The Simple Life

I decided just now that I am making this life thing a whole heck of a sight more complicated than it was ever meant to be. A friend said to me today, "We have a calling in life and when we have fulfilled it we will go home to Jesus." I already knew this. However, I like to muddy the waters with continual wanderings and wonderings.

Let me explain (briefly, to your relief). One of my favorite habits over the past decade was what I will not-so-affectionately term the "try-very-gingerly-and-then-retreat-at-first-sign-of-setback-failure-or-rejection" method of determining my destiny in life. This retreat strategy was always followed by "sit-at-home-and-do-little-ya-can't-be-hurt-that-way" mode of action, er, inaction.

In short, I became a semi-recluse who doesn't try much of anything new and who takes precious few chances. I wasted a lot of time. I have decided that, instead of agonizing over whether or not something is in God's plan for me, feeling ever more like I cannot hear from Him, I will develop my relationship with Him, pray to Him, do my best to keep in step with His spirit, and then DIVE into life full force. He will help me to whittle away time-wasters and I know he will jerk me back from wrong turns, because my heart will be in the right place.

Back to the statement my friend made. It thoroughly yanked me back into reality. No, all of the markers of success the world looks to are not reality. They are transient. They are like chaff. Blink and they are blown away. What she said strengthened my resolve to make the most of my life, because God has work for me to do. Every single day. Even when I am resting by necessity, I am filling my tank for the next task He is going to give me. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the disappointments and heartaches that I feast my mind on, thereby draining my spirit, are weakening my focus. Only what we do for Christ will last. We are only passing through.

It's time to do life. Every single day.

Nature Speaks....Again!

In a micro-burst of this-unstructured-holiday-has-gone-on-too-long blues I jumped in my car, grabbed a Starbucks Gingerbread latte and headed for the Williamson County countryside this morning. I don't know what I hoped to accomplish. I think sometimes I expect the answers to my many life questions will come bounding out of the hills like the deer I so often see on these jaunts.

They never have and did not this time. But I did make some observations I thought might be worth recording. For my own perusal next time I am face-down in the muddy waters of life. (Some time tomorrow.)

I made a decision a very long time ago to forego career aspirations and stay home with my kids. They are teenagers now. Just in time for me to question said decision. Just in time for me to wonder if I am crazy for throwing two college degrees into the wind, for burying every single thing I ever dreamed of doing when I was young and impulsive like they are. No, I do not regret being available to them, helping them, watching them achieve so many milestones. Not at all. But sometimes I wonder if I am now, at age forty-five, like an old pickup stuck in a muddy ravine. A ravine that gets rain 24/7.  If I will ever spring to life and use any of the talents God gave me, or even really recognize them anymore. What chills me further is the idea of not sharing with others, not involving myself in their lives, not making a difference. As a reaction to rejection, real and perceived, I have become reclusive to some degree. This needs to change, but I am walled in by so many insecurities. Selfish, I know.

At some point I thought about turning my car around and heading home, but didn't see a good turnaround spot right away. Additionally, I wanted to go a little further, see something I had never seen. It reminded me of life in the Spirit. About how as we go along with God we see more and more of who He is, more of His plan. The deeper we go, the more likely we'll see what we have never seen before. Suddenly I noted that the Steven Curtis Chapman song playing in my car was about "diving in"....going deeper in the Spirit. At the same time a river appeared on my left. It might have been a hugely swollen creek, but it was rushing along with a lot of force. I smiled. At some point on my way home a song on the CD moved me to tears. I was feeling so alone and bereft when it suddenly occurred to me that the words then being sung were something to the effect of "you are being loved right now" and "there's a song that's being sung over you".... wow.

Holding His Hand in the Dark

I have been wending and wading my way through what has been, unquestionably, the most challenging period of my life to date. I have looked up to God, but I have also, many times, felt a distance between us of my own making.

Sometimes I am angry with Him for letting me go through such pain. My rational mind knows how stupid that is, and how sinful. I repent. I try to listen for His voice. Then I clench my fists in frustration and the cycle begins again. Here's the thing: I know in my heart of hearts that His plan for me and my loved ones is FOR OUR GOOD. We were not created for continual defeat.

Yesterday I prayed very specifically that I would tune out religious spirits that mockingly tell me that suffering and defeat are my lot in life. No, Jesus Christ's death on the cross was my path to worthiness in the presence of God. Yes, I will grow from suffering. No, God does not bring it. It is the by-product of being in a fallen world, and is also the work of my adversary, the devil. Yes, He allowed it. However, that does NOT mean He plans for me to live in defeat and discouragement. Help is on the way. God's plans, which are for good, will unfold. He hears and answers prayer. He works miracles. ("For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him." 2 Chron. 16:9, King James Version of The Holy Bible.)

Neither me nor my loved ones were created and placed on this earth to endure one bone-crushing defeat after the other. We were instead created to fulfill our specific destinies, to enjoy our callings, to be fruitful and to enjoy life in the loving care of our Heavenly Father. If that offends someone's religious sensibilities....I just DO NOT CARE.

Don't care. Sorry. I have lived under the banner of condemning voices from hell telling me either that I deserved what I am enduring, brought it on through my actions or inaction, or that there will be no end to it. Those are lying spirits.

Today I ask God for direction for the next 24 hours. I ask Him for the strength to do whatever He tells me to do. Sometimes that's as far out as He will let us see. Sometimes He asks us to hold His hand in the dark and let him lead one step at a time. Other times there will be just enough light to put one foot in front of the other, the path slow-going and painstaking. Always He expects us to look to Him for direction and trust Him for strength. It's when we adjust our sails in our own direction or trust our own resources that we will fail utterly. In Christ there is only victory.

A Darkness That Can Be Felt

When life brings terrific storms, challenges designed by our enemy, the devil, to turn our boat upside down in the swells, to swamp us with discouragement and drown us with horror, there is always a still, small voice in the wind.

This still, small voice, the sound of the Holy Spirit, the wisdom of God and the anointing and strength (I think of Him as the grease in the wheels of our God-given destiny) of God, is accompanied by the sight of Jesus Christ coming to us on top of the water. As He comes, light surrounds him, engulfing the darkness of our trials.

I am in a particularly challenging season of life. The darkness of the trial I am facing is reminiscent of the plague of darkness in the Old Testament. God wanted to demonstrate his power among the Egyptians, who had enslaved his chosen people, the Israelites. He did so through a series of curses. One of these was to send a darkness among them so penetrating that the Bible says it  could be felt. The first few days of my current challenging season, I felt plunged into a darkness that could be felt. I am not referring to the velvety black of a peaceful summer evening sky, when the stars string an array of hope across the countenance of the heavens, breathing peaceful sleep into all creatures below. I am talking about a darkness that leaves you groping for an emotional handlebar. I am talking about the kind of darkness an amusement park might plunge parts of an indoor rollercoaster into, leaving the riders guessing about what comes next. Will there be a hairpin turn that leaves you uncertain as to which direction you are traveling? Maybe a massive plunge downward at what feels like a ninety-degree angle.

It doesn't ever take long before the Lord begins to redeem a season like the one that I am in. Right away I stop my rebellion, my spiritual laziness and I start to look for Him, to cry out to Him. If I were God, I would not listen. But He always does. Pretty quickly I sense that He is with me. With that assurance comes hope. It's not necessarily a hope that everything I am facing will be resolved quickly and perfectly, though the Bible does say that I will experience His goodness here on earth. It's more a hope that His blessed presence will go with me WHEREVER I LAY MY FOOT on this fallen planet.

Here is a wonderful promise for those of us who are scaling our own personal Mt. Everests: "The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who fear him; he hears their cry and saves them." (Psalm 145:18-19.)

Rest in His love today.



(Scripture reference is from the Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984, International Bible Society. Published by Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.)

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!