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The Run a Muck
therunamuck.com
23
Amber has 4 sons, a guitar-playing husband, and a love for the funky, the narrative, and the dirty South.
#57437 in All , #2087 in General Lifestyle

Marriage Letters: On Outside Influences

Dear Seth, I came to marriage with misconceptions – what is sexy, what is biblical wife, what is it to make a man happy. I think often in all our not-knowingness, we reach for answers and affir...

30 apr 12

Do we have hope?

What is this thing I call my faith? “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1 I know I’ve spent some good Christian years in ...

26 apr 12

Marriage Letters: On Loss

Dear Seth, I thought it would be the sex or morning coffee or the children that showed us all about love, and indeed those things have, but most of all it’s been in the losing that we’ve ...

23 apr 12

A Rock Home Companion and a LoveFeast Table giveaway

Our table is scratched and has wobbly legs. Apparently, when I’m not looking, my boys use yogurt as finger paint, so if I ever actually get it clean, I give the laser eyes and tell them to git ...

20 apr 12

Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

In all my efforts to gather them into myself, to fold them back up for keeps like a love letter in my heart, every day is a pulling away. I have 4 boys, each turning man by the spoonful of oatmeal. I...

18 apr 12

Mother Letters Releases Today: Share the Mess and the Glory

Today, I would like to humbly send you over to a guest post I’ve written at A Holy Experience for Ann Voskamp. That my words are in her space is utterly humbling. Then? Could you get up and do ...

17 apr 12

Marriage Letters: I trust you because …

Dear Seth, This letter to you has terrified me from the moment we chose the topics. Now finally writing it is like painting the invisible elephant that popped into my head when I started mulling it o...

16 apr 12

Dear Mother: On Bats and Handling with Care

Dear Mother, You know that moment in the church pew, when everything is all decorum and near-gloom serious? And then something happens, a smell or a sound or the preacher makes a slip, and suddenly y...

11 apr 12

Marriage Letters: On the Names I Call You

Dear Seth, Who came up with these marriage letter topics? I remind you of the one for this week, and you giggle like a boy in the kitchen, swat me with a towel, and call me Sweet Cheeks. Oh we’...

09 apr 12

Dear Mother: On Shame and Who Loves First

Dear Mother, Last week I gave up. Many nights I go to bed and stay awake to the dark. I hate shame, yet I use it for covers and writhe underneath at all the things I know I should be doing better. I ...

04 apr 12

Marriage Letters: On Serving Together

Dear Seth, A young friend recently asked us if we thought serving together was part of what made things so good with us, and we gave him a great big YES, and we both sat and watched his wheels spin, ...

02 apr 12

Mother as Curator: On Seeing God in Art and in the Artist

I haven’t written here about my time at BlissDom Conference, how I roomed with and next to the besties I only get to see once a year. If you’re not a blogger, I know you think this is wei...

28 mar 12

On the Quiet

My husband has been pursuing quiet for lent, and he’s been speaking it to me before he leaves for work. Hands on my shoulders, he says, “Take peace, and find that quiet place with God....

26 mar 12

Share the Beauty: Marriage Letters Topics

Seth, Joy, Scott, and I would love for you to join us again by writing Marriage Letters to your spouse. We’re starting back in April, every Monday writing letters because we believe that when w...

25 mar 12

Boys in the Bed and Calm in the Storm

This stage, the baldy head, the new repeated sounds – ba ba ba – the baby in studied finger motion to pick up the leaf fallen from big brothers’ shoes, this stage with baby is magic...

22 mar 12

Grace’s Greatest Offender

When I pulled up to the event where I was to tell my story and point listeners toward grace, the first person I saw was a friend that had stumped me. Her life had spun out of control, and I was one o...

20 mar 12

Share the Beauty

The other day, my 4 year old demanded I stand outside his preschool classroom to hug and kiss him. He still gave me a sloppy kiss before heading toward the girls with long hair, the eye glances his w...

17 mar 12

You are an Authority on Grace

They asked if I would sit on a panel about grace (to share my story) with an amazing local pastor and with Mike Foster of People of the Second Chance. I immediately said yes, and then in the quiet as...

14 mar 12

Mother – your art, your Letters, your photographs

This is me. One of the ways a woman can blossom before Mother happens. How many ways are there for us to bloom, I wonder. For me, motherhood must be an expression of LOVE in art: the little fingers a...

12 mar 12

A Mother: A Curator

It’s my hardest job, to be a curator for these boys, to look around and call ART to the tape and glue, the stick-figures drawn on our bills and the mysterious videos on my phone. My sons reflec...

09 mar 12

Make a Celebration

When I was small, I lived next door to my great-grandmother, Mama Lois, and I would run to her house barefoot. I ran alternating from the burning blacktop to the thistled grasses. And then in the col...

07 mar 12

invisible things: the mountains

After the dream, he wakes afraid and straight away drives, sweat on his face, to that cinder-block building down the road, the one we believers pass by with eye-rolls. The Fortune Teller wears hot pi...

06 mar 12

Marriage Letters: I Knew You Loved Me When

Dear Seth, Before we got married, I really don’t remember how I knew you loved me. I’m not sure that I did. I’m not sure we knew what we said when we said “I love you.” ...

27 feb 12

What Can You Do?

I sat on the couch with sweet, rare friends, and one prayed words that I couldn’t understand. They were meant to bless me, and I cried in unbelief. I am none of those things she called me, stru...

24 feb 12

Marriage Letters: My Job – Your Job

Dear Seth, The transition you get from counting minutes and outlining lives into a billion technical documents to our home, where by the evening our boys are on the emotional ferris wheel of mania me...

20 feb 12

my RL (in) Arkansas

A few days ago I climbed another tree to retrieve one of my 4 boys. He was about 2 stories high, dangling and tangled in a mess of saw briars. I stood on a thick vine that wobbled, leaned my shoulder...

19 feb 12

No Goodbye

Today I sit at a table with friends who are moving to the other side of this globe, and I sit and reel. At this coffee shop, they are known. People walk by and put hands on their shoulders, to touch ...

15 feb 12

Marriage Letters: On Patience

Dear Seth, I guess that because we’ve written about our love, it’d be easy construct an imagined Rock House world where pictures hang perfectly, where you always remember to take out the ...

13 feb 12

cosmos

I’m overcome with temptation, so I eat the bowl of ice-cream that hurts my tummy and causes Titus eczema all over. I wrestle and limp in my spirit to the pot of beans, then the friend comes ove...

09 feb 12

Marriage Letters: Opposites Attract

Join Joy, Scott, Seth and me as we stake a claim in our marriages by writing Marriage Letters every Monday. *** Dear Seth, I’ve seen black widow spiders all over this property, dime-sized and p...

06 feb 12

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