Imprints of Life...

As usual, we are having a normal weather week in Arkansas -which means things are distinctly weird. Hopefully no one had any problems getting out and around this morning and can rejoice along with the school kids and grand-kids at having a "free" day.  I know my teacher friends had mixed reactions on FB today - some were happy and some were miffed because of make-up days yet to come.  

It's funny how my perspective has changed. During the 31 years I taught, I never tired of snow days and frequently prayed for the weather man's forecast to pan out when inclement weather was predicted.  Most of the time, those prayers weren't answered the way I wanted and I learned to dread those informative weather talks where they showed how LIttle Rock was "right on the line" separating sleet from "dry" snow or - even worse, rain! Such a bummer!!!   Some of my dreariest memories are of going to school while a perfectly good snow was falling - but not sticking! - and having to teach when neither the kids or I wanted to be there.  I always felt like that type of snow was such a "waste"!

Now that I get to stay home most of the time and I have a young son who is driving in the snow and ice, I really don't want it to do what it's been doing off and on in what seems like forever! Phil has had the instructive:    Son,  this is how you drive on freezing fog, snow, etc.  And as for ice - you don't drive on it!  (And now I feel guilty for doing my snow dance in past winters when other parents had to send their young adult kids into hazardous driving conditions!!!)

There are still some times, however, when I'd like for the skies to drop about a foot of snow, say between midnight and 1 a.m., and just bring most everything (here in the South!)   to a quiet, beautiful, pristine halt.  I really like it on those rare days when the traffic noise is pretty much silenced and all you can hear are kids laughing and yelling as they play in the snow (until someone gets hurt and there's tears and accusations and yelling...)

In past years when we worked with international students at UALR, they almost all described Americans as "busy".    And my net sister in Tel Aviv has expressed shock at the distances we drive for "normal" activities and all the things we do after working hours and on the weekends on a regular basis. 

I'm still reading/studying Arthur Matthew's book, Born for Battle,  and one of the points in his work is that real prayer centers around God's will. In order to know what He desires in "messy" situations that are not "cut and dried", we have to spend quality time in deep communion with God.  For me, it's hard to find that quality, prolonged quiet time, even in retirement.  There is just something in our culture (as well as within me) that mitigates against it.

I have a framed "rubbing" from England - a penciled imprint of two Greek letters that were discovered on an ancient tile. The characters make up the first two letters of Christ's name and are believed to have been etched into the tile by a persecuted Christian.  Now, hundreds of years later, an imprint of what this anonymous person painstakingly carved under adverse circumstances - that framed picture which to me, at first, looked like broad pencil shading/scribblings and really nothing else, is now one of my prized possessions. It sits where I can see it every single day, close up and personal.  As far as I know, it's all that person left behind but it's enough.  It's of great value. Because it speaks poignantly of his Jesus.

I hope that in all the busy-ness of my life, I can leave behind something valuable - some imprint that points others to Christ.

But I know that won't happen without times of single-eyed focus, when no matter what is going on around me or happening to me, Jesus is all I see and His fellowship is all I want.

That's hard.  Still working on it and probably will be until the day I graduate to Heaven.

So I want to end with a quote from Born for Battle:

Prayer must start at God's end, for isn't that the control center of all that happens?   Therefore our relationship with him and our attitude toward the things he allows to disturb our lives is more important than passing information to him.  Because of this, our first duty is to make sure we are really in that lofty place by his side with the right attitude and with nothing in us to prevent him from hearing us or to prevent us from hearing his still, small voice.    It is only from that place of closest intimacy that we may learn what the will is that we are to pray will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

I hope everyone has a good rest of the week!

C.

                                                                                                           

When Deep Prayer Is Needed...

      Today I had a "what if" moment...
       What if the president (any president) of the U.S. gave his State of the Union Address and held a press conference immediately afterwards. Only at this conference, the President's closest friend stood with him at the podium to help the president battle critics.
       And what if the first difficult political football was lobbed at the president's friend - say something major such as homeland security or restructuring the tax system...
     And the president's friend responded with:  Today I want to talk about the real issues.  For example, my lumbago is just terrible; I'm in pain all the time; and I'm allergic to all of the meds that could help me.  Plus, I also have chronic foot pain so just standing up here is a real problem for me right now. These are issues that need to be addressed immediately if not sooner.
     I personally think that would be a little weird and can only imagine what the pundits would say afterwards... Not to mention the American people or even the President himself.
     In Ephesians Paul writes that the Christian is seated with Christ in the Heavenly places.
     I don't really know any more about that than I do about fixing lumbago.
     But a man of prayer, a great missionary statesman in my opinion, wrote a book called  Born for Battle.  In that book Arthur Matthews writes to people who have a deep burden, a great prayer need.  And he tells them that taking our position in the Heavenlies means that we approach prayer from the standpoint of victory.  Too often we approach prayer from an attitude of defeat, from underneath the problem, the heartache, the crisis.  But, um, it's been over 2000 years now since Christ died on the cross and rose out of the grave, kicking the grave clothes off  forever as He went.
    True prayer begins when He draws us to take our stand beside Him in the place of victory - if nothing else, that is what the Heavenly Places means... a place of victory.
    Next, we do the open kimono thing, as I once heard a pastor say - we open up the hidden places of our past, the secret sins, the failures, the recent mistakes - we lay it all open before Him with Whom we have to do.  (And it's really okay to do that! He already knows everything  anyway- we just need to get it out and let Him deal with it.  We need to be healed because it doesn't work so well to go into battle still licking our wounds from the past... Kind of leaves us vulnerable to the enemy of our souls...)
    We also need to be saturated in the word of God.  Not just the parts we like... We need to be familiar with all of it.  So we can't just take the first 34 verses of Hebrews 11 and charge into battle, ignoring the last six verses of the chapter. As Arthur Matthews says, we need the WHOLE counsel of God.
    This is kind of important because, according to Ephesians 6, we've only got one weapon.  That's it.  Just one -  the Sword of the Spirit (i.e., the Word of God).  But the good news is that  it's not like any other sword because apparently you can switch out blades right and left, suiting a specific Bible passage (rapier?) to the particular battle that God is calling you to fight.
     However if the only verse we know is: Now I lay me down to sleep.... (Just kidding - I know that's not a verse....)  Anyway, if we only know a poem, a song, and a couple of verses, our repertoire of blades is going to be, um, really pitiful.  Stone Age weaponry  against the spiritual forces of darkness... Not good...
    But if you have a working knowledge of multiple passages from the Bible, the Holy Spirit can bring the right verse to mind as you wrestle through for a lost child, a devastated friend, a ministry in trouble,  or even a crisis in another country.
    For example, what if you've witnessed to someone and they've always been open to the Gospel and they've even promised to come to church  - but the next time around it's the same thing: apparent openness, willingness to learn, and sincere but unfulfilled promises to come to Christ, come to church, come to Bible study, etc.
    What's the hold up?  Is it that they are just people-pleasers and so they smile and nod and make empty promises just to make you happy and get you off their back?  Or is it something else?  After I started re-reading Born for Battle, I began to pray for an acquaintance who has strung me along for months with an apparent willingness to learn but no follow through.  This time, however,  instead of telling God what to do, I asked for  the Holy Spirit to select the right sword for this particular battle.  And II Timothy 3:6-7 came to mind, surprisingly enough.  I've never memorized it but I was familiar enough with it to know that it was probably in one of the Timothy's. Through this Scripture I felt led to pray specifically that issues from the person's past (which I am not privy to) would no longer keep them from  truly coming to Him.
    The last point that impressed me was this:  God doesn't come to our side so that we can complain about our Lumbago. (See.. I did put that illustration in at the beginning of this blog for a reason!)   He does invite us to bring our needs, large and small to Him but  prayer is always God-centric, not ego-centric.  And prayer that wrestles  - deep prayer that engages the enemy of our souls - that type of prayer is where God calls us to stand alongside Him and pray His will, not our own. In order to do this, we have to know His will and that takes time.  God doesn't  reveal Himself in sound bites or 30 second devotionals.
   Once you know God's will, as Matthews puts it, you have a winning combination:    God willing something in Heaven and man willing it on earth. Matthews even says that when a critical situation breaks out on earth, God looks for such a man to be His prayer warrior on earth.
    I'm not that person yet, but that's what I want to be.
 

No More; No Less....

       Who can ever forget Kermit, resplendent beside Miss Piggy, singing,"It's Not Easy Being Green?"
       I used to watch that with our son when he was still knee-high to a grasshopper.
       At those times I had already started to dread the teen years.  Little did I know that even though our son is  a good guy, still, the times of greatest motherly angst would come after adolescence.
       Put succinctly, it's not easy being young.
       Why did I ever think it was?
        How could I have forgotten the trauma of dating, falling in love, breaking up?
        How could I have forgotten the decisions that loomed large? School.  Career.  Finances.
        Getting started.  It's just not easy.
        I see this from time to time not only in my son but also in his friends.
        I've read that when you are a child, you draw your identity from your parents.
        When you are a teen, you move away from the parents and draw your identity from your peers, for better or for worse.
        When you suddenly find yourself thrust out into the adult world, where does your identity come from?
         Your job?  The one you date? (Or don't date?)  Or even worse, the sum total of the decisions you have made in order to get where you are up to that point?
          For the Christian, our identity is found in the love and grace of Christ.
          In retrospect, I believe that our children need to know this as well or even better than they know their own names. I think it needs to be drilled into their impressionable minds from the get go: you are who Christ says you are. You are loved.  You are not the sum total of your choices. Some will be good. Some won't be.  Good choices will make you feel better and get you farther down the road of life.  But none of your choices will define who you are. The love of God does that.  
         You are who He says you are.
          We like to say that the past doesn't define us.  But then we turn around and define ourselves and others by what we've done up to that point.
          Yesterday I got the yard mowed, the bills paid, and I took chicken soup to a needy neighbor.  I.e.: I was a good person.
         Today I blew it six ways to Sunday,  lied to my neighbor because I didn't want to be bothered by their incessant requests to use my phone and let the dust bunnies pile up while I sat around in my jammies, watched t.v., and ate chocolate.  So now I'm a bad person.
         Maybe I did better on one day than on the other.
         But the fact remains:  yesterday I was a person for whom Christ died and today I am exactly  the same - a person for whom Christ died.
        No more; no less.

       
     

December in Pictures with Much Thanks...

Eucharisteo...  Things which made me smile and for which I gave thanks in Dec.  (Short list only... ;)

Jewelry and I have a bad history.  I've accidentally flushed, stepped on, broken, and lost more pieces of jewelry than I care to think about. And probably more than Phil realizes.... ;) (And, yes, I have a jewelry box - I just don't always use it... obviously)  I love this bracelet - have had it for three whole days and so far it's still intact!!!! Plus, I can READ it!!!   (What a cool idea!!)    Necklace is a little more iffey, however. Fragile. May just hang it over my computer where I can see it.  One has Scripture and the other is from Ann Voskamp ministries, a reminder to look for eucharisteo daily in the small things...

A blending of the seasons for a mixed-up mind...  Spring-like curtains,  harvest pumpkins, rubber snowflakes, Amaryllis Triage, and Christmas oven mitt...  Honestly, this is me... For real.  "Classic", in my vocabulary, only applies to books and music.  Eclectic, in my humble opinion, is a much more valuable word...

Christmas Tree with Snoopy ornaments, angels, tons of multi-color lights, and whatnot... What's not to love???  I'm totally serious!! 

 Jesse Wreath... 24 days of making space in my heart for Jesus...  Still waay   too much of me and not enough of Him so I plan to keep the wreath up all year long somewhere in the house as a reminder to make more and more room for Him.    (I'm retired. Geriatric people can do things like that and get away with it.)

Candles - never too many. (Well, maybe too many to get in one pic)    And sweet gifts that remind me daily of the family and friends who gave them to me.  The idea is that every time I see a gift from a friend, I'll remember to say an arrow prayer for them.  Doesn't always work but that's the idea... (I stole it from someone at church - the idea, not the gifts..)

They say to look up when you feel down. The other night I felt down and looked down.. and had to smile.  Honestly, warmth crept up from my socks straight to my heart.  Love warm, woolly socks and happy sheep faces and friends who either think like me or who have the uncanny ability to read my somewhat warped mind. And still love me.  Seriously, these socks are so much higher up on the scale than my beloved frog socks, even though my frog socks had plastic eyeballs that rolled around.  Still, these are da bomb!  Besides, one of my frog socks lost an eyeball.   It's unnerving to have a one-eyed frog staring up at you every time you look down at your feet.  

 Love the fashion model! Love the one who so thoughtfully picked out this gift for me!  (They are not one and the same - to my knowledge Phil has never picked out a yellow purse for me. Or any purse for me for that matter. And that's actually a good thing...) And for those who don't know, that shade of yellow is most definitely manufactured in Heaven... Has to be! I can never see it without thinking of sunflowers and sunshine.

Anything chocolate!  (The peppermint is just there for seasonal decor... Trust me - it'll still be there this time next year.  Not the chocolate though!)  Thanks, sweet friend! You know who you are!

This is the life... I'm in my favorite chair, dog is being quiet (for once), and we're both warm, plus the tree is nearby and my kindle is in my lap.   This is the quintessential definition of the word "cozy".  There is no other!

What keeps me going.   Everyday.   All day.  What's kept us together. Every year.  Since 1986.  God speaks. We try to listen.  How do you make it if you never touch hearts with the Creator God through His word?   (And written in the front of the Bible?  The names of three of my sister chicks, women who are following hard after God and letting me limp  along behind them.  And beside their names, the date when my biological sister transitioned to Heaven in Oct. 2008.  So thankful God has an endless supply of sisters to bestow, both here and There.)

Color. Pens. Twistables.   Workbook studies with friends highlight my life.  Over and over and over again....

I am blessed....

Thanks!

Pink Foam Curlers and Rear View Mirrors...

      Blogs can be too much like looking in the rear view mirror and seeing that you forgot to take out that one pink foam curler that you meant to pull out of your hair at the last minute.  Seriously.

     I said I'd choose joy in my last blog entry.  But as I look back over the past 2 weeks, the truth is that I've chosen to grump and complain (and be offended over nothing) as much as I've chosen to opt for joy. It's been a real roller coaster ride emotionally with one day being "good" and the next being "bad". I think I spent most of the day yesterday, the last Monday of the "old"  year, confessing my sins and I am still not sure today if I got them all....  Suffice it to say that it's been "fun" around here as we've pushed each other's do-not-push "buttons" to the background orchestra  of coughing, hacking, and grumbling amid the swishing of two vaporizers in the house.  As best I can tell, Phil and I both have bronchitis now and David is thankful to be mostly at work or with friends these days.
     Yesterday, as I've said, was "reckoning time". Phil was at work. The house was finally quiet.  Past thoughts, words, and deeds loaded with selfishness, hypocrisy, and self-pity came rapidly to mind.  Like an endless replay of Mabel-dale's most unfunny video...  Did I really say that???  I didn't mean it!!  Or did I? Could I have actually thought that  just two short days ago??  Thank goodness no one knew it!! Or did they???
    Well, there's, um, always... God.
    So what do you do?
    I got out the Christian's bar of soap, I John 1:9, and began asking God to search my heart.  What a messy job!  Surely He deserves time and a half pay for thankless tasks like that. (Hold still, Cathie! There's one more sin in there that you've got to face!  Enough justifying already! Bring it out into the light and call it what it is so that I can deal with it.)
    Confession.  Good for the soul.      
    Bad for the ego.
    But as a friend of mine says, I feel sooooo much better afterwards....
    Still, it's hard to see myself for what I really am.  I prefer illusions, selective rear view  mirrors that blur pink foam curlers  until all I can see is just a pleasing pink color.  Trick mirrors that magically  skip over spiritual warts (i.e. sin).
    And then I saw this on FB, an excerpt from a website called Hebrew 4 Christians.  It really spoke to my heart and so I wanted to share part of it here:
    Brokenness distills the intentions of the heart by helping us to be more honest with ourselves. 
    We begin to realize that we are more vulnerable than at first we thought;
    that our faith is not as strong as we imagined,
    and that our motives are often mixed and unconscious. 
    Illusions are stripped away;
    idols crumble; 
    deeper levels of selfishness are uncovered; 
    the gap between our words and our deeds is exposed... 
    It is one thing, after all, to intellectually think about faith... 
    but it is quite another to walk out faith in darkness. 
    Yet it is only there ... that we discover what we really believe and how our faith makes traction with reality...
    Take hope, struggling friend. It is surely the will of God to find strength in weaknesses and comfort in affliction. As it says in our Scriptures, God is "the Father of Mercies and God of all comfort" .... and the Lord "comforts us" (lit., "calls us to His side," ...) in our afflictions so that we may be able to comfort those who are afflicted with the same comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God (2 Cor. 1:3-4).

 
Take hope, struggling friend.
That would be me.  And maybe it would be you also.
Tomorrow is the first day of the New Year.
My goal is still to choose joy and to keep on choosing joy as much as I can until it becomes a habit.  But when I fall, when I don't like what I see in the rear view mirror, there is still I John 1:9 and a Savior who cleans us up and "calls us to His side," the sinless Lamb of God, the God of all comfort.
The God who came so that we might share His very own joy, even as we trip and stumble through this earthly, sin-filled existence.
 May we all be blessed with that joy as we stumble imperfectly into  2014!
     

   

Joy...

     What do you choose?
     As for me, I choose joy....

    Last night as I was sitting in bed, thinking about how this irritated me and that aggravated me in this house of coughing and sniffling and getting on each other's nerves, I picked up the book, One Thousand Gifts.  In it I read about how the tongue is the tail of the heart.  Um.  Okay.  So my heart was causing my tongue to wag in a lot of ungracious ways.  Often when I was alone and no one... but God... could hear.
    No one... but God...??
    Is that an oxymoron or what?
    I opened the Voskamp book to where I had left off and I read about how her kids were breaking the rules, running in the house, when the lead runner smacked right into the glass front of the entertainment center and broke it.  She heard glass tinkling and someone yelling in pain and her heart rate spiked. Then she heard accusative words and her blood pressure began to rise.
    And when she got to the scene of the crime, she knew she had  choices: complain or lament.  She explained the difference.   Complaint is venting without faith in God. It's what aroused God's anger with the ancient Israelites and got them in serious, deadly trouble in the wilderness.  Lament is voicing frustration, anguish - with the expectation that God will hear and act.  Complaint is dumping on others while leaving God out of the picture. Lament is drawing God into our moments of angst, irritation, and whatever.
    Ann didn't want her tongue to wag and issue forth all the complaints that were coming from her heart but it happened anyway.  And then she went to God with the cry of Psalm 73 - acknowledging that she must seem like a senseless animal to Him when her tongue is driven by a faithless, irritated heart.
    And I sat there both convicted and amazed at how God brought the right words to me at the right time.
    She was basically saying that God offers joy, day in and day out, even in the midst of kids bickering and broken glass lying on the carpet.  But joy can be killed. Not by disobedient kids but by self.  When our fist clenches, the fingers point back to us, to  this:  my demands, my rights, my self...  And that's when joy dies.
    The word "rights" brought me up short.
    My demands may be unreasonable.
    But rights?
    If it is a legitimate "right", then aren't I right to demand it?
    Yes.
    And no.
    Only if I don't want joy is it okay to hold to those everyday rights that sour me on others, God,  and myself.

    And then I read:
    Though my marriage tree may not bud and though my crop of children may fail and my work produce little yield, though there is no money in the bank and no dream left in the heart, though others may choose different ways to live their one life, til my last heaving breath, I will fight to the death for this:  "I will take joy."  Hab. 3:18.  (One Thousand Gifts, p. 176)

   And below that I read:
   Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy."  James 1:2

   And I decided to let go of my rights - the ones I felt had been "violated" over this holiday period - and to take as much joy as I could from the flu, the coughing, the sniffles, the whole shebang for us this Christmas, existing here in a little house with maybe a tad too much togetherness..ha!

   This morning, I choose joy.
   By God's grace... today and everyday I will awaken with the decision to grasp joy instead of self.

 

A Toast... to Jesus...

        It's Dec. 24th but Christmas has already "come" for me.
        It didn't arrive with packages, boxes, and bows, to paraphrase the little green guy with anger management issues. Or with any of the things that I associate with Christmas, wonderful as those things may be.  Honestly, it hasn't come in the orthodox ways at all this year.
       It's come in the form of  sickness for  one thing.    Helplessness helps, apparently, when I'm trying to catch the spirit of the Christ Child.  Frankly, I am helpless to "fix" my husband's illness - he is still down for the count and Christmas is non-existent right now for him.
       And there are, of course, other areas I wish I could fix - such is life.  But... I can't.   And my "can't" seems to be the tie that is binding me to the Christ Child this season of 2013, bringing peace and joy to my heart at odd intervals, in unorthodox  ways - even  in the midst of flu and missed pay checks and doctor's visits and a to-do list that is temporarily suspended. Yes, and even in  the midst of irritability which seems to be always sitting on my shoulder or hiding behind the next door (or relative), like an imp who just lives to sour my moment, my day, our life. Out of my helplessness and this mix of joy- stealing things, joy still somehow manages to come.
       Last Sunday morning for example. Dec. 21.  Four days before Christmas and with a sick husband at home in bed, I sat in a pew with two neighbor children sitting  beside me.  My companions were a  boy who was turning 13 that very day and an 8 year-old girl whom I didn't know. The music was wonderful; the sermon powerful. I listened to it all and imbibed as much as I could because I am a straggler after Jesus and that's what stragglers do.
    But joy came, not through the music or the preacher's words but through the actions and words of the kids next to me. The little girl snuggled next to me instantly, trustingly -even though she doesn't know me. Child-like faith. I watched her and tried to learn.
   As she snuggled, she  stared admiringly at  her white shoes, feet sticking straight out in front of her so she (and I) could see them better. Twice, she tilted her perfectly shaped little face up  towards me and breathed this wondrous message, "My shoes are   slippers..." Each time she had a satisfied little smile on her face.  A white, full skirted dress-up dress, white leotards, and white leather shoes that don't snap or velcro or tie.  Her cup of happiness was overflowing.
    And by  God's grace, it spilled right over into my cup and there was joy in the pew where we sat. White slip-on dress-up shoes can do that for you, I learned.
    Then it was time for communion.  As I passed the impressive communion plate high over her head to her aunt, the little girl's eyes got big. She knows not to talk in church but... the pressure was too great. In a voice that was small and with eyes that were large, solemn, she asked me what was in the plate. I told her.  She sat still for a bit longer and then quietly asked, "Do I get some?"  I was caught on the fly, so to speak, so I whispered back that it was mostly for grown-ups.  Not good theology but I couldn't think of anything else.
   Then the plate with the thimbles full of grape juice was passed. This time I was ready when she asked. I told her it was juice and that later, when she gives her heart to Jesus, she will drink it too. She looked solemn before whispering to no one in particular. "I like juice."   Then to my surprise, she said, "Is this  all about Jesus ?"  I nodded and she got quiet once again.
  Before we drank it, the 13 year-old next to me said, "Mrs. Cathy!" I turned towards him and to my total surprise, he "clinked" his plastic thimble full of juice next to mine and said, "A toast...to Jesus!"  An unlikely mix of thoughts flashed through my mind... "What did he say?  Are we even supposed to do that???" And then a quick look behind me  to see if anyone noticed... Followed by  suppressed laughter as the reality of what we'd just done hit me. I had joined an all-boy, next door neighbor in toasting the Savior and I think it was okay with the One  who turned water into wine. Who turns unlikely boys into disciples. And who turns grape juice and white slip-on shoes into joy.
 That's the God I celebrate this season.
  And that's how Christmas came to me this year.