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I met Emily in person last year at Allume.  I’m pretty sure she’s part angel.  I know you’ll love her, too.  I am honored to welcome her to the blog today as she launches her memoir Atlas Girl into the world.  I continue to be in awe of people who tell their stories with courage and compassion.  Bless you sweet Emily on this special day!  

The cookie jar is empty.

The laundry, piled six loads high on the dryer and the boys won’t sit through homeschool. I didn’t sleep well last night and I haven’t had my coffee and all I can think about is needing to make those cookies. Because what kind of mother doesn’t have cookies in her cookie jar?

I am constantly failing Pinterest’s Martha Stewart standards. I don’t have a chalkboard with tonight’s menu on it — goodness, I don’t even have meat thawing, and it’s day-old Chinese for lunch. Again.

I’m rushing the boys, yelling, taking my pent-up mother-guilt on them, forgetting that home is not a casserole or color-coded towels or clean toilets.

Home is mommy’s arms, is Daddy wrestling with his sons on the floor, is a stack of board books piled precarious on the coffee table because your two-year-old is addicted to building towers.

I don’t have to be a great housewife in order to make a home. It’s not about my casseroles or my manicured lawns; it’s about my state of heart, and unless I am filled with peace and joy, my home will feel distant and cold.

Home is sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor and pulling your boys to you with tears in your eyes and begging them to forgive you for getting stressed out over an empty cookie jar.

Because your life is beautifully full.

And you sit there for a while, a tangle of arms and hearts.

It’s taken me 33 years to find this place with the broken doorbell and the dirty door mat. I traveled the globe searching for it. Because we’re all, deep down, searching for our Father’s house—our eternal dwelling.

Home is a place for the broken to break bread. And in my traveling I learned the comfort of a cooked meal, of a welcome mat at the door, of family’s open arms, and when my Mum got sick with brain cancer I returned to take care of her and found God at her bedside. In the eyes of a woman who homeschooled me, who baked bread every week, who made home for me.

How about you friends? Do you feel the pressure to keep your cookie jars filled, your floors squeaky clean, your laundry neatly folded and put away? Can I say something to you, if you do?

Stop! Stop, and rest. Because friend?

You are more than your clean floors. You are more than your folded laundry or your stocked shelves. You are more than the role of Mom or Homemaker or Wife. You are a woman. You are an intricately designed creation woven in your mother’s womb, whose hairs are counted by the Maker of the Universe. You are loved.

[box] Our lives are not Pinnable. They’re messy, with peanut-butter fingerprints and toy cars and runny noses. And you know what? They’re perfect.[/box]

Because in the end, it’s the family that makes the picture, not the frame.

My memoir, ATLAS GIRL, is releasing this month, and I am excited to give away THREE copies today. Just leave a comment below to win!

From the back cover:

“Disillusioned and yearning for freedom, Emily Wierenga left home at age eighteen with no intention of ever returning. Broken down by organized religion, a childhood battle with anorexia, and her parents’ rigidity, she set out to find God somewhere else–anywhere else. Her travels took her across Canada, Central America, the United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. She had no idea that her faith was waiting for her the whole time–in the place she least expected it.

“Poignant and passionate, Atlas Girl is a very personal story of a universal yearning for home and the assurance that we are known, forgiven, and beloved. Readers will find in this memoir a true description of living faith as a two-way pursuit in a world fraught with distraction. Anyone who wrestles with the brokenness we find in the world will love this emotional journey into the arms of the God who heals all wounds.”

Click HERE for a free excerpt.

I’m also giving away a FREE e-book to anyone who orders Atlas Girl. Just order HERE, and send a receipt to: atlasgirlbookreceipt@gmail.com, and you’ll receive A House That God Built: 7 Essentials to Writing Inspirational Memoir — an absolutely FREE e-book co-authored by myself and editor/memoir teacher Mick Silva.

ALL proceeds from Atlas Girl will go towards my non-profit, The Lulu Tree. The Lulu Tree is dedicated to preventing tomorrow’s orphans by equipping today’s mothers. It is a grassroots organization bringing healing and hope to women and children in the slums of Uganda through the arts, community, and the gospel.

Emily T. Wierenga is an award-winning journalist, blogger, commissioned artist and columnist, as well as the author of five books including the memoir, Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look (Baker Books). She lives in Alberta, Canada with her husband and two sons. For more info, please visit www.emilywierenga.com. Find her on Twitter or Facebook.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Hope you are enjoying a wonderful day of rest and play with your favorite people.

True freedom is to learn to live our days for others, like so many men and women do everyday to keep us out of harm’s way.  Thank you so much for your service.  May God bless you and your families!  We honor you today and everyday.

My favorite slice of Americana?  Johnny Cash, of course.

 

We’ve been in a string of busy weeks the likes of which we haven’t seen for a long time.  The weekends, which for us are often retreats of reading and writing and food making, have been full to the brim.  So, we decided to claim this one for rest.  We are headed up to the mountain cabin for some much needed fresh country air.

Going to the cabin is like going camping, only with an indoor bed and indoor plumbing.  Packing is fun, but there’s plenty to gather. You need stuff for s’mores, easy camp-ish food, books, yarn, the bow and arrows, ammo, fishing gear, and so the list goes.  It helps if you take the slow country mindset and a heart full of gratitude with you.

Really, I guess those are things I wish I carried with me all the time.

That’s where Daily Grace comes in.

I thought I’d share with you these beautiful pieces from Dayspring, from their Daily Grace Collection.  I LOVE them and have used them nearly everyday since they arrived.

These would make perfect gifts for Mother’s Day or for just any old day when you decided to have friends over and make homemade pizza.

Also? Apparently, I love cupcakes.  More on that very soon!

There’s so much to love in this collection.  Every piece is beautiful.

I especially love these salad plates and this salad serving bowl!

Dayspring is so generous to giveaway a wonderful bundle for one of you lucky peeps.

Just leave a comment on the piece you love the most in the collection and you will be entered to win the candy bowl, the memo chalkboard, and the 16 inch platter.

I’ll close it down Sunday night and then pick a winner on Monday.

Happy Weekend, friends!

 

I finally made it home safe last night and I’m gonna tell you all about my trip to Charlotte very soon, but today is a very special day.

My baby turns 12!

TWELVE.  THE BABY.

Oh, I get all teary eyed just thinking about the way she has changed me and made me a better person and momma.

She’s kind and funny and reads literary fiction.  She’s so smart but also works incredibly hard at her studies.

(Perhaps slightly nerdy like her momma!)

She’s an amazing dancer and a darling little sister.

She LOVES church so much.  She misses taking Latin and she’s so darn organized.

I look at her and marvel at what a beautiful young lady she’s  becoming, in every way.

I’m so lucky to joined to her at the heart and I pray she knows how very much she is loved.

Happy Birthday, baby girl.  You have my heart and all my love.

xoxo

“I have been homesick for you since we met.  I have been homesick for you.”

 

Sweetest surrender of winter
She put up a flag, it is waving
The thunder of summer is rumbling in
And I haven’t seen you in days
And, my, how that feeling has changed
Oh, I have been homesick for you since we met
I have been homesick for you
I’ve got to take to the sky
And I’ll tell you what that means for you and I
If I die it’s for you
If I die it’s for you
I never lived ’til I lived in your light
My heart never beat like it does at the sight
Of you baby blue, God blessed your life
I do not live ‘less I live in your light
I do not live ‘less I live in your light
The realest thing I ever felt

Was the blood on the floor and the love in your yell
I was a child before
The day that I met Eleanor
The kiss of the wind in the hills
The clearness of morning, the late evening thrill
Blurry and grey like the roar
The wheels of the highway, above them I soar
When I’m in the sweet daughter’s eye
My heart is now ruined for the rest of all time
There’s no part of it left to give
There’s no part of it left to give
I never lived ’til I lived in your light
My heart never beat like it does at the sight
Of you baby blue, God blessed your life
I do not live ‘less I live in your light
I do not live ‘less I live in your light

“Every written word is a victory against death.” ~ Micheal Butor (Amy’s favorite quote)

Amy Greene is one of a kind.  She’s that  person you meet only a few times in your life—where you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the appointment was divine.  I met her in October of 2010 at an Appalachian arts festival, just as her debut novel,  Bloodroot, was taking the literary world by storm.  All my friends had read it and told me that it was a book I would love.  I bought a signed copy of her book that day and it sparked a friendship that has become precious to me.  When I met Amy, there was an instant kinship that is hard to describe.   She is almost other-worldly—like she’s been transported from another era, or maybe just straight from heaven, as a special gift to our generation. Maybe it’s the haint blue eyes or the way she can twist words into the most vivid pictures.  Whatever it is, it is the most rare and delicate sort of genius—the kind of art that transforms us and shifts something down deep in our souls.

This lady is some kind of wonderful.

Long Man is near and dear to my heart because it’s set in the 30’s as TVA plans to flood an East TN town.  (I live on such a lake, made from such a flooding.)  When I sat down to read it last month, it felt like Christmas morning.  Amy’s writing is lyrical, haunting, memorable, and visual.  She is a master at making art with words and I savored every last sentence in the book.

Here’s a little sampling of her prose as the book’s heroine, Annie Clyde, thinks about the threat of water covering her home and land when the Tennessee River will finally be flooded:

She could almost hear it seeking whatever there was outside its banks, searching fingers moving over gnarled root and scaly stump bark. Leaking between trunks and lapping at grasses, mussels clicking against each other and the scoured rocks of the shoals. She dreamed of it coming for her, black and rippling. She woke afraid it would be pooled around the porch steps, the rains bringing it closer and closer. Since spring a scent had been lingering in the eastern part of town where the woods and pastures were halved by the river. She smelled it in the house sometimes, algae and carp and decayed wood from long-ago boats run aground. When she opened her door it slipped in as if to scout her home before the lake came to fill her chimney flue with the opposite of fire.

Amy came over a few weeks ago (she lives just down the road from me!) for lunch and a visit and to talk about the book.   I thought I would seriously cry when I saw her.  (I know, I’m a crier, but still.)  You know that feeling, when someone has affected you so much that their very presence makes you well up?  Yeah, she’s THAT kind of sweetness.   I couldn’t  stop asking her questions about her books, her life, and her dedication to the craft of writing. I asked about all her favorite books, the music she loves, what she eats, when she writes, etc.  One thing I’m gonna tell you right now is that she writes every thing long hand in an actual physical notebook.  EVERY WORD.  I mean, they don’t just make people like that anymore.   I saw it with my own two eyes.  I keep a journal and do a lot of handwriting, but you can imagine the notebooks full of long hand writing she has.  It’s amazing.

Here’s a little synopsis of the book written by Gabe Habash.

 Like a classical myth or a painting by Thomas Hart Benton, Greene’s second novel, set in the summer of 1936, transforms a period of cataclysmic history into a gorgeous, tragic tale filled with heroes and heroines. After the Tennessee Valley Authority builds a dam to electrify rural Appalachia, the river that folks have always called Long Man rises a little more with every turn of the page, and most of the families in the town of Yuneetah, Tenn., are long gone, scattered to other cities to take up factory jobs. In days, the hardscrabble farm fields they abandoned will be overcome by water, and Annie Clyde Dodson’s family farm, too, will end up at the bottom of the lake. Only Annie Clydewon’t leave; she’s determined to hold out so that her three-year-old daughter Gracie can inherit her ancestral land. But Gracie disappears with her dog Rusty during a terrible storm, the floodwaters rising by the hour.

Here are a few reviews of Long Man.

Her novel fully inhabits the contradictions within each character and the ironies inherent in destroying a place in the name of progress. A smart and moody historical novel that evokes the best widescreen Southern literature. (Kirkus Reviews)

And from Publisher’s Weekly,

Greene’s enormous talent animates the voices and landscape of East Tennessee so vividly, and creates such exquisite tension, that the reader is left as exhausted and devastated as the characters in this unforgettable story.

I’m giving away a signed copy of Long Man today to one lucky commenter.

Or head on over to Amazon and get your copy of Long Man today!