Birthday Week Celebration Coffee Date with Lenae

In celebration of the Bigger Picture Blogs community turning one year old this Thursday, June 23, we’re featuring a few friends who have made the journey of this past year so sweet and so memorable. If you want depth, these ladies have it. And once a connection is made, they are loyal friends. Won’t you grab a cup of tea or coffe, say hello, introduce yourself and stay awhile as we get to know each other a little bit better?

Don’t forget to stop by our birthday party Thursday at Undercover Mother. Share your favorite Bigger Picture Moment at the link up, and visit some other favorites! {And stick around for a few treats at the party!}

Coffee Date: Lenae of {Just} Lenae

Twitter: @JustLenae

In a world filled with both beauty and stress, it takes a special sort of person to weed away the difficulties and truly appreciate their lovely surroundings.  Lenae is just such a person.  While growing her gorgeous young family, she writes about every aspect of life, and she does so with grace, humor, faith, and honesty.  Lenae’s posts are often wise and soul-searching.  She invites us into a life of true acceptance and hope, even as she makes us feel at home in her words ,which she wraps around us as skillfully and gently as a hug.  Lenae is a study in living life beautifully.  And we at Bigger Picture Blogs are honored to host her thoughts here today

What Bigger Picture Blogs means to Lenae:

“I’ve been blogging for a few years now and participated in many carnivals, dabbled in a few different online communities.  But Bigger Picture Blogs?  Well, it’s beyond blogging, really.  When I first read their About page, I felt the warm delight of instant recognition: Oh yes, these are my kind of people. 

A little background on me: I’ve been living a nomadic lifestyle since I joined the Air Force in 2004.  In seven years we’ve lived in four different locations, and even though I grew up in different spots in northern California, this constant moving in my adulthood has affected me more than I could have predicted.  In those seven years since I enlisted, I’ve also married and born four babies.  If there’s anything most mothers can agree with, it’s that when you embark on this deliriously amazing, exhausting road of parenthood, you ache for community.

I’ve made wonderful friends in the places we’ve been stationed, dear faces I’ll hold close to my heart for the rest of my life.  Yet an interesting development has come from me publishing my written thoughts on the Web — I’ve built friendships that transcend the circumstances of my life and resist the pull of new surroundings.  There are kindred spirits waiting patiently for my next sharing, who will send me e-mails on the days I need to feel loved the most, laugh at my silliness and help me celebrate on my mountain tops.

Bigger Picture Blogs surprised me with its immediate sincerity and welcome.  The defining moments for me came during the past Christmas season: ‘Twas The Write Before Christmas!  I felt my writing muscles stretched and challenged; I rose excitedly to see the day’s prompt.  What I did not expect was how everyone else’s posts squeezed my heart and touched me deeply.  In their poetry, essays, and photos, I discovered a profundity to Christmas I hadn’t been able to previously grasp on my own.  Soaking in others’ treasured memories and reflections completely reordered the season’s meaning for me.  It propelled me through my first, intentional Advent.

Thursdays’ Bigger Picture Moments have given me something to look forward to every week, an opportunity for me to step outside the structure of my own blogging agenda and simply embrace the beauty in my life — “the bigger picture.”  There is healing and growth in intentionally pausing to search for this in your existence, whatever it may be.  And there is friendship and family in the conduits that encourage that act of eucharisteo, as Ann Voskamp would say. 

Yes, Bigger Picture Blogs, the journey is indeed so much better with friends.  Thank you for providing that place to congregate, and here’s to a successful, inspiring year: This military wife is so grateful for what she’s found in this community.”