As a Christian, I am supposed to make it my goal to live according to the plans of God for my life. I suppose this makes sense, but there are some problems with it. Namely, knowing exactly what those plans are – and if they are specific or general – is a daunting task.

I’m always reading, listening, questioning in hopes that I’ll understand this whole process better. Everyone has an opinion, of course, and most of them are at least slightly different.

Recently I heard a great perspective on the following God issue: Just take the next step.

The image the speaker used was one of a father and child walking in the snow. The father strides ahead and says, “Follow me!” For a child, that first step looks pretty big. Following is sometimes more like leaping or flying. Still, he just says to follow.

My greatest weakness is when I see where Father is  – several steps ahead of me – and I try to find my own way to that spot. Instead of focusing my eyes directly on the step ahead of me, I decide I could probably make it to where he is a little faster if I cut this corner or skip that stretch. I forget that I’m being led in a particular pattern for a reason. I try to figure it out instead of just taking the next step. What if he bypassed that particular spot because there was a hidden ditch? What if he knows what he’s doing?

So these days when I look down that unseen path and I see a distant goal, instead of getting frustrated, I’m trying to remember to just take that next step. It feels scary sometimes and I don’t always know how it is going to get me to where I think I’m supposed to go, but it’s the only safe step to take if I believe I’m truly being led. And I do.

I guess that’s why I call myself a person of faith. Because I need some.

“With $5 I could buy an entire meal for you, Claire. That’s ridiculous.”

This was my response to her only request at the Mizzou game last weekend. We ate the obligatory hot dog and drank Diet Coke from a huge black and gold souvenir cup, but otherwise I was determined to be thrifty and frugal on this outing. Spun sugar at $5 a bag, no matter how pretty it looked, did not fit that resolution.

She didn’t argue with me. She went back to cheering and shaking her pom-pom and watching all the people around us.

Once in awhile she would say, “Yum. I love this lip gloss Pam gave me,” smacking her lips, “It smells like Cotton Candy!”

“Sorry, no Cotton Candy. It’s really messy, Claire.”

But then as we were walking back from the restroom we happened to be following the lady with the brightly colored bags of cotton candy on her tall wooden stick. A $5 bill in my pocket was jumping out and screaming at me, “I’m NOTHING, but this little girl has only asked for ONE THING today . . . on her BIRTHDAY . . . and it doesn’t matter how messy or nutritionally worthless it is, Claire will never forget it if you let her buy that bag right now!”

“Excuse me, we’ll take some Cotton Candy!”

Many childhood experiences could fit into this Cotton Candy category: no nutritional value, messy, sticky, and over-priced. I’d include sleep-overs, amusement parks, Happy Meals, and birthday parties in this list. But sometimes these are the right choices to make anyway.

Sure, it might mean we’re cleaning up or taking extra naps or temporarily emptying our wallets, but these are investments in memories.

Will Claire remember that pink and blue Cotton Candy of which she barely ate a third? Maybe not. But when she looks back on her childhood, I think Cotton Candy will pop up in there somewhere and she’ll feel warm and happy inside.

That’s worth a few extra wipes and $5 bills today.

If there is one thing I have learned in my 36 years on this earth it is that life is about managing the tensions between truths. Very few things are as simple as they seem. Jesus pointed this out often. He was Lion and Lamb. He told us the first would be last. He promised life if we died. Tension between truths.

This week college football took a hit. And rightly so. As I heard Kirk Herbstreit say on ESPN, “We need to remember there are bigger things in life than college football.”

So there’s that, which sort of makes me hesitant to write this. Until I remember the tension.

Because just about 9 years ago, college football did everything right. At least for me.

Most of you know that 9 years ago I was pregnant with Claire and Ellery and things didn’t go well. During the three or so weeks before they were born, I was in and out of University hospital in Columbia, Missouri, because of the complications. The first of those stays was especially difficult. I was on something called mag sulfate that made me feel hot and weird and sick. My room was kept quiet and dark so that I wasn’t overly stressed or excited, but the effect was more depressing than soothing.

Finally one Saturday afternoon we opened the windows – I’m not sure why.

L.G. Patterson/AP Photo

The Missouri game was on the tv. The volume was low, of course, but it was nice to watch the images of strong healthy people on the screen. Then, as if orchestrated, a Tiger (maybe Brad Smith – in my memoir, it will definitely be Brad Smith because you can do that in memoirs) ran in long for a touchdown. I saw it on the screen but not before I heard it through the window.

Thunderous cheering and shouting from the stadium just blocks away. Thousands of people forgetting their cares and worries and cheering for the conqueror, taking part in a celebration bigger than themselves. On the screen, a quiet and tiny image of what could be. Through the widows, the noisy proof of its truth.

For me it was a tension-filled reminder of life: how we sometimes find ourselves grieving and celebrating in almost the same moments. How life is triumphing even while death is threatening. Those sounds and the way they affected me are all that’s right about college football.

Saturday we celebrate Claire’s 9th birthday. And quietly in our hearts we’ll also remember Ellery’s passing. It’s a tension every year. A good friend is taking Claire and Jesse and I to the Mizzou game that day. And we will cheer. And we will be reminded of good and health and life. Maybe our cheers will be someone else’s reminder that day. We all need them now and then because we live in a world of tensions. Both of us living truth. Both of us needing the reminders of each other.

This Saturday we will throw open the windows to the sounds of celebration! I hope you’ll hear us from wherever you are.

This is what I overheard.

Macy to the horse: (whispering) “I’m go-in’ be you best friend!”

Me to Macy: “What did you say?”

Macy to Me: (laughing) “I can’t tell you!”

I showed you a beautiful image of The Beginning. With more photos, I wrote about The Middle. But what can I say about The End?

Because no one knows their own end.

I’d like it to be something like The Notebook. We’d be holding hands in our sleep and just drift away to Jesus together. I’ve recently read two different news stories about the real-life versions of that movie, two couples married for years who were able to escape the sorrow of living without one another because they met death within the same 24-hour period. That would be ideal, wouldn’t it? But that doesn’t happen for many. Most of us have to deal with something less than perfect.

No one knows their own end. Mostly.

One thing we do know. A Facebook friend alerted me to a new ABC series called Once Upon A Time. It is mesmerizing (but not for children even though the title might imply as much). The fight between good and evil, so clearly depicted in fairy tales, is the basis of the show along with a bit of The Matrix twist about living in one reality and forgetting the truth. Fascinating. My favorite line so far came from Snow White when she realized her newborn child had escaped the evil Queen’s curse and would someday return to rescue them all. Full of fire and hope even in the midst of her deepest sorrow, suffering, and loss, Snow White locked eyes with Evil and said, “You are going to lose.”

That much we know. No matter when death takes us now, it will not win in the end. It will lose.

So I cannot tell you how The End will look in words, but at the same wedding that gave us beautiful images of beginnings and middles, my brother-in-law caught this one that makes me think the end will be something like this: Us looking back over our lives – over all that we’ve known, loved, made, and cared for – and knowing it’s been good:

And by then we’ll also know it isn’t really The End. It’s the beginning. The beginning of Forever. And I don’t have a blog post for that yet.

By Katie J. Davis and Beth Clark (Howard Books, 2011)

I would like to write two separate reviews for this book. And that frustrates me.

The first review would be a full and complete endorsement.

The second review would be less favorable.

But I just don’t do “less favorable” very well, so instead I’m going to write a review on the book I read and a review on the book I WANTED to read.

Kisses From Katie – the book I read:

The beauty of Kisses From Katie is the story itself. I’ve followed Katie’s blog for a couple of years. At 19 years old, Katie chose the life of an adoptive single mom in Uganda over the life of a single college student in the United States. She does this at great cost to her family relationships (specifically her parents) and her romantic future with her then boyfriend. Instead, on what was supposed to be a one-year stay in Uganda to teach in an orphanage, Katie adopts six little girls within just a few months. Today, Katie is a mother to fourteen.

I assign Katie’s blog to my composition students for reading responses because her story is rife with challenging ideas. It is easy, on the one hand, to be inspired. It is also easy, on the other, to find Katie’s story somewhat out of reach. My students wrestle with her unconventional decision to adopt as a single woman. They argue over whether she could have lived a similarly God-pleasing life from the safer boundaries of her Tennessee neighborhood. They wonder if they could ever possess the selflessness they see in Katie’s life. These are great questions for first-year college students to consider.

For me, there is so much to love about this story. Katie owns an impulsive and brave spirit that allows her to make life-changing decisions in a moment. I envy that. Her heart for the poor, the sick, and the orphaned stir me to some kind of action. As a married mother of four, my story can’t look exactly the same, but I find courage in Katie’s story to challenge my own comfortable ideals and plans for the future. For these reasons, I highly recommend this book.

In Uganda They Call Me Mommy – the book I wanted to read: (new title, yes)

I think most of my problems with the first book (the one I actually read because it is published) are with the writing and presentation. There are so many things I would have done differently. I haven’t read any reviews that even mention these points, so maybe I’m being too critical. It just seems to me that an amazing story deserves to be well told. Was this a rush job on the publishing end because the topic is hot right now? Probably. Did that treatment serve the story well? No.

Here are the best parts of the Katie Davis book I WANTED to read:

1. The story is told like a novel. It begins in the yellow convertible of Katie’s American lifestyle as a typical teenager and moves us along bravely to the rusty motorbike bouncing over the dirt streets of Uganda. The prose is tight and image-rich. As a reader, I am gutted by the differences in Katie’s two worlds and sometimes shocked by her selfless but possibly reckless choices.

2. The narrator answers questions that aren’t already addressed on Katie’s blog. We hear the conversations between Katie and her frustrated parents. We see the officials who describe what it requires to adopt little girls even as someone who has very recently been one herself. We meet the boy she loves and we love him too, so that when he isn’t in the picture anymore we actually care. As readers, we share in the emotional life of Katie not just her thought life. Not just in the words she wants us to hear but in the words she never says but we feel just by watching.

3. The book isn’t preachy at all; it lets the story stand on its own as a testament to faith and bravery. We feel stronger just by reading it. We close the pages, sad to part with a new world and a very special family, and we look out onto our own horizons looking for our Uganda, our little girls, our places of service. We close the book and we don’t stop at admiration of one person but we move into action ourselves. Not because we feel guilty but because we feel called.

And THAT is the book I wanted to read. Maybe we’ll still see that book someday after the dust has settled and a little more life has been lived. I hope so. It’s really going to be a good one.

And this one is good, too, but it isn’t that one.

*Read more about Katie on the Amazima website or in this Christianity Today interview (this one actually answers some of those questions left out of the book).

I love the beginning, but living in the middle is pretty sweet too. Fluffy filling. Smooth caramel. Chewy dough. The good stuff is in the middle. We loved celebrating Drew and Kate’s beginning at their marriage ceremony this weekend, but I was never so happy to be in the middle either.

Dan and I would catch each other between runs to the tux shop and walk-throughs at windy rehearsals and we’d smile, “So glad to be on this side of that!” So glad our beginning was beautiful, too, but mostly glad to be past it and to now be in the middle.

The middle of this bounty:

The middle of playing wedding . . . or orphanage, or mommy, or rock star, or all of them together:

The middle of dreaming into mirrored glass and smiling at the hazy images:

The middle of barn dances and laughter and twinkle lights:

This is basically the middle of life together, and it is sweet. Sure, there are moments we don’t necessarily want captured in digital ink, but I’m thankful for these shots that provide markers along the way. These photos, I know, will eventually fill a photo book that we’ll turn the pages of again and again.

“Look how small you were!”

“Oh, I loved that barn! And I loved our dresses!”

“Did I always smile like that?”

“What was I pouting about?!”

And none of us will remember because all we’ll see is how good it was in the middle.