I finally have the time and energy to blog. Not to mention something I've been thinking about other than the impending birth of our second child, Chloe. I've been thinking a little about relationship. This Sunday we had a beautiful time at the beach watching the sunrise together, celebrating the new life we have in Christ. Afterwards Mike, Jackson and I went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast and it had me going down memory lane.

Our sending church is in Gainesville, FL...which is kind of like the south, as opposed to West Palm Beach which is more northern in feeling. (Lots of northern transplants enjoying the warmer weather I guess) Cracker Barrel is a southern style restaurant which is not technically one of my favorites. Our Leesburg friends would love to go to lunch there every Sunday after Church and the country store attached to the restaurant is a favorite among the women in my church in Gainesville. Again another thing I am not fond of. I am not saying that is is bad to like this type of food or style of decorating... it is just not my taste....no judgment.

Anyway, I was fondly remembering all of the people that have come alongside me in this journey. Ones that have pointed me towards Christ and encouraged me in my faith. And even though I rarely talk to or see many of them, they are still a part of who I have become. I don't know how many conferences I've been to or sermons I've heard but when it comes down to it...it has really been relationship with others because of Jesus that has taught me, trained me, changed me etc. Not fast flashy friendships but the kind that cement over time and experience with one another. Lots of walking and talking together through many circumstance.

I just finished reading an article in the book Simpler Living Compassionate Life a Christian perspective by Frederick Buechner. It is entitled "Introduction to the Sacred Journey". In it he talks about how the story of your life or autobiography is an essential place to see God speaking.

More as a novelist than as a theologian, more concretely than abstractly, I determined to try to describe my life as evocatively and candidly as I could in hope that such glimmers of theological truth as I believed I had glimpsed in it would shine through my description more or less on their own. It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our lives that he speaks.

The entire article had me thinking about my story and maybe toying with the idea of writing it down, as a way of watching the hand of God in my life over long stretches of time. Kind of like those picture books you had as a kid that you would flip the pages quickly from back to front and watch a picture story unfold. Anyway, that's what I've been mulling over.