She is fiercely independent, this little one.  She pulls her hand away when I try to walk with her, and she is determined to carry a snack and sippy cup and walk down the stairs "by self."  She climbs and runs and throws herself head first without reservation onto any patch of grass she can find and yells "Safe!" (We can thank daddy for that one).  She swam in the lake all summer, and while it took a few times for her bravery to show up, once it did she wanted no help, no hovering mama nearby;  just the freedom to walk and float and jump and look proudly back at the shore to yell "I swimming, mama!" This girl loves the wide-open, no boundaries, run fast kind of life.  That mostly scares me to death and more than one time my heart has fallen to my stomach watching her be daring, but truthfully, I wouldn't want it any other way for this girl.

My life needed a daughter like this: one that is so very opposite of me.  I clung to my mother's leg until preschool, then cried when she left me there.  Harper would stroll through the neighborhood looking for flowers and rocks by herself if I let her.  She was born with a sense of adventure that I think I am still looking for in life.

There is no end to the humbling that twenty-one months of parenting this beauty has been for me.  No end to the joy, either.  I don't really know what I am doing, and so much of how her dad and I learn is by trial and error, lots and lots of error.  There have been days that I'm beyond tired and weary and cry over the thought that she might be the teenager who is not afraid to sneak out of the house and let boys drive too fast with her in the car.  But there are other days when I am bursting with gratitude that she might sneak Bibles in to a closed country or help rescue young women trapped in the brothels of India.  And also tell those fast-driving boys they can't touch nothing with her.  I pray relentlessly for the later.

I do not know what God has in store for you, Harper Kristin.  But you can be sure that I am going to point you to him every step of the way.  We will both make mistakes on this journey, but I promise to be good at both "I'm sorry" and "I forgive you."  I'm am so thankful God let me be your mama, sweet girl.  You make me laugh and cry and want to swoop you up in may arms and snuggle you tight, until you wiggle free, because you weren't made to held back, were you?  Let's go get life together.   

I am less than a year away from wrapping up my twenties.  And not that it scares me, it just surprises me.  It came so fast.  When I was eighteen, thirty seemed old, far away.  I just knew by then I would have so much of my life figured out and established, and well, I’m almost there and I totally don’t.  Truthfully, I feel only a little bit older than that girl who graduated college with a plan: job, marriage, kids, home, minivan, contentment.  I’m four out of six— working on the minivan (I dream big!), but mature enough to realize contentment lasts about three minutes in this world before I want, think I need, or am jealous for more.  If anything has truly changed about me in the last few years, certainly a piece of that is the mortgage and the wedding ring and the dark brown line two babies left down the center of my belly.  But it’s also this: I’m less concerned with what will make me content and paying much more attention to what makes my heart burn.

On the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24), we read the words of two of Jesus’ disciples after he appeared to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened our eyes to the scriptures?” They speak with the clarity of hindsight that the words spoken to them right from Jesus were the very things that made their hearts burn.  I stopped there, on verse thirty-two, because I knew this much: if Jesus speaks and it makes the heart burn, I want my whole life to have that heart.

The beautiful Bible commentary of Matthew Henry says of this scripture: “… when we are much affected with the things of God, especially with the love of Christ dying for us, and have our hearts thereby drawn up in holy desires and devotions, then our hearts burn within us…”   

I think there is a difference between a life that pursues contentment, and a life that goes after what makes our hearts burn.  Contentment wants this world: pretty things, nice reputations, fun social groups, big homes, well-behaved children, and you know the whole list because we all have it running in our minds all.the.time.  But a life following hard after a burning heart— that’s a brave life, maybe even a bit dangerous at times, because it wants the kingdom of God.  If you’ve seen others living like this, you know it.  Their lives aren’t explainable other than to say the Holy Spirit is alive and well.  They are daring, exciting, inspiring, contagiously joyful.  They believe God’s word will accomplish its purpose (Isaiah 55:11) and they unashamedly listen for him. 

What makes your heart burn?  Is it your career, your wayward son, your neighborhood?  Is it the orphan or the widow, the hungry and homeless, is it marriages falling apart around you or friends lost in a fog of depression?  Too many of us don’t let our hearts burn: we throw water on the brokenness we see because we believe the problems are just too big to fix anyway, or we fill our lives so much with ‘contentment’ we have yet to make room for passion.  Jesus invites us in to so much more.  Let’s listen when our hearts burn. Let’s let God trade our ‘minivan dreams’ into holy desires, things that are so on mission with Him our entire countenance changes when we lean in.  A burning heart is a good thing.  It means Jesus is who he says he is, and he is still talking to us, inviting us on to the road with him. 

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And just we’re clear, I still would love the minivan someday. 

Simple is good.  Most of the time anyway.  Simple chocolate chip cookies will do, but add a touch of cornstarch and an egg yolk and they go from simple to melt-in-your-mouth fluffy and delicious.  Add a little brave to a simple life and we go from status quo and restless to dreaming and doing things we thought only storybook lives could do.  And that's what this space is all about.  A simple life with a little bit of brave.