Fear

Living on the Edge

I look at the clock…..3:10 AM. I lay back down, my heart wonders whether to pick up its beat, but I breathe deep and it settles back down…..Not time to get up yet. I know I won’t go back to sleep, but it is enough that I can lay here for awhile longer. I don’t pray, I just turn over. When the small hand approaches four and the big one nears 12 I hit the button before it has a chance to go off.

I turn my phone over face up to check for messages first thing. With folks in their eighties living in another state, you never know….I fear the message, the voice mail….”We took Dad to Urgent Care last night…..or Mom fell.” Give us a call when you get up. But there are none. Thank you, Lord.

Not for the first time I panic. How much longer will I have them, and what will my life look like when they are gone? I see a gaping hole where they once were, bigger than life. Always there. “You don’t have to worry,” my Mom always says, “the Lord is taking care of us.” But I do. How can I not?

I hear the morning traffic already churning up for the commute. They sound angry today. I hear a crotch rocket tearing down the road and the sound cuts through my head like a buzz saw. Coffee……oh, I need coffee.

I pull onto the freeway and join the morning communion mass. At 5:00 AM it is not nearly full force yet, but it is working itself up to a fever pitch that will reach its peak around 7 o’ clock. I am thankful it is not too bad yet, at this hour.

Help me, Lord……just for today. Just for this 12 hours. I am living on the edge and I never did like the edge. It is stressful at this new place at work. Our little group was thrown in with the big dogs and the heat is being turning up. I think of Daniel in the lions den, Shadrach Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace and I know my little stress is really nothing. But it feels big.

I approach my exit and start to turn off the freeway when I notice a truck trying to speed up and get there before me. “Not so fast buddy,” I think. This little yellow bug may look like something Tweety bird would drive, but it has some get up and go……it has a killer overdrive, it floats over 80 mph.

Maybe he feels on the edge this morning too.

About that time, I hear my Dad’s voice in my head say….”Everybody wants to be a Nascar driver now” and he’s right. But you kind of have to or they will run right over you.

As I pull into the Intel site, I notice a truck ahead of me. It has DVLMAN on the licence plate. Does that stand for Devilman? And why would you put that on your plate?

I guess maybe  for the same reason I put my Jesus sticker on my back window. You have to align yourself with someone. I am just really glad I am aligning myself with Jesus not that other guy.

It is a battle in the parking lot as well, everyone jockeying for the few covered spaces. I didn’t get one today.

I turn the car off and enjoy the few moments of quiet before I go in. And  once more, I thank the Lord for being here with me on the edge. I imagine that He’s sitting beside me. I feel His arm go around my shoulders as He looks at me sideways and smiles, and I know this promise is true.

For God has said, “I will never fail you. I will never abandon you.” Hebrews 13:5

I love you God, but…….

“Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God…….Exodus 3:1

“I love you, God…..” But after I said it, I could hear how it sounded to my own ears. What must it have sounded like to God’s? I was weary of myself so I could understand how He could be weary of me. Of my same prayers…….my same requests. I was feeling like a bad actor before a Holy God. And the act of sitting out there felt like a charade this morning.

Here I am Lord, again. Don’t you get tired of me Lord? I would if I were you. It was a prayer, but there was a “but” behind my “I love you” that didn’t belong.

If I knew how Holy the ground was beneath my feet, these Teva sandals would be off my feet in a New York minute. The truth is, sometimes it is just hard to feel the Holy when we are down here on what feels right now like a grubby little planet. The dirt and debris has piled up near the door from yesterday’s dust storm and I stepped through it to make my way to Him, to the place of our morning meeting.

I’m still the same old me. I have not lost the ten pounds I wanted to lose by the trip to California in July and the month is half over. I will shock everyone with the blinding white of my skin when I put on my bathing suit. I also need to dye my roots.

And today my prayers sounded more like exasperated sighs than reverence for you.

I wasn’t feeling it today. But I know better now. I have learned you can’t always trust feelings. I am, however haltingly, learning to trust Him.

I turned where He directed, to the story of Moses. I wanted to read about the bush that God lit with Holy fire and it didn’t burn up. And then God taught this slow learner another lesson. He showed me that Moses was a big bundle of inadequacy and nerves and fear just like me…..

The words were truth…..leaping out through the pages. Moses was just like me. Over and over again, he tried to convince God of all that he wasn’t.

But Moses protested to God, “Who am I to appear before Pharaoh? Who am I to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt?” 

God answered, “I will be with you.”

And later on……after God explained all the wondrous signs and miracles He would do, Moses protests once again……“What if they won’t believe me or listen to me? What if they say, ‘The Lord never appeared to you’?”

Lesson number two came when God told Moses to grab his staff which has now turned into a snake.

Sometimes you have to grab hold of that snake before God produces the miracle.

Moses then proceeds to work on God’s last nerve, and boy don’t I do that every single day?

Yet God is so full of love for Moses that he produces some help in the form of Aaron. Then the tears came and once again my love for God was as real as the flame in that bush. And there was my prayer, and this time it was real…..

And no buts about it.

Looking back to what’s ahead…..

“Keep your face to the sunshine
and you cannot see the shadow.
It’s what sunflowers do.”
by Helen Keller

Been thinking about………Soft answers. And how the Bible says they turn away wrath. All this time I was thinking it was to turn away the hearer’s wrath, but maybe the whole point is to turn away the wrath of the deliverer as well.

There is always more behind what Jesus says. The Bible is filled with layers. The more I read it the more layers and meanings God reveals.

Life sometimes feels like it’s going frightfully fast. I find myself wanting to stop the stream of it, plug the hole with my finger to keep it from flowing, rushing past……stop it in midstream. And yet I want to move fast forward to retirement. Maybe, I think, life will move more slowly after that. If I can only just get there.

Meanwhile, during the night our minds manufacture dreams through our fears, joys and sorrows. I dreamed one night that I had pulled up to a campsite bulletin board. You know the kind where people put their paperplate message on the board so you will know where to find them? Except I awoke, heart pounding, because I realized they were gone and I could not go where they were.

They went to the place of too much time gone by……Aren’t we all drifting there, even now?

I wonder? Is that part of what drives us to write? To stop time, freeze the moment. Never forget?

These days I find getting older brings a certain comfort. Comfort in knowing the truths I have believed for so long have been verified, proven true. Only years and experience teaches that. Not any school that I know of, except the school that God puts us through.

The more I read the Bible, the more it becomes alive. The more try to live it, the more I know it’s true. And when I clutch it to my chest I can actually feel it saving me. It is a book like no other, it is pulsating with life…..

Redemptive power of both the redeemed and the Redeemer.

And this is one song that has no end.

The song of the redeemed. Let Heaven and nature sing.

Along came a spider

I was driving home a couple of weeks ago when it finally happened. The thing I always dreaded. The “what would I do if this happened scenario.” I was talking to my Dad on the commute home when I noticed something in my peripheral vision……a movement. Say it isn’t so. But there it was, skittering across the dash like it owned the place. A spider. Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about them.

I know they are God’s creatures. I know they are good to have around…..as long as they remember their place…..outside. I know they eat flies and other pests, and that their webs are works of art, especially when hit with morning dew. I really can see the beauty in that. But where there’s a web there’s an occupant. There it is, smack dab in the middle of that glorious creation…….along with all eight creepy legs that I imagine crawling across my face in the middle of the night.

That actually happened to me once and I never forgot it.

Surprisingly, Charlotte’s Web was my favorite book growing up, but no matter how my Dad tried to tell me to “let Charlotte live”  it didn’t matter. It only pulled on my heartstrings for a second…..right before I switched on the vacuum cleaner and sucked Charlotte right into her new forever home.

There it was, dangerously close, on my side of the dash. I held my breath and leaned over as far as I could toward the passenger side. Then it leisurely went across to the other side….I released my breath. It was tortuous. I thought it would help if I stayed on the phone and so I did, never letting the panic hit my voice. I was extremely proud of myself for exercising such supreme discipline and control.

That is, until it started to crawl, in that fast creepy way they have, right over to where I was sitting. Trapped. My hands gripped the wheel and did the only thing I could do.

I sped up.

Then the worst happened, it disappeared! I lost track of the sucker. Any minute I expected it to float down right in front of my face. The not knowing was worse than actually seeing it.

It appeared again by my left shoulder. That’s when all my self control and discipline went out the window. By the time I approached the Wal-Mart off-ramp I was approaching 80 MPH. I was in complete control of course, my hands never left the wheel except for once.

I barrelled around the corner and screeched to a stop in the garden center parking lot. By that time it had managed to make it all the way to the backseat floorboards. I should have let it go but I didn’t. I got a towel from the trunk and smashed it good.

I feel bad for killing one of God’s creatures….

If it just hadn’t been in my car.

Later I told my Dad about it. After the laughter subsided he told me he was impressed by my tremendous display of self discipline.

Snippets of life

“you can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.” — Frederick Buechner

This world is made up of little snippets of life….the life we live every day, made up of moment upon moment, memory upon memory. I look back at 20 years aghast, because I really don’t know where it has gone. Time is passing by…….sometimes so fast it makes my head spin.
 
Writers and photographers feel a need, sometimes an urgent need to capture these moments of life, all the joy and beauty and pain, lest they be lost forever. Others live them as deeply as they can, so that the memory and the goodness can be taught and lived and passed on to others, like living beacons of wisdom, they catch life like a spark catches a dry timber. Others seem to glide by life and never notice anything….they remain untouched by it all.
 
Sometimes we think we see a glimpse of the future and we don’t much like it, so we hastily immerse ourselves in the past or get real busy in the here and now. I got a little taste of this the other day at Border’s standing in line along with all the other book lovers to cash in on their misfortune. I looked around and suddenly I thought of a world with no bookstores and I shuddered. Is this our future? Is Barnes and Noble next? A tremor went down my spine.
 
What kind of a world would it be? No public place to go to sip our coffee, cozy up by the window with a stack of books, sharing our treasures with friends. If that were gone, a very important part of our community would be lost. But then, a flicker of hope. Maybe this will be good for the little used bookstore on the corner.
 
Maybe this will bring the independent bookstores of my youth back. Well, I can dream can’t I?
 
I don’t think this would have impacted me like it did, except that I just finished a book called The Last Christian. The year is 2088 and everyone lives immersed in virtual reality, hooked up to what they call “The Grid.” People don’t travel much, they all schedule meetings in VR anywhere they choose. They don’t read real books, the access them on the Grid.

They think this life is great, but they are all empty, joyless, for they have also eliminated God in this world they have created. They are much too advanced for God, you see.
 
Well happily, I can say that we are not there yet. Most of us are still immersed in the real world in all its glorious and living color. And God is still very much alive to many Americans, thankfully.
 
Yesterday was a strange day. I felt like I was walking around under a lid of oppression. I felt exhausted and mentally drained….worn out. I am worried about my Mom, who had another possibly cancerous growth removed from her leg. I automatically think the worst, knowing her brother died of melanoma. It makes me think of all the years I have been away from her and I wonder how much time we have left.
 
Yet I rejoice in what I know to be true, He has plans for us……and they are all good. “For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

and not only that……….For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7

I love that, only the King James uses the phrase “sound mind.”
Hope is alive in me because God’s promise gives me a whole future of sound minded days……starting today.

Drawing from the Well

“But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:14

What a wonderful thing to have memory…….it is our well-spring that we can draw upon again and again. I think if we counted the times during the day that we dipped into it, we would be surprised, since it is not really a thing we count….

We think of times well-spent and our memory bank is always adding up as the new slide in with the old and they all become part of who we are…..the good ones tend to override the unpleasant ones with enough time and healing.

But if I lost every scrap of my memory today……..God would keep me, I know that. For He has hid His Word deep in my heart.….. I would have the wellspring of His water that never runs out to draw from. I have Very God living in me which will carry me into eternity, along with all that is me……
was me, and will be me.
Everything I am is kept safe in Him, for He has promised that, so there is nothing to fear, not Alzheimer’s…..or cancer….or old age, or anything else……..“and we have a priceless inheritance–an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.” 1 Peter 1:4

I really don’t know how it would be to lose my memory, my mind…..living with someone with Alzheimer’s has made me ask that question. It must be terrifying, I really can’t imagine it. I hope I never have to find out. But one thing I know.

When I have the water that always quenches, it will be more than enough.

thankful for feeling better today, almost over my cold……thankful for two specific things that happened yesterday, one the direct result of prayer…..thankful for days off to re-energize……for God who never gives up on me, even when He sees my inside my heart, it still doesn’t faze Him…..wonderful memories of a great Birthday week…..appliances that keep right on going through the stifling heat of summer….my first cuppa joe in the morning…..people who speak wisdom into my life….the memory of sand in my toes…..and being splashed my precious niece…..#701-711

Join the Gratitude Community here and add your list to Ann and others…….

It all begins with prayer

“Do not have your concert first, and then tune your instruments afterwards. Begin the day with the Word of God and prayer, and get first of all into harmony with Him.” Missionary Hudson Taylor

Mary Slessor wrote to a friend who had long prayed for her: “I have always said that I have no idea how or why God has carried me over so many funny and hard places, and made these hordes of people submit to me, or why the Government should have given me the privilege of a Magistrate among them, except in answer to prayer made at home for me. It is all beyond my comprehension. The only way I can explain it is on the ground that I have been prayed for more than most. Pray on, dear one — the power lies that way.”

On another occasion she wrote: “Prayer is the greatest power God has put into our hands for service — praying is harder than doing, at least I find it so, but the dynamic lies that way to advance the Kingdom.”

As I scrolled through this website of quotes from different missionaries, these heroes of our faith, once again I was in awe. I thought…..how to get that mindset, how to get there? To be able to say to God, “I will go wherever you send me.” It is the “wherever” that scares me. Oftentimes my mind is so made up that I have left no wiggle room for the Holy Spirit to work.

The “wherever” is the unknown……and the unknown can be very intimidating if you don’t know where it is. Yet when God is the sender, I can be assured that the “wherever” is always a perfect fit for me and also for the person I am being sent to.

I have so far to go, and yet I am assured, along with both of these courageous ones and so many others who have gone before…..It all begins with a prayer. In that regard we are perfectly in step.
And sometimes, the wherever turns out not to be that scary…….Not when God is walking with you.
Often, I tend to think that being sent means going somewhere really big….another city, another country, another culture. When all God wants me to do is move off the front step….
go across the street….
call someone, or lay a hand on a shoulder.
It is the attitude of my heart that He sees……the willingness to answer that small whisper of the Holy Spirit when He tells me to give the person sitting right next to me some encouragement instead of turning away.
And always, it is a going forward, of pressing on, of striving in the Spirit. Of walking toward Him. Though I falter far too often, still He holds His hands out.
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:14 NAS
Photos by me
website source: http://www.wholesomewords.org/missions/msquotes.html

The Fear Factor

Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, Surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’ “Behold, all those who are angered at you will be shamed and dishonored; those who contend with you will be as nothing and will perish. Isaiah 41:10,11

If we could see God’s grace all around us…….just imagine. I envision something like these Palo Verde tree blossoms which fall everywhere here a certain time of year……we would see it everywhere we walked, for He has promised to hem us in on all sides with His love and protection.

That doesn’t mean that our path will be trouble free and easy. In fact, Jesus promised that in the world we would have trouble. But right after that He tells us to take heart because He has already overcome it. That means, if we belong to Him, so have we! Whatever the world dishes out, we can take it my friends.

And I love what He says right before that……”I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.”  

We can rest in the hollow of His hand. Of that we can be certain.

And when we close our eyes at night, can’t you just feel His grace keeping you? For He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

There is much fear and uncertainty in our world today, but we don’t need to pay attention to it. We don’t have to worry about the economy……

our health

our jobs or lack thereof

or anything else that keeps us up at night.

Our Heavenly Father knows we need all these things. So, whatever you are worried about today, give it to Him, He can handle it!

“Who did this? Who made it happen? Who always gets things started? I did. God. I’m first on the scene. I’m also the last to leave. Isaiah 41:4
The Message
And a special prayer for Elaine, my best of friends. You take care of everyone else, but today and every day He will take care of you! He walks behind you and before you today….. May He keep you in perfect peace today and cast away all fear! Me

Because God is Real

photo of clouds behind my house

People may ask, what does it matter what you do? What you watch? What you listen to? Does anyone really care? In this age of anything goes, does it matter anymore? It matters greatly because we greatly matter to God! It matters more than ever.

Not only is God alive to us, He wants to be involved in everything we do. He has a personal investment in us! It is the difference between feeling like a latchkey kid, always having to let yourself in the door at night, and being a kid whose parents want to know where you are and who you are hanging with. Not because they are busybodies, or nosy, or want to rule your life….but because they care and want the best for you.

Not only that, but He comes alongside and helps me back up when I fail miserably. He understands that I will, but because He looks on my heart, He knows my motive. He can see if love is what drives me or something else.

This morning I was tossing and turning……It was three o’ clock and I had to get up at four. I rolled over after looking at the clock, and was glad I had another hour. But I couldn’t go back to sleep. I tried the 23rd Psalm, that usually works to lull me back to slumber. But this morning I got stuck on lines. The first one actually…..

“The Lord is my Shepherd……the Lord is my Shepherd…….the Lord is my Shepherd”…..Thoughts crash in like ocean waves……I wonder how much time I left with my parents, Dad is turning 83 this week…..what will I do if I get a phone call saying they are gone and I didn’t get to say goodbye…..What is our President doing with our money? Will we have anything left to call our own after he gets done playing monopoly with it? Maybe I should sell everything and move into the RV and put my money in a coffee can.

I shall not want, I shall not want, I shall not want…….He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

He leadeth me beside still waters…..

In Him, I have everything I need, and yet I toss and turn some more. I never go back to sleep. 3:10…..3:20…..3:50……

This morning, my first cup of coffee having cleared my head, I was thinking about Psalm 23 again. This image stayed with me. I pictured My Shepherd, His body laying down across the sheep gate in the night, the sheep gate of my life, my heart…… protecting the sheep (me) from preditors in the night…..

thoughts that go astray…….worries that won’t sleep.

He says: “Don’t worry, I got you covered.”

Picture credit of sheep: Google images

Prayer Request

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13

I have a special prayer request from my blog family today. My best friend Elaine is struggling under a heavy load right now. She just started a new job, which was a very good opportunity she didn’t feel she could pass up, but now she is wondering if she made the right decision. She also has what feels like another full time job, taking care of her folks. She is wondering now whether she should have taken the job at all…….and also wondering how long she can do both without it adversely affecting her health, which is it already doing. Today she cut off her unemployment, and it feels final. No more safety net.

She thought she would be able to ease into her new job, but they loaded her up the first day, knowing she had experience. The prayer she needs most right now is to learn to let go. To learn how to leave work when things are unfinished. To let it all go at 5:00 and not carry it home, where the other job, the other stress  starts.

I feel helpless. I can help, but only so much. It is the internal struggle and burden she alone carries that I can do nothing about. But I know One who can. And she has prayed about it, over and over. What do you tell someone who is carrying this kind of burden and has no clue how to unload it? It is all too easy to speak platitudes: “Just give it to God….” I know she already has. I wonder why God doesn’t just do a miracle inside her and fix it. I ask myself, “Doesn’t He know all the things she is doing?” But I know He does. It just seems to me He is biding His time. She needs help now.

And yet, I see all He has brought us through since all this started.

And I know He has been there, and will continue to be.

The statistics of caregivers dying before the ones they are caring for are way too high. I have heard it over and over again. I don’t want her to be one of those statistics. She doesn’t want to be either. She has too many others who depend on her. God knows that.

Thank you in advance for praying. I breathe thanks for all He has brought us through today. And for what I have learned from this thus far:

That maybe I am more of a caretaker than I thought I was….. that I am doing things I thought I could never do……that in spite of it all, there is still joy and laughter to be had……. for extra leaning on the Lord for our strength…..for noticing beauty in the midst of quiet moments of rest……for appreciating even more the support of good friends…..for the prayers going up from dear friends and family……for extra physical strength and steady attitude…..for hope to see what God will do through this…..extra understanding for others going through the same struggle….and for the Lord who holds my friend and me in His palm……#656-667

When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong, because the LORD is the One who holds his hand. Psalm 37:24

holy experience