Praising Through The Seasons

In the waking of the dawn, I hear You.  I will give You praise.  For, in this moment of coffee dripping from the pot, laundry tossing in the dryer, quiet surrounding my heart…I can see You.  All around me.  You are calling me into Your beauty that overwhelms.  Outside my window, fall has settled in.  Trees have begun to change to yellow…sprinkled here and there.  Mornings are met with a cool damp mist, winter gently trying to make her entrance. 

But, in the midst of fall, SUMMER still breaks through my soul.  For only a few short weeks before, walking in the woods of birch, Your glory rained down through those trees and my spirit was set ablaze!

 

I can still feel that moment of grandeur!  I can still faintly hear You whisper Your love over me on that day.  And how my heart rejoices b/c I can hear Your love wash over me fresh and new THIS morning as well.  It doesn’t matter what season we are in, what storm we are facing, what light we see before us.  “Your mercies are new every morning, GREAT IS YOUR FAITHFULNESS!” 

So, bring on winter, in all her fury!  I am ready to praise! 

The Process of Breaking…

Pride.  What a small little word that carries a lot of weight!  A word, that when paired with a heart, can result in nasty, ugly things.  How funny, that many people “take pride” in being humble?  What a completely ridiculous statement!  But I think we are all guilty of it. 

To be humbled by the mighty hand of God hurts something fierce!  When the Almighty breaks your heart into a thousand tiny pieces, when you have fallen so low that, when on your face in the miry muck, it is a struggle to even look up, it doesn’t feel very “good”.  But oh, the holiness of that moment!  B/c in that moment, you realize, it isn’t about me!  This life, this breath, this world I claim as my own, isn’t about me at all!  I am here to serve the purpose of my Creator.  Those words taste a bit bitter rolling off the tongue.  They go against everything my flesh tells me is true.  But then I read words like Luke 17:10 which says: “So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done ONLY that which we ought to have done.’”  I am reminded that what is accomplished through these flesh and bones are only things that God enables me to do for His purposes.  He is Sovereign and in control. His ultimate plan for all humanity has little to do with my wish lists and selfish ambitions.  I would dare even say that my “to do” lists may stand as a hindrance at times for His master plan to unfold.  I don’t want to stand in the way.  I want to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, even if what I feel He is calling seems inconvenient or “hard to swallow.”

I am being humbled this day.  My heart is broken and laid bare before the Lord and I am ashamed of the pride that has crept to the surface of my life.  Oh, but I will bask and delight in the forgiveness of my King.  He offers, and I will bow low and accept. 

To pray the prayer for humbleness seems spiritual and right.  But when it begins to take place, it is truly an unearthly experience.  B/c I would never wish this kind of humiliation and hurt on purpose.  But I know, with all faith in my great Lord, that it will bring about beauty and tenderness of heart that I have never before experienced.  So I am walking forward, on my knees, trusting in His holy process. 

My Daddy

The phone rings.  In the middle of cutting up chicken for dinner, taking cookie sheets out of the oven, I answer.  Daddy.  He rarely ever calls me.  He is busy.  He isn’t much of a phone-talker.  But neither am I.  The timer is buzzing from the oven, another batch of cookies ready to come out.  I am balancing one sheet in one hand while trying not to drop the phone. 

And then I hear his words.  “Thank you for believing in me.”   He called just to say his thanks.  And tears quickly spring to my eyes.  Nothing elaborate.  Just a simple “thank you” turned my crazy, chaotic day into a memory that will last for a lifetime.  The act of believing, the words of encouraging, the time of investing…he noticed and he gave back.  My heart stills within me.  Love overwhelms and I give my “thankful” back to the Lord. 

How blessed I am to have a father who lives with integrity.  This moment is good…and I offer up my praise to the good-moment Maker! 

Hurting…My Thankful This Day

How a heart can break.  In the early morning light, my heart is laid bare, and the hurt seems so big, so overwhelming.  Too quickly I forget that “we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and things not of this world”.  Too often, my war is fought against the wrong enemy.  Far too often I loose my focus, I forget, and I hurt. 

Deep, gut-wrenching sobs rack my body…tears fall across my keyboard as I type.  I don’t want to forget.  I don’t want to hurt.  But sometimes only the hurt can bring the healing needed for my soul.  Sometimes only the hurt can open my eyes.  Sometimes, in hindsight mostly, hurt can be a great and dear friend.  For God uses that hurt to bring me to the foot of the cross.  That hurt turns my eyes up.  That hurt…helps. 

So, I embrace the hurt.  This morning, in the breaking light of the dawn, that very hurt is my “Thankful” this day. 

Change me Lord.  From the inside out, change this heart of mine until it no longer resembles me at all!  Make me a mirror of You, precious Savior, Father. 

Loving the Body Of Christ

I love the body of Christ.  All of our quirks, abnormalities, differences, I love them all!  We are so different, and in that is amazing beauty!  None of us are perfect!  As much as we would like to think we are, we aren’t!  And when you put a bunch of us together, you can truly see all those imperfections shine!  But the flip side of that, the HAPPY side of that, is that all those fabulous, wonderful, Christ-qualities shine out as well!  God’s glory starts to weave it’s way through all of us…His goodness and grace start seeping into relationships and moments of togetherness…and Jesus is suddenly evident like never before!  It’s supernatural!  And it is glorious! 

But why do we run from those beauty-making moments?  Why, when things start to get just a little sticky…when we begin to notice our brothers and sisters working out and working through their imperfections and struggles, do we tuck tail and run the other way!  We had rather judge their faults and blast their wrongs instead of pray grace over their lives and encourage their weakness til strength is found!  We are always growing.  God is always weeding junk out of our lives…He is constantly molding us and pruning us…our relationship with Him is a DAILY walk.  We haven’t “arrived” at some spiritual place of grandeur where we get to sit and critique everyone else’s walk with Christ.  We are all in the same boat!  We are all dirty rotten sinners saved by the gracious and loving hand of God the Father.  There is nothing in us that is good!  Nothing!  Only by the shed blood of Jesus Christ can God look upon our hearts!  We all have a common enemy…one who is prowling around looking for someone to devour!  So shouldn’t we be a unified force, coming together with the soul purpose to show God’s glory?  If only we would be patient with one another, and let prayer become our “crutch” instead of idle gossip disguised as “concern” in our Christian circles.  If we would love each other long enough to watch God’s miraculous hand weave in and out of hearts, we would see the super-natural, awe-inspiring, miraculous sign of repentance that only God can bring about in people’s lives!

But we don’t want to wait around on THAT, now do we?  We see the wrong in people’s lives, we are quick to judge and point out that wrong, and then when that person doesn’t “change” b/c of the pointing out we have done, we become impatient with them and turn our backs!  Instead of continued prayer over that person, we “dust our feet of them” all too quickly and move on.  How dare they not change!  We forget that it takes the conviction of the HOLY SPIRIT to  change lives!  My “pointing out” may be a stepping stone, an eye-opener, but not a life-changer!  Lives can only be changed through the Holy Spirit! 

I think we miss out on many of God’s greatest blessings b/c we give up on people too fast!  We get frustrated and walk away too soon!  We quit praying, I mean REALLY, DOWN ON OUR KNEES, TEARS POURED OUT, kind of praying for others!  And then, when God comes down from heaven and touches that soul, when that spirit is moved and sin is confessed and a life is changed, we aren’t there to witness it!  We aren’t there to glory in God’s amazing grace b/c we have too quickly forgotten that His same grace is what changed our heart, convicted us of our sin, waited patiently on our stubborn will, and we have piously walked away. 

My prayer is that I will wait on the LORD!  That I won’t get ahead of His Spirit moving in our midst.  I pray that I can love the body of Christ patiently and forgivingly.  I pray that I can stand in the gap, down on my knees, humbly waiting and watching for Christ to move those mountains and and create “water-walkers” all around me!  He is God! He is good!  He is big!  And He is doing big stuff in the people’s lives all around me!  I want to see those blessings unfold! 

Some Reasons Why We Homeschool…

It’s 3:47am and I am awake.  My heart is restless within me.  I can’t sleep b/c I have a million and one thoughts running through my mind…and writing them down helps me establish importance within my soul.  I’m sorting through some major questions in my brain, and since this is my blog, I will use this outlet to figure a few things out!

Question #1:  Why do we homeschool?  Homeschooling isn’t easy!  It isn’t some lame excuse of a way to get out of getting up early and making lunches and putting kids on the bus.  It isn’t our way of saving gas money in not having to run all over the place taking kids to and from school.  Homeschooling in our family is a hard, yet beautiful commitment!  We choose to homeschool b/c we want to instill in our children more than just a secular education.  Reading, writing, math, science, social studies….all of those things are important!  We spend countless hours choosing curriculum, praying over what will suit our children’s learning styles best, preparing lessons and teaching those lessons to little minds and hearts.  But deeper still than educating their minds, we want to educate their hearts in the depth of God’s Word and His ways.  Children are so impressionable at these young, tender ages.  I want to impress God’s way into their hearts, to teach them the importance of living for Christ and lay a foundation in their life rich in the ways of God so that when they are older, they will KNOW how to stand for HIM when faced with adversity, difficulties, and peer pressure.  The world is so big, so aggressive, so hungry to deceive our minds and lure us into it’s way of thinking.  Homeschooling provides such an amazing opportunity for me as a mother to spend time weaving the fundamentals of following after Christ into the day in and day out of education and living in this world but not becoming indoctrinated by it!  It is such a fine line, a hard line to distinguish and we think as a society that our children are ready to figure this out at the age of 5? 6? 7?  And these days, with preschool so popular, we throw our children out there in the world at the ages of 3 and 4! (Preschool is an entirely different post I could write about…but I’ll save that one for another day!)  We have these precious little people in our care for such a short time!  We have to make these years count!  One day, far too soon, they will be at the age where they won’t want to listen to what we have to say.  The world is grabbing and trying to grasp their attention at every loop and bend!  Through television, advertisements, movies, music, entertainment as a whole,  the world screams at our children that it can offer them so much more!  Our time with them is limited! And in that limited time, I want to teach my children what IS important, what will last for eternity, that this world is but for a moment and we are placed upon this earth for one ultimate reason!  And that reason is to bring glory and honor to our Creator!  This life isn’t about us!  It isn’t about having fun or becoming bigger and better at whatever it is that we are doing!  It is about pointing others to the cross!  It is about Kingdom building!  Christ-Kingdom!  And when I think of sending my children off for 7-8 hours a day to have a system (which I don’t even respect or trust)  instill in my children what THEY deem important and acceptable, that just screams a BIG FAT NO! 

Not only is homeschooling meeting my expectations in a spiritual manner for my children, but I am able to work with my kids in a one on one environment where learning is faster and more efficient!  I am able to pin-point their struggles quickly.  And then we are able to work on those areas specifically. As soon as they grasp a concept, we are able to move on to the next, we don’t have to wait for anyone to catch up.  

For me as a mother, it isn’t an easy task to undertake!  I spend hours and hours of preparing and then teaching!  But it is so worth every minute of my time.  The joy and exhilaration of  that moment when one my kids grasps a concept we have been studying, it is beyond words or explanation!  And when I watch my kids sharing with each other, serving one another, loving on each other…it brings such a peace to my spirit, and to our household. 

I’m not a super-mom either.  I have plenty of moments of impatience and insanity!  Days when I just don’t remember why we have chosen this path!  But God will gently whisper into my heart and I am reminded once again.  We are not perfect.  We are no different than anyone else.  Homeschooling doesn’t make me a better parent than my neighbor.  I am not taking pride in my commitment.  Homeschooling is a blessed opportunity that I never ever want to take for granted.  Can you instill all of these character traits in your child and still send them to public school?  Most definitely.  But I believe that you have to be deliberate and have much resolve in the time you have with them at home.  Will I forever homeschool?  I can’t answer that question this morning b/c I don’t know what the future holds.  I do know that while they are young, I want to teach them and direct them as much as possible.  I want to provide as many opportunities to instruct them in the ways of the Lord as I can!  Homeschooling provides one of those opportunities.

Parenting is much bigger than changing diapers and making lunches.  Christ-parenting is a daily responsibility to teach our children how to become God-fearers, not man-pleasers!  Christ-parenting is growing our children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.  Parenting is 24/7.  We don’t “get a break”.  It’s definitely a privilege we receive from the Lord, and I don’t ever want to take it for granted ,or think of it lightly.  It’s big!  But it is so AMAZING!  I love my children…and I want to sow into their lives as much as I possibly can!  And that is why we homeschool. 

 

(There are many more reasons why we have chosen this path, but for now, this is what I needed to write down.  I will expound more later.)    Question #2:  …that will come later:)  I got carried away with question #1.  

LIVING in the Right Now!

He gives me life, and He says LIVE!  Right now, in this moment, LIVE!  Drink in the beauty of here, now.  Bask in the grace supplied for the present.  He wants us to enjoy.  He wants us to FEEL the grandeur of the mountain, serene and intense!  He wants us to be AWED over the delicate berry, so round and so blue.  He wants our senses to come alive to HIS beauty, the beauty that He created for all to see.  This creation is His handiwork.  His masterpiece.  The tree bent low.  The caterpillar so intricate.  The tundra so soft.  The breeze blown across the meadow, whispering words from the very lips of the Creator Himself. 

“Don’t worry about tomorrow…”  Christ speaks with wisdom.  He knows that worry will cause us to miss out on this day, this moment dipped in majesty and glory.  He longs for us to be still.  To slowly open our eyes and LOOK.  “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  He appeals to our senses for He designed them for His glory. 

So, He calls…and I hear.  My soul stops its frantic searching and planning for the next moment, and I begin to live in this one.  My long list of schedules and “to do’s” fade from sight and I SEE my Savior ALIVE AND ACTIVE right now.  This day is a gift He has granted me.  This breath is given from GRACE Himself.  I lay aside the stress of responsibility and I embrace the wild, the adventure of being HIS!  All the chores will still be there tomorrow…but right now the opportunity exists to run free!  To  dance with arms stretched wide, face turned up toward the warmth of the sun, and smile spread from ear to ear!  This minute of wild abandonment will fuel the next with joy and inexpressible contentment!  For everywhere, in everything, God is near and I will rejoice and LIVE!

Tuesday Morning…

Women.  We sit around a circle.  Each one carrying a story all her own.  We laugh nervously as greetings are passed back and forth, one to another.  We fill the awkward silence with timid questions and quiet smiles.  Everyone trying to find her place.  This group of women, from the youngest of girls to the most seasoned of grand-mothers.  We are all here, all trying to connect in some form or fashion.  Our hearts yearn for unity, to find relationship, to be knitted together on common ground.  A prayer is uttered and the floor is opened.  The question has been poised.  Who will answer first?  Who will open her heart wide and let all of us inside?  Who will bear her soul and allow us to look deep within? 

And then she raises her hand and begins her praise.  She is thankful.  She, who only weeks before buried her most treasured friend.  Her dear sweet grandmother had gone to be with Jesus… She is thankful.  Her eyes speak of peace no earthly explanation can expound.  She sings her Creator’s praise back to Him with genuine gratitude and my heart is stirred within me. 

I listen, spellbound, as each woman opens her heart and allows us to catch a glimpse of the beauty and workings of our great God and King within her.  One by one, she gives glory and testimony to the proof that we indeed serve a RISEN LORD. 

Another explains the humility God has brought upon her, and she is grateful.  In her embarrassment, she is able to see the graciousness of God and again, is so very thankful.  We laugh, deep belly laughs with her, and I marvel.  This quiet, reserved woman is able to offer her story up with joyful happiness over a most humiliating event. 

We move through each story, each testimony, and each is the same, yet so different and unique.  God is weaving His grace through each of our lives and is creating this beautiful masterpiece.  I am truly speechless in response.  Tears flow freely down tender faces.  Tears that speak of years of heartache and sadness.  Tears that testify of hardship and disappointment.  But through those tears, praise is lifted up and glory is placed at the feet of Christ.  How?  Why?  She utters her gratefulness over years of hurt, b/c it was through that hurt that she truly found her most precious Savior.  She recognized Him sweeter and more faithful as she faced the storms of life than she ever did sailing through on a perfect day. 

Another stands firm in the face of fear and claims the victory that her God has promised!  She refuses to give in!  She will not worry!  She will stand with resolve before an enemy defeated!

I listen.  I watch.  These women God has created, chosen to be His own!  We can come together, in the middle of our hectic, busy schedules, and we can offer up sweet smelling sacrifices to our Lord.  We can praise Him together b/c we have seen Him.  We have felt His presence.  We have experienced His conviction. We have humbled ourselves under His authority.  We have been embraced by the same Father.  We are more than just women sitting around a table on a Tuesday morning.  We are sisters.  We are family, brought together under the most glorious name of Jesus!  My soul sings!  My heart skips a beat!  This is living!  This is testifying.  This is good.  I am thankful. 

Transitioning…

I stand in his doorway as tears fall freely down my cheeks.  He is sleeping in his big-boy bed!  My baby is no longer in his crib.  The soft sobs shake my body.  Where has the time gone?  It is speeding by so quickly.  I can barely keep up.  These precious moments with these sweet little angels.  They seep through my fingers like grains of sand…how I ache to hold on!  Sometimes I want to capture this minute in a bottle and never let it go!  Foolishness, I know.  But the desire is so overwhelming at times.  I don’t know why this moment caught me so off guard?  It crept up on me…too sudden maybe?  My sweet husband walks quietly down the hallway, embraces me in a hug as my tears stain his shirt.  He holds me knowingly.  My heart about the burst. 

 

And then the Lord ushers in His comfort…so quickly that it almost steals my breath away.  He gently reminds me that there is a way to make these moments last for all eternity.  Count them.  Number these seasons of grace and praise them back to Him.  And so I hurriedly grab a pen start writing…

…548. little chubby arm, wrapped tight around his monkey love, satisfied grin playing on his lips…sleeping in his big-boy bed!

…549. deep, knowing embrace from husband standing in a darkened hallway.

…550. an aching hurtful heart, a reminder to count the moments, to record the graces God sprinkles throughout each day!

I will choose to walk slowly…to savor each breath as a gift, a treasure straight from the heart of my Savior!