Hi, I'm Jennifer Blair.
There are few things I enjoy more in life than creating art. My aim is to create as a reflection of the Creator. Thanks for stopping by my blog. Here you'll find posts of me work, family adventures, and thoughts on following Jesus in today's world.
I don’t have to know where I’m going anymore. I’m fine with riding passenger. It’s taken a while to get rid of the bad theology of “The American Dream” (or most of it, I hope). I’m not the “master of my fate” or the “captain of my soul” as stated in Invictus. I’m content, joyful even, to know Jesus is leading me. Even with so many reasons to be discontented, I’ve found God has given me contentment. I’m less “in control” than I have ever been. I honestly don’t even know what this summer or next year will look like, what I’ll be doing, or if things will resolve in so many respects. Yet I know this is where God has led me. So how can I have contentment without any “game plan”?
I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life I haven’t been hoping for something. I’ve struggled throughout my life when there wasn’t something “to look forward to”. If there wasn’t anything, I planned something, anything. When things got hard I comforted myself by looking ahead and thinking, “But I just have to make it until ___ (something fun) comes.” My joy and contentment was very much controlled by the circumstances of my life. (Enter the difficult years.) It’s been a crazy past 4-5 years, full to the brim with difficult things. To name a few: a hurricane crushing our home, my mom dying after a sudden diagnosis of late-stage cancer, my husband having emergency heart surgery at 35, being homeless several times, PTSD, etc…Planning something to look forward to just stopped working for me at some point. When life is so hard you can’t look beyond the next few hours or when what you see ahead only brings more anxiety, you need something MORE. Better. Deeper.
It’s the time of year that many people look back on the year that is drawing to a close and highlight all the good or say “good riddance” and wish for a better year to come. I’ve thought often about what this year means to me in retrospect. It was certainly an “ebenezer” year, and I wish I had an actual stone to put somewhere in remembrance. It was a year I saw a true miracle: God spared my husband’s life when he had, at best, a 2% chance of survival. It was incredible, undeniable and I will never be the same or stop being grateful that we can all still be together as a family. But we can’t tie up our story with a nice bow. We can’t say “God saved Jonathan and this is why.” I can’t negate the dark valley I walked through afterwards or the fact that Jonathan still lives with a medical condition that gives him pain and hinders normal activity. He still can’t run around in the yard with our kids and he’s not back to 100%. The discouragement and limitations that continual nagging pain causes is hard for us both, especially because it looks like there may not be any resolution on the horizon apart from another miracle of God.
I love the Christmas season, and I always have. But as I read the other day, Christmas seems to be a great magnifier of good and bad. Many good things seem even better, and hard things can feel even harder. I have known both sides. This time of year reminds me of loss and reminds me of my innumerable blessings. Over the years I’ve parred down the things that we do during Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the things! But oftentimes I need the simplicity so that I savor the reason we are celebrating and not succumbing to merely being busy. I’ve found that these are things we do every year because they are simple and meaningful. Apart from reading a good advent devotional, here are a few of the sweet traditions we enjoy, old and new:
The outdoors have always called to me. Many times I feel I simply need to go outside and feel some sunshine on my face. During our normal homeschool days, we try to take a daily walk around our neighborhood. But after my husband almost lost his life in February, I’ve been rethinking, well, everything. I took an imaginary look forward into our future. In five years I will be 40 years old, our youngest (the twins) will be 7 or 8 and our oldest will be 14. I can’t imagine them being so big and independent since they insist on “Mommy!” for everything at present. That is a big change in such a short amount of time. It reminded me that I have a lot of groundwork to lay in these brief years. There are more vital things than schoolwork, though I do still want a high bar set for academics. Going through something traumatic will teach you that you can’t survive without a good framework and a good vision for your life. The unnecessary things seem to crumble away. I see now the need to change a lot of rhythms in my life, and being outside for my sake and my kids was something we all needed more than our current schedule allowed. Our curriculums have always encouraged a field trip day or something of the like on Fridays, and we did that plenty, but now we go outside for different reasons.
I have always thought that Autumn is the perfect time of year for family photos, but every year I fall more and more in love with Utah in the Fall. The Wise family was such a joy to work with this year. Each family is uniquely beautiful, and I love seeing how each person and family is never replicated. Even though this is my favorite location, no shoot ever turns out the same. I loved how this family was so caring for their baby brother. The light was beautiful, but love makes the magic in photos.
It’s true what they say, the years go by so quickly. My babies don’t have their summer tan anymore and the all the flowers have faded, even though it feels like just a few days ago everything was green. I want to view all of my life, but especially the present with nostalgia. I want to see my life through a rose-colored lens. Just looking at a black-and-white image seems to do it for me every time. I need the reminders: “It’s sweet” and “It doesn’t last.” Though each part does seem to get sweeter, even though many things in life are hard, I want to savor each moment. I want to FULLY live and love where we are right now. I think this means looking for joy and beautiful things, like chubby cheeks, morning light, and “I wuv oo mama!” I often pass by beautiful things because they are simple and ordinary, but they are the things that I should hold close to my heart…Like my Sammy’s baby hand holding a flower to give to me.
What if life-giving words were spoken to us over and over and over? Words have the power to shape us, yet we often don’t give enough attention to what our own words are doing. James gives us the image of the tongue as a fire, yet Proverbs speaks of good and timely words as “apples of gold in a setting of silver.” We can let our words be something that destroys beyond all repair (only rebuilding) or something beautiful, valuable, and enriching.