Category: Uncategorized (Page 18 of 71)

I’m enjoying my last hours of alone time, on my own grown up girl time, while my girl has been away at a weekend youth retreat.  I’ve heard from her off and on.  She’s having a rich and wonderful time.  It makes my heart happy.  I love that she has other adults who are pouring into her, coming alongside her.  I love that she’s listening.

But this morning, I sit with my wet hair drying into curls and decide that while the kitten is away, the Mama cat will visit a friends’ church and see what God looks like there.  I love to walk into a body of His kids that I don’t know and take the pulse.  It reminds me that I am not the center of the universe and, in fact, that God is not limited to the doors of one church, one set of people, one way of doing things.  He is a wonderful stew of sights and sounds and people and life pounding in our veins.

I drink my coffee and listen to the birds outside.  I can’t stress enough to you how much I love that sound.  So I will not try.  Just know I love birds and how they sing.  I look out my kitchen window and see two deer curled up content in my back yard.  I love that they feel safe enough to lay down.  I consider a picture but decide to keep the memory in my mind and not disturb them.

  I spent time this weekend with a woman who lives right round the corner from me but life had choked us busy and we’d lost touch.  “I always wanted to get to know you better,” she said “but I didn’t want to push.”  PUSH, I told her.  Sometimes we need that, sometimes I need that as it would not occur to me that someone other than me felt like that.  We sat four hours talking all things life, big and small.  Her son is severely autistic and I listen to her tell me what it feels like to have others see him as a disease.  I take in how selfless her choice to bring her mother in to live with her family, already full to the brim with a pilot husband and three grandchildren that she takes care of on a regular basis.  “I’m sorry if I talk too much.  Sometimes people ask how you are and they don’t really want to hear your story.”  I do, I tell her.  I do.

She tells me about her best friend who died and how she can picture us three sitting together in that restaurant, how she missed her.  “You’re like her in a lot of ways.”  And I get chills. I knew they’d known one another.  I did not know they were close.  It’s her boy at my school that I’ve come to love.  It’s the second time I’ve felt like I’m following in her footsteps. It makes sense to me more now.  The conversation feels appointed.  “Keep praying, keep loving.  I’ll show you how,”  I hear whispered in my spirit.

She dropped me off in front of my house.  “So, it’s okay to call sometimes, to just show up?  Jan and I used to do that.  But some people don’t like that.”  Yes, friend.  Yes.  Just call.  Just show up.  It’s okay.  That’s what life and friends are for.

I bought bean bag chairs with some Christmas money to put in “my” school store.  Because I was having a problem with my prayer being answered and nowhere to put the blessing.  I’d asked for Him to hover there, to make the store a place He lived.  To take His peace and tuck it into every crevice, every shirt for sale, every conversation.  I wanted Him to be welcomed in so He could stand at the door and welcome in.  I wanted Him to be honored so that He could do miracles.  Quiet ones, loud ones, messy ones.  I wanted Him to stir us up so that we bumped up against one another.  So He gave me ideas and the means to do them.  They needed a place to sit, these blessings coming in the door each morning.  First it was bean bags, then it was a table and chairs, inherited from my son moving far away to Africa.  The first morning the kids discovered the table waiting for them in the store,  it warmed me inside bright to think of what it represented to me.  My boy flies off in search of God dreams and leaves a piece of himself behind and I watch others gather around with dreams of their own. I feel tears gather up ready to spill like happy bouquets.  But then, I cry easily so pay no attention to the sappy woman behind that curtain.

So, Chase sits next to me some mornings, he on one bean bag, me on the other, and slowly others come and sit on the carpet next to us and listen in.  It’s that listening in that spreads seeds and welcomes others into the God dream.  He tells me he writes poetry and I perk up.  I used to do that same in high school, I tell him.  What do you write about?  Mostly life like I see it, things I think about.  I tell him I would treasure being able to read it.  If he trusted me to.  Really??  He seems surprised.  I write too, I tell him.  I know about heart on paper.  If you would let me, could I share it on my blog?  He hesitates overnight.  He needs to think about it.  “It would be an honor,” he says to me the next day.  I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Shane.

Chances
By Shane Scott

Go to work every day and see the same guy.
 He always looks the same way, fire in his eyes.
His life a constant cliff hanger;
hanging off a cliff of anger

You know the word says to share the truth,
but why would he want to hear from you; yet his soul screams out,
 because it seems doubt is the only route.
He goes home that night and cries in his bed;
takes nine pills to kill the thoughts in his head
and before you know it, it’s done.  He’s dead.

Drive to the same place for lunch every day of your life,
see the same lady there, overwhelmed with strife.
You think her outside appearance says “leave me alone,” but her inside cries, “my soul needs a home.”
You don’t want to talk about the One who conquered sin.
You would rather see her soul rot within.
The lady goes out that night, looks down at a text and gets hit on the left side.
She’s gone, instantly dies.

You come home late, had a long day; before you go to bed and lay down,
you have a heart attack and hit the ground.
Your soul ascends up the stairs, to the judgment seat
for God sits there.
You rejoice, for you know your fate
but you see the others there that await.

God opens the door just for you;
as you walk, you look back at the other two.
They sing a symphony of cries, a horrible song;
and wonder if you knew all along.
But then they fall down those firey rings……

and suddenly, you wish you had said something.

I stepped onto the school gym floor very early this morning feeling a particular charge in the air.  A sense of urgency, really, coming from outside myself.  Like?  The Father had been waiting on me.  He wanted to talk to me.  I plugged in Chris Tomlin singing I Will Follow and reached my hand up to Him, open and eager to lay it all out there and give up my agenda.  God, what does it even mean to follow You?   Show us.  Show us where You are.  And we will go there.  I’ll tell my friends and bring them along.

My word for months, the one I kept hearing in my spirit, was “abide”.  I looked it up, the meaning, and grabbed hold tight and let it live in my head and my heart.  Here lately, though, the word, words, seem to have changed.  “Stop striving.”  So, I opened my Bible to the Psalm numbered the same as today.  “God is present in the circle of the righteous.”  It was then that I sensed He was here.  HERE.  And waiting to hear from us.  So I began praying in earnest, not for what I thought He should do?  But for Him to show us what He wanted to do.  And God?  Give us eyes to see, ears to hear, spirits eager to follow.

Later I sat in the circle of the righteous, my friends here at school, and it was good.  I found names and faces scrolling through my mind as I listened to them talking and I wrote them down.  I grabbed up my paper and went to find a quiet space to pray.  I ended up on a corner couch, sitting in the morning sun and began to pray over the name of a young lady I only know by name.  I looked up to see her coming toward me, the only person in the hallway.  I had to let her know, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, the God of the Universe was thinking of her through me, a total stranger.  “Is your name _________?” I asked her.  Yes, she replied with a question mark at the end.  “You want to know something crazy?  I was just praying for you.  And I don’t even know you.”  It was the look on her face that told me I’d heard right.  A look that hardly has words for it.  Like He’d just said it to her Himself…..I’ve got you in my sights, daughter….and she’d heard Him.  “Really??  Wow.  That is wild.  Wow.”  I knew He meant to change her life.

Later, the boy came by, right through the door, not hiding behind anyone, not avoiding.  Standing full front in front of me, looking me in the eye.  “Thank you for the special gum you gave me yesterday!  She gave me a bag of special gum!” he said to the other kids in the room.  I’d just asked this morning.  Father?  If you mean to restore, will you bring him to me?  I’d let him down and he ran.  When he walked out of the store, I sat with chills running down every part of me.

“Stop striving.”