pen in hand and writes for a living. For me, I’ve always had a knack for writing long non-fiction. I can’t come up with a fiction plot to save my life. And writing choppy, fast-paced news articles or advertising slogans leaves me stumped.

That’s why when I went to college, I majored in magazine writing, where the words can flow poetically and wrap around ideas and images like a silky scarf, being twirled around in the summer breeze before skipping off to the next part of the story.

And even though writing a blog is not the same as writing a magazine article, I’ve noticed that a lot of my writing on here is quite similar to that which I wrote professionally for years: My posts tend to be longer, concentrating on a single subject with some kind of takeaway or lesson-learned nugget for the reader.

Sometimes though, I just wish I could write breezily about nothing at all. I wish I wrote more about my day-to-day life, to capture it on the screen as a keepsake of days gone by for the future. But when I sit down to do it, my mind draws a blank.

How do I write about how I spent my day and make it interesting, instead of just a list of facts? How do I share the beauty of a single moment without forcing it to be longer than it needs to be? It is a challenge for me, needless to say.

But it’s a challenge that I am attempting to overcome. So (hopefully!) you’ll notice more posts that aren’t as how-to oriented or musing on the deeper facets of life, but instead just glimpses into the ordinary aspects of the day-to-day that is my life. To do so, I'm going to try a new tactic, which is to write a post like that with a ten minute deadline. In celebration, this is the first post in this journey to open up my writing even more.

Here's to more to come…

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