Six Months

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Even during the hard times, time passes faster than you expect. It’s already been six months since my husband passed. I thought the day would bring an onslaught of tears, but not so far. My mind is busy with my to-do List and Cooper, my Brittany, wants to play and cuddle. Those ease my heartache and loneliness.

Last night I visited my son and his family. My two granddaughters both hugged me and told me how much they love me. That moment will stay with me for the rest of my life.  

Not only that, but it seems that on every trip to the grocery store I end up in conversation with another woman.

Last week, as I passed the jams and jelly section, I overheard a woman mutter, “I don’t need three jars of jam.”

I paused at the ache in her voice.

I asked, “Is the reason you don’t need three jars the same reason I don’t either?”

“Yes.”

“How long has it been?”

She answered, “Four years.”

“Almost six months for me.”

“You know what I miss the most?”

“What?”

She held out her arms. “Hugs.”

I didn't hesitate to hug her back.  

Only God could orchestrate two widows meeting in the jam aisle and exchanging hugs.

God is with me no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

“…for he himself has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5.

“Dear Lord, I am forever grateful. Amen.”

 

A New Adventure

Orignal Photo by Author

My brother-in-law (my late husband’s brother) calls this next phase of my life a new adventure. I suppose it could be called that. However, it isn’t one I chose. Then, most heroes and heroines are pushed by some force or purpose to take on a challenge — otherwise there wouldn’t be a story. While this wasn’t my first choice, God smoothed the journey.

The rental market is tough. Homes rent within minutes of their online posting. Through divine intervention, my inquiry into the one I’m living in was the first. Delays in scheduling a viewing aligned with my arrival in the area. After some initial hesitation, the landlord accepted Cooper, a larger dog than she usually approves.

Add in, God has provided me with the funds to secure the deposits and moving costs, leaving me with ample income for years to come.

Besides all that, the home is more than I expected with downsizing. It has many of the amenities I enjoyed in my old home, plus a breathtaking view from the front window and porch. The neighborhood has numerous walking trails and parks dotted with tall Ponderosa pines. Snowcapped mountains line the horizon.

The small town consists of quaint coffeehouses, art galleries, specialty shops, and eateries. No large department stores or strip malls. Activities abound with live concerts, art shows, and more events than I can name. Everyone I have met so far is friendly, outgoing and helpful. For more shopping, a large town with every imaginable store is twenty-five minutes away.

My son and his family are close. In fact, my granddaughter’s school is just around the corner. My other son and daughter are only a few hours’ drive away. (Compared to the eight and ten-hour drives from my old home. )

Other than still missing my husband, this adventure has a happy ending, thus far. But it’s not over yet. There will be more adventures to come, filled with challenges and setbacks, interspersed with beautiful, sweet moments. That’s life. We can choose to see it as an adventure, or wallow in self-pity. I have my moments when I indulge in the latter, but it’s over quickly. How can it not, considering the beautiful resting place, and wonderful support system God has blessed me with? More than I imagined.

Dear Lord, there isn’t a way to fully thank you for all the blessings you’ve given me. All I can offer in return is my gratitude and unconditional love. Amen. 

Back to Basics

With summer now in full swing, I’m out in the yard early to avoid the heat. Unfortunately, I let that momentum carry on throughout the day, jumping from one task to another. My husband commented on how I never seem to stop.

I took his words to heart.

I’ve gone back to keeping a To Do List. Not so I can accomplish more, but to keep me from piling on more than is necessary. I try to be flexible with it, moving or skipping chores when needed—without feeling guilty.

Besides yoga and my other exercises, I’ve also gone back to using Dr. Emmett Miller’s Letting Go of Stress. 

I first became a believer when I had a horrible stiff neck that prescription muscle relaxers wouldn’t touch. My husband suggested I try the CD. He had discovered Dr. Miller during a police training seminar on handling stress and found it very effective. Dr. Miller is a medical MD and an early promoter of a holistic approach to medical treatment.  One session and my stiff neck was gone.

My devotions added another way to look at my day. The word bless means to set apart or consecrate for holy purposes. Now that I know the true meaning of the word, I’m more cognizant of what I ask God to bless and endless, unnecessary chores don’t fall into that category.

There’s been a difference in my attitude these last few days since I’ve gone back to these basics. I get less irritated, and amazingly, I have more energy.

This time I hope these changes stick.

Dear Lord, help to keep my focus on your will rather than mine. Amen.

 

 

Mother's Day Heaven Previews

Original Photo by Cecilia Marie Pulliam

My views out my windows this last week have been extraordinary. If our broken, imperfect world is this beautiful, imagine heaven! 

I wish all of you mother's a wonderful Mother's Day filled with love and many, many blessings. May God always hold you close to Him. Amen. 

Has It Been a Wonderful Life?

Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay 

I originally posted this in December of 2014. It popped up in one of my social media memories and it resonated with me again this year. 

The classic movie, It's A Wonderful Life, has been a tradition at Christmas for as long as I can remember, and for just as long its premise has haunted me for days afterward. If I had not been born, would anyone's life be affected? I agree with Clarence, very few can truthfully answer that question beyond immediate friends and family. Even then, would their lives be affected that much?

I haven't found the cure to any disease or initiated the end to any injustices. I haven't written a book worthy of the Pulitzer or done any deed that warranting the Nobel for Peace. In fact, those closest to me would say the opposite is more likely. St. Paul had it right. Why do I do the evil which I wish not and not do the good that I wish?

And yet, if God will bless someone like me with His miracles, love and compassion, then everyone in the whole world has an equal chance. 

I've seen rainbows and lilies appear when I needed their messages of hope. I've had visions, premonitions, and divine encounters in which God has told me how much He loves me. I've been loved and cared for. I have loved and cared for others. I have been blessed with talents I've been allowed to share with others. I've laughed and cried, rejoiced and sorrowed. I've been ill and been healed. I've been devastated financially and been delivered.

Thus, even if I haven't managed to right wrongs, win a Pulitzer or save the world, it has been a wonderful life - and it isn't over yet.

Can you say it's been a wonderful life?

A Hard Lesson

 

Image by James Chan from Pixabay 

I’ve read the parable of the generous employer in Matthew 20:1-16 several times. I empathize with the men who grumbled about the unfairness of being paid the same for working all day compared to laborers who worked only one hour.

In trying to understand Jesus’ point about God’s generosity, I equated it to the Good Thief. He repented only hours before his death and gained a place in heaven with Jesus, the same as those of us who have been practicing our faith longer. Rather than jealousy, I rejoice in knowing God will give me the same compassion.

However, Paul Pennick stated in Living Faith, Jesus had something else in mind with this parable. “This is a lesson on coveting someone else’s good fortune.”

I don’t begrudge financial aid to the disabled, the unemployed, or the ill. They are unable to work. But it still galls me that those who are able, have the opportunity, and still refuse to work receive the same benefits as those who work long, hard hours.

The fact the last laborers lingered in the marketplace at such a late hour only because no one had hired them, mollifies my sense of fairness, somewhat.   

With that in mind, I need to remember God sees into our hearts and gives us what we need according to His wisdom, not ours. If He blesses someone with what I think is more than they deserve, who am I to question His generosity? I certainly haven't earned all the blessings He's given me. 

Dear Lord, help me rejoice in another’s good fortune, even if it seems unfair. Amen.  

Thankful

It isn’t always easy to be thankful when the road gets rough. When illnesses, financial crisis, and death strike, I want to give into doubts, fear, and complaining, but God loves me too much to leave me alone in my misery.

He’s sent strange messengers (The Unexpected Messenger), promises and encouragements in dreams (You’ll Never Look at the Stars Alone) and Scripture. He sent a turkey when I had no money for food (The Miracle Turkey), rainbows reminding me to trust in His promises, unexpected financial boons, confirmations, and even some chastisements (Insurance).

I am unworthy of all this attention. I doubt, argue, and complain. Not as much as I used to, but I haven’t conquered the tendency yet.  

Besides working toward more trust and less doubt, I am trying to be more generous with my money, my time, and my talents. It’s easy to round up my grocery purchase to help with needy families and the local food bank. I enjoy giving away paintings (Paintings), writing, and creating free book covers for other authors (Original Book Cover Designs). They are tiny ways I can give back.

For the rest? I’m leaving that in God’s hands. He knows far more what someone needs than I do. When I pray, I leave the outcome open to His will. As a recent meme stated, I must trust that He will get it right.

 

 

The Miracle Turkey

Photo by SJ Baren on Unsplash

This Thanksgiving my husband and I are thankful for many things, especially my recovery and cure from breast cancer. Hard to believe we will celebrate my two year anniversary this coming January. 

We also are blessed and thankful to have such a beautiful home, loving family, and good friends. 

The list goes on, but these are the topmost.

This year, besides listing the things I'm most thankful for, I want to pull a story from the archives and share this once again. Although this incident did not occur on Thanksgiving, it did involve a turkey and even after twenty some years I can't look at one without thinking of this miracle.  God does indeed clothe us, pay our bills, and does the extraordinary through the very ordinary.

My late husband had been laid off for weeks. My part-time job and his unemployment benefits barely met our basic necessities. With three kids still at home our grocery bill was bigger than our house payment and that week we were flat broke with several more days to payday. Things looked pretty grim with a bare pantry.

As I drove home, I remembered this story. 

A flood ravaged a small community, forcing many residents onto their roofs to await rescue. One man looked at the water already lapping against his ankles and realized he couldn't wait too much longer to be rescued. Desperate, he cried out to God to rescue him. God promised He would.

 A rescue helicopter appeared and lowered a rope. A rescuer yelled down for the man to grab the rope and they would hoist him up to safety. The man waved them off. God was going to rescue him and he didn’t need the helicopter. The crew shook their heads at the man’s foolishness and moved off.

Two men came by in a row boat and offered to take him with them. The man refused their help also, again stating God was going to rescue him.

A surge of water swept the man off the roof and he drowned. Standing before God he asked why He hadn’t saved him as He had promised.

God replied, “I sent you a helicopter and a row boat, what more did you want?”                                                                                                                 

Author Unknown

Whatever God sent my way, by whatever means, I would not decline the offer. I would look for and accept a helicopter or a row boat, but I didn't expect Him to send a turkey.

A twenty pound turkey, thawed and ready to cook, sat in my kitchen sink. I really didn't believe it just materialized out of thin air. Someone had to put it there, and only one person outside my family who had a key to the house, my mother.

I called her, and listened to a story almost as amazing as if the bird had suddenly materialized out of nothing.

The freezer belonging to a woman on the other side of town malfunctioned. She was able to salvage most of the food by either cooking it or transferring to the small freezer in her refrigerator, except for the twenty pound turkey. She offered it to a neighbor. The neighbor accepted it, but passed it to a friend. That friend decided she didn't want it and passed it on to someone else.

This was repeated over and over until the bird crossed town and landed at my mother's doorstep. My dad hated turkey, but Mother knew my family and I loved it. She brought it down to the house and set it in my sink just before I arrived.

I marveled at the timing. It was early afternoon and I had plenty of time to cook the large bird. As with the feeding of the five-thousand, we not only had enough for dinner, but enough to last  for several days until the next paycheck.

Since that miracle, whenever I'm faced with difficult circumstances, I think of helicopters, rowboats, and turkeys - for truly nothing is impossible with God. 

Just Two Words

Just these two words He spoke changed my life. “Enjoy Me.”   

St. Teresa of Avila

Those two words change my concept of faith.  

Enjoy Me.

Not just joy but enjoy.

Enjoy Me.

Enjoy life, family, friends, passions, home, country.

Enjoy Me.

Enjoy His unconditional love, compassion, and forgiveness.  

Enjoy Me.

No wonder St. Paul described heaven as a paradise and why so many who have had near-death experiences say they wanted to stay and not come back.

Enjoy Me.

For eternity.

These two words shifted my world, changed my faith, changed my life.

Enjoy Me.

Yes!

Concern, Worry, and Finding Peace

My father worried most of his life about many things, particularly whether he was good enough to enter heaven. During his last days, we tried to reassure him. We reminded him about God’s great love for us and His forgiveness of all our sins. I recounted the story of the Good Thief on the Cross and my visions of Jesus and heaven.

He remembered 1 Peter 4: 8: “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover a multitude of sins.” We all agreed his generosity to others would nullify any failings.  

Yet, I still I worried and prayed for him to find peace. I even begged God to be good to him — and caught my breath. What was I saying, asking God to be good to him? I bowed my head, asked for forgiveness for my lapse of faith, and gave Daddy into God’s keeping. There is not a safer place than in His presence.

This holds true of everything else too.

I can be concerned about many things without carrying the burden of worry, especially after giving them to God. Who could love us more? Who would be more dedicated to giving us eternal life in a state of perfect happiness?

Daddy loved God, regretted his failings, and had asked for forgiveness. Isn’t that all God asks of us?

God granted me a blessing during my scripture readings. As I turned from the Old Testament to the Psalms, my Bible fell open to the Book of Tobias, who was famous for his generosity, just like Daddy.  

Chapter 14: 8: “And the rest of his life was in joy, and with a great increase in the fear of God he departed in peace.”

Thank you, Abba, for giving me this undeserved consolation. Your compassion and generosity are beyond my mortal understanding and expectation. I love you! 

The Unexpected Gift

We thought we had the ivy removed from the front flower bed, but small shoots are now sprouting everywhere. It’s time to take the next step.

Most landscapers recommend covering the area with a black plastic liner. It deprives the vegetation of sunlight and water, inhibiting growth and eventually killing anything underneath it. Since this area is in the front of our home, we decided to cover the plastic with small river rock. We estimate we will need 6.2 cubic yards, which equals 6 tons.

We brainstormed various ways to minimize the amount of labor involved in transporting that much rock from the driveway to the flower bed. The simplest and easiest is a small utility dump trailer for the garden tractor. Their starting price is about as much as the gravel. My husband balked at spending more money on garden tools, and we put off the decision.

Christmas Optimist, Pessimist, Idealist, or Realist?

We idolize the holidays, believing this special season changes the entire world and everything and everyone in it. Like Chuck Griswold, we become overly optimistic, believing in the ideal of the perfect family Christmas. Life is built on the imperfect, and we are usually greatly disappointed for one reason or another when our expectations are too high or unrealistic. Then we become pessimists at best and Scrooges at worst. I suggest something else - a true Optimist. An idealist who recognizes and acknowledges flaws, but chooses to focus on what is right, rather than what is wrong.

In the well known story, two boys were placed in separate rooms. One filled with every imaginable toy, the other with manure. After an hour observers went to each room to see the boys' reactions. Sure enough, the Pessimist could only complain. Nothing was right. Every toy had a flaw or defect. Noting this, the observers moved to the next room. To their amazement the Optimist was busy digging in the manure. They asked him what he was doing. His answer, "With this much manure, there has to be a horse in here somewhere!"

This holiday season will not be Courier and Ives perfect, not with family scattered across several states and cities and the usual dynamics causing conflicts and misunderstandings, or other concerns trying to push their way in to spoil it. It will be somewhere between A Christmas Story and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and with a little effort some What A Wonderful Life mixed in, filled with more blessings than I can count. 

I will go one step further. Those visitors on that first Christmas could have chosen to see only a poor family and a cold, dirty stable, but instead they saw the glory of God and the Salvation of Man, Emanuel - God With Us. 

Merry Christmas. May your holidays be blessed with love and joy in whatever form they take. 

The Other Woman

In 2 Kings 4:8-37, death claims a woman's only son. Reading about her grief dredged up memories of my husband’s death. I spent months languishing in sorrow, wishing God had taken me too. 

Unlike this woman's son, God didn't send a prophet to raise my husband from the dead. In fact, my husband returned in a dream. He told me to let him go. My tears and pleas would not bring him back. 

The following day, I made an appointment for a  haircut and dragged myself out of the house.  

The woman in the next chair was complaining about her house renovations. “After all the money we’ve spent redoing the kitchen, the new counter tops don’t match my decor. The contractor insists that’s what we ordered and refuses to change it. It makes me ill to think of shelling out more money to replace them, but I can’t go into the kitchen without bursting into tears.”

After just losing my husband of seventeen years and becoming the sole proprietor of a small business, as well as a single parent, her problem seemed shallow in comparison and I never forgot the conversation.

Now, twenty years later, my current husband and I have listed our house for sale. To my horror, I have become that woman, whining and complaining about small annoyances while others are dealing with horrific problems. How easy it is to lose perspective, caught up in the mundane and often ordinary aspects of our micro-worlds, blowing inconveniences into major tragedies. 

Life can change in a single breath. 

Worrying, even over big things, accomplishes nothing except robbing us of today’s blessings. It is a better use of our energy to be thankful for what we have and to pray for those who are not so lucky.  

Forgive me, Lord, for focusing on my small problems while others suffer. Open my heart, encourage generosity and compassion instead of shallow pleas for personal gifts. Amen.

The Not So Golden Moments of Retirement

It’s finally here, retirement. After months of planning and dreaming, the day has come, but my first few weeks weren’t the joy-filled, do-whatever-I want-time I thought it would be. Of course, I expected there would be obligations, tasks and chores, what I did not anticipate was being ill, needing a skin biopsy, and having partial laryngitis. Add in a computer crash, garbage disposal on the fritz, brand new dryer making odd noises, and a jammed tailgate on the truck. Sounds like too much fun, doesn’t it?

Retirement has been my golden egg, the place of peace and contentment, less stress ― in my imagination. I knew there would be bumps and a few rough places, but I figured those would be spaced a bit, not slam me right off the bat.

What's for Dinner

There are many weighty issues on my mind, the state of our world, the suffering of so many people, crime, wars, political scandals, personal issues. It is overwhelming.  My heart and soul are bent under the weight of it all.

I have heard all the usual axioms: think positive, don't worry about what might or might not happen, in other words don't borrow trouble. Who's borrowing? One look at the news, or an honest evaluation of my own circumstance tell me I don't need to borrow any. There's plenty of trouble right here in River City. Yes, folks, plenty of trouble.

What He Sees

My eyes were opened to another spiritual truth this week. God really does see everything. Let me repeat. God sees everything. He does see my many failures, but He also sees the morning prayer, the prayer during a lunch time walk, and even the private pleadings while hiding in the restroom at work.

He sees when I put my last few dollars into the collection plate, just as He did the woman in Mark 12: 43-44. Jesus noted she contributed not from  her abundance, but from her want. He noticed,  and I am sure He blessed her for it, although Scripture doesn't say.

God also sees the times I clamp my mouth shut instead of uttering what is really on my mind, sparing someone's feelings. He sees when I stand up for my beliefs, even when no one else notices.

He forgives the wrong and blesses the good,giving abundantly when I trust Him, and I can trust Him even when my circumstances hurt.


This means I don't have to worry about competing for His attention. Neither do I have to strive to get anyone else's attention, or covet another's good fortune. I will always have His attention, and plenty good fortune of my own, if I open my eyes and look.

And God goes further, He sees into my heart and knows my many failures are rarely a deliberate attempt at rebellion. He sees how hard I try. And, it all counts toward that moment when I stand before Him waiting to hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful Servant."