Cold

Caleb’s soccer season ended this weekend with a forfeited second game of a planned double-header, the first game ending with only the second loss of the season for Caleb’s team.

It was an anticlimactic way to end the season, but mid-November is getting a mite chilly for the fans. And now my Tuesday evenings are freed up. Saturdays, too, theoretically, but it is just in time for the holiday season.

This Sunday we sang Henry Lyte’s “Abide With Me”:

Thou on my head in

Early youth didst smile

My song praised God for setting His favor on me from before the foundation of the world; for causing all things to work together for my good throughout my life; for birthing me into a family that put His name and His word before me from my early youth.

And He smiled on me in other ways as well. Jason always said that having brothers toughened me up; and growing up in New England, where one must stack firewood all summer and shovel the driveway all winter to survive, is no joke. 

But if I hadn’t been so dang cold, and so sick of being so dang cold, I wouldn’t have been driven to move so far south, where I ended up here. And here is where I joined a church that teaches the whole counsel of God, that loves me and my family and disciples me and my family and provides friends for me and my family who point us all to Jesus.

So every time I’m cold now (which is still more of the time than my children can comprehend), I will remember that my propensity to freeze in any weather is what God used to bring me here. Truly He has smiled on my head from my early youth on.

Onedayhh 2025

I’m pretty sure this is the first year I’ve done #onedayhh that I did it before the specified date. I thought it was sometime in November but couldn’t find the host post until just now. 

Record one mundane day in your life, that’s the idea. I did it in 2024, 2023, 2021, and 2020, and now I give you: One Day, Hour by Hour, Sunday, November 9, 2025.

 

Reading through that day’s sermon passage to prepare for church. We’re in an excellent sermon series through Revelation. On my night stand is a Christmas cactus that Lizzy just got me when she went out to lunch with Chloe.

Below, I stumble into the bathroom where the dawn greets me through the eastern view.

Heading out the door with myself put together but the bedroom, not so much.

This week at church, in belated honor of Clergy Appreciation Month, we had the Sunday school kids create this banner thanking the deacons for their service (we made a similar one last week for the elders).

Later, at home, when I remembered to keep taking pictures. Couch, fuzzy blankets, and football: a typical Sunday afternoon at the Miller house.

Normally by 3:30 the kids would be back out the door for youth group, but there was no youth group this particular week. Instead, all 60ish high schoolers were invited to our house for a taco bar and game night hangout.

So as 5:00 approached, Caleb and Jason and I retreated to our bedroom to make way for the thirty or so kids who showed up. Below, my newest hobby, creating my own acrylic nail sets.

Once the teenagers went through the taco line we did venture downstairs to get our own taco dinner. Then it was back upstairs to watch football and play on our phones some more.

Later in the night my dear friend Melissa checked on my mental wellness, which evolved into a conversation about our accommodations while we were avoiding the party, which led to me sending her pics of Jason’s office, aka the sitting room off our bedroom, and the little hallway leading thereto.

All was well with the party, incidentally—none of the neighbors called the police when the kids played a friendly, murderous game of Body, Body in the yard, and when I went downstairs after they left, I found my house cleaner than it was before they got there.

#tbt: November over the years

On this day exactly twenty years ago:

 

And one week later, since we were apparently full of energy and optimism when we were twenty-five:

Three years later with a second baby in tow, what else would we do on a November morning but climb a huge mountain? Apparently I still had ambition at age twenty-eight.

I see that another three years and a third baby (not pictured) reduced me to the local playground.

Then there was the following November when we went to Sea World with Nana and Grandpa, when Lizzy had just turned one and I didn’t yet know I was pregnant with Caleb:

I’ve always thought Sea World should pay me for this picture

I’m thankful to reflect that in November of 2025, my brood has grown to include a daughter-in-law, and if I climbed a mountain, they’d probably be more likely to carry me than vice versa. 

Hold your applause, please

We went to a college women’s volleyball game as an end-of-season outing with Lizzy’s team. It was very exciting. Those women are better than the high school and middle school girls we usually watch. 

The venue is also better. You can eat concessions, and the stadium seats have backs; and when a player makes a block or a kill to win the point, her name, picture and stats flash across the screens all over the arena.

I think my name and likeness should flash across screens when I do something awesome. Miiiindyyyy Millerrrrrrr!!! With the successful carpool completion! Mindy Millerrrr, playing the mom position, with the nutritiouuuuusss DINNER! And that’s team co-captain Mindy Miller with her ten thousandth career load of laundry!!!

Also the picture of me that flashes up would be incredibly flattering.

Of course, the play I most want recognition for is driving someone somewhere. Because I had a realization the other day. While driving last Sunday afternoon to our church’s fall festival (hay ride pictured above), a forty-five-minute-each-way journey undertaken after we had already driven nearly an hour round-trip that morning to church and back—but a journey that was nevertheless stunningly beautiful with the foliage and mountain views getting more and more brilliant as we neared the farm—I realized: it’s not the driving per se that bothers me so much. It’s a feeling I can’t quite articulate, but something that puts me in mind of junior high school, when the unambiguously cool kids would stand in a well-defined circle in a very specific spot in the hall before homeroom. 

I was not in the circle.

But I have clear memories of seeing the outside of the circle from my lesser spot in the general area of the hall.

Something about driving really far (relatively speaking) when EVERYONE ELSE (translation: some number of other people) had to drive really short somehow reminds me of looking at the outside of that circle in seventh grade.

And I’d feel a lot better if every time I showed up anywhere, everyone else stopped what they were doing to cheer and said Wow, Mindy, you are awesome! The stats screen says you just drove 22 miles for a grand total of 76 miles today! We can’t even imagine being as awesome as you! We just put on our shoes five minutes ago after taking a nap all afternoon. How do you do it?!! You put more effort into life than we would ever be able to!

Although that still wouldn’t soothe the concern that possibly all my friends and acquaintances are hanging out without me, since they’re all next-door neighbors.

Halloween

But also after the college volleyball game, the players sit at a table for people to line up and get their autographs. So maybe if people also clamored to tell me how awesome I was, after being informed by a flashing screen how awesome I was, and if they’d rather stay to hang out with me than go be with their friends and family and all their cool kid neighbors, then I’d feel pretty good about driving twenty miles to town.

This might be a me problem.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

~ Ernest Hemingway