Kitti Murray | The Grit and Grace Project

It’s OK to Be a Little Less Intentional

Our granddaughter, Charleston, flings her right hand in the air these days like Queen Elizabeth at a polo match and pronounces: “I hate Pop-Tarts. I hate Pop-Tarts.” I feel you, Charlie girl. And it’s okay, because Pop-Tarts aren’t good for you anyway. But the incident reminded me that there’s a word (not food) that I hate these days, and I hate it like a little girl all dressed up in a sequined yard sale gown, fluttering her fingers, tiara bobbing on her fluffy blonde head, telling the world what she doesn’t like. It’s no one’s fault, but I loathe the word “intentional.” Sometimes it’s this idea that every single step of my life, every conversation, every appointment, every book I read, every […]

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Alarmist Mom: How to Fight the Urge to Freak

By Kitti Murray / Motherhood

I have a new hobby in my middle age. I am an alarmist. I wonder if this is something new or if I’m just now realizing it. When they were little, I did a decent job shielding our boys from my tendency to warn them about impending doom. I vowed to never say things like, “Get down from there, you’ll fall,” or “Put that knife away, you’ll put someone’s eye out.” By not saying these things, I hope I communicated something like, “You are such a refined amalgam of balance and skill and strength and grace that I trust you will rarely fall.” And, by golly, they didn’t … very much. I wonder if I’m already losing my filter. We have a

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What It Really Means When an Introvert Backs Away

By Kitti Murray / Relationships

I now know that the greater part of love is knowledge and insight. Knowledge of the person loved. My self-disclosure to him or her so that he or she can know me back. This insight helps us know how to best love one another. I know, it doesn’t sound sexy, but believe me, this is where real love lives. I wish I’d understood this sooner. Allow me the understatement that my husband and I are different. I could make a list of our differences, but this is the one that used to feed the most discord between us: he is an introvert and I am an extrovert. The other day I ran into a friend, literally, while running. I stopped, a little breathless,

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Parenting Truth: It May Get Worse Before It Gets Better

By Kitti Murray / Faith

I think like a human. Like an earth-bound, time-constrained, self-absorbed human. And I parented like that most of the time, too. Humanity bears the imago dei, which means we reflect the loveliness of our Creator, so this was not always a problem, this human thinking. But I always knew there was more to life than my human brain could grasp, and I didn’t want to miss it. One day a long time ago, Bill stepped out of his little sunroom-turned-office and told me, “The Lord spoke to me today about Matt.” Bill is never flippant about this kind of thing, so I was immediately all ears, and, besides, in that season of parenting, I needed transcendence. Badly. “He told me He would

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Your Teenage Boy Will Break Your Heart, and You’ll Be Better for It

By Kitti Murray / Motherhood

What is it about teenage boys? I’ve been in love with them since I was about twelve. They are, in general, insensitive, inarticulate, clunky, and smelly (even when they discover deodorant and cologne, because they don’t discover moderation until later). But they are all those things with a seemingly endless supply of charm. I’m in love with them. Good thing, since we raised four. And, at one time or another, all of them broke my heart. I mended, though. A Mama’s Boy Let’s be honest; most moms secretly want a mama’s boy. A boy who will engage us, prefer us, unburden his very soul to us. All things teenage boys hardly ever do, in part because they don’t know how and in

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Are You a Wife in “Machine Gun Mode?”

By Kitti Murray / Relationships

There is something that happens to me during the flurry of activity that accompanies anything I’m in charge of. Like hosting people in our home. Bill named this setting on my dial “machine gun mode,” and I think it feels good. Things need to be done, and I do them and check them off. Ahhhh. I am a list-maker by nature; the rat-a-tat-tat of ammunition firing is a beautiful sound to me. A list in motion! Here’s what I’ve learned about machine guns: if I am not careful with mine, it can create carnage. I can drastically reduce the collateral damage if I aim the gun only at myself, but I do better if I put down my weapon altogether. But I am addicted

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How to Handle Little Boys Who Think They Know It All

By Kitti Murray / Motherhood

Little boys are know-it-alls. At first I loved that about them. Tell a little boy he is handsome or strong or smart and, likely, he’ll say, “I know.” And when he stands with his buddies on the doorstep of his prom date’s house, they will say something like, “All the girls want me,” while the girls are inside saying, “I wish my hair looked like yours,” to each other or, sadly, “I look fat in this dress.” And then you realize that knowing it all, for a boy, hides insecurities and doubt. But a boy’s know-it-allness isn’t always so transparent or endearing. It can wear you down, commencing as it does on the heels of the “why?” stage (that one doesn’t last

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Are You Believing These 7 Lies About Your Son?

By Kitti Murray / Motherhood, Best Of

The origin of this post is a mystery. Does this list come from my observation of our granddaughters and my recent speculation about what my life might have been like had I had a girl, just one? (FYI: I never really wanted a daughter, but these precious girls make me wonder why not.) Or does it spring from my wonderment these days at how utterly different my husband—classic boy—is from me? We’ve been married 35 years, and I am discovering that the divide between us is wider than I ever dreamed it was. The divide, that is, between how we think and feel and process the world around us. The divide that has been there all along, covered in fog like Cloudland

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Building Your Marriage on Rock

By Kitti Murray / Faith

We used to have a chalkboard in our kitchen. From time to time I’d scrawl a phone number or date on it, but usually I wrote things like Happy Birthday Jesus (a message that remained from Christmas until almost Easter) or Esse Quam Videri, because I love that phrase. Esse Quam Videri means, “to be rather than seem to be” which makes it a ridiculous thing to broadcast on a chalkboard. Sadly, over time, our board got harder and harder to erase, so that Happy Easter was barely visible, written as it was on top of every smudged message since Thanksgiving. Not long after cave walls became obsolete as memo boards and well before the invention of the chalkboard, early mankind scratched

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One Thing That Will Improve After Your First Year of Marriage

By Kitti Murray / Relationships

I’m going to tell you about one thing that will improve a lot after your first year of marriage… “I know you were exaggerating,” Bill says, smiling across the table from me at one of our new favorite pubs, “but did I really make you cry every day of our first year of marriage?” We’d ditched a party after an hour for our own after-party date night, a practice that I, an avowed last-to-leave-extrovert, have come to love. Bill remembered something I’d said earlier to a newly wed couple. “No,” I answer, “you didn’t. But I did cry a lot and almost always because you hurt my feelings, which, to be accurate, is what I said you did every day.” This, I

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How to Look in the Mirror When You’re Feeling Insecure

By Kitti Murray / Faith

Early in our relationship, Bill, who had no experience with the female psyche, having had three brothers and no sisters, discovered that I felt insecure about what I looked like. Or, as one of our sons said when he heard this story, “Dad found out you were a girl.” I could tell this fact about me disturbed him. He mulled it over for a few minutes and offered a solution: “Kitti,” he said, his earnest blue eyes ablaze with confidence, “I felt that way once when I was in high school. It was in the locker room after football practice. So I looked at myself in the mirror and said to myself, ‘Murray, you’re not the best-looking guy on earth, but you’re

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Grace for Your Kid’s Bad Grades

By Kitti Murray / Motherhood

He doesn’t remember saying it, but I remember. Moms do not forget it when their sons utter wisdom. We were talking about education, which not that long ago would have been rather remarkable. He was not a good student. He wouldn’t mind me saying that now. In fact, he regrets his so-so academic performance. And he knows how frustrated we got with him at times. He’s not dumb, far from it, and we always knew that. Hence, the frustration. The anger that we spent money we didn’t have on education he didn’t care about. Well, he cared, just not enough to sustain the efforts that care produced. In this he was a typical boy. A careless student who saw absolutely no value

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Rules for the Introvert Vs. Extrovert Fight

By Kitti Murray / Faith

This is the post in which I am the grumbling Israelites and my husband, Bill, is Moses. Not because I’m especially humble, but it’s just that this phrase in the Old Testament stood out to me recently. Three or four times in Leviticus and Numbers, during a heated exchange between Moses and the Israelites, Moses up and “walked away.” I wondered about that. “Walk away” is telling, don’t you think? You can walk away without moving a muscle. You can simply refuse to hold up your end of the conversation. Just like an introvert. As an extrovert, I place a high value on the spoken word. Unspoken words, I abhor them. But sometimes it is much safer to unspeak words, to let

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4 Lessons on Failure I Learned from My Kids

By Kitti Murray / Motherhood, Best Of

I’ve learned that failure can be a time-release sort of blessing. We bide our time through the pang of it until it does what we know it can eventually do if we let God use it: transform everything. When my husband Bill lost his job, it hurt a lot. It felt like a failure. This came at the end of the last recession, after quite a few good friends lost their high-level, high-paying jobs and had to live on their savings. Bill’s job was neither high-level nor high-paying (which means we had next to nothing saved), but it was what he loved, and thus it was a blow. Today we both affirm that his job loss was the best thing that could

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10 Navy Seal Mantras for Moms

By Kitti Murray / Faith

Somewhere between his graduation from Basic Training at Great Lakes, Michigan, and the Tuesday morning in Coronado, California—when one of our sons took off his numbered helmet, laid it down, and rang the bell signaling that he would not, in fact, become a Navy Seal—he showed us a book of mantras. Just a little book, with one page per original mantra, each written by one of his BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition School) classmates. Our son was married and in his mid-twenties at the time, so his mantra was appropriately inspirational, grammatically correct, and it actually made sense. As I read the others—many written by mere teenagers—I thought, “No wonder in a few short weeks this class of 300+ men will diminish to

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Our Secret Marriage Code

By Kitti Murray / Faith

Bill and I have this thing we sometimes say to each other. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s one of those habitual, intentional refrains we’ve chiseled into the foundation of our marriage. We don’t write it, we say it… but if we did write it down, and if archeologists were to stumble upon it someday in the ancient runes of our marriage, I’m not sure what they’d make of it. We say, “I need to express something.” Which is code for, “Listen up. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I have a feeling about something that won’t go away without verbal expression. I don’t need you to do anything about it, but I do need to say it

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