This Blog

I love blogging.  I rarely pay attention to stats and such, but the other day I noticed that the blog is approaching 600,000 hits??!!  I am in awe that a little Mom blog which started on a hot August night back in 2008 has morphed into this.  (Check out how little my boys were in the first blog post here).

I remember that Mike was not exactly thrilled at the idea of a family blog back then.  Now some of my favorite posts on the blog were written by him.  Here is a link to my all-time favorite blog post by Mike-you can read it here).  This blog has documented our lives (often in more detail than my family would like) since Kyle was in first grade.  My entire pregnancy and Hope's little life have been documented on here.

Back in 2008 I could not have imagined that God was going to use this space for His glory during David's cancer diagnosis and treatment.  I will never forget the words I typed after Smyth County Ambulance  transported us late that night to UVA hospital.  You can read those words from a scared Mommy here.

Blogging takes dedication and time, but I love to scroll back through the thousands of blog posts I have documented from the highs of our family life (Disney, vacations, Miami Heat games, concerts, and precious times with loved ones) to the lows.  I am so thankful that I took the time at UVA to document the nightmare of David's cancer.  It is slowly becoming a hazy fog (thankfully) but I am so thankful that I have it all documented.  This blog is a living testament to God's grace, mercy, and blessings. 

I look back over the pictures of David bald, skinny, sick, and hooked up to tubes and such, and I get so emotional and overcome with gratitude that God not only walked with us each moment, but He got us to the other side of treatment.  His handiwork is evident all over our lives and blogging has allowed me to capture His goodness during the "busyness" of our lives. 

This blog will be used for God's glory.  I am not a preacher or a theologian.  I am not one of those gifted people that can quote the bible verse by verse for you.  God blessed other people with that gift and I am often burning up my pastor's phone after reading our assigned scripture readings for the week because I have a million questions.   I am not your girl if you are looking for a biblical scholar.  After studying the bible for most of my twenties and thirties I STILL have to use the table of contents to find certain books of the bible.  Sigh.

But what I can do is use this little space to share my family, chat about parenting a child with Down Syndrome, share David's journey through cancer and how underfunded pediatric cancer research is, and to talk about Jesus.  I cannot use this space to share a coherent sermon on the book of Revelation, but I can share first hand how Jesus has provided moments of "amazingness" when I was in the valley called chemo and radiation with my baby.  You can read aboud God's awesomeness here. 

This blog will always be real.  I will never try to gloss over hard and scary here.  Life is hard and scary that is why we need Jesus.  I will share pictures of my family because I love them and this blog is a great place to document life as our kids are growing bigger each moment. 

Thank you dear friends for visiting this little space and celebrating the awesome times with us and encouraging us during the hard times.  Your support of our family is precious to us.  Thank you also for ignoring my grammatical mistakes and misspelled words and reading through my run-on sentences:)  I write like I talk which is often dramatic and "wordy!" This blog is my safe and sacred space to process life and to point myself and hopefully others back to the One who loves us all-Jesus.