Up the Down

Sunday I finally made it to church, and, WHOA, was I so glad that I did! I'm not glad because of what was said, or what songs were sung, or who I saw; those things were all wonderful, but not life-changing. I'm glad I went because I needed to be there. I needed to be in the presence of others loving one another and God. I needed to be away from my house, my job, my chores, my problems for just a few minutes. And you know what? I got what I needed.
Now, if I'm being honest, I can't tell you verbatim what the sermon was about at all (although I will be kind enough to link to it if anyone cares to fill me in later) - but at some point during that sermon, the pastor mentioned an escalator. This doesn't sound very exciting yet, but my mind immediately went to this viral video that I saw and almost wet myself over a few weeks ago:


Yeah, I know, right??!

But then I got to thinking about God, and escalators, and looking stupid, and how much I wanted to go the mall...wait...and how stubborn I am - we all are - most of the time.
Let's picture ourselves at the bottom of the escalator in that video. Our life stinks. We've had trial after terrible trial: sickness, a fight with our spouse, a paycheck that was short, a rowdy kid, a broken down car, and our favorite heels just broke...and that was just Tuesday*!
So what do we do? We want to get away from it all as fast as we can. We can see that, up on the second floor, things are much more calm. We take the first step onto that escalator toward happiness and guess what? Life is right there, pushing us back down to the bottom floor. We know where we need to get to, but our feet are still at ground zero.
We huff and we puff and we try with all our might to get up that escalator. We're going to get ourselves out of this mess no matter what. We might even eventually get there, but not without a lot of unnecessary work.
But what if God was at the top of that escalator?
Would we still fight to get to the top?
Well, we could...but why are the stairs moving the wrong way? Doesn't God want it to be easy for us to get to Him? Doesn't He want us to come to him with all of our hurts and wrongs? Why is God making this so hard on us?
He's not.
Think about it. What if God doesn't want you to climb the escalator?
What if He just wants to hop on the escalator and come down to meet you where you are?
That changes things, huh? Too often we fool ourselves into believing that God wants us to put out some extraordinary effort to get to Him in order to make our lives better, when what He really wants is to just meet us where we are and lead us up to the next level. He wants us to ask Him for his help, rather than relying on ourselves and our feeble knowledge to solve all of life's problems.
Which way will you go this week?
<3 Candice

*Just for the record, that was nothing like my Tuesday. My Tuesday was actually pretty good.
**No blondes*** were harmed during the writing of this blog post
***No offense meant toward any blondes reading this post. It could have just as easily been a red-head.

A New Direction

Life changes quickly, huh?
I can't believe how long it's been since I last updated this blog. Looking back at these posts, I'm amazed at how big the girls are getting, and how far we've all come as a family since then.
This little update is just to announce that I'm going in a different direction with this blog. You see, I've had all these thoughts running around in my head for quite a while, and I need to get them out somewhere. I'd love to sit and write them down in a pretty journal, but that's just not the world we live in anymore. Besides, I'm hoping that maybe someone out there will get something out of what I have to say.
Big ambition, yes, but good intention.
Trust - there will still be photos now and again of the two most beautiful girls on the planet.
Much Love,
Candice

"Mommy...I got some lotion on my hands..."

....That's what Ashlyn said to me when she walked into our room looking like THIS.
She was SUPPOSED to be taking a nap - but apparently she got distracted. I couldn't be mad - I was laughing too hard. Plus, I think there's a rule that you can't fuss about something you find funny enough to photograph...
The bad news for Ashlyn was that she had to get in the tub and I had to use the hand-held sprayer (which she HATES) to get all the lotion off of her.
The good news is that she has the smoothest, silkiest skin in town!