thank you notes (for butterflies in the landscape)

A butterfly fluttering through where I am can change how I see the landscape around me – and how I feel about me in that landscape. If I let it, it contains the ability to turn any frown inside or out, upside down! Butterflies are joy-personified, God-designed gifts to spark our hearts to joy – whether in a season of refreshing or in the wait of a prayer sent out.

You know how every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings? Maybe butterflies and prayers are kind of like that. Every time a butterfly crosses your landscape, a prayer has been sent to the Father for you.

I’ve seen a lot of butterflies since 2009 when I started my blog – or maybe I started noticing the butterflies, looking for them, recognizing them as God-gifts. These butterflies today remind me of those women I’ve met through blogging and those who I walk with in the daily, who reached out in prayer when I so needed it.Those prayers still resonate today – a God-kind of butterfly effect.

I know we grow from glory to glory, challenge by challenge – but sometimes God lets us savor the goodness of prayers answered, dreams walked out and the sweetness of a good rain or a cool summer breeze. In the savoring, I’ve felt the need to thank those who sent those prayers to God in the middle of hard moments  – because we all have hard. Maybe we experience different kinds of hard, maybe the same – but we all have hard moments, challenges that take us to the end of ourselves – yet, so many of you took the time out of their hard, nursing wounds not yet healed, in the wait of your own prayers sent out, in the midst of your own dream making.

Thank you for each prayer – for me, for my boys – for situations beyond my personal experience.

Not only did you pray, but
you sent notes of encouragement, of hope,
of personal over-coming stories that taught, that reminded
that God is in the business of over-coming
not just for you but me, too.

A friend of a teenager asked me the other day about the hard of raising our children – how not to break into a million pieces or run-away. I was able to answer because of women who took time out of their hard, of their own shattering. I am better able to Jesus-love, to encourage, to help another grab hold of the same hope you helped me hold on to in a hard time. Thank you for being like the butterfly that has the ability to change how I see the hope and faith in the landscape.

You took the time
to encourage another dreamer while seeking out yours
to point the way I hadn’t realized existed.
You were dream guardians in a world of can’ts, shouldn’ts, not-for-you-kind of attitudes.

Because of women who took time in the midst of their own dream-weaving either by skyping with real to-do things (like finding an illustrator), or telling me, “You can do this,” or someone sharing encouragement, “my children loved this story” – or maybe you wrote about this dream-thing God wove into the very fiber of ourselves, or maybe you prayed. Because someone took the time out of their own dream-in-progress to encourage another, thank you for being like the butterfly that has the ability to change how I saw my landscape.

There’s been a lot of beautiful this summer – a wedding, a family holiday, the 5 stools in my kitchen filled with sitting long and talking much, and a birthday this past week that looked like and felt like celebration and love, and my wedding anniversary (32 years). Someone asked, “How’d you do it. I can only manage the 4-year-kind.”

I think the answer is faith in the prayer, like those butterflies fluttering across my landscape.  Faith that God hears those prayers, understands better than I do how those prayers fit into his design – Faith has the ability to change how I see the landscape – both my prayers and those interceding for me.

Thank you, if you’ve been one of those encouragers, one of those who prayed – for sending those butterflies my way. Each one did, indeed, change the landscape of my life in a butterfly-kind-of-beautiful way!