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.

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.

Love Doesn't Have a Lane

March 30, 2020 Michelle Cuthrell

As our states have issued stay-at-home orders and our worlds have all become smaller in the face of Covid-19, I’ve found myself in stillness and silence more than at any other point in my entire life (at least when small male humans are sleeping).

Travel to China is closed. Families in process of adopting lovies from the nation we love are at a stand-still. Information about the superheroes we normally advocate for is brief and long-coming from orphanages just trying to manage children amid a world pandemic that hit their country so hard.

The military families we love serving are in an unprecedented season of immobility and non-deployments. Moves have been cancelled. Service members are actually home. Many bases and posts have moved to mission essential staffing only, and the soldiers who normally spend holidays on separate continents, more than ever, are spending days and nights with superheroes who actually get tucked in by them at night.

The “Capes” and “Combat Boots” part of the causes we fight for on this blog are both in strange and quiet seasons.

And in the midst of it all, I, like so many people whose calendars have been cleared, have found myself somewhat lost.

“Lord,” I have prayed on so many of the last 17 days we’ve spent almost entirely inside our home, “we have more time, energy and space than we ever have in our entire lives. Where are we supposed to invest in this crazy locked-in season? For the love of toilet paper, what are we supposed to BE ABOUT?”

Because this girl likes themes.

This girl likes labels.

This Type A rule follower likes neat little lanes I can move up and follow and say, “This is where I stand!”

But the truth is, God doesn’t work in categories.

He doesn’t fit my life into labels and lanes.

And the simple answer I’ve returned to as I’ve gotten more precious time with Him than I have in my whole life is the same thing we as Christians have ALWAYS gotten to “be about.”

The beautiful and messy business of loving God and loving people.

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