So I Won't Forget...April 2025
3 things I want to remember from the last month
I just have to get to May.
These are real words from my inner monologue…on April 1st. Shortly after they graced the halls of my brain, I exhaled and acknowledged this was no way to live one of my Aprils—wishing that I could skip to the part where I had less responsibility as if less responsibility magically equaled more rest. I’ve lived long enough to know that’s not how rest operates, so I had a chat with myself that went something like the following:
You can let some things fall off the edges of your plate.
You can think about tomorrow when tomorrow comes—at 5:00AM when you check the calendar to see if it’s a hair-washing day or not.
You can apologize to your kids when you forget to turn in the field trip lunch money. This will probably be of more value to them—you apologizing—than if they had the boxed lunch anyway.
As I write today, I’m happy to report that “April 1st Emily” was right on all fronts. This is likely coming to your inbox in the glorious month of May—the place I just needed to get to. Things fell off my plate. I did forget the lunch money. I lived a tad more moment to moment than I usually do and things stayed basically the same. Today I have my feet propped up at my favorite bakery in Tulsa and an empty plate sits next to me where once laid the most delicious coffee cake in all the land.
So let’s get to it, shall we? I have much to share that didn’t just fill my schedule, but also filled my heart and mind with the foggy goodness that only comes into focus through words.
This is April and here are the things I don’t want to forget.
#1…basketball and a human chain
I hate to be the one to point this out, but March Madness ends in April—something I had never paid any attention to until this year. So I’m getting ahead of any confusion—or I suppose my confusion because according to some people I live with it’s pretty common knowledge that the tournament ends in the first weekend in April. I digress.
Our two youngest played basketball this year and we truly had the most fun. On the heels of all the hype, we decided to go all in with the NCAA tournament. We taped all five our our respective brackets to the full-mirrored 1960s wall that dominates our dining room and tracked our weekly scores using a dry erase marker on the wall. With the help of ChatGPT and a gleam in my eye, I constructed a bracket that simultaneously communicated my deep hope for a Cinderella story and my sheer lack of basketball knowledge. Who cares about stats when the other team just feeeeeels right?1
The Monday evening of the tournament, we stretched out on the couch and floor to see if Houston would pull through against Florida.2 Thus far any family tournament-watching had mostly looked like the kids being still during advertisements and bouncing all over each other when the game was actually happening, but toward the end of this game, people started to settle down. The gel pens and tiny magnet sets that I had pulled out in attempt to stifle the wrestling had indeed bridged the gap for us to the remaining two minutes. Suddenly everyone was locked in on those final moments of fouling, shooting, fouling again—holding our collective breath to see if the players’ perspiration and desperation would keep the game interesting.
I glanced around the room observing my sweet people and noticed that we were all somehow touching. Think children’s science museum and know that if one of us had been touching an electric current we could have lit up a lightbulb at the other end. We were a human chain with someone’s leg drooped over someone’s stomach whose arm was laid across the chest of another. Our youngest was splayed out across her dad’s lap and his hand was comfortably on my leg. The little scene took my breath away for a split second and I thought to myself whoa, we’re a family.
In John 10 Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd and says that those who belong to Him are never out of the Father’s hand. They’re always protected and held and connected to Him. Somehow this image of the shepherd and his sheep became one that lingered in my mind as I thought about our kids completely comfortable and completely up in our business. Human touch is a powerful thing. Most of us can hardly resist it. Will you hold me? Will you scratch my back? These are the requests of my children, but also the things my soul whispers at the end of the day when my head hits the pillow and darkness rolls in.
Family can certainly be complicated, but I also wonder if in its most beautiful form, family could look a little like sheep huddled together, always touching and fumbling around looking to the Shepherd for what comes next. And I wonder if I might hold onto this tender image the next time my bouncy daughter leaps into my lap—bony knees headed straight for me whether I’m ready or not—and remember I’m never out of His hand.
My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. John 10:29, ESV
#2…preaching Holy Saturday
This year I attended my first ever Holy Saturday service.
If you’re wondering what even is Holy Saturday, you’re not alone. I grew up in a church that observed Lent and some basics of the liturgical Church calendar, but we were never quite “high church” enough for things like Holy Saturday. Our church plant, now turned bustling and beautiful local church, joined an Anglican diocese a few years ago and we began soaking up new liturgical practices and incorporating more aspects of The Book of Common Prayer into our worship. Holy Saturday became one of those delightful additions.
The twist this year is that I also happened to preach the service—something that still feels strange to even type and feels even more vulnerable to put out there to a world with potentially divisive views on whether someone like me should even be doing this. I’ll say this—it was a wholly wonderful process for me.
Holy Saturday is the day the dust lingering on our foreheads from Ash Wednesday gets a glow-up—a transformation into something more tender and especially beautiful. In the gospel narratives, this is the day where nothing really happens other than the Pharisees pleading to Pilate for a seal to be put on the tomb and a guard to be posted out front. We don’t get any details about where the disciples, Mary and Mary, Joseph and Nicodemus, and all the others spent that saddest of all Sabbaths, but we can assume that it was a devastating one. Did we get it all wrong? What will become of us know?
If you’re familiar with the Apostles’ Creed this is also the day that gets the strangest of all shoutouts—He descended to the dead it says3. Without opening a suitcase I can’t neatly repack for you in the context of this tiny essay, I’ll say that the most compelling perspective on this phraseology (and it’s contextual roots from 1 Peter 3 & 4) is that Christ descended to the lowest places of the human experience. He knows anguish, despair, pain, brokenness, waiting, and most of all sorrow. And He doesn’t gloss over these things, but makes space for them much like He did when he ugly-cried outside the tomb of his dead friend Lazarus knowing full well He was about to call him out of the tomb alive.
What will stay with me always about Holy Saturday is the pause of it all. There is moment in the Easter narrative for those of us who grieve, who’ve sat outside the tomb of our own Holy Saturday wondering if all was lost, if this too will be redeemed. Our darkest days and the scars we bear from them remind us that what we really long for is a Savior who hasn’t just skipped straight to the good stuff, but has wept with us knowing fully the pang of being human. With scars still visible in His resurrected body, Jesus says our pain matters, it will not be wasted, and then in all His Easter glory declares that even death will die.
There’s your mini-sermon, but if you’d like to hear the full version, you can do that here:
#3…the thing that feels like yesterday, but was actually 7 years ago.
When memories of the last 7 years scroll across my TV screen, the thing that seems fleeting is their cheeks. In the sneakiest of ways, these precious cheeks have slowly but surely gotten less squishy—something I grieve collectively with all mothers throughout history. Sure, they sleep through the night easily and they go to the bathroom on their own, but their cheeks are disappearing like water through my hands.
Seven glorious years ago I sat in an elementary pickup line waiting to grab my nephew from school. I had a 3 year old squirming in the backseat eager to get out of the car and my back was aching in a way that it had only ever ached once before. Alarm bells were going off in my head. This hasn’t gone away all day. It seems to be happening like every 2 minutes. The ache seems to be getting stronger and it hurts. I’m not sure what I thought the doctor’s office could do for me when I called them, but the wisdom they offered was this: if you’re having contractions while 37 weeks pregnant with twins, you should go to the hospital. It sounded reasonable enough.
Our twins were born 3 hours later.
Something about seven years feels magical. They are truly kids—not babies, not toddlers, not preschoolers, not little ones—kids who go to school, ride bikes with the neighbors, play soccer, and make their own tea on Saturday mornings.4 When we’re all out in public together, people still occasionally hold the door open for me and my three little ducklings, but not with the same frequency they did when I was trying to thread a double stroller and a toddler through the narrow doorway of Hobby Lobby on a Tuesday in the rain. The tradeoff happened as fast as people said it would.
I suppose the thing I’m remembering this month is growth—literal, messy, delightful, head-spinning growth. My son weighed 4 pounds 3 ounces when he came into the world and last night I had to brace my core and bend my knees when he jumped on me for fear I’d throw my back out. Growth is a beautiful and tricky thing that sometimes we resist, sometimes we welcome, and in this case sometimes it just happens. And it’s the just-happens kind of growth that we often miss unless we make remembering a part of our rhythms. It’s also the kind that seems to produce a tiny spark of delight on the most regular of days.
I wonder what growth is just happening right now around you? If you’re still here reading, can I nudge you to metaphorically look up? Squint your eyes for a second so things come into focus. Where do you see growth happening all around you?
Now soak up some of that delight before it slips through your fingers.
Did you catch the latest episode of the We Have This Hope podcast?
shares her story and talks about delight in a way that is so refreshing.
Next week I’m sharing a conversation with
—she’s an author, pastor, church planter, and lovely human being who wrote the book What We Find In the Dark: Loss, Hope, and God’s Presence in Grief. You can read an excerpt of her beautiful work right here:
I did not win.
They did not.
This phrase is based on passages from 1 Peter 3 & 4. Theologians and scholars have a few different perspectives on what this means. It’s a rabbit hole you’re welcome to tumble down yourself. I certainly did.
A recent development which is giving old man vibes in the best way possible.
Which bakery?!
This post should have come with a trigger warning for anyone reading it on the last morning their babiest kid will be six. 🥹