Hey Mom

Just thought you should know that just because you’ve been gone and my life has moved on it doesn’t mean that I don’t miss you. You’ve been gone now for 5 long years, and so much has changed in my life. Not all you would be happy with, but certainly I hope you would be proud of me, how I have handled myself (for the most part) and the woman I am becoming. It doesn’t ever not hurt, not having you around. Although it certainly has made as many things easier on me not having your phobias to deal with. I live right on route 59 and I am sure that would certainly have freaked you out. I sacrificed financial stability for a child, which I think you would have approved of in the long haul, would certainly have had you nerve wracked.

But I grew a family out of it, and you have missed out on that. You would love Jeramy, he is so fun to play with, very respectful and curious. I could imagine he is exactly the grandchild that you would love to have, and he would have loved you very much.

You would have been there to hold my hand through 4 miscarriages. I hope you are enjoying your grandchildren up in heaven while I miss them and you down here.

Your sister filled in for you at my wedding, but you would have loved the DJ, I had him play all the best songs, and the food was okay, but your friend Karen and Jeff made the hall look gorgeous for me, they did you proud.

I have so much more I wish I could share with you, I am sure you already know. This summer is a good one, one that takes me back to the days when we had a pool and the music was blaring and we spent all day outside. No one else likes noodle salad mom, who is gonna eat it with me anymore?

You would also love Facebook. I wish you had a page so I could post on your wall and share photos with you. If you get internet access in heaven, you can see all my pictures, especially of Jeramy. I love him so much.

Well, I have to say goodbye again. I love you and miss you more than ever.

Your daughter, Shelley

Gratitude just for today

I go to school. I am getting my bachelor’s degree, I take one class at a time, I just finished a class tonight, and have 5 classes left until I do graduate. 5 classes. Wow. Somehow it all came together that I am in school, I don’t remember how it happened, it just did. That’s grace.

I’ve been through a lot this past year. I have so much to be grateful for. 1. I have a place to live, we just resigned the lease. 2. I have a car, we have two infact that we own outright. 3. I am going to school and acing all my classes. 4. I have a husband who loves me. 5. Jeramy. 6. Our pets Abby and Phoebe. 7. My friends each deserving their own number, but to avoid favoritism all lumped under one number 8. Health care including medication (this is a big deal)9. Food, enough to eat and then some. 10. Bills  taken care of. 11 Gas in said cars and a major car repair accomplished 11. we met our IMPACT pledge at church 12 clothes on our backs and shoes on our feet 13 My salvation in Christ Jesus 14 my sister, Megan 15 other family that deserves their own bullet points but will not be listed individually …

I am overwhelmed with the magnitude to which God has provided for us despite my being unemployed. Now with unemployment coming to a close, I have been worrying about how God is going to provide, but why?

Why do I worry? Why do I freak out? God knows what I need.

And its in remembering his faithfulness that I can reduce my anxiety about the future. God is so good. I just need to remember, which is why I wrote this.

Attitude of Gratitude

I admit that the phrase makes me wanna gag. But the phrase has been chasing me and pursuing me, and finally coming to settle in my heart a bit today.

I started leading again, and leading at Celebrate the Journey is not something one does for fun. It is not easy, the people are so very broken and they look to you to have the answers. Never do I have the answers, but I know the one who does, and my job is to point to HIM. Yes, I am talking about Jesus.

Anyway I am so grateful for the opportunity to lead this small group of ladies and that they have trusted in me enough to open their hearts and their mouths and share their stories with me. God is going to use that mightily and reward them for that.

But the road is tough, I already am being told of challenges and temptations that have come since our first group. Heartbreaking, heavy stuff. Stuff I don’t know how to handle honestly. But I know someone who does, Jesus. I trust in HIM to help me and help the ladies to get through it.

I still can’t believe that people have trusted me with their stories. Its a holy honor to me. This is where the rubber meets the road, this is where the light meets the dark, this is where change happens, and I am so excited to be  a part of that.

I see a change in me, and at least that’s something good.

I am so grateful for so much that God has given me, but recently I am grateful for the attitude of gratitude that he has allowed me to experience. When you struggle with emotions, this is especially hard, and to say I am starting to feel it is a big thing.

 

Introspective from the balcony

It is too nice of a day to sit inside and type, so I am out on my balcony. I have some time to kill, so I thought I might give some attention to my poor neglected blog.

So much of my heart has gone into writing, and yet I have not been writing for a long while. Perhaps its the standby flight pattern of my life. Perhaps its the coldness of the winter.

I think it is mostly because I stopped believing in myself. I did. I have been through the roughest times of my life since I have hit 30. It has also been some of the most rewarding times. Honestly my attitude has sucked recently.

I think it comes from being let go of a job that was my world, it was my identity, and I lived and breathed it. I had no idea just how much my job had become my identity until I lost it. It wasn’t just what I did, it was who I was, and it was destroying me. Somehow  I had let it.

So I haven’t done much recently, but I really want to find out just who I am without a label, and its scary. Our real selves are supposed to be great, aren’t they? Maybe I didn’t like what I saw. Maybe I just have never had an identity that did not rely on someone or something to tell me who I was. I have been way too codependent my whole life.

Of course there is one person who I should listen to about who I am, and that is God. He says great things about me. I need to listen to those things that he says about me.I need to listen to the great things that others say about me as well, they believe in me and see some things in me that I cannot see myself.

Why is it so hard to accept the truth?

Cardinals

Not the baseball team, but the birds. There is this fabulous pair of Cardinals which live outside of my apartment in the trees, and I have gotten to enjoy their stark beauty against the gray of the winter.

I have a friend that just sent me a card with Cardinals on it and a little check inside. Stark beauty in contrast to the winter of my soul. Friends are like that to me, they meet something inside that is treasured way beyond any dollar amount could ever buy. They are the light in the darkness, the bright red against a sea of drab life.

To all my treasured Cardinals, I love you.

The rock I’ve been hiding under

It’s been nearly two months since I blogged.  I’ll admit I’ve been hiding under a rock. Depression is not something that anyone should take lightly. It steals your life and will to live. It stole mine. But you see I knew what was happening, and I am slowly but surely beginning to fight back. The biggest battle is keeping to myself. I tend to do that. I tend to ball myself up with my cat and hide under the blankies of insecurity.

Some of my friends know I’m struggling. A few know just how bad. They help me in that they still initiate conversation even when I don’t, and they have patience knowing it will just take time. In the past, I would have lost my friends because I was not able to share with them my struggles, and they didn’t understand how I was needing them so much that I pushed them away. I get that now, and I share it with them.

I’m scared of my future, I don’t know what is coming up. But I know I won’t be alone, and that makes all the difference.

On friendship…

I think I fell in love with my friend Jen when she asked me if I could help her to bless another friend. The two of us went over to her friend’s house and helped her to clean up. She was about to have a baby, and being immensely pregnant, could not do much on her own. So we helped.

Cleaning someone else’s house really helps me to realize that I am normal. I don’t feel so bad when I know that I deal with the same dirt and grime battles that they do. I don’t often see this side of people. Rarely am I invited over to other people’s messes. The clutter gets out of control everywhere, most people just seem to hide it well.

While I beat myself up for a sink full of dishes undone, it helps me to rememeber that I am not alone.

I have since done the same thing at Jen’s house. I loved working up a sweat and getting things done with her. It was so much more fun than cleaning my own home. We talked, worked, talked, worked, and talked some more. A chore became something more that brought us together than needed to be done. Accomplishing things feels good, and then there is the sense of knowing you helped someone that adds a little sparkle to the memory.

We worked so hard on cleaning the inside of her home, I think we actually cleaned a little inside of both of our hearts as well.

We all need a friend like that; someone who isn’t afraid to get dirty with you and get the work done. We all need someone who helps us clean the inside of our hearts as well as combat grime in the kitchen. As a woman, it is what I need to help me feel whole. Some people just don’t get that, but we all have our things. For some people, it’s their car, for others it’s their appearance, for me it’s my home. My home rarely meets my standards, I had to let those go. My friend Jen helps me to keep my heart up to code, even when my home is not. When I don’t feel up to par, she still loves me anyway, and that is what a friend is.

I always feel cheesy writing stuff like this, but it is what my heart needs. Take it or leave it, love me for who I am or leave me be. My real friends will know it is who I am and love me even more because of it.

Persuasive speech

I am kind of freaking out because my next assignment is a persuasive speech. I have never been the type to lean too heavily one way or the other. I don’t like it when people lean their opinions on me, and I certainly do not want to do the same.

Yet I have been persuaded by persuasion on more than one occasion. People present facts and I either act, don’t act, or tuck that nugget away in my brain for later. So perhaps maybe I can just give people some nuggets and let them decide if they want to eat them, put them in the fridge, or throw them away.

Yet how can I share my passion without feeling personally invested in it? You see, I have a person I am invested in, and I cannot wait to share this person, and the joy I have with others. For me, sponsoring a child through Compassion has become not just about me giving, but the magic of love. You see I can’t help but love my child, she amazes me. Maybe that is a gift that God gave me, maybe I am just crazy, but I love her, and something inside of me thinks that she might be able to love me back.

I want to watch her grow up strong and healthy and make good choices in her life. I want her to know that she is worthy of making those good choices.

perhaps I just want to fix some of the choices I made in my life. I didn’t believe in me, or believe that others believed in me.

Yet somehow something is different this time. I believe in me now, and nothing can take that away. Most of all, I believe in love. Love is the most powerful force that ever did or ever will exist, and somehow, some way, people will see that my love makes a difference. Hopefully they will want  a taste of that. It is all I can try for.

my topic: www.compassion.com Compassion International. If you are going to sponsor a child, this is the organization to do it through. Over 80 percent of the funding goes directly to benefit the child. That leaves less than 10 percent each on administration and advertising. And they don’t just feed the children, they help to eliminate poverty by addressing several different needs: social, educational, health, spiritual, and environmental.

These are just a few of my arguments, and with a good friend helping me on my speech, I will be well on my way to not just getting an A, but perhaps actually convincing someone to eat a nugget, or at least stash it away for later.

The Horcrux and the Christian life: Finding analogies in Harry Potter

Call me behind the times, but I am just finishing The Half Blood Prince in the Harry Potter series. We are reading the books together as a family, so no one can read ahead or get behind. I like it that way, it provides bonding way better than watching any tv show together could.

So last night we finally got to find out what a Horcrux is. Basically it is an item which a witch or wizard puts part of their soul into; in order to do it you must fracture your soul by murdering someone.

I don’t know how or why I got to thinking about soul splintering this morning, but my mind goes in spirals all the time, so I am sure I came around to it somehow. I thought about how Christians tend to split their souls when they first convert, not that they can place them into an object for preservation, but we try. You see, I think that when I first converted, I took the bad nasty part of me and tried to murder it, and set it off by itself. That nasty part of my flesh was not dead, just hanging around waiting patiently for its chance to come alive again. It is supposed to be left behind with baptism, isn’t it? So maybe the baptismal is the Christian Horcrux.

The thing is that it is a part of me, who I am and it most certainly did not die. It comes back to haunt me, as Paul has experienced himself. See Romans 7:15-20. We cannot kill the old fleshy part of us. So what is our Christianity and conversion for? Well, we have to find the hidden parts of our soul that we splintered off, and defeat them one by one. We have to bring to life the good parts, the pure parts, and feed them. We have to suffocate the parts that suffocate us, deal with pain and suffering and hurt so that we can let those old fleshy parts go. Galatians 5 describes the fleshy parts that we tried to kill, but don’t die instantly; as well as the fruit of the spirit that comes from living our new life in Christ.

Galatians 5 encourages us to walk by the Spirit, and not by the flesh.

So how do we destroy the little Horcrux splintered off parts of our self? Ignoring them won’t make them go away. We have to face them and say no to them. We have to be tempted in order to overcome temptation. The only way in which we can overcome is in the Spirit. You see we cannot do this alone, we cannot defeat Voldemort without the spirit of Christ in us. The very force that made the fleshy horcrux parts bad and exist is the very same force which will help you to defeat them. You see,  it’s because Christ didn’t just die. Christ was resurrected, defeating the very death which causes the pain and misery within us. We cannot ignore the flesh, but we need to pick up the power of the resurrection daily and follow Christ.

It is the only way which the splintered parts of who we are become whole.

It is not an easy process, nor is it instantaneous. However don’t forget that we are not alone, and that is what makes all of the difference. John 16:33 Christ says “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have overcome the world.”

Now I haven’t read yet the end, but I know that understanding the Horcrux is the key to Harry learning how to defeat Voldemort. He did a few before without really understanding what happened, but know he knows, he can be intentional about destroying the evil that comes up in his life.

This is where I find myself, 5 years into my new life I have accidentally destroyed a few Horcruxes in my life. But now I know what they are, and how they were made, and that gives me the power to find them, face them, and destroy them. It won’t be an easy process, but I am assured to win in the end. I may not have finished the Harry Potter series, but I have read the Bible, and I read the end *spoiler alert* and we win. God wins, Jesus defeats Satan and casts him into the pit. Yup, I know we win, so that should help me to always remain positive even when things seem dark and bleak.

I just have this feeling that in the end, Harry wins too.

Feudal Egypt

According to Genesis 47, once all the inhabitants of the land sold their everything to survive, the people lived and worked on Pharaoh’s land. What was due to Pharaoh was one fifth of their income. Rent was 1/5 of what they made. Pretty good deal if you ask me. Most people pay 1/3 or more of their income toward rent now a days.

Now the traditional expectation for giving back to God is a tithe. 1/10th of your total income. Most Christians still don’t tithe. Sad. I mean God created life and gave us everything, and we are so selfish as a people to keep from him what he so graciously gave us in the first place.

The people where glad to only have to give Pharaoh 1/5th but Christians just “tip” God most of the time. Seriously, think about it. 1/5 is twice the amount of 1/10. If you make 50k a year, thats 10k to Pharoah, verses 5k tithe.

Kinda makes me feel pathetic and selfish. Does it challenge your generosity? What do you put in the offering? A tip? 1/10? What does it mean to you to give back? Are you glad you have the life you do or do you hold it against God? After all, he is gracious, loving, and kind.

Giving means nothing if you don’t appreciate it. If you don’t appreciate the life you have been given back.