Fierce Peace

I need to take a break from Fierce Peace for a while. I’m feeling overwhelmed and understood. Can a person be overstood? Because I might be that too. At the beginning of this blog relationship, I found great freedom in this new way of communicating. But I have entered a new phase of life and I only know that the freedom I once sought is calling to me again. And this time the wind is blowing in a new direction. So, in the interest of self-preservation AND protection of those I love, I am going to disappear for a while. I honestly don’t know when or if I’ll be back. Maybe in the next phase. But the river phase ended in the ocean and I drank of it deeply. Now I’m in the blowing phase. And the blowing phase might just blow this blog off the face of the internet entirely in about a week or so. Or I might be back later when my phase is over. Who knows? In the meantime, I’ll say goodbye just in time for my husband to get his blog up and running once again. I know. We have issues. Multiplied. Funny that my name is Fierce Peace. Peace always seems so elusive. Like I’m desperately grasping at something that’s always out of reach. Whimpering, staggering and falling. Not very fierce-sounding, I know. I’d rather be a warrior, on a mighty stallion, galloping with my long hair flying behind me and my many-layered satin dress whipping in the wind. But I’m really not. I’m just here, in all my ordinariness, looking for truth and beauty and willing it to wash over me. In the washing, I feel God’s love. In the event of a flood, I may understand more fully His peace.

The only thing I’m not sure about is how I’m going to stay in touch with you that I love that live far away. I appreciate each of your blogs. They’re like lifelines to me and just seeing pictures means so much. If you join Flickr and add me as a contact, you can keep seeing pictures of our family too.

See you soon.

Leslie

P.S. I know I promised to put more pictures up from our trip to Galveston. You can see them all here on my Flickr page, if you’re interested.

Last weekend we did something as a family that we have never done in sixteen years of marriage: We took a vacation, just the five of us, for the sole purpose of vacating. It was glorious, marvelous, magnificent and delightful. We got a little condo right on the beach in Galveston, Texas and we swam, saw sights, swam, ate, swam and ate some more. Between the five of us, we took over 300 pictures with my camera, so I’ll have to get them up here in batches. I’ll start with these of us all dressed in white, since they’re my favorites. I also give thanks to some random guy walking down the beach for rescuing me as I was in the midst of trying to figure out my tripod and self-timer settings. He walked up, said he had the same camera as me and would love to snap some family pictures for us. He took some beautiful shots. I don’t even know his name. I hope I can be that random person for some family some day.

More to come…

(Dear Entire Metroplex, for that matter),

I love you dearly. You know I do. But I am thoroughly fed up and disgusted with the temperature of all places indoors in the summertime. How can it be healthy for a person to vacillate multiple times daily between 100 degrees and 65 degrees? And it’s not a gradual vacillation either. It’s an immediate shock to the system every time. In. Out. In. Out. Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold. My system doesn’t like it one bit. The other day, my husband and I sat, shivering, absolutely miserable, through my daughter’s awards ceremony at her elementary school. This is a public school. This is a school where my tax dollars are going to pay the exorbitant electrical costs of cooling a building to the ridiculous extent that you need to wear your winter coat inside on a 95 degree day. I don’t want to take my winter coat around with me in the summer. I don’t want to take my down comforter to restaurants. I don’t want to pay for something that is not good for anybody. Why can’t we be warm in the summer and cool in the winter? I’m not saying I’m against air conditioning. I’m simply proposing that the entire city of Dallas turns their thermostats up to 78 degrees in the summer. 78 degrees, people. That’s not unreasonable. Use your ceiling fans if you’re hot. 65 is fine for winter. Everyone benefits.

Consider:

• There are rolling blackouts every summer due to the energy usage across this state. I heard about them yesterday. And it’s only June.

• The cost of gasoline is creating hardship for many families. If we’d all cut back in other areas, we’d have lower electricity bills AND lower taxes (assuming all government offices join us in the cutbacks), which would free up gas money. And then we could ride our bikes or walk more places, which would free up more gas money. But I digress.

• If Global Warming is real, it surely can’t be good for the earth for us to be using more energy than we need. Just imagine all that invisible wavy, steamy stuff that our air conditioning units put into the atmosphere. If Global Warming is not real, disregard this point.

• It takes as much petroleum to make 14 plastic bags as it does to drive a car one mile. (I know, what does that have to do with air conditioning, right? Nothing. But it says it on the side of my green bag that Chris got from Half Price Books and it really affected me. When I bought a bunch of scotch tape at Target yesterday and I didn’t have my green bag with me, I told the lady I didn’t need a bag for it and I put it all in my purse. She looked at me like I was crazy. I felt good about doing my part.)

• If houses and businesses are warmer, we can all wear less clothing, which means we will be doing less laundry. I don’t know, maybe that’s a stretch.

Sincerely,
Leslie Linebarger

I am not who I was.

My daughter is content. She is not who she was. Her voice has grown deeper, her ways have grown lighter. She is calmness and thoughtfulness and dedication. Life in the seventh grade has been the best life ever.

My daughter is a storm. A deep, roiling storm. She is not who she was. Her eyes still sparkle, but we’re only beginning to see the flames that the spark reflects. She is coming into her own and the layers are slowly peeling. Life in fifth grade has been revealing.

My daughter is enthusiasm. Funny, but I think she is who she’s always been. Maybe someday she won’t be who she was. She rattles and moves and loves and dislikes with fervor. Life in second grade has given her a whole new vocabulary with which to rattle.

I am not who I was.

My husband is not who he was.

And love goes on.

I will not be who I now am.

God was and is and always will be.

And love goes on.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from this last weekend.

It’s here! The technically difficult video has been conquered! Thank you again, Wilmar, for sharing your wonderful video-making abilities with us.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Grace, singing in her school talent show:

(If you missed Sadie’s performance, you can see it here)

We went camping this weekend. We go camping every Memorial Day weekend, but this one was the first one I can remember EVER where it did not rain. And I’m not just talking a little bit of rain either. Usually we get bombarded, lambasted and saturated by Texas spring storms, complete with tornado warnings and all. But not this year. Nope. This year we were greeted with 95 degree weather with 95% humidity. And we let the sweat pour freely. We luxuriated in it, if I may go so far.

(For the remainder of this post, when I say “we,” I really only mean “I.” When I go camping, I like to speak of myself in multiples.)

We love camping because it’s okay to sweat. We love camping because it’s one of the two times of year when we wear shorts and we don’t care that our legs are funny-shaped, white with huge black bruises and some kind of unidentified itchy rash all over. We don’t wear makeup or fix our hair and we call it good. We live with strangers quite close in their campsites all around us and we talk as if we know one another. Nobody looks stressed as they sit in their lawn chairs with their dinners cooking on the grill, while they talk Columbian politics and church history. Dogs bark, kids play and nobody knows what time it is. Kids ride on the back of tailgates on their way to the pool. People play miniature golf in their swimsuits. It is a land of peaceful lawlessness. Kids don’t have to wear helmets in this land as they ride their bikes all over the campground that they own. Well, some kids do, but we don’t talk to those kids. Their parents are probably the ones in the air-conditioned trailers that cost as much as my house did, with their satellite dishes attached out in the grass next to my tent. Don’t get me wrong, we do not look down our noses at these people. We just do not talk to them, because they don’t come out of their trailers, except to ride their bikes with helmets on their heads.

We take lots of pictures when we camp so that years from now, we can look back and remember the joy and the love and the good times and not remember at all how much work it all was for mom. (Me, being mom) A friend yesterday accused me of using my photography as a way of rewriting history. Maybe. But we like it that way. It’s more glamorous. And glamour is not such a bad goal.

Yesterday I drove home from camping. The car was completely packed with dirty, sweaty (but not rain-soaked!) clothes, tents, bedding, dog and kids. Two of the kids sat in my back seat, sun-burnt and exhausted, looking out their respective windows, lost in their thoughts as music played on the iPod through the car speakers. With the vast Texas landscape flying by outside our windows and the air-conditioning blowing hard enough inside to make our hair move a little, a song came on that I had never heard before. It made me extra grateful for the weekend that I had just spent, surrounded by loved ones, and extra hopeful for all that is to come. It made me cry. I turned it up and let the music stir my soul as I drove home. I even passed a road sign telling me how far it was to Poetry, Texas, if I just turned that way. Poetry, Texas. Someday I will turn that way. But for now, I’m grateful for the poetry that already fills my life.

I attach the song here now, for your listening enjoyment as you look through my million and one history-rewriting pictures. (It’s Irvin Mayfield, playing “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.”)

Oh, and Grace’s talent show video is still on its way. It’s just experiencing some minor technical difficulties. Hopefully, it will be my next post.

Well, here is the first of the talent show videos. Thank you, Wilmar, for putting this together for us.

The video of Grace is coming next, but I am on my way out of town to go camping, so it will not appear until after the weekend. The Memorial Day weekend. The Memorial Day weekend that WILL NOT rain.

Last night, Sadie and Grace sang in their school talent show. Yes, my mother-heart bursts. They both did so good. A video will be on its way shortly, but for now I simply put these pictures:

This is what I came home to the other day after writing the previous post:

Have I ever mentioned that I love my husband?