Beauty in the both/and.
Stickers, tattoos, ampersands and your March downloads.
Here’s what I know: It can be winter and spring at the very same time. Grief and gratitude often go together. Hope and heartache tend to hold hands.
But I know this too, and it has held up and held true: God holds time in His.
There are pages I’m (beyond) ready to see turn. More dancing and less mourning, please. But somehow, strangely, that right there is the promise and the hope: the page can and WILL turn. We know how the story ends and this isn’t it. Not yet. The Author is still writing and promises not to stop until the time OF everything… becomes everything good.
The God named Faithful and True will take all of This and all of That and make it beautiful. He isn’t bound by time—He holds it. And He holds us, holds me, holds you, through every season.
Even the season of everything, of muchness, of thank God and please God and all the in betweens.
Our Right Now might be a lot... but His hands are not too full.
We talked so much about the both/and last year that when the image of an ampersand with wildflowers came to mind, I couldn’t shake it until I made it.
Then I turned it into a sticker. (There’s a first time for everything!)
Then I turned it into a tattoo. (That, again. ^)
Apparently, this is the year of trying new things and also, apparently, the message I really need to see?
And, it seems, you’d say the same… you are saying the same… because after I addressed dozens of envelopes, after I slipped a sticker inside and added a stamp to the outside, after the notes made their way to your mailboxes—the first but not the last of All The Things gifts you’ll receive this year ;)—you started to send images back to me with notes about the timing, about what the design means to you… your own pictures of the image that moved from my head to a computer screen to your mailbox and now to your journals, your water bottles, your real life.
I know I’m rambling, that these sentences run, but we’re all here somewhere in the middle of our own particular muchness and we’re daring to believe it, still here watching for wildflowers, waiting for wailing lament to turn to whirling dance… and it might seem like we’re alone in the waiting room, the watching room, the wondering room, but then there are all your individual messages, your real life pictures of ampersand stickers, and when held collectively the truth is louder than a single pixelated snapshot:
We aren’t alone in the in between, and even here in the both/and, we have found and will find beauty.
The March print and lock screen are below—a way to see the simple message before you swipe and scroll through whatever beautiful or brutal news awaits in the pixels, plus of course prints in multiple sizes so you can add one to a gallery wall, tucked between snapshots with your people and memories of This or That through the years, an ampersand of what was and is and is to come.
P.s. If you’d like one of the temporary tattoos, leave a comment below or send a message my way! I’m testing out different sizes of stickers and tattoos (what you see here is the large option) and playing around with ideas for future designs of both… if there’s enough interest, maybe we make this more of a regular thing, yeah? More gifts in the mail or maybe an Etsy shop so you could buy extras, if you want?
But first, I’ll copy over a small portion of the January Downloads email because I am forever moved by threads that are woven through, a small glimpse in the moment and a stunning gift in retrospect, a reminder that there’s a Good Author who sees the bigger picture and doesn’t miss a thing.
Click the link below for the larger context of these words, or just sit with this excerpt and laugh with me that we’re claiming this as a year of flowers and new life IN the wilderness, in the unknown, in the both/and.
Not on the other side, not just a line among the many ‘new year, new you’ posts, not just a nice idea for the first month of the year before we have a better idea of what the rest will hold, but here, now, too.
It’s been there all along… but now it’s on wrists and water bottles, journal covers and lock screens and gallery walls. Wildflowers in the wilderness, beauty in the both/and.
It’s been there all along (perhaps quiet and unassuming, but present all the same) but it’s also new, a surprise and a “well, of course” at the very same time. It’s an invitation—a lens to intentionally look through as the calendar pages turn. It’s a comfort—a hand to hold, a soft place to land, a warm blanket when winter stretches on. It’s both a guide and an anchor, a rearview mirror and a windshield, a metaphor stretched one hundred ways and yet it holds, remaining the same but also, somehow, brand new.
It’s been there all along. It’s the next line of the story, continuing on from the words in the last print. It goes with the lyrics played on a loop, shared with you alongside the most recent design. It’s the sister to 2023 and 2024 and, may it be, it’s the song of 2025.
You did it: you changed wild lament
into whirling dance;
You ripped off my black mourning band
and decked me with wildflowers.
I’m about to burst with song;
I can’t keep quiet about you.
God, my God, I can’t thank you enough.
Psalm 30:11-12
Wilderness. Wild lament. Wildflowers.
It’s not either/or… all along, it’s been both/and… smack in the middle of what in the actual world & getting your hopes up & how much longer & I trust God is good but this is far from it & what now & I’m not sure I can make it & the storm won’t stop & walking through new doors & haunted houses & waiting rooms & I believe but dear God, you’ll have to help my unbelief.
Wild lament…
To whirling dance…
To wildflowers and wonder, to singing and “can this be?!”, to abundance and goodness and immeasurably more than we can imagine.
It feels risky to dare to dream it might be true, to believe it will be written onto the pages of this year, but I said it to you in ATT in January 2024 and I’m not backing down in January of 2025:
Hope held me and Hope held true, so I’m holding Hope to His word.
May this be the year of miracles, of wildflowers in the wilderness, of laughter in the painful places of lament, of color and life and hope in abundance, of restoration so beautiful and redemption so stunning that the only thing to do is throw off our mourning clothes and dance with deep joy.