My humble Hosanna……

Thank you Lord for this day……this week…… this month…….all these years. 40 years now I have walked with you and many times I have turned aside from the trail only to get myself lost in the brambles, stumbling around in own wilderness which I thought was better than the road you and I were on together.

Time after time you have pulled me out of the deep and set me back into the blinding light of your grace.

And it’s your grace and love that brings me back again and again.

I hope that when I get to the end of this road, looking back will show me all the ground we have covered together and that there be spots of lights where I helped another find their way.

On this Palm Sunday I once again put myself in that crowd of people along the road to Jerusalem. I can hear their cries and see the cloaks thrown in the road and right alongside is my own.

I give you my humble Hosanna.

Waving my palm today for all to see.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey…..Zechariah 9:9

The treasure that remains

Stepping off a wonderful vacation and back into reality is tough, and yet something within us knows it can never last. Even at the edges of a dream we can always sense reality just hovering, nipping at our heels.

I was thinking about that today in prayer time as I was letting the memories, sounds and sights wash over me. I used to have a terrible time coming down off a good vacation. I would rebel against going home, starting work or school. I would keep comparing the beautiful place I had just been to where I came back to.

But kicking and screaming on the inside is so tiring, and no way to live.

With passing years, God has taught me how to be okay with it. One of the things I value most about my faith is knowing that my reality is steeped in the Presence of a loving God who has promised to never leave me or forsake me.

And as beautiful as it was, the beauty was only the backdrop. The part that is captured and held in the grip of eternity was the time spent with someone we love, hearing their voice and seeing every expression….things that email, phone and text can never do.

I remember how we talked and laughed and cried. The beauty of the coast and the trees and the mountains will fade away someday but pouring our hearts as an offering to each other, talking about hopes, fears, dreams and God……. That’s the treasure that remains.

I think about all three of our lives, and how we are all a miracle. And it’s a miracle how God brought us back together after so many years. I smile, because I know He jotted it all down in His book when we talked about Him right there in that coffee shop. We had church.

He was listening as we exchanged survivor’s stories about how He saved our shipwrecked lives.

And now that He’s brought us back, I know it’s just the beginning of a friendship that will last until we do.

Then those whose lives honored God got together and talked it over. God saw what they were doing and listened in. A book was opened in God’s presence and minutes were taken of the meeting, with the names of the God-fearers written down, all the names of those who honored God’s name. Malachi 3:16

When the thing you dream of is happening

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” James 1:17

The trip is happening today, the one she dreamed of when she was overwhelmed, buried and burdened with care-giving. At one point, she gave up on all of it. Of ever having any vacation again. But now her Mom is settled and in a safe place. Yet tattered remnants of guilt remain. When you have been a caregiver for so long, guilt has a way of becoming a constant companion. It permeates your life and settles around you like smoke at a campfire.

I really think certain types of caregiving almost become a variation of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages express empathy and sympathy and even have positive feelings for their captors. Especially when you are dealing with cases involving Dementia and Alzheimer’s. Of course, the one you are caring for is not a captor but usually someone you love or at the least someone you feel duty bound to care for. Because you want to. Because it’s the right thing.

Yet sometimes, when you are finally free, you don’t want to allow yourself that freedom. That’s an old trick of Satan, and personally, I don’t want to give him any satisfaction whatsoever. So we are taking this time off and accepting it as the gift from God that it is, with joy and anticipation.

Today, Elaine and I fly to Seattle and plan to eat seafood, see our dear friend and gaze in wonder at the ocean once more. And we will thank God for getting us through everything that went before. If you want a taste of it, just click on the sidebar under the Alzheimer’s category. It is with gratitude in our hearts that we will take this trip and savor every minute of it.

Hopefully, I will get a post in over the next week, but if I don’t you will know why.

For now, I am retreating for a few minutes of prayer as light starts to fill the sky and a day of promise begins. And we have a plane to catch.

The Sacredness of Sunday mornings

I pulled my sweats on and went out in the dark and it was cold so I needed an extra layer. I went back inside and got my no fail LL Bean terry cloth robe and carried my steaming cup out to the shop, the candle in my little lantern already flickering a soft glow.

A bird was singing its heart out and against the backdrop of that song, a dove cooed an accompaniment from a neighboring rooftop.

There is something sacred about this……reflecting on the week. Thanking God for how He got me through, how He got us through. I think of God pausing after the sixth day, looking out over creation, a Holy pause and here in the dark, I feel an echo of that same pause.

It’s good and right to do this.

Sometimes, activity has to stop in order for the appreciation to be fully felt, and standing on the other side of the events lets them breathe freely and take on new life.

This morning, I let it all wash over me. The events of the trip back home, getting my brother in and out of the hospital, the car almost conking out and Dad, a nervous wreck in the driver’s seat but holding it together and getting them back home. Me getting lost and nice people with directions. Mom and I sweeping my brother’s porch together.

Watching my Mom place her hands on Lauryn’s head giving her a blessing before school from my place in the driver’s seat; seeing her mouth the words I knew she was saying…….”The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine upon you and give you peace.” I pray that is one memory of her Grandma that Lauryn will always carry with her.

And even after a week, I still hear the praise song Mom played from her old boombox in the corner of the kitchen.

My life is in You Lord, my strength is in You Lord, my hope is in You Lord, in You, in You………

Yes indeed. It is. And thank you also, Lord for the little light that dawned while I was training yesterday at work. I really needed that.

Where almost everybody knows your name

I have been on a whirlwind trip back home and awash with thoughts and no time to capture them. For a blogger/writer this is almost like looking for a restroom when you really need one and find they are all closed for cleaning. There is no satisfaction until relief comes.

Also, no WIFI stations seemed to work and I think that was exactly what God in His wisdom intended for me and for everyone else.

My brother’s procedure went well. It took four hours for the Catheter Ablation and he came through with flying colors. I think I was helpful and that gives me a sense of satisfaction. There is something about pulling together as a family and making it all work that is good and right. The fruit trees were in bloom and yet we were alll moving so fast there was no time to “stop and smell the roses” or any other kind of flower for that matter, although we did manage to snatch some golden moments along the way.

It’s not too often we all hold hands and pray together, but we did before Dad and Ron left for the hospital.

Later, driving my Mom there I missed a turn and rediscovered how good and helpful strangers can still be when I pulled over to ask directions. I knew I had a local boy because he led me back on the right track and we were never so relieved to see “H” street. I had this proven twice in one day when I took another wrong turn at night and another very nice guy got me back on 50 and then South 99.

I hope God blessed them both for being so helpful.

Later, as we all sat in the waiting room watching old “Maude” reruns from the 1970’s, I asked my Mom if she remembered the long dresses I wore in High School when our singing group gave concerts. She said she didn’t but my Dad piped up and said he did. In fact, he remembered one specific dress I wore with blue puffy sleeves that tied in the back. I was touched by that.

After the hospital ordeal was over, I was doing an errand downtown for Mom and passed a friend walking down the street. I yelled out the window and asked if she needed a ride, and she was dumbfounded to see me. She didn’t know I was in town. That’s another thing that’s nice about small town life, you can still run into people you know everywhere.

The next day I went into the local Bible bookstore and ran into another friend who knew my folks. We had in fact, just been talking about her because she used to live a few doors down. She didn’t have the Newboys CD I was looking for so she actually burned me a copy while we talked.

And of course, there was the joy of seeing a little girl who was turned almost inside out she was so excited to see me. We did all kinds of things together. Saying goodbye is very hard for her, she takes after her Auntie that way, so I just squeezed her tight and told her I would be back very soon.

There is always a flip side to the joy of being there, since it brings to mind all the things I am not there for the rest of the time, yet I am so grateful I have a job that allows me to leave as much as I do, and it makes the time we do have all the more valuable.

I was so touched and grateful for all the prayers via family, friends, email, this blog and Facebook. I humbly thank each and every one of you. And thank you Elaine, for all you did in my absence and for making home a wonderful place to come back to.

I wish this were a longer post, but time is pressing and my break is almost up.

God is good, all the time.

Pulling over and slowing down

And he said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. Mark 6:31

Last night on the way home, I heard music literally spilling onto a page. It was piano, and the notes were played so fast and yet so perfectly they sounded as if they were spilled, not played. If you have never heard that I hope you do someday. The notes made me feel as if I were sitting in a grand but restful drawing-room in a Downton-like mansion.

Lately I have felt the need to pull off the super-highway of social media. For awhile, I was twittering, pinteresting, face-booking and instagraming all at the same time, simultaneously. Oh, and add blogging into the mix, and reading other’s blogs as well as trying to write my own.

I forgot why I was writing and who I was writing for. I was playing the comparison game and it was wearing me out. In light of that, I have decided that if an activity doesn’t give me a measure of peace, then I will stop doing it. Of course, that doesn’t apply to work, I have to do that.

Sometimes life is like what happened to me in my car last night. I was driving along minding my own business at around 75 MPH when all of a sudden the engine lost power. There were no warning lights on the dash. Nothing to tell me anything was wrong, other than the fact that all of a sudden, cars were zooming by me and I was slowing down.

I had to pull over, and fast. I put my flashers on and got to the side of the road and adjusted the floor mat which I thought maybe was a contributing factor in why I slowed down, I thought maybe it got caught underneath the gas pedal. I cautiously started driving again and it seemed fine, so once again I got up speed and zoomed my way home.

By the time I pulled in the driveway, an indicator light did come on which turned out to be the EPC (Engine Power Control).

Suffice it to say, I have had a warning light to slow down my activity on social media for a time. And I have.

And it has been good for my peace.

I will still blog and get on Facebook and all the rest, but now it will be like touching down and checking in rather than full immersion.

The desert is a peaceful place……and I want to bring that to you in this blog. A little corner away from the multitudes and noise and confusion of the world. I want to bring the peace of Jesus here.

Because sometimes you just have to pull over and let the others just zoom by. If you need me I will be sitting at the base of these trees.

They made me want to go

Every now and then, something you read trickles down to your actual life and it changes the way you think, even the way you live. Something stirs in your soul and reawakens you to something you believed all along.

Good words capture the power behind the action and get it right.

They open you up to new possibilities and remind you that one person can indeed make a great difference in the world, and a few can do even more. Like all great dreams, this one started in the heart of one person, Chris Marlow and like a tumbleweed on fire, that one dream spread to others and they made it their dream too.

And I would never have known about any of this without my friend and fellow blogger, Duane Scott. He was a member of the blogger team that was going there. Oh, I knew about Haiti and the terrible earthquake that happened but like everything else we hear about in the news, it gets sandwiched, stacked on top of every other catastrophe until they all get lost in the big stack of awful stuff.

It all leaves you feeling kind of helpless and like it’s all too big, too futile.

I followed the chronicles of the Haiti blogger team eagerly. When they all boarded the plane, I almost felt like I was going with them. Then, as I read the stories, my tears splashed on the page along with theirs. It was all so much, all too big, the need too great.

I read about the Pastor and his wife who slept out in the open between the children and the child rape and the food that was never enough. And I also read about their great faith and their big smiles and I heard about the church services that went on forever because the people just couldn’t stop praising God. Hello? Something is wrong here.

Then I heard about the school they wanted to build and I learned how my little dollars could make a difference by joining Pure Charity and backing the project. When I figured out that even ten dollars can make a difference over there, I started to change how I spent here.

And now I can’t stop thinking about that school, that playground, and those kids out there playing in the bright Haitian sun. I think of how my niece doesn’t have any kids to play with after school and I think of how much all those children would love to play with her and she with them.

And I can’t get that particular vision out of my head. Why are things so uneven? My niece is special needs and sometimes other kids aren’t sure how to play with her, but I know those kids would because they have special needs of their own…..which one of us doesn’t?

I was raised to be grateful for what I have, and I am a person who has always been mindful about the plight of the poor. I send a check each month to my sponsored child through World Vision along with my prayers, which can never do enough.

And I never lay my head on my pillow at night without thanking God for my bed. I ask myself why they were born there and me here, with so much. And I know that just thanking God is not enough.

Help join me in making dreams a reality for these kids, and for your own neighborhood kids as well. Join Pure Charity and back a project today.

You won’t be sorry you did.

And to think it all started with the Haiti bloggers and their stories, and how they almost made this hobbit-like, comfort loving, safety-concious barely leaving my continent homebody want to go there.

What 53 has taught me

I don’t know much, but it’s hard not to pick up a few things by the time you live to see 50, if you are paying attention that is. Regretfully, I have spent too much of life not paying attention, but a few things have stuck along the way. I have been blessed by many people who have nurtured them into my life so I can’t take full credit, I am just bringing the list to life…..The list is partial, and I hope I never stop adding to it.

Make sure the people you share your life with are never ever lonely in their own home. It happens a lot.

Don’t burden your child with talk of bills and finances and not having enough money, let them be a kid with kid worries.

Know that you can never change someones heart, only God can do that.

Surround yourself with people who are positive and know how to find humor in every situation.

Find time to do silly kid things, no matter how old you are. Roll down a hill, blow bubbles, eat fake food with your kids or grandkids…..pretend. I dare you to skip in public.

Sometimes in relationships, little by little one person ends up carrying the whole load. Every now and then, evaluate things…..find out if they are crushed under a burden they were never meant to carry. Take your part of the load back before it’s too late.

If you see someone doing something right, with their kids, with their husband or wife, or friend or neighbor…..let them know you notice.

Spend time alone with God first thing in the morning, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Those few minutes will make the rest go further.

Teach your children to be a nature lover, to listen for bird calls, see the brilliance of sunsets, to watch for the moonrise. To see each day as a miracle. That will help keep them grounded all through their life…….and hopefully, it will help introduce them to God.

Don’t bother attending a church unless you feel the presence of the Holy Spirit there.

Always remember that anger is a choice. You can restrain yourself in other places, such as work or school or in public, so you can hold that temper at home too.

Laying in bed staring at the ceiling makes the mind spin, putting your face to the pillow is better for blocking things out.

Live with an attitude of gratitude. Look for the things to be grateful for, they are all around you.

Teach your child to be kind to animals, it will follow through with people.

Life is hard……but without God life is impossible.

Blessings to you today, and peace. I hope you enjoyed my list. Feel free to add to it in your comments. I look forward to reading them.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:14-19

Somebody is waiting

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

Last night I wanted to go home, fast. It was a stressful day and I had things to do before I went to bed. I thought of checking on our resident Intel cat, Mrs. Howell, but my feet were going fast forward toward my car. The sunset was unfolding in a myriad of colors and along with the scattered clouds it was a stop and stare moment.

I threw my backpack and carry all bag in their prospective spots in the adjacent seat and sat down and drew a deep breath. I made it. Another day done. But then I thought of how the weather was changing, and how cold Mrs. Howell might get, and I couldn’t take not knowing if her food dish was empty or not.

I drove over to the neighboring building and went inside and then out again……out the doors that led to the back patio where she resides. She met me in her usual spot, unsure at first whether I was a friend or foe. When she figured out it was me, she ran to her dish and started eating…..she loves for us to watch her eat. Then she was meowing, and purring, and rubbing her head and drooling on my feet.

I was treated to a marvelous light show in the sky and I thought, I needed this, just this little space at the end of my tough day.

Sometimes it makes you feel better knowing you’re needed, even if only by a little critter.

I made sure her bowls were topped off and then I went to leave and she tried to trip me as she usually does by scissoring in and out of my feet. Then she meowed and grabbed my ankle……her little way of trying to get me to stay longer. She followed me all the way up to the door of the building which was very unusual. She is usually too timid to get that close.

I told her I would see her later. When I left she was sitting dejected by the door looking through. Not for the first time I thought, all over the world, people……animals……children……orphans…….are peering through the glass, through doors, through windows, through bars.

Waiting for someone to come.

Waiting for someone to be their Jesus.

Filling in the blanks

There are scattered clouds over the Superstition mountains this morning, a bit like my header picture, and the moon is still up shining through the window where I sit reminding me as it always does that God is near. I think He gave us the moon not so much for its light, but because it’s really hard to deny God when you stare at the moon. And you can’t very well stare at the sun.

When I see the moon, I see the light of His face shining back at me, His tangible way of saying, “I am still here, and it’s gonna be okay.”

I needed that assurance today. This morning was one of those mornings when I didn’t have many words for God, I felt silence was best. Some prayer times are like that, and it’s okay. I just held the names softly in my heart for Him to see.

This morning my mind got caught up in the game of what if. Every now and then I go down that old path, rethinking my steps away from my hometown, away from my family all those years ago. I wonder how things would have been different if we had opted to stay behind when the company moved. That kind of thinking is never constructive, and I don’t believe it’s a path God wants any of us to go down unless it leads to some positive change for right now.

It also ignores every good step in between, and there have been a lot of those. Steps that were important. Steps that lead us to where we are right now. And where we are now is good.

Besides, that kind of regretful thinking is a little bit like putting myself on the throne instead of God.

Sometimes the mind insists going on rabbit trails that lead to dark empty holes.

I reel my mind back in as I turn my gaze back to the fading moon and know that long after it fades from my view, it is still there. Just like God. Every day we have a choice………..we can either give Him His rightful place on the throne or replace Him with someone or something else. Today I will put Him back where He belongs. And I take comfort in the fact that He can restore lost years and change the hearts that need changing.

Right now, I will open the Psalms to the highlighted yellow, verses that never fail to bring God near and fill in all those empty places of uncertainty with His comfort. The Psalms are great for filling in the blanks on the page, and in the heart.

Selah…..(I don’t know what that means but it sounded good here)

Psalms 9:8-9 “The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, A refuge in times of trouble. And those who know Your name will put their trust in You; for You, Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You.” Psalm 9:8,9

Psalms 37:23 “The steps of a good man (or woman) are ordered by The Lord, And He delights in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; For The Lord upholds him with His hand. Psalms 37:23

Lori's Prayer Closet

"And when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done is secret, will reward you……"Matthew 6:6

Reflection