Elizabeth Sands Wise

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Big News!

December 10, 2018January 2, 2019 / Elizabeth

we live here announcement

P.S. If you enjoy reading the letters I post regularly to my daughters here on the website, I hope you’ll consider helping me spread the word about my most recent book project. It’s the second fifty letters in a tidy 180-page paperback. It makes a great Christmas present!

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books, daughters, family, hospitality, letters, love, motherhood, mothers, parenting, wisdom

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← The Hundred-and-First Letter: Personality Types & Praying in Walmart (Advent 1)
The Hundred-and-Second Letter: Love Wins (Advent 2) →

The next 50 letters! Now available as a paperback on Amazon. (Click the image to purchase.)

Thanks for visiting, friends.

You can find some free digital print downloads under the “Sharing & Freebies” tab.

A great gift idea! This collection is coauthored with my husband. (Click on the photo to purchase on Amazon.)

Purchase the First 50 Letters as a paperback or Kindle book on Amazon!

This Sacramental Life: The First 50 Letters to My Daughters

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Last weekend marked a year since this happened. Yep. It was a year of change in our house, our lived-in never-ending fixer-upper 1950s small-town home that has been the centerpiece of many a poem and article on hospitality. This weekend in January 2019 when the ceiling came out was messy, messy, messy, and the weeks and months that followed? Pure chaos. And exhaustion. Social media posts with occasional updates don’t do justice to the overwhelming tiredness that accompanies change. Especially change that accompanies living without a kitchen, which many of you know happened just months after this project ended and lasted until the fall. It was a year—oy, what a year—of projects and change and exhaustion around here. And that’s not scraping the surface of change that happened around us and our community: professional changes, church leadership changes, mourning the loss of loved ones, brand new exciting adoptions, foster placements becoming permanent, friends and colleagues moving away... Friends, it was a year of change. And last weekend, when I thought back to how far we had come, just here in our living room, I was astounded. Because it is a beautiful space now. It is a peaceful place of grace and cups of tea and lots of room for tears. But it was a chaotic journey. And knowing it ends up well does not make the journey any easier to stomach. What I mean is, the journey can be chaos, friends. And the end may turn out fine. But it’s still hard. And so we begin again. Or we just keep going. And, sometimes, we are grateful for grace. Which is enough.
Sometimes your 96-year-old great grandmother gives solar-powered hula dancers from the dollar store as Christmas gifts. And even here, on an ordinary Tuesday, with candles over lunch and monster face sticker giggles and Nancy Drew binge reading and piano lessons and no idea what’s for dinner, even here, as her hips click-click-click in the afternoon light, there is metaphor. The light shines. Darkness shall not overcome. #light #epiphany #thedarknessshallnotovercomeit #metaphor #handlettering #itssimplytuesday #sacredordinarydays
Two friends told me recently how much they love Mondays, one for fresh starts and one for the return to routine. Meanwhile over here...
I see lots of snow on my Instagram feed these days, but we didn’t even manage to get the rain that was in our forecast today. And, y’all, I’m not mad about it.
I’ve been thinking about the significance of starting over. Beginning again. Resetting. Refocusing. Getting back on track. Whatever you want to call it. And I’ve been thinking about it specifically related to this: you can do it whenever you want. We tend to focus on big milestones—beginning of the school year, beginning of the new year, beginning of the summer. We make lists and goals and resolutions and bucket lists and get excited about getting things underway. And then when they fail or if we just get sidetracked by other things and come back to them later to catalog all the things we didn’t do, well, then we throw in the towel. Or decide we can just wait until the next year to start over again. But why next year? We rarely talk about how we can stop at any point and start over. Especially at the New Year, we act like our resolutions or goals or words of the year (don’t even get me started on that) are set in stone. But hear me: you can stop at any point and start over. And what’s more, it’s not just that we can stop and start over, it’s that we often should, and we don’t. We’d often rather throw in the towel than pause and take a deep breath. Because let’s face it, it’s often easier to throw in the towel or wait until tomorrow than start over today. Maybe this idea of arbitrary beginnings just resonates with me because my days often don’t start off on the right foot. The news I need to hear pretty much every day is that halfway through a day, or halfway through a morning, I get to reset, I have an opportunity to start over, rather than being a grumpypants all day long and chalking the day up as a fail. What I mean is this: We can start over whenever we want. I can. You can. We don’t have to play by the rules of the calendar or the season.

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