Nesting

Many, many times over the course of my life, I have rared back (not sure this is a real term, but it's one we use in the South) and pitched myself headlong into my faith, with the express intention of giving Christ my all. Of selling out to Him lock, stock and barrel. This is a significant step for someone like me, who was ADD before it was cool. I have what I affectionately refer to as "motivational phasing." In short, I go AWOL from certain areas of my life while going OCD bananas in others. I scrap-booked for two or three years in manic fashion, then trailed off to pursue other things. I will steadfastly clean house (for a few minutes) then fall back into domestic lethargy while reading an entire book in days.

It is not as if I have EVER walked away from my faith in Jesus. It's just that following Him requires a single-mindedness of devotion that I have never mastered. At the rate I am going, I am going to be carried across the finish line, bowing low in thanksgiving that Jesus died for my (MANY) habitual sins. I have and do pay the heavy price of broken fellowship with Jesus, a life filled with fears that make daily duties sometimes feel like a walk through a fun-house of mirrors, and a continual sense that I am A) missing the mark, B) unworthy of fellowship with the very people who would help me to grow and C) wandering around in the mist and fog of someone else's destiny, not my own. And at my current weight (35 lbs over what I'd like), I guess I could say it's like a scene from "Gorillas in the Mist."

After reading a beautiful book by one of my favorite Christian writers, I started to make some meaningful changes in my spiritual life a few weeks ago. I was sleeping at night for the first time in recent memory. Satan immediately attacked, leaving my little fortress in tatters. He brought irresistible distractions, in the form of struggles involving my children and conflicts with other family members. He has studied me for a very long time. He knows what flings me into the wind. I suppose, instead of concentrating on my weaknesses and failures, I should get back up. Just get back up, take the Lord's hand, and move on. After all, following the Lord is NOT about me. It's about Jesus. If my life reflects Christ, it is CERTAINLY not to my credit. His overwhelming grace and mercy and the power of His Holy Spirit bring about any and all good in me and in my actions. He is the center, and I need to make my nest in Him.

Crooked Seams, Dusty Dreams!

My day began at 3:30 a.m., when I awoke from a glorious, generous slumber of approximately four hours. Give or take. I was thrilled that I could not go back to sleep, especially given the fact that I have only around ninety-five million things to do today.

An hour-and-a-half  (and a cup of coffee) later, I see that someone has posted something in Spanish on my favorite author's page. I burst into tears (whether from nostalgia, longing or sleep deprivation I simply cannot say) at the fact that, after all of these intellectually indolent years as a housewife, I can still read Spanish fairly well. Sometimes I get a nudge that I am not operating in my areas of giftedness. We know that nurturing, while maybe not a gift, is a passion of mine (hence the being home even though my kids have twice my shoe size), but cleaning and organization are not. We know that cooking, while necessary, has never captured my complete fascination to the degree that perhaps it should. Let's move on to sewing.

I decided that, since my husband said that his grandmothers had quilts about the house and the sight of them raised nostalgia, I would go "all-in" and learn how to do it! Hooray! I am going to challenge myself! I am going to make some amazing quilts. Gary will arise and call me "Blessed"!!!

Never mind that I had never flipped the on switch on a sewing machine. Never mind that I have notoriously rotten hand-eye coordination. Never mind any of that! Signed up for a beginner machine quilting class.

The very first three-hour class was a continuing series of disasters for me. We were given little pieces of fabric to practice sewing a straight seam on. At the slightest tap of my foot, my machine seemed to take off like a runaway train, sucking my little slips of fabric in at a bizarre angle. I felt as if my dignity had been yanked under the needle as well, only to emerge on the other side with the pitiful riverbed-crooked seams, as tattered and pockmarked as a bullet-ridden outlaw in the old West. I never got the practice seams done right. Had to move right on to my actual quilt strips. Fun, fun for everyone. At one point my fabric bunched up along the seam. Someone fixed my tension by removing my bobbin (which looked like an obscure part belonging to a one-hundred-year-old Buick) and tinkering with it. Another time there was a tangle of threads and I had no way to accurately report what I had done to cause said tangle. It was as mysterious as the ways of a goat family on a lonely Himalayan mountaintop.

After what felt like seven thousand tries, I had about half of the day's work done. "What you don't get done in class will be homework," announced the instructor. I immediately felt gongs of doom going off in my heart. It was as if someone had said "At this times next week you will be publicly executed." If I could not do the work in class without constant supervision, how on earth would I ever get it done at home?

I cried tears of humiliation, frustration and disappointment on the way to the middle school to pick up my child. I am not giving up learning to machine quilt. I like the idea of challenging myself, of strengthening a part of my brain that is apparently as unused as a frat house library. I am, however, going to try to find some balance.

I know that language is my greatest strength. I am praying for opportunities to strengthen those muscles, as they will allow me to run faster and leap higher with regards to God's plan for the rest of my life than the underlying craft muscles. It will be fun, exhilarating even, to produce a quilt from such a mammoth effort. It will be gratifying and affirming to write things that people read, or to teach others to do so, and to understand that my efforts will be rewarded with a God-inspired destiny. I don't want to be guilty of pursuing my own way and in so doing leaving my obvious gifts on a shelf to collect the dust of regret.

POST SCRIPT:  I dropped out of quilting class. Seems the mammoth effort equaled more misery than exhilaration. I get cold chills every time I drive past the quilting shop.

Seeking

This has shaped up to be the "SUMMER OF NO BLOGGING"!! However, my favorite post since beginning this online journal was inspired in June. That's when Nik Wallenda's high wire walk over a portion of the Grand Canyon captured the fascination of millions and bowled me over with the spiritual/life-application parallels.

It was as if scales were dropped from my eyes and I saw life the way God intended for it to be lived....minute-by-minute in complete trust of His provision and constant connection to Him. I was suddenly jerked from my SEA of self-pity into a realization that I had stopped praying (and really believing) for so many things and had instead bought my enemy's lies and retreated into the muddy trenches of negativity (which breeds foul things of every shape and size).

The last couple of weeks I have looked at my life with even greater scrutiny. What negative influences have I allowed to shape my thinking? What am I filling my mind with? What am I exposing myself to? I am pruning my already rather miniscule television viewing habits even further, cutting down all of the crime whodunit shows I have poured into my spirit. I am avoiding people who don't really want help from me, but would rather just splash their unhappiness in my face and bring me as low as they enjoy wallowing. I am working to use better judgment in the friendships I forge and be less of an open book to all people and more of an open book to the Lord, asking Him to show me who to associate with, who needs me, who would benefit from what I have to offer. That's not exclusivity, that's wisdom, which the Bible (particularly in the book of Proverbs) has an awful lot to say about.

I am PITIFULLY far from perfection in my faith....but I have confidence that if I keep seeking, I will find the Father's heart. And it's a big one! 

Happy Trails

I turn forty-five next month. That feels like some kind of danger-signal-high-watermark birthday, all set to scream "Be gone, all ye time-wasters! The sand in her hourglass is moving at warp speed! And at least half of it is in the bottom of the glass!"

I wonder if the Lord has chuckled at me today. I have a journal going, and I am working through an "Overcomer's Bible".... leads one through the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous one devotional at a time, with multiple scripture references for each step. I am not a recovering alcoholic or drug addict. I decided to apply the twelve steps to other addictions I practice, such as overeating and overuse of hobbies and the internet, to name a few. I did my devotional, looked over the new "parameters" I set for myself, and then got a few things done. In the meanwhile, I struggled so hard against my addictions. I even snuck a few peeks at hobby websites here and there during breaks. I have such a hard time with the idea that I won't have my overuse of otherwise good things to help me escape. I am sure that, spiritually speaking, I looked like a little mouse running dead-end tunnels all morning.

God has been working on me for several months. He has been letting me know that I cannot use diversions to escape living for Him. I cannot run from the work He wants me to do. I feel like Jonah. My "whale" is my impending birthday. My impending day of death, too. One day I will stand in front of God. I know I can't earn my way into heaven; Jesus already paid for my ticket. I do, however, want to be in the heaven mindset when I get there. I already want to know what it's like to live, breathe and move in the Spirit. I want to be all about worshiping God while I have my clay suit on. A big, huge part of worshiping God is living the destiny he marked out for us. This involves evaluating our gifts, talents, abilities and opportunities and soaking them in prayer, and walking something out that gels them all. Every single day.

I seem to like to try things that don't have my aptitudes anywhere near them. That way, when I do a nosedive into failure, I can say "See, I just wasn't cut out for that." I tell myself it's just because I like a challenge. That is partly true. I really do love a challenge. Challenges stretch our brains and our faith. The biggest wedge of our time should be spent honing our abilities, though. Using them in some way. That's my new soapbox to me.

Life on the Wire

Yesterday, it was with much ambivalence that I, settled deeply into a Sunday evening rut of boredom, decided to watch Nik Wallenda's wire walk across the Grand Canyon.

It would be important to note here that I have a phobia of heights. I am talking about heights in a relatively "safe" context, such as those experienced from a perfectly functioning aircraft, or from the side of a mountain overlook with safety railing for miles. I, however, am not about to stay at home, so I get on a plane almost yearly and fly my little petrified heart out. I have been out West three times in recent years and entertain a deep love affair with the Rockies, the Grand Tetons, the granite of Yosemite. Gotta drive those winding, white-knuckle roads to enjoy those dizzying heights to their greatest advantage. Last year, as I left the postcard vistas of Yosemite, where my soul was fed by her beauty, we drove a stretch of highway with no shoulder, no rail and a drop-off of the side that stretched straight downward for many stories. It was near an area called the Blue Slide. As we got close, we saw crews hauling a car up the side of the gorge. Someone had, perhaps, been distracted for an instant. To say that I was relieved when we left that stretch and hit "safer" ground on our trek back to Mammoth Lakes is an understatement of epic proportions.

I suppose I have established that Nik and I were not exactly "kindred" spirits as I flipped the footrest out of my end of our reclining sofa and looked at the television through narrowed, disbelieving eyes. What manner of man was this? Who, exactly, does this sort of thing? Almost immediately, something other-worldly started to unfold in my cozy den (anchored to, as far as I know, completely solid ground).

As Nik put one leather stocking-shoe (his shoes were so flexible they almost looked like socks) onto the wire in front of the other, balancing his wire-walking pole horizontally, a camera gave us his view into the canyon below. It was horrifyingly dizzying to me. What happened next was that Nik began to call on the Lord in an intensely personal way. I was deeply touched. I realized that, not only was this man asking for help, he was praising and loving Jesus, revering God as King and exalting him as he made his way across this gorge, 178 countries watching by television. He acknowledged Christ as his everything, his all. He asked God to calm the wind. He took authority over it in the name of Jesus. He prayed, very fervently, nearly all of the way across the gorge. One step at a time he picked his way along this incredible journey, PRAYING intimate prayers most of the way. They were faith-filled prayers. They were humble, servant prayers. They were detailed prayers, mentioning the fact that the wire needed to be calmed down, the wind needed settling. At one point he testified that God was giving him strength. At somewhere near the halfway point, I bailed out of the den, leaving Gary to watch as I shouted questions from an adjacent room. I then stayed up until 12:30 a.m. to watch the walk in its entirety. It was like the most powerful devotional time and most riveting church service I had experienced in some time all rolled into one. Almost immediately I realized what was happening; I KNEW that God wanted me to approach my life and its myriad challenges exactly the way that Nik approached EACH step of his walk across the canyon; soaked in prayer, strengthened by faith, led by the Holy Spirit, and with a backdrop of unceasing praise born of an intimate love relationship with Him.

I thought about the things that had been worrying me lately. I thought about several forks in the road that have me confounded. Then I wondered what would happen if I trusted every step of the rest of life's journey to Jesus in such a profoundly faith-filled way. I started chatting online with an Australian friend. She told me that she had known nothing about Nik's planned walk but happened to tune in at the beginning. She said that she knew I was aware that she was not "religious" in any way, but that witnessing Nik's feat indicated to her that "faith is real." She also said that she, like me, had drawn the analogy to every person's personal walk through life's challenges. When she communicated all of this to me over Facebook chat, I had an instant realization that God had orchestrated this event and used it to communicate this truth to millions. He wants us all to know that, if we choose to walk closely with Him, He will take care of us, guide us, protect us, and lead us EVERY STEP OF THE WAY.

As I nestled into bed, my heart full of the goodness of the Lord to reach out to us, to speak to us so freely in the midst of our need, I asked Him to help me to remember all of the many lessons of the evening. I realized that the fact that Nik, as has been the long-standing tradition of his wire-walking family, did not use a safety net, carries another obvious message. All of the dependencies (overuse of hobbies, overeating, overuse of the internet, etc.) that I run to to help me limp from one stone to the next in the rushing river of life are unnecessary if I will take Christ's hand. If I will commit myself to Him and soak my life in His.  While Nik picked his way along, I had also thought about the fact that the dreams God gives us are part-and-parcel of who He made us to be. Those dreams I have let die can be brought back to life under the power of prayer and the step-by-step with God approach Nik used on that wire.

Finally, I remember the moments just after the walk, when Nik spent some time on the side of the canyon alone. I imagined he was thanking God for making his dream come true. I imagined that it was an intimate moment between a loving, personal God and the man whose faith and hard work resulted in victory. How sweet those moments will be for me, too! I will remind myself today that I was not created for defeat. God has mountaintop moments for me, too. My story has not been fully written. I can hardly wait for the next chapter.

Every So Often....

Every so often, my overuse of certain adult pacifiers (Facebook, sugar/food, internet information-surfing, hobbies, ebay-browsing) creates a callous on the heel of my life, and I have to address. I'm sorry if you are a regular reader and are straight-up sick and tired of this theme. It is interesting to me, however, that I am on a tether of sorts...I have a certain weight that pings an alarm in my heart, and God allows certain things to happen to alert me in the other areas, too! Mostly it is that urgent, desperate grabbing feeling that leads me back to my Bible and to prayer. Desperate and grabbing usually leads to serious missteps. I am so tired of it.

As I have underscored in previous blog posts, a lot of sea changes happen in my life when I back off from my addictions. The first thing that happens is that fear rushes in, and huge waves of uncertainty tower over me. I don't have my life preservers. I flounder a little bit. The next thing that happens is that I start having to deal with all of the emotions that I had been seeking to numb through my addictions. Those waves can hold me underwater at times. It's a lot of work to live life without any crutches. Today I will comfort myself with the fact that Jesus said His yoke is easy and His burden is light. In other words, if I will surrender my all to Him, He'll do all of the heavy lifting.

Today is a BEAUTIFUL day. I will place all of my fears, regrets, shame and heartache in a box and sail them down the river to heaven. God will dispose of them and He will bathe me in His light and His love. There is no detail that He is not intimately concerned with.

Making Wanky Work for Me

Yesterday someone treated me kind of wanky. You know, they acted funky around me and then made me feel kinda unwelcome. We've all been there. We can't all agree. My husband pointed out to me, in so many words, that the problem was theirs, not mine. That I had a right to the opinions I had expressed to them that may or may not have led to the wanky.

DIRECTLY after that encounter, as I was passing that way anywho, I dove into the Lifeway store. I was thinking I would get a new devotional book. Or a new journal. Or a new Bible that included devotions. Or a new Bible that combined devotions AND journaling. I was pretty sure Lifeway would have whatEVAH I needed in this regard. As I browsed the stacks, studiously pushing down images of the 47,000 Bibles, devotional books and empty journals I already have at home, I had an original thought. What if, instead of purchasing a new Bible, (there are Bibles geared to everyone from teens to homeschooling moms to, I'm sure somewhere, tightrope walkers working overseas) I tried using the "Bible That Gets Read Daily" (I could convert one of my existing Bibles to this.) Or, another brilliant idea, how about I convert one of my designer-colored Bibles to "The Bible That Is Applied Daily After Being Studied Regularly"????????

I am in full-time, full-blown, mid-life crisis mode. No, I don't have a new sports car and YES, I am far too chicken for the plastic surgery route. Yes, I am also too lazy to get one of those stringy, muscles-only bodies. But I am reassessing purpose. The thing is, without my Bible, I have nothing to strain all of the possible activities I could engage in through to get to the meat of life. Let me log off so I can start converting my pink "Ladies Who Lunch" study Bible to the One That Gets Cracked Open Bible. Watch out, religious folk. I may just start doing (or not doing) all sorts of things that shock you.