Monday, October 15, 2012

Two Years Later...

Wow - has it really been two years since I've written anything here? Hard to believe. Now I'm trying to think back over the last two years - so much has happened! So much has changed. Greg lost his job. We've moved. Found a new church. Left our new church. Lost Greg's mom, our sweet Moo Moo. The kids have grown. We've grown. God has done amazing things in our lives! Most of them through the mundane, if that makes any sense. He's brought some amazing people into our lives, too. One of them is a missionary friend that I've never met. I follow her blog avidly (www.arabahjoy.com) and we've been corresponding through emails. She is an amazing lady and a wonderful mom and her entire life inspires me beyond words. She calls me her Barnabas, her encourager, but she's the one that encourages me! She told me I should start a blog to encourage others, and I remembered "Oh! I have a blog!" You can't really compare my gathering of odd little paragraphs about work and food and kids and whatnot with her amazing blog full of wisdom and insight straight from the Lord. But I had forgotten how cathartic it is to just sit and type things out. Often without thinking, which can be dangerous. So today, October 15, 2012, I'm making a commitment to myself: Self, I'm going to try to do this, on a regular basis. Nothing fancy or terribly important. Just my thoughts and my struggles, on the screen. Transparancy is a good thing, right? And I'm going to encourage my Gregory to do this, too. A huge part of our dating was bonding over his blog about his wife Denise's death. He has an amazing gift for stringing words together in such a way that God just uses them to speak to people's hearts. I'm in awe of that! So now I just have to remember to encourage him to do it and NOT to nag  him. Sometimes that distinction escapes me...

So, now that I've made this "momentous" decision (ha!), what on earth to write about? I could write about this Bible Study book I was reading this morning by Priscilla Shirer called "One in a Million." The idea was to attend a weekly morning Bible Study with a group of women (one of my friends from Life Church mentioned it and I invited myself to go). But, as so often happens, life got in the way. I went to one meeting before the kids got sick and work got crazy and before you know it, I'd missed the next four weeks. But the book is amazing (wow - how many times can i use the word "amazing" in one little blog post? Stay tuned to find out!) and is so exactly where we are right now. She talks about God taking us through the wilderness so that we can see His glory. Experience it for ourselves. Greg had used some of the exact same terminology as Mrs. Shirer the other day - was talking about how he felt like God had led us out into the wilderness and that some days we were going in circles. I started grinning from ear to ear, which annoyed him since he was extremely frustrated at the time! But then I told him about this study and how God was using it to show me that the wilderness doesn't have to be bad. It doesn't have to such a horrible thing, something just to slough through on the way to wherever we think we're going. There can be beauty there, just not the beauty we're used to seeing. God did such miraculous things before the Israelites - the cloud by day and the fire by night, manna, water from the rock. Any one of those would have been (or should be) a life changer! 'Cause in a lot of ways, God has provided "manna" for us - no, not literally in the sense that he had bread fall from the sky, but he has provided supernaturally in ways that I can't even fathom. And He has given us water from the rock - water, life-sustaining fountains of refreshing, streaming from something that's hard and cold and unyielding. I'm probably not expressing this well, but what I'm trying to say is that He hasn't changed - He still does the unexpected in the middle of the desert. He still gives us glorious displays of His power and His love even when - or should it be especially when? - we're stuck in the middle of a dry and thirsty land, with sand blowing every which way and the sun beating down on our heads until we feel we could just crawl under a rock and die. That's when He really gets the chance to show off, so to speak. He send a cloud to show the way out or He sends a note from a friend to give you that bit of encouragement. The signs of His love are everywhere, if we but open our eyes to see them.

See? This is why I'm not a true blogger - that paragraph above is entirely too long. There really should be some structure other than me just rambling! Shouldn't there? But perhaps not. Perhaps this truly is just an extension of my prayer journal. Just an excuse to sit down and let the thoughts fly! Because I find that when I do this, I'm much more likely to talk to the Lord throughout my day. And much more likely to be quiet and listen to Him, which is an even greater feat! Talking's easy - listening's not. So maybe that's the second part of my commitment to myself: that not only will i talk, I'll take time to listen. That i won't just rush through my time and then rush on to the next thing in my day. But that I will settle in and get comfy. That I'll come prepared to hang out and just be there a while. No agenda, no time limits. Just communion. No, wait - that's too official and makes me think of the actions involved in "taking communion". Just communing? That's a little better... I know that I tend to get so caught up in doing the right things (and the wrong things!) and checking off the boxes in my Christian life (go to church? check! read a devotional? check!) that I neglect the whole point: worship of the One True God. Serving Him. Waiting on Him. My heart longs to do that - so why then do I not make it a priority? Why is it the first thing to get pushed aside?

Take for instance a song we've been wanting to learn for the past few weeks. I heard it driving to the office one day: Redeemed, by Big Daddy Weave. Awesome lyrics that wreck me every time I hear it. So I told Greg to listen to it and that we really should learn it so we could do it that next weekend when we did worship at the Counseling Center Saturday night or at Revolution X on Sunday night. We haven't learned it yet. We've sung it - a lot. But we also haven't done worship anywhere. We keep saying we're going to make more of a concerted effort to worship regularly as a family at home. And we've made some progress. But lately that means worshipping to a CD, not taking the time to go downstairs and pull music and get behind the keyboard. Not that worshiping to a CD is wrong! But God has called us and nudged us (me and Gregory) to do more and we've neglected it. Come to think of it, the last few times we have gone down and pulled music with the intent of worshiping as a family, the kids would get a little overexcited dancing around and someone would usually end up whining or getting irritated or getting hit by someone else. The kids usually do fine for the fast songs, but they usually don't "get it" when we switch gears. And they really don't understand when mommy and daddy get frustrated with them for doing the same thing that they were doing just one song before (flailing about and dancing exuberantly and loudly!). Should we get irritated with them? Nope. Do we? Every time. We're human, you know. Totally fallable. And quite prone to irritation, apparently. To borrow a line from "Redeemed", I remember, oh God, You're not done with me yet! I'm ever-so-thankful that the good Lord doesn't get so irritated with me as frequently as I do with my babies! I certainly give Him ample cause to, on a regular basis.

Did I have a point to all this? Probably not. And even if I did, I can't recall it right now. I could go back and reread this post... but if I do that, I know I'll delete it without posting it. So I don't believe I will. Read it, that is. I think I'm going to just hit the orange button and send this out into cyberspace. And in a few hours, I may try to do this again because I've enjoyed myself immensely. Will any of this encourage anyone else on the planet? I don't know. But God has spoken to me through all my rambling. And isn't that the point? At least, I think that was my point, way back up at the top. To let God speak to me through this, however He chooses. To open myself up to hear His voice. To be still and listen. Yes, I think so. So thank You, Lord, for being faithful. Thank You that when I'm still and quiet, You talk. You don't leave me hanging! You may not ramble on for paragraphs to get your point across - usually it's just in a few words or impressions. But thank You, nonetheless! Because what You have to say is always worth the stopping to hear it. And no doubt the act of being silent - even for a minute - will hopefully over time develop the habit of doing so. And then maybe one day it won't be so hard to quiet my mind to hear Your still, small voice. Maybe then I'll do a better job at listening. Maybe...