Category: Art

Over the weekend my beautiful daughter gave birth to an amazing baby boy. My heart could not be any fuller than it is when I hold that sweet baby, surrounded by my family.

Amidst my journey of infertility, adoption, marital issues, and other heartaches, I try desperately hard to hold tight to the beautiful bits of something. The way my beaming, pig tailed daughter would giggle and play on warm summer days; that crisp flavor of the a fresh picked autumn apple as it tickles the tongue; the lazy Saturday mornings of streaming sunlight and sheet chaperoned laughter and dreams spoken aloud with my husband; crazy late Idaho-summer sunsets… My mind has stored up thousands upon thousands of these moments in which life simply feels.  Every time that I am caught in one, something in my soul tells me to carve that moment into me. Those moments are gone and all that remains are the bits I’ve sewn deep into my grasp. I look for more, and my supply gets me through the ugly dark.

If I were to take the culmination of thousands of those moments and put them all together to get one giant amazing feeling, that feeling might begin to compare to how I felt one evening in early May.  My 17-year-old daughter had nearly died a few days before. My life was in the climaxing stage of seven months of turmoil and stress had taken its toll to the point that my body had stopped working the way it was supposed to. My mind was full and as a friend and I went to dinner that particular Thursday evening I found myself so overwhelmed by life and all of its hopeless details…

I do believe in Jesus. I love God with all of my heart, but a lot of people I care deeply for do not share these feelings and that has never stopped me from loving them, laughing with them or building our own leg of our life-journeys together. I can’t speak for them and how the events of that Thursday evening would have felt. I can only share of my experience… I went into that Hillsong concert in Boise, after dinner, with no expectations but this deeply burning knowledge that I needed to be there. As the hours played out, I lived an incredible experience that balmed my soul in a truly unexplainable way. Within the crowds of people I witnessed many extraordinary, beautiful and deeply human things. My daughter texted in the middle and said that she really wished she could go, that she felt like she needed it. This is the girl who had tried to take her own life a few days before… This is the girl whom I had said nothing to other than that I was going, because I felt guilty being 2000 miles away from her and I didn’t know how to say what my spirit was feeling because I could not understand her frame of mind. Still, she told me she knew she was broken and that she really wished she could have gone with me, to Hillsong. After the evening ended, I knew I needed to take her, and in a few weeks I am. Chicago, here we come…

When talk of the Hillsong movie Let Hope Rise was first surfacing, I viewed the trailer with a skepticism which turned to a soul-deep-ache. I wanted to crawl inside the movie and live. I am a lover of concerts, but not typically this genre. Something about that trailer stirred me and I wondered… When I attended, in May, I lived it. That same something was there, it was touchable and real.

Like I said, I can’t speak for someone with different God/heart choices than mine. As deeply personal as I can muster, I’m just going to state that I would spend every day in that moment, if I could. I would share that something with anyone I could, anyone hurting, lonely, broken or weary… I am powerless to do such things, but I can share with you this trailer… Because I believe Hope will Rise, and if you’re wanting that something, then you understand how this movie excites me as much as it does…