The Summer That Covid Created

September 7, 2020 Michelle Cuthrell

Like everyone on planet Earth, we had big plans for this summer.

We were going to board a cruise ship, sail the seas and celebrate a military retirement 20 years in the making.

We were going to fly to Alaska to celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the 16-month deployment that rocked our worlds and reshaped our military lives.

Our freshman was going to venture into the land of high school cross country and marching band, our middle schooler was going to compete live in the National Tae Kwon Do tournament he’s been looking forward to since the last one.

And our youngest children were going to frolic and play with sweet friends we’ve always met once a week at splash pads and pools on hot summer days.

But our not-so-little friend Covid changed that all.

And it turns out, God, in all His grace, used it to gift us something so much better.

Simplicity.

Stillness

Perspective.

Greatly needed personal growth.

Covid's Memorial Stones

May 21, 2020 Michelle Cuthrell

On this, our last full day of stay-at-home orders in our state, it’s easy to anticipate all the amazingness that is coming next.

A little freedom.

The ability to leave the house without having a good reason to.

Real live haircuts from someone other than a soldier with a set of clippers that sounds more like a chainsaw than a grooming tool.

But today, nine weeks and six days after our team started social distancing inside our home, we don’t want to be so excited to move forward with our new normal that we forget to thank God for everything He did looking back.

Or the life-changing lessons that He, in all His grace, taught us during this time.

In Joshua Chapter 4, after the Israelites crossed the Jordan, they erected memorial stones to signify God’s faithfulness and everything, as they crossed from one side of the river to another, that God had done.

The same kind of memorial stones we want to erect as we arrive at the other side of this figurative river today.

What a Wonderful World

April 23, 2020 Michelle Cuthrell

We started the practice years ago after the first time I read Ann Voskamp’s life-changing One Thousand Gifts.

We were fresh home from China with Superman and in the thick of frequently moving, frequently deploying, frequently failing military life.

In the midst of surgeries and separations and months on end of single parenting, I wanted to document all the beautiful things all of us had each day to be grateful for.

So we started family gratitude journals.

For the last five or six years, the boys have documented one thing each day (or each day that they actually remember) that they thank God for.

But somewhere along the way, life and lunch packing and waging morning hygiene battles with little boys who don’t believe in toothpaste got in the way, and I stopped logging my daily blessings in mine.

And I noticed something small and subtle and ultimately totally life changing take place.

When my eyes don’t view my life through the intentional and daily lens of gratitude, they quickly begin interpreting my life instead through the dangerous lens of entitlement.

They shift the blessings to the background and the frustrations to the forefront.

And they begin noticing only what I don’t have instead of everything I do.

Without gratitude, in the same set of circumstances, I transform from content to complaining. From a celebrator to a critic.

From a worshipper to an all-out whiner.

The Overwhelming Opulence of a Husband at Home

April 20, 2020 Michelle Cuthrell

For nearly 16 years of marriage, Super-Spouse has missed out on all the fun.

He missed the hurricane of 2016 that leaked through log walls and downed power for multiple days.

He missed the hurricane two years later that flooded our land and our county and closed schools for can't-sit-still superheroes hopelessly bound to their homes.

He missed the Great Bat Infestation and Simultaneous Basement Flood of 2018 (and all the repairing and re-flooring that followed).

And he missed the 15-minutes-after-arriving-at-the-hospital delivery process of Superhero 2. (Thankfully, thanks to hefty speeding on back roads, Kiersten Slevin, saver of baby deliveries, did NOT 🙌.)

But now that he has changed out of the very last command of his military life (in his pajamas from home in what was an introvert’s dream of a non-ceremony), my favorite superhero who loves to live on other continents when disaster strikes is, for what feels like the first time ever, HOME!

And in a world where we know one deployment or TDY could have easily kept us apart for months, I have never felt so humbled, grateful or blessed.

Quality time together is a luxury in this military life.

Quality time with a man like this one is just plain opulence.

An Acoustic Version of an Electric Life

April 15, 2020 Michelle Cuthrell

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived a “loud” kind of life.

I love bright and bold and busy and constantly freight-train fast.

I love music sung in 15-passenger vans at decibel levels that have the drivers at the light next to me nodding their heads, and I love the electricity of a room packed out with people I love.

If our crazy, chaotic, constantly on-the-go military life could be played in song version, it would be one filled with drum sets and cymbals [definitely played by un-showered boys in no pants] and the melodies of a thousand screaming electric guitars.

Because in this house that is something like the OPPOSITE of tranquil, we all kind of like to live and love out loud (and the ones who don’t just haven’t yet learned the meaning of an “inside voice”).

But then came Covid.

And then came quarantine.

And then came the realization that maybe, just maybe, this loud life we’ve been living has been drowning out something much quieter.

Much calmer.

Much more important.

Like the still-small voice of JESUS.

What’s actually crazy is that it took a world pandemic to interrupt our jam session and get us to turn down the noise long enough to hear a song our sweet Savior has been playing all along.

The one that offers REAL Resurrection life instead of a cheap, loud cover of the real kind.

Blog