Genuine in the Journey

  May the joy of the season envelop your hearts and minds this holiday and may the love of Christ be evident in your lives, as we set out to remember and celebrate the birth of Christ.  This sounds like an incantation that I would have heard at the beginning of the Christmas season in church growing up.  I’m sure many still hear something very similar.  This year, however, though moments can be peaceful, and joy can be present at times, the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas was characterized by somber moments and questions as we watched my husband’s father slip away towards eternity with Jesus.   Having put him to rest on a Monday, we now seek to settle our hearts and minds towards the God that is love on a Christmas Eve Wednesday. It is important to recognize that in the midst of a season characterized by joy many of us still deal with things that keep us from shifting our perspective towards the Lord.  It can take a focused moment and a bit of...

  Refining By Fire: It has been said many times that “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.”  In my younger days I used to carry this idea around like a banner over me.  “Since God Loves me, He won’t give me anything I can’t handle.”    But these days, I think that idea is a load of poo.  There are plenty of moments, and painful experiences in life where I’ve often thought, “Lord, I can’t do this, I CAN’T handle it.”  I begin to feel as though the walls are caving in around me and there is no way to see my way through.  We are absolutely given that which we really can’t handle.   I shared my thoughts with hubby, as I often do, and I put forth this idea that we’ve all heard.  He agreed with me when I said that there are plenty of things we go through in life that it really feels like we can’t handle…BUT for the grace of God. With God we can travel through the impossible.  In his husbandly wisdom he added that it isn’t G...

In February, 2024, Covid came to visit our household again.  We knew it wasn’t gone forever, it just has a way of bringing everything to a standstill, especially when both parents get to quarantine and leave some of the jobs up to the teenagers to handle.  In the midst of not feeling well, I found myself texting with my teens to check on the status of bedtime for the seven year old, and taking polls on what to order out for a few nights, since no one wanted me covid-cooking anything.  By day six, I was starting to feel a little stir-crazy, trapped, chained in my circumstance.  I had to take a step back to try to not only appreciate the fact that I was given the opportunity to pause, but also be thankful that at this point in time things would return to normal pretty quickly.   This is a stark contrast to the quarantine the world had to endure back in 2020.  I don’t think those of us mature enough to remember will forget for a long time to come, and we ...

Often in worship, I lead the song “Worthy of It All.”  Other than the fact that he simply IS worthy and wonderful and HOLY, how do we personally connect to this idea? To get into a frame of mind connecting me to the song in a way that I can lead with the Spirit, I try to think of all the moments in my life that God is so worthy of praise for bringing me through.  Unfortunately, the first items that come to mind are negative moments of hardship and trial.  Events where at the time, I’m like, “God, WHY?  What is this for? This does not feel good.”  I don’t curse God for the hard times when I go through them, but I do question. To question is part of being human and not divine. So is remembering the bad before the good.  The human brain is programmed to hold onto the bad memories much longer than the good ones.  We thrive on The Drama.   There are probably good, evolutionary reasons for this. Fight or flight helps us survive. We etch the things ...