Post #1. Stoked.

To Become Bit by bit means this to me...

I was thinking the other night that there aren't very many things in life that you just become. Yeah, you can become a wife overnight or a mom, but those are just titles. The actual relationship is built day by day. You don't become healthy overnight. You choose to go on that path but then you have to continue day by day to be healthy. You don't become impatient overnight. You choose day by day on how you respond to life. And so you become either more of who you want to be or more of who you don't want to be. And you don't even realize it. All of those in-between moments that you have in life. Those are what are shaping you into who you are. All of those times when you are frustrated or happy or don't want to wake up early and go to the gym...that is who you become. And so this year I want to become more of who God wants me to be. So simple, yet not simple in that I am not passive in this process. And I also want to help others around me become more of what God wants them to be. I want to help my boys become encouraging to others. Patient when it is hard. Strong when they need to stand up for what is right. I want to help Jeremy become more of who he wants to be and God has created him. Our family. Thriving.

And none of this will just happen.

To become means you Selah. Stop and listen.

To become means you embrace.

To become means you are present.

To become happens bit by bit. Just like the Skin Horse knew...

 The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

 I am stoked. I feel like this is the perfect word to follow up the powerful year of story of 2013.