May 3, 2012

• Today

  Today has been a day…86,400 seconds worth of a day (well, it’s still continuing, but you get the idea), as Alistair Begg noted on the radio.  I miss hearing him at 9:00 p.m., but since Truth for Life has been moved to 12:30 p.m., I only hear him on week days that I’m home…which, during the school year, isn’t often.  I’ve been home today due to a doctor’s appointment that got rescheduled after a substitute was already secured, rendering the purpose of the day moot, at least in regards to a reason to take off school…until I awoke…after 9:00 a.m., exhausted, feeling lethargic and unwell and with a headache that has lasted ’til now (perhaps the Excedrin will kick in while I write).

  As usual, I have so many thoughts swirling in my head…and don’t get nearly enough of them on paper…or typed out as the case may be…to justify the time spent on them in my mind.  That brings me to one area in which God has been louder and more loudly speaking to me–the amount of time spent on things that don’t matter for eternity…on things that just. don’t. last.  To begin with, I’m restricting computer usage, well, *internet* usage…and will probably restrict more of it in the days ahead.  Ironically, that might cause me to write here more, in that one of the things that I don’t do, but would like to do more, is to write…and because of other, more mindless, transient internet usage, I don’t.  I am restricting the more aimless internet usage not because the internet is bad–it’s a thing.  It’s amoral.  But the way in which it is used is done for good or for evil, as the user does, and this user has far too many millions of seconds that are lost somewhere in a bejewelled cyberspace, never to be seen again.  I don’t want to that to be the epigram of my life.

  I have been dealing with the aftermath of a series of small decisions that led to a bigger issue (another major theme of late) here in the kitchen today.  Last fall, I ‘didn’t get around to’ taking care of the garden hose outside from last summer.  At first, it ‘wasn’t that cold’ (and really, it wasn’t!).  Then, I can’t tell you how many 60 degree days we had in this, our third? second? warmest winter on record.  Thirdly, we had NO Snow Days this year WHATSOEVER.  None.  I can’t tell you the last time that happened, either.  Fourthly, to take care of the garden hose would have required the work of doing it, of getting ‘filthy’ and then, too, of doing something with my flea-ridden garage, thanks to some nasty creature that got locked in there for three weeks last summer, the fleas of which refused to die, even after four flea bombings.  So the garden hose stayed attached to the house spigot, the winter was winter and got cold, but never that cold, and after an 80 degree, warmest March ever on record, I arrived home from my warm and sunny! Minnesota Spring Break to find that it was scheduled to get down to 29 degrees that night and my bursting-out-in-Summertime-March strawberry plants were in danger of losing their happy white blossoms to the evil, killing frost.

  No fear!  I read Farmer Boy as a girl and I know how to save the corn crop from an Upstate New York Fourth of July Eve killer frost!  And what will work for that will work for strawberries, I am certain!  All I need do is make sure that the strawberries are well-soaked with water before the sun hits them and then they will survive and I will be enjoying sweet, red deliciousness near the end of May!   So, thanking God for modern technology that would not have me out of bed hauling water in buckets from a well at 3:00 a.m., I attached the sprinkler to the garden hose and set about manipulating my contraption with the strawberry plants in the garden in the very chilly (36 degrees) dark of 10:30 p.m. after having driven in from Chicago that day, and from Minneapolis the day before.  Only the sprinkler wouldn’t work.  There was just NO reasonable water pressure.  I messed with it for 10 or 15 minutes before finally concluding that weak water pressure was better than no water pressure and I would simply set my alarm for 7 o’clock the next morning to make sure the water was well enough distributed with about fifteen minutes to spare before the sun touched it’s killing rays on my frost-fearful plants.  So I went inside.  And heard water running in my house.  Loudly.

  Two steps down the basement stairs, I dashed back up them, out the back door and ’round to the side of the house to turn off the water, that wasn’t coming out of the sprinkler very well because more than half of the water that should have been coming out of the house into the garden hose was being doused all over my basement.  From the pipe that had had a sizable hole in it because the hose (with water in it) was kept attached to the spigot last fall instead of removed, as one should take five minutes and do, and the water in the hose had frozen back into the house and when it went as far as it could freeze in the house, it burst the pipe.  I went back inside, had a moment or two of tears that tried to add to the overall water total, gave up on that drenchingly purposeless and further exhausting idea, gave thanks to God that this wasn’t sewage water (perspective, how I love thee!), and then set about trying to salvage what I could of my boxes of ‘momentos’ that had been in the ‘safe’ corner of the basement during the previous sewage floods, and that were now inches deep in garden hose water.  I got to sleep some time after 3:00 a.m. and was back up before 7:00 a.m., attempting (and, thank You, God, apparently successfully) to save the strawberries.  And in the meantime, my kitchen/dining/bathroom/living room floors became covered with drying ‘momentos’.

  And this is where I’ve been for the past several years, most especially since my body went crazy on me four years ago.  Since April 5, I have had the remnants of that mini-saga about me, and have only made minimal, slow progress in dealing with all of it.  This time, it’s this flood, but at seventy points past, it’s been seventy other things.  Something out-of-the ordinary will happen, and while it is not an easy or convenient thing, it is certainly not a ‘gigantic’, life-stopping thing.  And yet, I will allow it to throw a two week/two month/two year wrench into my ‘dealing with it’, and I allow myself to become paralyzed with the ever-growing “I can’t handle this!”-ness of it.  I never used to be this way.  I don’t like living this way and it is certainly not how I believe God would have me to use His resources of time, home, energy, things or provisions.

  I feel rather like the deeply seeded thistle weeds that are in my garden area, especially the kitchen garden and the back-of-the-garage garden, that continue coming up faster than my good plants and continue coming up no matter how many of them are pulled up by the roots.  Somewhere, somehow, at some time, they took hold deep in the dirt and while other weeds can/have been/are eradicated, those persist–painfully, plentifully, and regardless of all efforts to get rid of them, both at surface and root levels.  Somehow, in my life, I have gotten to the place that even ‘small weeds’ grow quickly and crazily into large, good-plant-killing weeds that take over my life, home and energy and far too often, I just give up and let the weeds win, rendering myself unfruitful in so many ways.  And yet, although I have had to learn to not freak out about things that I don’t like (in this case, my house and by consequence, many areas of my life, being a mess) in order to not over-agitate my body,  there is no question that these life-sucking weeds of disorder, laziness, and overwhelm-ed-ness suck the nutrients from my soul (and certainly don’t help my body, either!), keeping me from being fruitful and productive in the ways God would have me to be fruitful and productive, living in the freedom in which God calls us to live–not enslaved to anything, save our One, Good Master.

  This must change.  God has been telling this to me for awhile…over a year, actually.  *sigh*  I’m a slower learner on some things than others.  But this must change.  One thing I have discovered that I use to drown out the ‘I’m buried!  I must act!  But I don’t know where to begin!  And I know I wont’ finish!’ voice is over-usage/wasteful usage of the internet.  When something is ‘too big to tackle in the next 20 minutes’, instead of getting 20 minutes further into the project, I much more easily, lazily and slothfully check facebook, read news articles, play a mindless (only 1 minute!) game, go searching for something interesting to read because I can’t find any articles in the eight websites I just skimmed…anything to get out of 20 minutes of progress that, if applied three times daily, four times weekly, would have me out of my current mini-disaster, whatever it is, in just a few short days.  Out of my 86,400 seconds?  I shudder to think of how many are lost in the abyss of Time Wasted.

  In the past three months in thought, in the past two weeks in action, thanks be to God for His great patience, this is bit by bit, decision-by-decision, action-by-action changing.  I am a long way off from where I know God wants me.  But I have begun walking in that direction, and by His mercy, grace and strength, I plan to continue walking that direction, and am working to run in that direction.

  It will take continued time; it will take continued effort; it will take continued, consistent obedience and it will take repentance and re-continued obedience when I don’t do it and then have to do it, again.  But I am making changes in the life and home He’s given me, God wants me to continue to make changes in the life and home He’s given me and faithful is He Who called me, Who also will do it!  My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest strain but wholly lean on Jesus’ Name.  I have demonstrated time and again that I am weak and unwilling/unable to do all that I need to do on my own.  I must look to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of my faith, Who, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, scorned its shame and sat down at the right hand of God the Father, considering Him Who did not grow weary and give up.

  There is a great comfort and confidence in praying to a God Whom you *know* wants to AND will answer your prayer.  ”For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy; giving thanks to the Father Who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in Whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.”  …from Colossians 1.

  I began this year wanting to make some changes and even posting about some changes I was making, particularly in the area of reading.  By God’s grace, I’ve been successful in some of those…I am still making my way through the Old Testament (I Samuel 22, currently), and will post another time about the reading list updates.  Reading changes aren’t the only things God has been working on in my life.  There are many, many.  Well-using His time so as to be a better stewardess of the life He’s given me is another needed change, and a big one.  How utterly thankful I am to serve a merciful God Who is willing to step out of timeless eternity into, not only the 86,400 seconds per-day that He’s ordained for us humans, but into the even-more-elongated, oh-so-often-so-slow pace of my personal growth in order to make me more like His Son and to perfect the work that He began.

  In truth, I feel rather ridiculous that such is an area of needed growth at this point in my life.  I feel as though this should be in the ‘my-parents-taught-me-this-when-I-was-four-and-it’s-stuck-with-me-the-rest-of-my-life-and-I’m-so-grateful-to-them-for-this-essential-life-lesson’ clear.  And to be clear, fair and truthful they did!  This massive failure of wise actions, as anyone who knows me can tell you, is something that has really come out in the past five years, for, probably, various reasons.  Regardless of the reasons for its arrival in my life, however, it is something that must change, and on which I am utterly dependent on God…because it’s abundantly clear that I am not going to succeed on my own.  I am not worthy of God’s faithful work in me, but I am so desperately, exceedingly thankful for it.  One Day, He will finish that work, may Jesus Christ be praised!  And in the meantime?  I must obey…one minute, one step, one decision, one action at a time.  ”Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”  Philippians 2:12-13

  But we never can prove
    The delights of His love,
  Until all on the altar we lay;
    For the favor He shows,
    And the joy He bestows,
  Are for them who will trust and obey.

  Trust and obey,
  For there’s no other way
  To be happy in Jesus,
    But to trust and obey.
  ~J.H. Samis

  Oh…and those strawberries?  This is me giving thanks to their most gracious Creator for the delightfully delicious firstfruits…literally.

  

   

  • 8:32 pm
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