Five things

1. There is a market baby and the market baby makes my day. I go to the vegetable market in the mornings and the market baby is often there, walking around in squeaky shoes, or trying to eat food off the ground, or being passed from stall to stall. Her mother works in or near the market, and I remember when she was pregnant with this little one. Now the little one is just over a year old, she has grown up in the market, and everyone loves her. The man at the fresh coconut milk chases after her and pretends to bite her fingers. The fruit ladies call out to her. Her life is a constant smile directed toward her. Also, her name means New Rice, which is just beautiful.

2. There are a lot of emotions in my house lately. I have two children entering the wild world of emotional rollercoaster at roughly the same time. Thankfully card games and silly talk still work on everyone.

3. Recently I took a trip to Chiang Mai and was driving around a little neighborhood with my friend Naomi. We were on two scooters, and came across a couple who were embracing in the road, standing and leaning into one another. They were an older, hippie-looking couple. She had long gray hair and a skirt that brushed the ground, and he had a beard. As we reached them, they moved apart and turned to look at the sky. The man lifted his binoculars to his eyes and that was when Naomi and I both realized that not only were they a beautiful, loving couple having a sweet moment in the middle of the street, they were also bird-watchers. Birders! My heart gave a great leap. Naomi and I looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing-- We loved them. The end.

4. Here’s another story of witnessing a sweet moment. Recently I saw a woman I know only a little, a kind woman who once visited me in the hospital. We said hello and then I watched her cross a bridge over a pond in a beautiful garden. I knew that she had been walking and praying. When she reached the end of the bridge, she lifted her arms and threw her head back as if to say, “All of this!” All of this. I saw the response and recognized that moment. This is the response my heart gives to God when I see the world and all the beauty that I forget to see if I’m racing from thing to thing like a mad beast. I’m here and all of this is here and God says, “All that I have has always been yours.” That bird that you might glimpse in your binoculars, that cloud, the blue of the sky, a night of unseasonal rain. I recognized joy in that woman and I loved her. The end.

5. I'm at less than ten days to book launch! Releasing a new book is such a combination of excitement and anxiety that I would like to zip myself up in a suitcase and throw myself in the ocean. Bob around on the waves for a while, let a warm sea take all my thoughts and smooth them out. This kind of thought reminds me of a conversation I had with Kai, after he had read Trees Tall as Mountains for the first time, just a couple of months ago. Surprisingly, he loved it. He loved reading about all the little things he used to do when he was only three years old. And he told me, “I liked when you hallucinated.” 

“When I did what?” I said. I didn’t remember any hallucinating in the book.

“When you were hallucinating about us going wild in the store and you dropped yogurt on people’s heads.” 

“That’s called imagining,” I said. 

He shrugged. “It’s pretty much the same thing.” 

That's me then. Hallucinating since 1980. 

A Traveler's Guide to Belonging: Cover Reveal, Preorders, and Giveaway!

Here it is, friends: the cover for A Traveler's Guide to Belonging!

I love it and i love my super talented graphic designer of a husband as well.

Twenty-four-year-old Timothy is far from his home country of Canada when his new wife dies in childbirth. Stunned, he finds himself alone with his newborn son in the mountains of North India and no idea of what it means to be a father, and begins a journey through India with his baby, seeking understanding for loss and life and the way the two intertwine. 

Set among the stunning landscapes, train tracks, and winding alleys of India, A Traveler’s Guide to Belonging is a story about fathers and sons, losing and finding love, and a traveler’s grand quest for meaning.

Here is the page and excerpt.

Not only that, but you can preorder the Kindle version today, if that is what you like to do! 

Annnndddd, to celebrate the flight of this new book into the world, I'm asking for help with all the sharing, and doing a giveaway for those who would like to help. The winner will receive the paperback versions of The Journey Mama Writings series, which will also be the first time that A Home as Wide as the Earth is in the world in a paperback version. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Announcement! Upcoming Cover Reveal and Release Date!

You guys, this is so exciting! Finally, finally, I am ready to release my novel, A Traveler's Guide to Belonging to the World. The World!

The release date is set, and the date is December 15, 2015. Here's some more about it:

Twenty-four-year-old Timothy is far from his home country of Canada when his new wife dies in childbirth. Stunned, he finds himself alone with his newborn son in the mountains of North India and no idea of what it means to be a father, and begins a journey through India with his baby, seeking understanding for loss and life and the way the two intertwine. 

Set among the stunning landscapes, train tracks, and winding alleys of India, A Traveler’s Guide to Belonging is a story about fathers and sons, losing and finding love, and a traveler’s grand quest for meaning.

Where is the cover, you ask? I'll be doing a cover reveal on Monday, along with a giveaway, and you'll be able to see the beautiful cover my graphic designer husband has created. 

I'm also looking for five advance reviewers- so if you would like a free ebook in exchange for a review on Amazon and Goodreads, just let me know!

Yay! Much love,

Rae

Separating your identity from your circumstances.

If you are in the midst of hard circumstances, it is easy to let them define you. To give up and let them be the book on you, rather than a brief whisper in your very long line of sentences. Perhaps you are struggling with money, so you count yourself into a shapeless, unknown crowd of people in poverty, and all the shame that accompanies being in that mass, especially if you buy the lie that if you had only worked a little harder, done a little better, you would be all right. Or you are going through a tricky time with your kids, so you stamp yourself as a bad parent. Or a bad friend, and on and on. 

But you are not what happens to you. The truth is that you are radiant, you are beloved, and Jesus wants to walk beside you because he loves you. Your circumstances are like a sidewalk that you are walking along rather than a blanket that has been thrown over you, or even a house that you live in. Cracked and dirty, or shiny and glittery, the sidewalk is separate from you and can change without changing you. The core of you, the person that you are, can pass through trouble, not unscathed, but intact and free of shame. Telling yourself that you are poor (or letting other people say it) defines you. But the truth is that you are having a hard time with money. Such a different thing, because you are not taking on a definition, but walking through a circumstance. Living with money problems is stressful, living with the shame of poverty and all the blame that can be heaped onto it is crippling. Money comes and goes (as anyone who lost a fortune in the recession can tell you) but you are there and your life is a continuous unfolding of trust in God to guide you down many different sidewalks. 

It’s the same with relationships, whether it is a marriage (you are not a bad marriage, but a couple walking through a bad area of town) or parenting (there are going to be a hundred tricky spots, it doesn’t change the fact that you were given to your child to love them through it all) or boyfriends and breakups and friendships. Or the other circumstances; sickness or mental illness, career success or failure. Making mistakes can blindside with you with shame unless you truly learn to keep walking with God down that sidewalk, learning and trusting and being loved.

Allowing your circumstances to define you causes you to feel undue shame or self congratulation depending on what is happening at the time, when actually, the true you, the deepest you is in there in both circumstances, just being you. That deepest you needs to grow toward God, like a plant growing toward the light, wherever you are, whether your circumstances are great or difficult. The great work of life, in knowing God, is to learn to be loved and to love, whether or not you feel like you deserve it, and that is why your circumstances cannot define you.

Why you should just put out the katydid (and it will not eat you).

The other day Isaac and I were in the bathroom while he was using the toilet. It was just about time for his nap and he was doing one last pee. As we left, we noticed that there was a little water in the bottom of the bucket that he uses for baths, and there was a dead katydid floating in the water. This was infinitely fascinating. 

“Is it dead?”

“Yes.”

“And it will not eat you?”

“No.” 

Isaac could have talked about the katydid endlessly. I, however, was focused on nap time because I had school I wanted to work on with the older kids. I got him ready and put him in his bed. 

“You should put it out and it will not eat you,” he said.

“I will.”

By this time he was all cozy, ready for sleep. 

“I want to watch,” he said. 

“Okay. Well, I’ll wait for you. I’ll put it out when you get up from your nap.” 

“Okay,” he said. 

So I left the room and walked toward my room to get something, my footsteps loud as always on our teak floors. This was when Isaac lost his mind and I heard sudden screaming.

“You’re not going to!” he wailed. “You’re going to put it out and I want to watch!” 

I went back to the room. “Isaac, I promise I’m not going to get the dead katydid out of the water until you get up and you can watch me. But you need to go to sleep. I promise to let you watch, okay?” 

He calmed down a little and I went downstairs. Our floors are completely uninsulated, with cracks, and they resonate so much that we can just call up to one another and hear perfectly. And the boys’ bedroom is directly over the table where we do our school work. So as I was helping Kenya with math, I could hear Isaac yelling down to me every few minutes, “Did you put it out?”

“No, Isaac, I’m going to wait for you, remember?” I called back. “Go to sleep.”

After about the fourth time, I realized that this was very, very important to him. And the back and forth was heartfelt and about promises and trust and the difficulty of going to sleep when you are worried that something exciting will happen without you. And it was also a big, tearful drama about a dead insect. And this is life when you are two-and-three-quarters. The substance might be lighter than what I feel, but the emotions are no less real. 

I wonder if God sees my life like this, when I worry about my little things. Is it like the katydid in the water? Am I fretting that God will not live up to his promise of letting me watch him flush a dead bug away? He has told me and told me, but I just don’t believe him, and he says, “Rest, child. I’m not going anywhere without you.” The things seem important to me, in my own small world. His view is so much more expansive, maybe it encompasses so much that my books and plans and dreams are like katydids. And yet he listens, and promises, and waits. He shouts up through the floor that of course he’s going to wait, no he didn’t forget. 

When I went to get Isaac up from his nap, (I have to wake him these days because the boy will sleep for three hours and then not sleep at night) he opened his eyes and said, in the sleepiest voice ever, “Did you put it out?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I was waiting for you. Should we go do it?” 

And that is why, when you first see it, you should just put the katydid out (and it will not eat you).