tensions

'For you are God,

and you don't miss a thing'. 

We drive a lot at the moment, Beth squashed into her car seat and distracted by cornflakes in a box, the Ukrainian summer ambling part (the Lada doesn't rush) and it is beautiful. It's also time to think. I've been mulling a lot lately about if God is good or bad - really, really, if we stop saying pat answers and making excuses for the Old Testament bloodbaths and the crusades and all that, if we're honest. Is he good? 

He is Him self and that's somewhat epic because of that whole he is the source of all and any intelligence thing he's got going on. You know, that whole being God thing. I wonder what that's like. 

I think for me one of the most challenging things about this faith is the tensions.
Is God here hugging me when I cry or is he off moving galaxies? Yes.

Is he one God or three persons? Yes.
Is God simple and easy to understand or endlessly higher than my intellect? Yes.
Does he want to punish sin or would he forgive a rapist? Yes.

Is he a judge or a loving daddy? Yes.

Lately I've been learning about how God loves his kids - kind of predictable because we fairly recently had a kid but all those sermonators weren't lying. When you have children you learn about God as a dad.
Sorry but i'm going to veer off into stupidly in love with my daughter territory for a minute. She smells so good that I think I could get high off her cuddles, she is so delightful that even when she's being a little git i'm proud of her 'strength of character', she is perfectly and wonderfully made. Everything she does is this ridiculous achievement that I call John in to see and also anyone within a two mile radius. You're welcome, world.

And I know all that stuff in the Bible about God being a good father but he's so big that surely that's a technicality, a formal relationship conducted mainly in a study or a library and then back to the nanny we go?

Obviously He doesn't let me stay there in my thinking. When me and B are rolling around in a giggling ball or when she's tickling daddy or when we're learning to rub noses and I could stare cross eyed at her face for hours
that's when a little voice whispers

'I feel this way about her too. And about you.'

Which is more than my silly heart can handle - I understand the logic, the relationship that we have with God because of Jesus, we're part of the family but to think that God wants to stare cross eyed into mine? That he is super excited about what we do? That he laughs when we laugh? That he invented rolling around giggling? That whole 'check out my boy Job' conversation, I see a proud dad there. And hens with wings for Jerusalem, that's a mummy metaphor. It's all through the Bible, this thread of us as his kids like gold running through humanity's story.

So loving daddy? Yes.
The judge. Yes.
Still good? When we talk about hell, judgement, discipline, punishment, Holy...still good?

Some beautiful friends gave John the Bethel Loft Sessions DVD (it's worship music and it's pretty and they've got some token hipsters in there so I feel quite cool watching it, get in) and there's a song all about how God knows us so intimately, like a dad. So far so la la la. There's a line that says 'You are God, and you don't miss a thing'.
I know it's meant to be about ourselves but I found myself sobbing over a girl that I've come to care for, she lives in an orphanage and I felt something of what God the daddy feels when he see what is being done to his children. He is God. And he doesn't miss a thing.

That should scare us.

He doesn't miss a thing. 

Our cheap clothes made by slaves?

He doesn't miss a thing.

Our fuel burning the earth?

He doesn't miss a thing.

Our selfishness,
our global disregard for others,

our willful ignorance,
our personal selfishness?

He doesn't miss a thing.

When we leave our lovers? When we break promises we never had the guts to make in the first place?

He doesn't miss a thing.

Children trafficked for rape? Children dying from runny poo? Brides burned alive for dowry?

He doesn't miss a thing.

He is God.
Because he is a loving daddy, he cares what I do to his other children, and he will not raise feckless sinners. He protects me from my sin but he also protects everyone else from it too.

So a judge? Punishing sin? And still good? I reckon so.

To repeat myself: He is God. I wonder what that's like.

Don't have to wonder, can see it, have been shown it, in Jesus. Loving to the point of pissing off many people who would like a more religious messiah thank you very much, loving enough to be completely inappropriate socially (that's my excuse), loving enough to get really angry at sin. Loving enough to take the worst results of sin - torture, loneliness, betrayal, injustice, despair, death - loving enough to say 'it's on me' and then to actually take it on yourself? To judge sin and to take the place, to take the punishment of the sinner? Justice is done and yet...I walk free. 

Turns out, being God will get you killed.

So a loving daddy or a judge? Yes.
It's basic stuff but it still blows me away, even without the cross I could happily understand his goodness. With the cross? The question becomes
'loving daddy
or judge
or astoundingly determined to win us, completely merciful and ridiculously lavish?


Yes. 

You know you're a very bad missionary when...#2

You know you’re a terrible missionary when:
1) You check face book every 4 minutes. Your husband calls notifications ‘reds’ and every time you log in you compete over who has the most reds. It is always you.
2) You get pulled over, again, by the Police, for not understanding the Ukrainian highway code, again.
3) Your husband tells the Policeman that he lives nearby. What he actually says translates as ‘I am a house’.
4) Said Policeman tickles your husband’s upper inner thigh and lets him go free.
5) Everybody in the whole world loves buckwheat, apart from you, you mainly eat chocolate.
6) You communicate with your house guest via google translate, so when you tell her that if she likes she can hang out in her room and relax or that you are going to be a bridesmaid what you actually say is:

‘You can be alone in his room’ and ‘I am looking for a bride’.
She is alarmed. You do not blame her.
7) You have produce. So much produce. Ukrainian soil literally spews forth produce.
8) Your toddler overdosed on cherries and did some truly terrifying nappies for you to change.
9) And blackcurrents.
10) And apricots.
11) You have a freezer stocked with cherry sauces that you will never use.
12) You panic about all the produce and try to make jam. This happens.
13) All the women in town are gorgeously, gloriously tanned. You are British. You are not tanned. You look like Edmond Dantes on the day he escaped prison.
14) Everyone you see (not usually the men) are wearing stunning maxi dresses.
You shop for maxi dresses.
There are no maxi dresses.
Where are the maxi dresses?
15) You shop every week in second hand clothing shops, and you love it because it’s all the stuff you couldn’t afford in England! A little bit mucky! With some holes in it!
16) You make John lemon meringue pie – the meringue goes wrong because you didn’t know to grind the coarse beet sugar in a coffee grinder (which you don’t own) and you forgot to prop shut the dodgy oven door with a chair. Still, the lemon bit was delicious.

Oh well, our kid is cute.

garbled today

Here she is, splashing about drinking rain water and ignoring mummy and being so naughty and so completely excellent. And yes, that is a rusty bucket. And yes, she got sick. Well done mummy.  

Commence bloggity blog:

Music is just the best thing. Sometimes I listen to these earphones and wish that these fingers of mine could create the experience that we get from those songs that grab your soul and soar somewhere more beautiful, more right, more home and more adventurous. I wrote once in my God book (journal, diary, prayers, private blog with more terrible poetry than I permit myself to publish on the internet) the following:

'God, make me like the exciting chords'.

You know what I mean? Those notes that make your chest thump, the bits of the good songs where your hands fly around and you change a little bit inside.

I've never been into the kind of music that's ever so clever but ever so dull - if you can't turn it up loud and have a good time you may as well turn it off. And go sit in a beige room drinking lukewarm milky tea and wearing boot cut jeans. In 2013.
Music is a taste of God - it's to be inside who he is, to experience something spiritual that everyone can feel. Living with Him is meant to be outrageously, astoundingly exciting. He invented the exciting chords. He is when the beat drops and the room roars and the world shakes.

If I know one thing well, it's Christianity.
I've done church a lot, 29 years worth. 

Some of it wasn't very exciting.

One of the things that hurts the most when you're following Jesus is how the media portrays you. It feels personal, and you have to breathe and remember that it's not. You follow Jesus so by default you're part of a religious group and the people that hate tend to shout loudest and they get heard and they get caricatured and then, alarmingly, you're a Christian so you're judgmental  ignorant, two dimensional, cultish, uneducated, emotionally unstable, bigoted, prudish, perverted, simple, outdated...many things.

All of that stuff I can take because it's a load of crap - we're all of us on this globe messed up and some of us are Christians. Jesus loves us all and he's not messed up, he's doing pretty well actually and he can carry us home.
The thing I can't take is the perception of Christians as boring.

Maybe because it's a little bit true?

I used to be bored, I got funneled through GCSEs and Alevels and I did some weed and a lot of drinking and some praying and some Bible studies and I kissed some boys and was bored bored bored but I didn't know it because I wasn't awake yet.

And then this little thing happened called faith hitting me in the face, I suppose that God touched my hand and I came alive. My heart has been overwhelmed with joy and with pain so many times - my joy in His presence, and sometimes His pain when I pray for the world that He loves. There is no going back, there is no retract, there is no other option than to keep living this even when I feel nothing for months when I turn around and see Him there then...off we go again. Feelings and choices and determination but all of it ignited by Himself meeting myself. Those eyes.

And it's not just the experiences or the feelings or the heart stuff. My brain knows his character because of the Bible and because I pay attention during sermons and because I've studied this stuff and because of the stunning things around me but so often I have found myself bewildered by the boringness of our lifestyle as Christians. HE IS WHEN THE BEAT DROPS, people. He is the one who now laughs in the face of death, who turns over the tables and stomps about shouting at us and scooping children up out of the dirt. He is the one who offends all the proper people who deserve heaven because they're oh so righteous. If he was here in your town right now i'm pretty sure that if you wanted to follow him you'd find yourself walking into places that no 'good Christian' would go near. Where's the last place you would go to find someone and rescue them? Who do you judge? Who offends you?

Religion is a death dirge and it sounds ugly. Too often we sound ugly and we don't look much better.
He invented dancing. That's one of my favorite things about God - that no matter how we leap or fling or thump about...he did it first and he's doing it bigger. We've got glow sticks but he's got galaxies.
And the thing i'm trying to explain is stuck inside my chest and it's late and I've got to sleep but I think my point is that we're too religious and we don't want to dance with God. 

I think we should try it.

I know that my life isn't boring, I am often drowning in the difficulties of what i'm trying to do/ survive but i'm not bored. I haven't been bored in years. We were worshiping (sacrificing goats and pigeons, that kind of thing) at home the other day and it  hit me that this Transition Home could destroy everything I love. My marriage, my family, my relationship with God, my sense of home. I am so vulnerable from here on out and I am utterly terrified.

When B was born I struggled so much with how much she needed me, with feeling like I couldn't love her like she needed me to, I hated being depended on that much and I resented losing my personal freedom. It took a while for my heart to stretch to fit her in all snug and safe and now i'm asking, actually asking for that process to happen again. But harder this time, for so many reasons, it is going to be so much harder.
Because today I got on my knees and asked God to make my heart bigger so that it can fit more girls inside it to love them like I love Beth. Which is a lot. 

This doesn't feel like a boring song. It feels pretty epic.
So to conclude: I think that God is epic and that we should all learn to cha cha cha.

Good night. xxxxx

Hope

This week we met with the first girl who is (hopefully) going to be moving in with us so that she (hopefully) can avoid the nasty things waiting for her if she doesn't.
John has been finding my uncharacteristic silence on this matter both frustrating and confusing, it is not often that I process things inside my skull. Generally I get a bit shouty/ excited/ cross and this is ok because he has been known to claim to have married me 'because she doesn't know when to shut up and I hate carrying conversations'.

So this new thoughtful me has thrown him a little bit, he's been muttering and grumbling and prodding but I have found myself unable to engage in a conversation about this, I keep avoiding the question and wandering off in silence.
Why? I think it's because I've finally encountered something so precious and so fragile and so divine that to use words, even carefully, is to risk tainting it. This 'transition home for girls' is a piece of treasure that belongs nestled in my heart and it's not for grabby hands or silly soundbytes.

He asked me to write about it.
I can do that.

We were meant to be doing this T home for boys - they're apparently easier to help, less complicated and they can't get pregnant. But John read a prayer diary all about things happening to women in the world - we keep it in our loo and he has often emerged weeping, which is alarming until he explains that he was finding out about dowry murders or porn or something else that completely explains the tears.
So he started to feel like maybe God was pushing him to ask if we could do the home for girls, and our lovely Andrew bossman very kindly said maybe. So we waited not knowing if we were right or wrong or what needed to happen but content to dwell with good leaders and our good God and see what came of all this praying.
The day we got back from Croatia, Andrew picked us up and mentioned that some friends of ours knew a couple of girls who needed somewhere to go. John mentioned that when he was at one of the orphanages a few months ago he felt God light his heart up over one particular girl - she said hi and something in him leapt with the idea that maybe she could come live with us. He joked that it would be fun if one of the girls was this girl.

It is.

So that's the fun story - the less fun story is what has transpired for this girl in the past and the tragedy that would be her future. I don't want to tell you her details because they're hers to tell or to keep secret, her dignity is hers and I will not violate that.

I mainly want to try to explain to you why this opportunity is so beautiful, so cherished that I find myself unable to speak about it.
Imagine that you were rejected - you didn't get the cuddles or the rules or the protection needed from day one. That your brain never got the chance to form the connections it was meant to form - that the science of your growth got twisted from what was meant to be because you never got read to or played with or rocked to sleep. That your heart has always, always known pain. Imagine that you are vulnerable and tiny and you have never known a safe person's arms to nestle in, that the people who were trusted with your life saw it as nothing important and imagine not ever knowing that you are safe.

Because if you're a kid in an orphanage then you're there because your parents are dead or because your parents didn't know how to love you before themselves.
The little every day things of being a child are so, so developmentally important and if you don't get given that then life starts hard and becomes impossible.

The buzzwords might help me convey this: suicide, sexual abuse, physical abuse, substance misuse, unemployment, addictions, HIV. Nothing that these children deserve but that's what they get served up by this life. 
10% of kids from Ukrainian orphanages kill themselves within the first two years of being kicked out into the world. 
65% of the girls end up working in the sex industry. 
This isn't ok, engaging with this isn't optional, I don't care what you believe or what your politics are or how busy your life is - if children going through this 'life' abused and neglected and addicted and suicidal doesn't move you in some way then I suggest not at all humbly that you go and get. on. your. knees and ask Him to take your heart and smash it to pieces and wring it out and make it worth something.
We should be doing more.

So in this darkness, this conveyor belt of failure comes an opportunity.
A chance.
A chance to be accepted into a family, to find what you're good at and to chase that path and see where it goes. To wear clothes that you chose, to eat the food that you chose, to read the books that you chose, to stand on your own feet and hold your own life in your own hands. To reject despair, to begin to dream and to see dreams come true, to travel and to fly and to experience more than you could ever have conceived of.
To go from doubt to security,
to be given worth,
to be prized,
to be waved off everyday and welcomed home every evening,
to have arguments,
to fight,
to forgive and be forgiven and be held and to know that those arms aren't going anywhere.

It's the gospel.

Transition Home = this is who our God is, he who our help comes from, he who swoops in with his armies, his might, his hands that make stars like it's nothing and he who stands over you and says 'mine'.

So yes, it's precious, because it's him. Because he stands over orphans and says 'MINE'.
He who saves.
I want to be part of that, and the scary things like what if it doesn't work or what if I cock it up or we get taken out by how hard it's going to be, well they kind of don't matter right now standing looking down at the wave we're about to surf that could kill us but we can't go back now because we would die inside if we did. Because this is the gospel, a reflection, a mirror, an example of Jesus on the cross. A metaphor that's being played out in real time. With lives at stake.

So yes, LORD, wring my heart and smash it to pieces and I know it's going to hurt but please may this be salvation for children. For your sake. Amen. 

Always good

' For we are not long here. 

Hope is coming for me. 

Speak to me in the light of the dawn for mercy comes with the morning. 

And we have this hope as an anchor for the soul.'

(C.S. Lewis, Brooke Fraser and Hebrews mashed up. Yes, that's what a mash up is.) 

It's been a while, and this isn't because 'you haven't been feeling ranty' because as Chris knows well I am always feeling ranty.

It's been a while because I've either been living in places with no internet or living in places with no spare time to think let alone write.

But John has taken B to the seaside for an hour so I can sit and write something that I should have written about weeks ago when the whisper started behind my bones, the nudge that prompts these rants that shed the fear as I type. Dropped out of DTS craziness for a while and I don't have any idea how i'm going to shape the thing I want to tell you.

When I was at uni a good friend said that me and him were alike because 'we both struggle with life'. I was a bit taken aback because I thought i'd come across as quite cool and I felt a little exposed by his comment, a bit too seen.
I'm a grown up now (BAHAHA) and I have seen enough and been pierced by enough to believe that life is hard and we all struggle.
I don't believe that if you have God your life will be easy, that your situations will always be resolved or comfy or kind. There's a dangerous theology in some expressions of Christianity, the worldview that promises puppies and mansions if you obey the ten commandments. The theology that reduces Jesus to a guidance giving guru with a Paypal account. The theology that says that you won't get cancer, and if you do God will heal it, and if he doesn't it's because you lack faith and by the way you can get more security if you obey more rules you special little flower, because the rules and the rule makers are all about you. 

I don't follow that theology, but at the moment i'm not sure i'm on a great path of truth. I don't think i'm going to get puppies. But i'm not really expecting anything nice at all ever - moving away from home was/ is still really hard and I shut down a little bit inside. I wasn't expecting to struggle as much as I did/ still am but I fled from the questions that this raised and buried myself in survival.
I got hard and tough. Expected nothing but trial and the ability to survive trial. I will not remain a baby because babies are lovely but they're no good in a war and love is war so yes, grow me and stretch me and make me strong and give me these battles. For love - for you - I will fight. 
We were asked to help lead an outreach across the Balkans and thought 'well that's going to suck  in a variety of interestingly sadistic ways but hey ho, survival mode, let's be obedient and get on with it'. Head down and heart secretly a little bit sad. Ok, a lot sad. I was in a very sad mood a lot of the time. And quite angry. Lucky John.

I don't know how I got to a place where I expected my God to be mean to me all the time for the good of his kingdom. It's a pretty horrible kingdom if the staff training is suffering.
I knew in my head that the Kingdom of God is a place where prisoners are released, the blind can see and the lame can walk but apparently I thought God required depressed, savaged staff to make that happen. You can call me a friend of Job. Or just plain stoopid.

My intimacy, my trust in, my fun times with my God had kind of got squished out by the need to regulate my daughter's routine or navigate a food shop in cyrillic or clean a massive house with chickens in it.
I'd forgotten my first love, i'd forgotten what his smile feels like and that he likes to dance.
I'd forgotten that it's him who does the healing, not the torture. I'd been professing a God of love with my lips but believing in a task orientated dictator. 'Get it done, wormy, it's not about you and orphans need help'.

When you really need a hug but you've stopped trusting the person who invented hugs? Messed up.

So we shouldered our backpacks and got on a million planes, trains and automobiles and we ended up in Sarajevo. With lovely people and lots of sunshine. And then to the stunning Banja Luka. And then...our outreach led us to Hvar.
HAHAHAHAHAHaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
SILLY.
Hvar is a Croatian Island and it is ridiculously beautiful. There is sea that is blue and sky that is wide and sun that is warm and lemonade that is fizzy and boats that are floaty and tans that are happening.

And I started, over the last two months, to remember who He is.
He's not the sadistic taskmaster who is only interested in my personal growth and usefulness as a missionary.

What if he's kind? What if he saw all the things that broke me? What if he was there all along and it made him sad too? What if he knew that he would be putting me on this rock in the ocean to thaw out? What if he meant it when he promised to make all things new?

Life is not always good. The world is broken, yes, and this is a fight, yes, and the darkness is huge and sometimes we cannot breathe or see beyond the bodies and the smoke. But if I had looked up I would have seen him
after the crucifixion
with us again
cooking me breakfast on the beach 
and telling me where to find fish
and filling my net but not letting it break
and never ever going away again.

Because he is always good.
Not 'if you ignore the pain then you can see his goodness' or 'somehow the pain accomplishes his purposes and proves his goodness' but
with the pain, alongside it, by my side, as well as the hurts, there is also, always, Himself. And I am starting to believe again that he is kind. 

Dabble

So a couple of weeks ago some friends and I watched a movie called Rock of Ages. I walked out after a bit because I got sick of being told that being in a boy band is a worse lifestyle than being a stripper. The fabulous 80's soundtrack couldn't hide the fact that women were being naked naked naked and that if you had a problem with this then you're an uptight, sexually repressed religious nut bag who - like all women - just needs a good time in bed and then you'll calm down and stop screaming hysterically about things like feminism and equality and rights...

In case you're reading this and you don't know me. Hello.
I'm 29, I have a gorgeous husband-man and we made a baby. Sex is involved in that.
Just sayin'. In case the rant that's coming up conjures images of neck high ankle low floral frocks and hair under headscarves and picketing funerals and shouting at people and hating everything and being terrified of anything secular because it's OF THE DEVIL and wanting everyone to be miserable like me.
That's not me.
I follow a God who is a lot more controversial, sexual, and imaginative than we will ever be.
Just sayin'.

So. My point is this. We can't dabble, people.
Just for a second, let's suspend our stupidity. Sex and the sex industry pretend to be two different things but they're not - 'i'm a good Christian man and i'd never pay for sex or watch porn but this movie is just good fun and those women may well linger at the back of my mind for days, to be owned and recalled when i'm in bed with my wife/ by myself...that's ok. I don't pay for sex. That's sinful.'

'And sex trafficking? The repeated rape and torture of women and children? That's terrible. 

Oh, it's awful that these things happen in those countries with their barbaric cultures but it's so good that we're sorted over here in England, there's no need for feminism anymore over here. We know how to do family. We know how to do sex. I pity those countries in Eastern Europe with their terrible sex industry problems.'

Just to rewind a little bit, we sent our troops into Eastern Europe and they got bored of watching people slaughter each other so they required entertainment. Brothels. Sex is comforting, and that's legitimate and i'm sure that our guys saw some horrific things and i'm sure that warm arms and a fuzzy beer filter helped. In the short term. Momentarily took away the pain of being amongst so much pain (100 people killed everyday in Sarajevo, for months and months, FYI) so the sex industry boomed. Where do you get enough girls to satisfy and please that many men?
You think little girls who have been loved and cherished grow up thinking 'when i'm big I want to spend my days and nights gyrating for drunk, faceless, often cruel men? I want HIV please, and oh if i'm lucky I could get pregnant and have a forced abortion. And I want to give all the money I earn with my body to yet another man. It would be really great if he could be violent as well. That's the dream'.

Not a lot of girls want that. And yet girls are fast becoming the number one biggest, and most lucrative, criminal export ahead of weapons and drugs. So where do you get the girls? Easy. You steal them.

So we sent our bored men to eastern Europe and they paid for sex with stolen girls and then the brothels stayed, and the demand is still there but it's on our soil so the cargo gets posted here. And our men are still up for paying for it, and our women are up for facilitating this trade, and our media sells sex so really are they going to do anything about it?

It's not like this is happening to our daughters.
They were daughters in Ukraine. But to us they're flesh. Naked.

Nobody chases a 13 year old orphan girl across the world to claim her back. Not the orphanage who took the bribe. Not the police who visit the brothels. Not Liam Neeson. Another Hollywood lie, thanks for that.
Sorry. She's giving herself over and over and over until she's useless and dead.

So maybe it's not their culture that's to blame. Maybe our culture isn't innocent in this.
Maybe all our 'no big deals' tumble and spin and accumulate and then we don't see when it is suddenly a huge deal.
Maybe we're the problem.
Maybe when our churches sit by and say NOTHING to the media when they imply that only slutty women get raped and it's their fault anyway because they were wearing provocative clothing.
Maybe it's when we take our church traditions from theologians who believed women weren't made in the image of God ('oh but he had such a revelation of Grace').
Maybe its when we judge women for not being beautiful enough -too fat too thin - and then slap her into the dirt if she decides to celebrate her beauty in a dress that shows a little leg. We cannot seem to stop contradicting ourselves.
Maybe it's because we tolerate everything apart from intolerance and so nobody stands up and starts screaming in the streets when a van carrying Chinese children to their next brothel in Crowborough gets into an accident and the confused, bemused, police find 11 year old sex workers inside.
Maybe we're so busy lining our nests with cool prints and big tellies and good food that honestly, fighting rape isn't a priority for us.
Maybe we are the ones that are sick.
We are the market. We're the culture that buys the sex. We've gone wrong somewhere.

So yeah, I stopped watching the movie when it started making prostitution look glamorous. Because to me that's just one more no big deal that is actually, definitely, a big deal. 

I do

 

So today is Ukrainian lady's day - lots of ladies are walking around holding single roses and looking rather excited. It's a day (I think) where the country honors women and all they are, apparently with flowers and stuff like that. It's nice to bust out a stereotype every now and again.

My husband spoilt me rotten and couldn't wait to give me my present, and it's a wonderful present so i'm a very happy wifey this morning. (When it comes to romantic gestures and gifts, John's ethos has always been go big or go home. We'd been dating for two weeks when he brought me an ipod. At three weeks he proposed.)

One of the things we did when we got hitched was say vows to each other - statements of intent, declarations of adoration, promises before God.
Today is a day that's all about ladies and there's a tiny lady snoozing in the room above me, snuffling into mr.soft and singing in her sleep. So i'm going to write her some statements of intent, declarations of adoration, promises before God.

Bethel,
I love you.
I loved you when you were hidden in me, wriggly and safe.

I loved you as you were grafted into my heart. Permanently there.

I will speak to you truth – insights and wisdoms to light your way.
You are beautiful.

I will never offer you mediocre life. I will never teach you that to be a woman is to compromise your fire, your wit or your will. I will always, always dance with you.

If you want kisses, I do too.

I will never stop learning.
I will never stop asking for help.

I will grow as you grow.

I promise to defend you against lies, against robbery, against stupidity.
I promise to endeavour to build a home that resists evil.

I promise to love your Daddy forever, to show you with every embrace what kindness looks like. What it looks like to respect.
How dignity behaves.
How to respond to love.

I promise to trust him. Because he is a Daddy you can trust. I do so want you to know what it feels like to trust a worthy man, so you can walk away from the unworthy ones.

Whatever you do, I will accept you.
Whatever choices you make, I will be your mum.
I will always pray over you. And I will always pray for you. I will spend the rest of my life learning how to pray for you.

I promise to speak you into confidence
I promise to wave you off onto adventures
I promise to have fun with you
I promise to fight for your education, to ensure that your mind is set free. That you may soar.

I promise that if you need a cuddle, I will rock you to sleep.
I promise to believe the best of you, I promise to be shamelessly biased and uncompromisingly fair.
I promise to try to hold on to God's patience so that I can be patient with you.
I promise to create things for you,
and when you're bigger I promise to show you how to dream up your own creations. I will be nearby with plasters and soap.

I promise to be proud of you for every attempt you make,

I promise to boast of the things you tried, to cherish every gift and to celebrate every triumph more than my own. 

Because it’s his will. I will spend my whole life trying to be a mum who loves you in the name of the Father. 

So, my little woman so full of everything that is so beautifully human, made in the image of our beautiful God, these are my vows. These are my prayers.

That you would grow to be yourself. Amen.