My hair is a huge pile of crazy on top of my head and I'm wearing those sweatpants that no one should own.  I woke up and went on this rampage and now my car is immaculate and my skin has never been cleaner and my plants are drowning in water.  I have a personality swinging thing that I do when I need Him.  I turn into a crazy Martha but she always gets me to Mary and as exhausting as Martha is, there's something so real and demanding about Mary, sitting and being still.

Because when I'm still, I can't avoid anything.  Life is the hardest when you say no to the lovely little distractions.  And so here I am and here He is and holding it together is impossible because my heart is His and He knows everything in it.

My cousins came and stayed with me for a weekend and I don't have the words to write how completely precious they are to me.  They're outgrowing themselves and when I think of them my heart turns into a fierce prayer.  I have never been more demanding with God.  Praying over their coming years, praying over their past, praying, praying, praying.

The refining, it's beginning younger and younger.  Part of me wants to scream at the world, scream that they're still kids and children and let them be, leave them alone.  Please not yet.  But the part of me that understands the world and understands it desperately wants to win too, that part of me pushes the rest of me to trust. 

Trust is so hard for me.  I am reading Daniel, studying it with older women and Daniel is blowing me away.  We talk about resolve and courage and those words excite me.  We read about God and the furnace and I could not get past His protection.  I could not get past the three's willingness to stand.  To look at their people and their past and their love of other gods and to say Enough.  This stops here.  We will not bow and we will not bend.  We will stand.  We will maybe even burn.  But we know our God and that is not him.

The same God who built a fire so hot it killed the people surrounding it.  Who in that fire, walked with His three and removed their bonds and kept them from death.  That God is fiercely for His people still, today. 

So here I am, and here He is, and my heart is full of His ferocity.  And there is this quiet knowledge nestled deep inside of me.  The knowledge that my God wins. 

Always, He wins.