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!

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Sometimes, the new paint you picked out turns out to be a little more like lemon meringue and a little less like happiness, but you roll with it and paint on that second coat anyway. 💛 Sometimes, you wear a twenty-year-old T-shirt but cover it with a cardigan even though it’s 80 degrees, because those threads are a wee bit bare and you just don’t care that it’s a little snugger than it used to be. 💛 Some days start with running three miles and planting a tree and painting a room and end with Lara bars in the ER keeping watch with a friend, because friendship is showing up and shared life and witnessing the messy when you’ve got nothing else to give. 💛 Some nights you sleep and some nights you don’t and some nights just when you think you might your child needs to reset with a snack and readaloud in the wee hours, and you are grateful, so grateful for a husband who gets out of bed to deal with it all. 💛 Some Sundays you wonder what it means to love God with your whole heart when you’re an #INFJ and some of your people are hurting and some are rejoicing and you are feeling the things and seeing the grace and living the crazy and your children are asking you if the tears are happy tears and the truth is sometimes you don’t know but you keep on loving your people and calling out grace when you see it and wearing the retro shirt with no makeup because late-thirties are exactly where you want to be. 💛 In other words: Some weekends are magical and some weekends are not and some weekends you have literal magicians in your church sanctuary making a woman disappear. For real. There’s grace in that, too. Keep looking for it. 💛 #sacredordinarydays #loveyourneighbor #weareplacemakers #notkiddingaboutthemagician

Some days, the finch baby birds fledge right in front of your seven year old’s eyes, peeking into the fern, and you wouldn’t trade anything for that look of surprise. Some days, the birdfeeder empties in one afternoon and you notice the tomato volunteers growing up between your potato plants because you bent down to pull a few weeds. Some days, you hop up on the slack line to entertain your children, and you fall off because you’re laughing too hard at your own wibble-wobbling balance. Some days, you’re surprised at the quirky and beautiful things people ask you to handletter for them, because you’re friends with quirky and beautiful people, and sometimes you’re not surprised at all. Some days there is room for friends and neighbors and sweatshirts and sunshine and cupcakes and bug spray. And one more Magic Tree House book. Always one more. I guess what I mean is, Some days, you know what grace is. #whatgraceis #butwhataremicrogreensanyway #mommaswobbleandtheydofalldown #howwehomeschool #sacredordinarydays #itssimplytuesday #handlettering

You know what I was thinking about this week? How much my haircut makes me look like my mom. It does. And when I sport a visor or a ball cap? Might as well just call me Bonnie. Sometimes I look in the mirror and am stunned. Sometimes I hear my laugh and can hear her, and her sisters, and her mom laughing through me. All of the idioms about nuts not falling far from the trees? I’m basically a baby tree. An acquaintance of mine saw a copy of my first book of letters recently and told me he thought that the dark-haired woman in the photograph on the cover was me. He did a doubletake when he realized it couldn’t be me, given the age of the photograph, and that I must be the little girl in the photograph. That photograph is thirty years old. This week, heading into Mother’s Day, I realized I’m the exact age my mom was in that photograph. It’s on the book cover because it hangs in our hallway in a frame, one of the mementos that inspired me to start writing these letters in the first place, wondering about my mom at my age. We did the math last weekend when she was here in town visiting for your birthdays. We were walking home after preschool pickup and a lunch picnic at the park. The exact age. My age. My mom’s age. Right there in the hallway. Mom told me last weekend that her grandma—your great-great-grandmother—was freckled and fair-headed and used to say that if you washed your face with the morning dew on May 1, it would lighten your freckles. I love that story for so many reasons, including the fact that I had never heard it before—and of course I Googled it; it’s a folklore-ish custom about May Day dew having magical properties—but I especially love knowing there was a megenerations ago in my family tree with freckles just like me, especially as my freckles get darker and heavier every year, and I look more like my mom, as your freckles crawl across your noses, even though I make you wear visors all the time. You look like me. Which means you look like her.

Right now, glancing through my real-life phone text threads with my real-life friends and family, I stand as witness to much pain and struggle. Human experience, even here in my little corner of the world, is hard, friends. I’m sure it is in your corner too. Here on my phone are babies born dangerously early, children suffering debilitating anxiety, divorce negotiations, child abuse accusations, group homes to help with addiction accountability, inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. These are my dear ones and the dear ones of my dear ones, suffering. The journey is long. So long. But the story of our faith, is an “and yet” story. And yet, scripture resounds, God is faithful. And yet, Christ came, he comes now, and he will come again. That is the litany of the church from the beginning. And it’s still Easter. Here on my phone, too, mixed up with the lament and the tears, are the glimpses of what Easter looks like in a broken world. There are new haircut photos and book recommendations. Adoption announcements and 2-year-old birthday smiles. Play dates scheduled and prayers offered. Theological questions and emojis and hashtags and enneagrams and HSP and INFJ and all the feels all the time. Friends, what I’m saying is this: Easter looks like living. Like loving. Like being. Easter looks like grace. Thanks be to God.

Life requires attention, friends. People you love require attention. People you don’t know require attention, too. Squirrels wreaking havoc on your front porch require attention. The lawn during those three hours of sunshine this week. The potluck lunch. The out of town guests. The children’s birthday parties and the reading groups and the homeschool and the church newsletter and the read aloud. And the finch eggs transforming into fuzz balls in their nest inside your ferns? Them too. (They require you to not water your ferns quite so regularly.) Basically, what I’m saying is this: I’m paying lots of attention. That’s how we live Easter. #livingtheincarnation #squirrelsandall #morereallife #lessIGlife #sacredordinarydays

Recent Posts

The Hundred-and-Seventh Letter: May Day Dew, Motherhood, & the Incarnation
The Hundred-and-Sixth Letter: Fancy Cursive & Plain-Jane Hospitality
The Hundred-and-Fifth Letter: Christmas, Birth Narratives, & Being a Rockstar
The Hundred-and-Fourth Letter: Christmas Rolls Gently In
The Hundred-and-Third Letter: On Repetition and the Pink Candle (Advent 3)
The Hundred-and-Second Letter: Love Wins (Advent 2)
Big News!
The Hundred-and-First Letter: Personality Types & Praying in Walmart (Advent 1)
The Hundredth Letter: One Hundred Letters
The Ninety-Ninth Letter: Hospitality (Worth Saying Again)

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