to define what matters

this weekend joey and i met my grandma's cousin and her husband for some delicious food and a personal tour of dc. we're so grateful to have family here, especially family we didn't even know we had! the picture above of us at the franklin d. roosevelt memorial (my current favorite) is one of many photos that they offered to take of us throughout the city. you're welcome for not sharing them all ;)

let me say my heart is a little heavy tonight, so i apologize for how deep this is going to get. feel free to pop back in a few days... probably by saturday i'll have some fun tales to share :) if you're good i'll post a picture of my new couch then too, because i l.o.v.e. it!

it's funny (but really not too funny) how much of life we take for granted when we become caught up in the day to day. we focus in on the little annoyances that seem like mountainous catastrophes or spurts of schedule gridlock that turn us into stressed out zombies. the busier we are, the more we let those responsibilities and commitments become our points of pride. i somehow feel more relaxed and at peace with myself because i spent ten hours working yesterday instead of eight. the extra two hours means i must have accomplished more, did something more important. it's not a bad thing we feel this way i suppose, it just turns our lives into a series of sprints and we forget how beautiful the path was before we got so busy. i say "we", but i mean "i" in the most literal sense of the word. i'm more guilty than many (maybe most). ask me what i'm busy doing and i might throw you a handful of work responsibilities or awe you with some combination of chores and errands that i ticked off my to-do. we can pat each other on the back as we compare and contrast how busy one another's lives are. it doesn't end, these lists of responsibilities, and neither does the importance we place on them. we're made up of these commitments, we let them fill us until we're somehow more whole.

this all started because i wanted to emphasize how truly important, but sadly often forgotten, the "other things" in our lives are - faith, family, friends, marriage, love. how monumental these things become when they're spread out across hundreds of miles. i wanted you to know how petty the day to day stuff seems in comparison because the big stuff isn't at my fingertips anymore, my family and friends are all a plane ride away. but petty isn't fair, not when the thing that defines you - the busy, the responsibility - has been taken away without your consent. these words hold brand new meanings when they're no longer part of your life, and the control that you once had and depended heavily on has disappeared. without the "busy" we feel empty, without purpose, and wounded - oddly. without a list of tasks, some degree of reliance or expectation that someone (anyone!) has placed on us, we feel like shadows. we are no longer who we were, and now we let the absence of busy define us.

someone very important to me has been left without that feeling of purpose achieved through the day to day responsibilities, and my hope is that there is a way for that person to become whole again surrounded by the truly important things in life - faith, family, friends, marriage, love. my prayer is that those things will become enough again, and the other things will come too (but with less importance) because the emptiness is no longer there to take up all the space. your prayers would be wonderful, we're praying hard at our house too.