the wheat princess

Hello, Goodbye

I’m glad 2021 is over. It was a hard year, harder even than 2020. If I had that information this time last year, I’d have sat my heinie down and cried. I could recount all the things I learned in 2021 and how different I feel on the other side of it. Truthfully though, I don’t feel like it.

Normally, I start the shiny new year off with a trailing list of plans, goals, and to-dos.

I’m very organized and goal oriented and I like checking off all the boxes on all the pretty pieces of paper. But the 2nd day of this shiny new year feels different to me. Yes, I have goals and ideas for the year ahead, but one word keeps pressing into my heart with every beat: contentment, contentment, contentment.

I’ve spent the past few years with so much wanting.

Wanting more, wanting different. Not all wanting is bad. Not all having is good. This year, I feel God asking me to just sit. Be still. Stay, and tend, and grow. Use what you have…look away from what you don’t. Take each next step as it comes. Stop trying to run ten steps ahead to see what’s next.

I assure you, I acted just like the rowdy toddlers you know when I was given such advice. And just like the toddlers you know, I wore myself out fighting, and flailing, and throwing myself on the floor in protest until I was ready to surrender and see if God does, in fact, know what he’s talking about.

One baby step I’m taking toward contentment this year is simply staying off social media.

I’m planning on this blog being the only place I connect online. I’ve never been good at keeping up with the pace of Instagram and other platforms that require daily engagement and short snippets of life. I prefer the longer form of blogs and the freedom to connect less, even if just once a week. I can’t handle the constant “feed” of other people’s lives via social media, and I know my soul needs a break from the scroll.

I hope this time next year, I’ll be able to say I walked peacefully and presently through these days — with joy and contentment, no matter the road we were on.

What do you hope for in the year ahead? I look forward to connecting with you more consistently here going forward.

Sincerely, Kari

Posted in Ponderings: Thoughts & Questions
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Seasons Change

I am not a minimalist. I sit pecking out words at a desk hemmed in by a hundred little shreds of paper attached to a hundred vivid memories. Pieces of my life, tethered to my heart, and taped to the wall to remind me of where I’ve been and of where I’m going.

Pages ripped from my favorite book, a stub from Gusta Pizza in Florence where my husband and I ate again and again during our week there, the words of a cherished poem to remind me of my childhood in the prairies. The stories of our lives strung together day after day after day… and remembered by a hundred shreds of paper hanging from the wall.

We aren’t always conscious of the story we’re writing with all these strung-together days of a life. So many, many days are almost exactly the same, and we get lost at sea in the living of it.

Then, something changes, and we are jolted awake. Are we not all quite awake after 2020? Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll ever really rest again.

For years, my season of life was MOTHERHOOD. All day, every day (and through many nights, too) I mom-ed, and mom-ed, and mom-ed. I very much got lost at sea in the sameness of it all. It was a season that would never end, and certainly, I’d never sleep again.

And then one day, I woke up and the seasons had changed. My children were both in school and I was back at work. And while I still mom very hard and still don’t always sleep through the night, I know without a doubt that what was ended and something new began.

I look back on my early days of motherhood and marvel at their passing. How many times did an older mom say, “it goes so fast.” It does and it doesn’t. Those years were long and hard. And yet, now that they’re behind me, I feel those older-mom words burning a hole in my retrospective heart — it goes so fast.

It is not just motherhood that has me nostalgic. I see the passing of time everywhere these days. In the thirteen years of marriage my husband and I celebrated this summer, in the changing and aging of our parents, in the babies I babysat having babies.

Time marches on and on. We can’t stop it. So, may we live awake rather than lost at sea. May we notice, and cherish, and tape to our hearts the moments we’re given. No matter how it looks today, for better or worse, seasons change.

Posted in Ponderings: Thoughts & Questions, Seedlings: Children & Motherhood
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These Ordinary Days

Thirteen years ago today, I stood in a wheat field and married my husband. Today, Darren is at work and I’m home with our kids. I’ve spent the day putting away laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning up an unreal amount of glue from a rogue craft project. It’s just an ordinary day.

Out of the Ordinary

But I’ve learned one extraordinary thing over the last year of marriage: You should never stop dreaming together. For most of our marriage, dreaming together was easy. We wanted to work and buy a house. We wanted to travel. We wanted to start a family. Check, check, check.

All Good Things

These are all good things, but even good things require a lot of time and energy. And before we knew it, we stopped dreaming together. We put one foot in front of the other, one ordinary day after the other. But our paths were diverging.

Darren had his work and life, and I had my work and life. And of course, we often collided in the middle to iron out details and practicalities. But we weren’t dreaming together.

A Shared Path

I didn’t think too much about it. It was just the season of life we were in with little kids and such. But crazy 2020 showed me something: If you’re not dreaming forward together, you’re likely not moving forward together. A once mildly divergent path can lead to wildly different places if you don’t course correct.

Thankfully, we realized our error and are working on that course correction. We’re finding our way back to a shared path.

Last night, we sat up after the kids were in bed talking about the future. Darren showed me pictures and ideas on his phone which led me to research a few things as well.

As I fell asleep, I thought: we want the same thing. We have the same dream for our future and family. Maybe that sounds small, but it feels like the biggest thing in the world to me right now.

Going Forward

I woke up this morning, on this thirteenth anniversary, not only thankful for my husband, but excited about our future together. Excited to be planning, scheming, and dreaming in the same direction again. And that is the most extraordinary thing in the middle of this very ordinary day.

Posted in Ponderings: Thoughts & Questions
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You Can Trust Me

I always get up early hoping for a few quiet minutes before my children wake up. I’m usually successful at the waking up early part but rarely successful at getting ahead of my kids. They fully endorse Anna’s words in Frozen: “The sun’s awake so I’m awake.” And so they are, every morning at the crack of dawn.

Yesterday was one of those rare mornings when both kids slept in, and I had a few minutes to myself to curl up in a favorite corner. Sitting in the morning light, one thought settled on my heart and mind: You can trust me.

“Me” being God. And I, not being a trusting person at all.

I Can Do This

The last eighteen months have been unusually tumultuous for our family. Even before a pandemic rocked the world, we were wrestling with big questions about hard situations that could potentially change the course of our future. The answers to many of those questions came crashing down around us right in the middle of Covid.

A Sinking Ship

In looking back with the gift of hindsight, I see how desperately I’ve tried to hold everything together these last eighteen months. How firmly I’ve believed the course of our future is entirely up to me. I need to make the right decisions and show up in the right places. I need to have a plan worked out for every aspect of our lives. If I do everything right, everything will be ok.

Sure, I trust God. But I trust myself a lot more. Who, after all, could be more invested in my future and the future of my family than me? I can captain this ship. I can direct our fate. If I just get up early enough and work hard enough and make enough consecutive right choices, then everything will be ok…

Can you feel the exhaustion in those words? I can feel it right down to my bones. Yesterday’s “you can trust me” was a gentle nudge to stop spinning all those wheels and webs.

A Good Story

God whispered in my heart, yes: you can trust me. You can trust me to want good things for you. You can trust me to write a good story for your life. You can trust my heart in the middle chapters when the story is bumpy, confusing, and unresolved. You can rest…in me.

A Still, Small Voice

The day before, I was sorting through boxes of books bound for the thrift store and stumbled across one by Elisabeth Elliot called Keep a Quiet Heart. Elliot had been on my mind repeatedly throughout the week, so I scooped that book up and set it aside. Yesterday, after God whispered all those “you can trust me’s”, I opened Elliot’s book and read the following:

He taught us to work and watch but never to worry, to do gladly whatever we are given to do, and to leave all else with God.

Elisabeth Elliot

Do you ever have a moment with God where you’re like, okaaay…I hear you? I kept reading:

“Every assignment is measured and controlled for my eternal good. As I accept the given portion other options are cancelled. Decisions become much easier, directions clearer, and hence my heart becomes inexpressibly quieter.”

“The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

“A quiet heart is content with what God gives. It is enough.”

Elisabeth Elliot

And that was all just in the first few pages. I understand now why God kept whispering Elisabeth’s name in my ear…and why I woke up that morning with such an urgency to sort through all those books in the attic. It was all orchestrated by a still, small voice that I can sometimes hear, but often drown out in my noise and bustling.

And, if God can direct me so specifically to words I so need to read, does he not also direct the much larger story of my life? Can he not make my path straight as promised (Proverbs 3:6)?

I believe he can. I trust he will. Now the hard part, to live like I mean it. To keep a quiet heart.

Posted in Roots: Faith & Theology
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The Long Road Home

Last week, I went to my hometown for the first time in the thirteen years since I moved to Massachusetts. I never meant to be away for so long; that’s just how life worked out. The house I grew up in is gone…sold and torn down years ago. Certainly, that’s a big part of why I’ve never gone back.

Maybe it’s the upheaval of the last year, the rolling waves of dislocated friendship and community, the isolation of a world in pandemic and unrest…I don’t know. All I do know is, I’ve been homesick for the prairies and it was time to go back.

After flying into Kansas City for a reunion, I had one free day to do whatever I wanted. So, I packed my people in a car and we drove out to Higginsville.

I wondered if I’d even recognize the place after all these years, if I’d be able to find my way there. Well, it turns out almost nothing about my little hometown has changed.

We wound down the familiar roads, past all the same landmarks that dotted every day of my childhood. And there it was, just as I left it, Hearthstone Rd.

Our long driveway is the one landmark I most hoped to find intact…and it was…just as I remembered it.

It’s not an overestimation to say that I worked out my faith and theology, who I would love and marry, what my dreams for the future would be, and much more all while pacing up and down this driveway. It now seems a sacred line of earth leading both to and away from home.

All those dreams and plans come full-circle standing here with the man I love (the man who I whispered those very words to for the first time in hayloft on this property).

I watch my children, immediately at home, chewing shoots of grass and gathering dry corn cobs from the field.

And I think of all the places I’ve been since I last walked down this drive. Paris and London and Rome. All the places that are not only dreams, but memories now too.

How much I’ve changed; how much remains the same.

When I left this place at 22, I was ready to go. I’d finished school and was about to get married and move to the East Coast just like I’d always wanted.

What I didn’t know then was just how hard it would be to find my way back. I didn’t know that I’d never again step foot in the house I grew up in or that the barns and apple trees would all be gone by the time I got back. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be halfway through my thirties with children at my side before I’d touch this ground again.

We all make choices — whether to stay, whether to go. And none of us can predict how the dominoes will fall once we set down a path.

I love the life I’ve lived and built these last thirteen years. But I think I’ve finally been gone long enough to understand what I left behind. Paris and London and Rome will never hold the memories in my heart like those of this dirt road.

Posted in Adventures: Travel & Doings
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A Merciful Mess

Yesterday started out as a really hard day. I was ready to give up and forget the whole thing by the time we finished breakfast. We pulled ourselves together and went to church anyway. And by the time we left church, there was some light breaking through the hurt of the morning. Once home, we decided to spend the rest of the day relaxing as a family and went for a bike ride.

That was the right choice. We needed the time outdoors filling our hearts up as a family.

My boys showered me with flowers on a day when I really needed a backpack full of them.

And I thought, life is messy. I used to think there are hard seasons and you just need get through them…and sometimes, that’s probably true.

But more and more, I think it’s not a season at all — it’s just the way it is. Life is beauty and ashes mingled together. There are hard mornings that bleed into merciful afternoons. There’s tears and frustration, joy, and laughter with the same people on the same day.

A lot of life is learning how to gracefully hold both beauty and ashes at the same time. It’s learning to let them both be what they are without trying to pretend otherwise. It’s trusting the heart of God who both gives and takes away.

I’m learning to stop watching for a bend in the road where we come out on a smooth plateau. But rather, to keep my hands stretched out to the One who walks before me and lights my way through every peak and valley. He, the giver of beauty. He, the mercy in ashes.

Posted in Roots: Faith & Theology
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For the Love of Rain Boots & Words

I miss writing and telling stories.

The last few years really sucked the creative energy out of me and somewhere along the way, I decided I don’t have anything to say — anything worth saying, worth reading, anything that hasn’t already been written or read.

Be that as it may, I miss words and stories. I miss taking and sharing photos. And I’ve found lately that when I DO share, something inside of me lights up.

So here’s to words and stories… just for the love of them, just for the fun of them…even if that’s all there ever is.

My kids go all the way through a pair of rain boots every summer. It’s turned into a bit of a tradition for me, buying them each a shiny new pair come spring. Already, my son’s boots are splattered with paint (and ever covered in mud).

I wish I had thought at the very first pair to start saving them — how I’d love a photo of all those little rainboots lined up in a row as a testament to the years gone by. At least I’m smart enough now to document them along the way.

Here’s to summer days whittled away in rainboots. And to words written and shared, photos taken and cherished…just for the love of it, just for the love of them.

Posted in Seedlings: Children & Motherhood
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Within Reach

I realized yesterday that my children just assume I can always hear them. I can be on a different floor on the other side of the house and they will start a conversation with me just the same as if I were sitting across the couch from them. Yelling a conversation through the house does not bother them — they just expect to be heard.

I can be in the bathroom or shower and my kids will lay on the floor outside the bathroom door and yell to me over the water. They never seem to question if I’m busy or if there’s a better time (or person — hello, your dad IS in the living room) to ask.

As far as my children are concerned, I’m always on call. Always ready to listen and respond to their every thought and question. And for the most part, they’re right. I pretty much can always hear and respond to them –whether I like it or not 😉

This open line of motherhood made me think about prayer and the line of communication between me and God. Do I assume, like my children, that God is always listening — always within earshot and available regardless of what else is going on?

Subconsciously, I know God is always there, always listening, and available. But in practice, I want everything to be just so before I talk to him. This is more about the noise in my own head and heart than anything else. It’s difficult for me to talk with God when the roar of life is so loud.

Plus, lately, God has felt far off.

The last eighteen months have been filled with no’s. God’s given lots of good things…endless good things. But lately, he’s simply said no a lot too. And when I fear my questions will be shot down (by God or people), I tend to stop asking. I pull into myself and try to figure things out on my own.

It wasn’t until yesterday, pondering the way my children approach me, that I really thought about how freely I might approach God too. Do I really see him as a child sees a parent — always within earshot, ever available to stop and listen? And unlike me and my children, do I trust that he does not grow weary of my questions or fail to give right answers?

I’m not writing this today because I’ve settled all these questions in my heart; I’m writing because I’m asking them. Maybe you are too. Maybe the questions and uncertainty are the very thing God will use to open up the line of trust and communication between us. Maybe I just need the reminder that he’s both God and father — and like a parent, he hears me regardless of the noise and chaos between us.

Posted in Roots: Faith & Theology
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The Seedling Society // February 2021

Posted in Haberdashery: Odds & Ends
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Chasing the Light

I’ve been pulling my camera out more this year, trying to notice and remember all the little details that make up our days.

On Saturday, everyone was grumpy and irritable. The kids were fighting and falling apart about absolutely everything. The house was a disaster and I was done with all of it.

At one point my daughter stood in front of the window and in spite of all the bad moods, I couldn’t help but notice how pretty she looked standing in the light.

I grabbed my camera and started clicking away. When Darren saw what I was doing, he got our son dressed and we had a little impromptu photo shoot in the living room.

I hesitate to share these photos at all — full of laughter and sweet smiles. Because that is not at all what our day looked like. If I zoomed out, you’d see our disaster of a house and plenty of grumps inhabiting it (myself included).

But in the end, I’m glad I stopped to take these photos — because these sweet faces are what I will remember about that day long after my memory of the grumpiness is gone.

I don’t ever want to forget the toothless smiles or the baby(ish) toes. I don’t want to forget the way the light fell on my daughter’s hair or caught in the folds of her dress. I don’t even want to forget the way these two will be fighting like crazy one minute and laughing themselves silly together the next.

These photos are far from perfect, I know that. Our day was miles from perfect. But I still want to capture as best I can all the little moments that make up these few short years we have together at home as a family.

I’ll blink and the pudgy toes will be gone. So will the toothless smiles and sweet little dresses. So for all our imperfection, I choose to notice and remember all the light we’ve been given to chase.

Posted in Seedlings: Children & Motherhood
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the wheat princess

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