For the Love of Ivey

Rocked the Iron Girl Tri today with Beth and 1500 of our closest friends. It was awesome!! Thanks Beth and Angie.... My motivators And today....Ivey gave me those minutes of Faith. Love my girl.

The first time I jumped into the water - it was October and freezing - so I wrote it off to nerves and the hypothermia effect of every muscle as my body locked up due to oxygen deprivation.  That's what I kept telling myself even though every cell in my brain was screaming otherwise.  So I was left to cast away the hours of practice, i.e. training, and inefficiently swim and breast stroke my way across the lake and back again.  All the while my two friends were gracefully skimming across the water looking like Olympic athletes.  Periodically one of them would turn back prompt me and encourage me on....on the outside I was laughing, which I tend to do in moments of hysteria, on the inside ; however, there was a battle raging between sheer panic and nightmarish fear.  I thought I would actually die before it was over.  As you can see, I am still here.  The next day, race day, I figured I had the jitters out and this lake swi...

Over the past several weeks I helplessly watched a friend as she struggled with a sudden unexpected injury to one of her children. It was a momentarily life altering complication that will not leave her the same person she was in the seconds prior to the accident.  It has hurt tremendously to read her blog posts, reading her words as she veered from her usual Joyful self, parts of me could literally feel the pain searing straight to her bones.  Pain of confusion and fear all masked with a little disbelief that she had suddenly been blindsided and slammed into the concrete world that she just couldn't prepare for, a world full of uncertainty and unknowns, a world that only Faith can relish. In the midst of her tedious yet graceful balancing act of an injured child, healthy children, husband and self deprivation, her heart was being tended to by some extremely beautiful women.  My own heart knows them well.  And my friend is surgin...