8 things am j'adoring

Labor Day weekend presents a variety of opportunities to mow lawns and transition seasonal wardrobes.  Whatever your self-care/soul-care practice, here are a few and sundry things I am enjoying. A couple contain affiliate links, but most are just gratuitous for fun and sharesies. 

1. The Nike Training Club app.

It's free and very functional. It's exactly what I want in an exercise app. I'm doing some kind of 4-week ramp-up regimen right now that makes me sweat a lot while doing a reasonable number of burpees (which may be an oxymoron because when is rising into a jumping jack from plank position ever reasonable (?) But it's very encouraging (the narrator says, "Come on! You've got this!" as if she can read my soul's true feelings about burpees). Most importantly, I don't have to think or tally my reps. I just do what the Nike boss tells me to do. 
 

2. NATIVE Deodorant

Speaking of sweaty betty, this stuff works. The coconut is my favorite, especially since it conjures the smell of being on a tropical beach with an umbrella in your drink when you're just standing still waiting at the bus stop not doing anything besides sweating. 

NATIVE Deodorant

3. LUSH hot oil treatment

I don't think anyone can say "scalp" without starting to itch their own or triggering someone to do the same, so let's not dwell on this too long. Just getchoo some. I was skeptical of a $11 wax lollipop and its powers to treat my hair and scalp but, trust. It works wonders. I've tried the new cinnamon and the hair doctor and I think I like the spicy cinnamon best.

4. Staring at puppies online

Did you know that the application to adopt a puppy is akin to applying to board a major aircraft into outer space? It's really intense. So instead I mostly just stare at puppies online and gather name ideas for someday. 

5. These cute melamine bowls from Anthro
I bought one for my MIL for her birthday because MIL goes to lots of potlucks and it's always nice to bring a pretty pretty with a lid. When I visited MIL, though, she had placed the pretty pretty on her coffee table because she said it was too pretty to stain with kimchi. So there you go. Also, they're on sale! Magnifique. 

6. The Ministry of Ordinary Places by Shannan Martin

I'm on the launch team for Shannan's book because her words are poetry and her heart is golden. And dagnabit if her book cover's not the most darling of book covers for judging. You should probably preorder her book if you feel the tug that maybe you should know your neighbor's name or you need to lay fresh eyes on the ordinariness of the extraordinary little community in which you've been planted. 
 

The Ministry of Ordinary Places

7. Bluprint courses
If you've ever watched a Craftsy video, this is the souped-up version. I'm learning how to embroider and pretending to learn how to quilt. Many of the teachers are funny and the database is pretty comprehensive. Recently when I was learning how to paint a mural, I followed their mural painting tutorial and it saved.the.day. 

Bluprint

8. Dawes "Passwords" album
It took me a few plays to catch on to the vibe since it was such a departure from earlier rockin' albums, but this more subdued, sentimental album is lovely. 

Dawes "Passwords"

What about you? What are you loving these days?

An update on life per ye blog times of olde

I transferred all the kendraspondence content to this proffy site to be less insane, oh I mean, to streamline the brand and it's all nicely in tandem with some other moves happening.

Like how we moved across town to the cutest little cottage. I keep pinching myself at the good fortune, which leads me to the notion of favor.

I've been feeling some favor over my life. I learned recently that mentions of “favor” in the New Testament usually uses the Greek word "karis." I'm told its purest translation is "grace." And that's changing my conception of what favor has meant and looked like, at least for me, in the past. Because from my sloppy read of favor in Scripture, it usually entails God doing a mighty feat through a cracked or flimsy vessel. God favors the surrendered heart so he can do his thing. It challenges our present-day definition of favor, from the verb associated often with teacher’s pets and the noun associated with plastic eggs full of slime netted from a birthday party.

At first blush, there is no expectation tethered to our modern concept of favor. A coach runs plays centered around one player; a party girl hands out bath bombs to her guests. But of course there is an expectation. To whom much is given, much is expected. So score some goals with all that ice time. And invite me to your party next time.

Our family has been given a house to occupy for as long as Loverpants is in this school’s employ, and in exchange we pay the price of our proximity. We have surrendered privacy for community, boundaries for a lack of a mortgage.

Whereas God lavishes us with favor and expects nothing in return. He has already paid the ransom for our very lives. This is why the Gospel is just so impossible, so unmanageable. What could we even offer him?

And yet he makes like our turning hearts toward him like sunflowers arching toward sunlight is enough.

I’m overwhelmed by the favor God has shown me recently: our house, some writing opportunities, the unbridled love of family and friends. It’s too much.

And then I remember how long we have lived with housing uncertainty in our short 13 years of marriage. I think about how dry and dark the winter was when I was pitching my little typing hands off to just land one article with one measly pub. I can’t forget the trials my friends have faced down and had to take on the chin.

This too, is where God has shown favor. The favor of his restoration. think I like God doing a new thing even through old battered vessels best of all. It’s not just the unlikely characters that he works through. He shows favor even when we have trashed the house.

In the last few months, I have seen the restoration of my daughter’s easy, trusting smile to an otherwise furrowed brow. I have seen the reunification of a friend’s marriage. I have seen a friend get engaged and thrive in her career after a year of scorched earth. I have seen my baby brother blow out 30 birthday candles on a cake. God has shown his kindness when we couldn’t have muscled any of this on our own. He has restored the years the locusts have eaten and dried the tears that the vipers had shaken out of us.

Restoration is my favorite. I’m buckets of grateful. God is good. 

Shifting Seats with my Tween

I am not sure whether my ten year-old is an aberration from the species of tweenus humanas but she has become a creature that is largely incomprehensible.

Something Changed this past year and by that I mean Everything Changed.

Although the years prior had been rife with giggles and craftmaking, curiosity and general chumminess, the Tween who now lives with me is an unpredictable force of nature.

The field research, as I understand it, runs long on this species.

The Tween, it appears, is not a creature that evolves in a way that is linear or even progressive. The Tween can be inexplicably mercurial in temperament. Sometimes she is fully independent and categorically dismisses the wearing of pink or frills, and other times she is not sure why I would deduce she’s too old for “My Little Ponies” and really-- why would I think that? Tween does not often offer clues as to how her needs can be met. For example, when I say The Wrong Thing on Monday, I am not confronted about The Wrong Thing until several Mondays henceforth at which point I have blithely been thinking everything had been forgiven, all the while a large fortress had been under construction around The Threat of the Wrong Thing Being Said Again, and the fortress is now fully armed with emotional explosives that can detonate at any time.

Dear God, it’s me, Kendra. Can you hear me? Because I need you to translate some things down here on the earth plain.

In fact, Tween terrain has felt to me like utter displacement. Much like waking up one day and learning that the house you had been living in for the last ten years had been transported right in the middle of a busy intersection. The rooms and furniture in your house were still all the same, everything inside was just as you had left it, but now you would have to get used to horns blaring and sirens wailing just outside your window, and the fun daily escapade of playing frogger just to get to your front door. The vessel is the same. But the traffic pattern and the sights and sounds have changed radically. You can’t go back to your old address. You can’t move to a new house. You have to learn to live within the familiar confines in unfamiliar territory.

Instead of leaning in to my own feelings of displacement, though, I have found a more helpful posture to be that of shape shifting. I cannot expect the evolving vessel that is my Tween to explain to me what is happening with her since, hello? She is going through it. But I can try to understand what it must be like to have your feelings and hormones and body and mind all learning a new tango at once.

Recently I put Tween in charge of decorations at our church VBS. Friends, I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared for the staggering creativity and ingenuity she infused into everything. I wasn’t prepared for the feelings I unintentionally stepped on when I rearranged the fluffing of plastic bags on the waterfall. But swtiching roles, making her the boss of me in a sense was just the Freaky Friday role-reversal I needed to help me see this complex world through Tween’s eyes. It’s a prescription --and a privilege--I hope not to ever lose.