I was talking to two good friends this morning and noticed I had repeated the same phrase twice, so I figure there is more than one person who needs to hear it besides me!

I was talking about going through my years of stuff, something I also find I am not alone in doing these days, and so many things no longer need to be saved. They are pictures, letters, papers relating to a me that I have outgrown. Oh, a lot of clothing goes in that category as well! Seriously, there are things that you have grown beyond, people who are no longer in your life, things that were important that have taken their seat in the balcony, or the basement.

We grow, hopefully, into the best version of ourselves over time. This requires updating, as would a previous edition of most books. A little editing, refining, making current the most important parts of our story. I referred to this refining as getting the barnacles off, as one would remove them from the bottom of a boat, so that it could skim through the water faster. That is what I am doing, scraping off barnacles for my own ease of movement to the next phase of my journey. What can I let go of that will allow me to travel easier, faster, a slimmer, more compact version of myself?

There are some parts I will leave behind. Past ways of earning a living, such as real estate and faux finishing, are probably best served traveling only as memories. They both carry a lot of weight in supplies and paperwork, past clients and information galore. I actually enjoyed the relief that followed my shredding of past files and was aware of a heaviness that lifted immediately off me. I am still wrestling with furniture, what to sell and what to give away, but that will sort itself out soon.

What I want is to take the very best, most streamlined version of my best self, pared down only to the necessities to maintain that self, and then begin my new life armed with the knowledge of who that person is, today, and what is important to her. On that I can build my best new life!

Forty-five days and counting. Still haven’t cataloged the furniture to foster care vs. to sell. Spent another day scanning papers that might be needed (or wanted) for review someday….probably only if I write my memoirs, but who knows at this moment?

Another call to Salvation Army who will be by with their weekly truck for pick up. Why does it seem that I am hardly making a dent in everything? Because I have waited 35 years to do this, that’s why!

I am really seeing the value of less is more, in regards to everything. The few things I should have been remembering to do on a daily basis (take vitamins, exercise, eat well) got lost in the volume of stuff that I probably just kept moving from room to room, pile to pile, house to house, all these years. No wonder I felt tired!

It definitely helps to have a goal, but just setting up easier methods in the computer can take an entire day! At the end of the day I just have to appreciate that the piles are lower, the system is there for the future, the appointments are made. It’s something. One more step toward freedom from the clutter that surrounds me! Resist the temptation to toss it all as there has been ‘gold in them thar hills’! (was that from the Beverly Hillbillies?) 

I am amazed at how many situations are made easier with instant cell phone calls, texting and emails. Plans can be changed in a split second, people can find each other in malls, one can know immediately of one anothers needs or successes.

Again, the boxes of pictures and letters, and the endless processing. Today I grabbed one more big green plastic container that had long ago lost its lid. It has a small fuzzy stuffed bear and a string of Christmas lights and what seemed to be as stash of  very old crayon drawings from kindergarten times. I wasn’t even sure which child may have drawn them, but I determined to wade through them, just in case.

There were several stacks of things that weren’t keepers, but I put them aside for review by the child whose early efforts at artistic expression were recorded, just in case there were clues to his life that might be of interest to him. The other son had already looked through this particular box this weekend, dismissing most of it with a cursory once over.

Somewhere toward the middle I began to find remnants of a retreat called Chriseo, that I had been part of on Mother’s Day weekend in 1991. It is a Christian ceremonial tradition of a three day walk with God, the “fourth day” being the beginning of the rest of your life with Christ. One of the wonderful things they do, while the pilgrims are preparing to go on their walk, is ask their friends and family to write letters that will be given to them the third day.

Often we don’t sit down and tell people how greatly we admire them or treasure who they are in our lives. Sometimes we make reference to those feelings in a card at birthdays or other occasions, or when they are honored at a function for business or community service. For the vast numbers of people, however, those thoughts may never be put to paper until we are addressing their relatives in a sympathy card after they die. I know that it is those cards and letters, mixed in with all the other bits and pieces of my past, that have been the things I moved to a separate spot, my new box of treasures.

Here amongst the others was a hand written letter from my Dad. He began by saying he realized he had mostly put pen to paper to tell me the things that he was concerned about as I made choices about my life. They had often been harsh and full of the potential negatives that he felt I might run into, should I choose a certain path. Unfortunately those letters had left scars that, while I was certain were unintentional, were never completely healed.

This letter made quick reference to those  other letters, but went on to address all the ways in which he admired the choices I had made. He confirmed the excellent job he felt I was doing as a parent to my boys and how I provided them not only the necessities for living but an abundance of love and support for them as well as a firm grounding in the love of God and knowledge of Jesus.  He told me how compassionately and unselfishly he saw me live my life and attend to the needs of others. His pride was evident in his choice of words and especially in the ones he underlined for emphasis. That letter gave me the opportunity to let go of all the harsh-sounding words that had rung in my ears over my lifetime, condemning me to try to resist them as the truth about myself. Here, in his own words, were all the things I had ever hoped he had felt about me; here was an opportunity to erase the familiar voice of the liar who had held space in my head most of my life.

As the mailman goes the way of the Pony Express, and email cards take the place of handwritten ones, I wonder if we will ever again hold those saved missives, bearers of both good and bad tidings. Is it our loss or will the gains be worth it? Will we tell each other more often how much we love and appreciate one another, so that summing up our feelings will never be as necessary? Only time will tell I suppose. With the fast sharing of news, in less than a week we have had to process the death and devastation of horrible tornadoes, the happiness and splendor of a Royal wedding, as well as the capture and demise of the man who caused the most incredible hurt ever to happen within our borders since the Civil War. In six days that requires a lot of emotional endurance, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the rapid delivery of news, and quick sharing between friends and family of our emotions that can be facilitated today.

My prayer is that good news and loving thoughts are hitting the airwaves and bandwidth just as quickly. That an email that conveying an unmeant but hurtful message will be quickly responded to with a phone call that heals what might have become a serious wound. It is possible, if we keep our hearts alert to what is/ or is not hidden between the lines of type. I know for me those important things were often written at the very end and up around the right side of the last page of the letter. The last P.S….and then the P.P.S. If we commit to keeping our emotional databases as up-to-date as our news, we will have a wonderful, healthy world (and family) indeed!

We never realize how long it actually takes to go through those boxes containing our past. All those seemingly random pictures, cards and letters saved, thrown into boxes, mementos of a life lived.

I think if we never allow ourselves that time to process them, we are missing out on some very important substance to our lives. It is a review of what we considered important, and a way to see if it still holds meaning for us. In many ways this can be confirming, or it can assist us in making future decisions or commitments.

I have found letters I thought I had thrown away, as well as some I never remember receiving. Like the one from my brother-in-law, mentioning that nothing was more important than my choosing Jesus in my life, and that everything else would fall into place after that. He was praying for me that day as he wrote. The date on his letter was Dec 9th, 1983. I ran from the garage to the house to check the bookmark in my Bible. It commemorated the day I had asked Jesus into my life. A single mom from the church I was attending had come to my home that day and cleaned for me while I was taking care of a newborn son. She asked me at the end of the day if I would like to ask Jesus into my life and when I said yes she prayed with me. She gave me that bookmark to remember the date. When I pulled it from my Bible, it confirmed exactly what I had thought, Dec 9th, 1983.

My brother in law mailed that letter that day and I received it three days later. But God didn’t wait on the mailman, He responded immediately to his fervent prayer and sent an angel immediately to my home. I found that to be an amazing testimony to His loving attention to our requests. I will now keep both together in my Bible.

We need to take time, and spend time assisting our older relatives, to process those memories. They hold a lot of good information and clues to a persons life. It is too difficult to do at the same time as we are trying to move someone out of their home, or after they have died. How much better if we make time to sit with them once a month or even once a year helping them preserve those treasures by scanning photos and letters, taking pictures of furniture that might be willed to family and making notes about its history while the person can still tell the story about it.

A gift of time is indeed a gift of love, and as in the instance of the mom who came to clean my house almost thirty years ago, or my brother in law taking time to write and pray, it may be the most important gift a person ever receives!

I am sorting through the past forty-five years of my lifetime in bankers boxes of paperwork, along with the furniture I have purchased and accumulated through ten homes, plus that for which I have assumed responsibility from my Mom, and it is a most interesting process.

Initially I had trouble deciding whether to sell the furniture (to help pay for my move) and be able to get what I will need on the other coast, or to store it here for a year until I see where I land and what I need and/or might want to have at some point. Hating to be an Indian giver, I resisted asking my family if they wanted anything, not knowing if I might want it back.

The idea of garage sales brings me nothing but headaches, and I find them to be largely a waste of time for me. I have found that donations are a better solution for most things I would consider garage sale items. I also realized I would rather someone in my family was enjoying  a favorite item, rather than realizing I had sold it for about one eighth of its cost to me, and missing the value that just seeing it once it enjoyed and used provided. It also seemed like such a final decision when I really can’t possibly know what my life may look like a year from now.

The most interesting thing that I have noticed was the fact that what I really wanted was more what the furniture represented than the item itself. I had asked for the dining table and eight chairs that represented all the holiday meals we shared when our family gathered at holidays. Having the table didn’t give me the gathering nor the large family it could seat. The memories were already in my mind. Truly the table was more a sad reminder that I mostly ate alone, so passing the table on to a family member who might actually have those gatherings was a much better solution than keeping the table.

In the same manner, I realized I have bought over fifty cookbooks and carried them around for years. While I often take them out and look at the pictures, envisioning meals and lingering conversations with others, I almost never cook for more than myself and rarely get together with friends, except at restaurants for lunch when our schedules and wallets permit. The cookbooks merely represent the desire of my heart to eat with others more frequently, not the desire to cook or to eat the foods I pick out in the pictures.

After several weeks of indecision, I have decided to take digital pictures of my furniture and ‘valuables’ and send them online to my children, siblings, nieces and nephews, and after that perhaps to my close friends. I will seek foster care for these items for the next year or two. I am really looking for someone who would really enjoy my things and would care for them as though they are their own (as they may well be in the future). It is preferable to putting them in storage for a year or more.  I may ask for a small deposit(or donation) which I will refund should I later request the return of the items.  That would give me a start on helping me purchase the basic necessities when I get to my new home.

At least for now, that is my favorite plan. What I take with me is the courage to find new friends to eat with, a sense of community that embraces me, and more opportunities to linger over coffee with friends and family. A tiny studio with basic necessities will be more than enough room to house the things I really need to sustain me.

In my last post, I wrote about what I knew about, shelter dogs. This drew two wonderful responses from friends who had had cats and/or pedigreed pups. They were adding their insight to what I saw and provided information that helped me to expand what I saw from my own experience to now include theirs.

It is all about sharing ideas in this worldwide classroom we call ‘online’. That is what is so fascinating about it, that if we choose to participate, we will find that our views are not the only ones out there. I think of it as a classroom, where the teacher calls on different people and each of them share from their own lives or minds. While they may disagree or just come at the issue from a different place, we all leave the room changed in some way. Our thinking is a little broader, more inclusive.

In a classroom you have often met the person, spoken with them about other things, perhaps shared a meal. Online, this person might be a total stranger, with a name that doesn’t give you a clue to whether they are male or female, American, or from some other country you know nothing about. Yet somehow your ideas found each other, and you passed them back and forth like the salad at a friend’s home.

The first tenet to being open to enjoying this maybe first assuming you don’t know everything, that there is no right or wrong way to see things here. If your background made you believe there was always only one way of seeing things, this could be difficult. I do believe the more you take part, the more you begin to enjoy the fellowship of ideas and the broadening of your experience, if only somewhat vicariously.

Thank you for reading and sharing your comments. You stretch me and also make me realize I am not alone. Although I may see things differently than you, our insight and feedback is invaluable to the whole that we see, and as I go through life today, I will bring with me the thoughts you have shared as a link to my own, and I will see more than I did yesterday!

I am back in the Bible study, trying hard to hear God, and yet not believing what He is saying, although I am getting confirmation so fast it makes my head spin sometimes. Today I was reading in John 21:15-17, the part where Jesus is telling Peter what to do. Peter is being questioned about his love for the Lord, to which he replies of course, you know that I love you, but the Lord is commanding him three times: then Feed my lambs, Shepherd my sheep, feed my sheep.

He has given me a ministry to be an advocate for working Christian single moms. They are His heroines, and He doesn’t want them forgotten, as they go about their daily struggles, rarely asking for any help besides prayer, relying on His provision for their needs and those of their children.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to figure out how I proceed with what He has asked of me, worrying about providing for my own bills and obligations and needs. He keeps impressing on me to step forward and do what He has asked, even though I cannot see how that helps my circumstances in the least. The drum in my head only beats louder. Follow me!

Sometimes, and frequently in the past, I must admit, God’s instructions have seemed crazy. They would seem to make me look irresponsible to others. He continually brings me back to “why do you care how it looks to others? I want you to see how it looks to me. I don’t have a back up plan. You are it! If you don’t put your puzzle piece down on the table, no one else can come and attach theirs. You will never see the whole picture if you don’t begin with the piece I have given you!”

Please don’t think He is yelling at me, because He isn’t. Like a parent who has reaffirmed the same thing several times to a child, He is only being firm, and perhaps a little frustrated. He knows I know better. I have already seen His provision for over 27 years of my life raising two children. I know His timing is perfect and He will never abandon me. So what am I waiting for?

Embrace the rain today and make the calls. Start the newsletter and let Him bring others to help complete it. I am beginning to think it may rain for forty days and forty nights if I don’t start right now! I am remembering Jonah on the ship and the high seas that nearly overtook them. He finally said to the sailors, its me. I am causing the trouble by not being obedient to what God has asked of me.

Lord knows, I sure don’t want to come face to face with my own big fish!

I was prompted this week, when reading a blog about abortion and how we have or haven’t dealt with it, to write a small response telling my story. Divorced, with a five year old son, finding myself pregnant at age 37 and in crisis. The father of the child was an also divorced friend, but the sheer reality of a pregnancy brought a quick end to both the relationship and the friendship.

I was surrounded by female friends who were very clear about what they would do if they found themselves in a similar position, and all offered in one way or another to drive me to the place to terminate this problem. I was adamant that the only women I wanted advice from were those who had either had an abortion or a baby out of wedlock. I knew only one of the former and none of the latter. This was before I became a Christian, so my friends were very forward thinking about what they “thought” they would do.

As for the one I knew who had recently ‘terminated an unwanted pregnancy’ (these words are cold and lifeless to me as I write them, somehow void of any emotion at all, something else that should have been telling for me even then), and when I asked her to tell me how she felt ‘now,  she burst into tears and then hung up on me. She never did tell me. I wanted to know what I would feel like twenty years later and I wanted to know that day. A very difficult thing, because even though abortion was legal, no one would talk about it. I kept thinking, how can they think this is a good thing, if it becomes something a woman has to keep secret for life?

Since I had already had a child, there was no convincing me it was not a child, and the decision had to be made quickly because each day was more painful and confusing than any I ever remember before or since; as I recall, I found out on a Thursday, drove to tell the father on a Saturday and was scheduled for the procedure on a Tuesday. There was little time to get input and weigh my options.

Not finding the support I had hoped for with the father, I was already at Monday night when I made a call to a good male friend on the other side of the country. I remember taking the phone to the basement (I lived in the northeast then and we had basements) so that my young son would never overhear this conversation about his sibling to be. I knew somewhere deep in my heart that I could never maintain the open, honest relationship we had if I erased all the evidence of someone who was also family to him, without even asking his opinion (I would never had gotten his permission, I knew, but it seemed a lot to hang on a five year old, no matter how grown up he seemed at the time). Then I listened to the words of a man whose only offspring had been terminated by a former girlfriend.

I will never forget the words he used, because they washed into my body and spread through my soul quicker than an IV bringing an instant end to the pain I was in. He said “What were you doing the next nine months that you couldn’t do pregnant?” There it was. Gray area, in a decision that had previously seemed to have only black and white sides to it. At that moment I experienced total peace and confidence that the decision to carry this pregnancy to term was the right and only decision for me. The decision to keep and raise that child could and did come some months later, but there was never a moment of looking back from that moment on to this very day, some 28 years later.

I offer this as an alternative that can be given to anyone who may find themselves at that crossroads with that enormous decision resting on their shoulders and so very heavily on their heart. Twelve words. If there is someone who can appreciate and embrace that gray area, they will recognize those words when they hear them. I responded immediately by laughing and crying at the same time, a whole world of trapped emotions bursting out of me in huge gasping waves.

Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? Because I couldn’t think and I wasn’t in my right mind. How could I be? I will tell you that even though I am an artist who loves and appreciates bold and vivid colors and who has never been much of a fan of dreary, dull days I used to reference with this color, I have never been so grateful for gray as I was that evening.

In the past few weeks, as God struggled with me and I with Him to really hear His directions for my life, I was caught by one recurring theme. How often well meaning Christian friends seem to play ‘devil’s advocate’ in my life.

Not that they were meaning to, exactly. I found that if I shared what God was doing in my life, or the crossroads at which  I found myself, several of them responded quickly from their own flesh, and very often added advice that was really harder to process than if it had come from a non believer. I wanted to give it weight, as I knew they loved the Lord, but God warned me to be careful of listening and taking that advice to heart.

I used to say, when I was much younger and still hoping to find the guy who would fill my heart and complete my family, that I would almost prefer to  have my heart broken by someone who didn’t know the Lord, than by someone I had met at a Christian function. It was much harder to get over being hurt in the name of Jesus, than by someone who didn’t even profess to know him.

I think that is still difficult. I now have mostly Christian friends, but I have to be very cautious in whom I confide when I am trying to hear God’s voice clearly. I have only a handful who have the discernment not to offer advice from their flesh, about how they think I should proceed or what they think I should do in a given situation. I am very blessed to have those few and I thank God for them daily.

I get excited about what God is doing in my life and often rush to share with sometimes total abandon with the first person I talk to after something I think is amazingly the Lord. Often the person I am confiding in does not have enough experience in the things of the Lord to know how that could seem even vaguely exciting to me. This is where God is training me in discernment. He has given me a large dose of that often for others who ask me for counsel, but lately He is really working with me on better protecting myself and the gifts, challenges and passions He has placed within me.

He  may also use complete strangers, speakers, books, sometimes even a tiny text message and I am sure a Tweet on occasion to confirm His directions to us. He can also use non believers in ways that speak to you loud and clear and focus you like a laser beam right to the path He wants you to see. What I have found is that sometimes friends may respond completely from their own fear of losing where I am in their life, or because they wouldn’t want to do what God is asking me to do, so they caution me against it, slightly framed as though it were a word from God. It seems to have a little more conviction that way, and don’t we all want to keep things from changing when they suit us; it’s really hard to resist that temptation, isn’t it? It happens to all of us, so we have to examine our motives, don’t we?

Words that seem to counter what we feel God is saying are harder to hear from well meaning friends, but as my ear gets more finely tuned to God’s voice, I hear can hear them almost before they are said. I am getting very private about the people to whom I turn for counsel. If they are not grounded in a community of worship, a Bible study and fellowship, a daily practice of meeting with God, but even more important: If I don’t hear and see them turning to God for direction in their own life, but merely asking Him to bless the direction they want to go, I know they are not where I should turn, and instead I keep his communications with  with me private and guard them in my heart. He will tell me with whom I am safe to share them.

Again, more listening. God made me a talker and a sharer, incredibly vulnerable with my openness to others. Deep listening and keeping things to myself have come with much difficulty for me. More counsel is not necessarily better counsel. I have had to learn that many Christians(who wouldn’t think of eating without first asking His blessing on the meal) will not pray, even silently, before they speak to another Christian, and may do great harm or even cause a setback, from the direction that God is leading someone else. I believe we are part of an immense trust when we speak for God into someone else’s life. We are meant to be encouragers and to lift one another up. Unless we hear God definitively, and we have been asked for our wise counsel, sometimes we also just need to listen and then continue to ask God in our private time with Him to direct that friend or loved one.

We need to use our words carefully, and  His even more prayerfully, if we are tempted to quote scripture, as we do not want to cause one of his chosen ones to stumble from the path on which He has put them. It is not our path, so we need not be afraid. If He asks them to do something, He will provide the means and the way. He will not allow them to come to harm. There is a much higher price they will pay in their own walk with Him if they follow our advice instead of His. Just a word for all of us to remember, we never want to be used as advocates of the devil in our well meaning for Christ.

The people we love and care about most deeply may be the ones where this will be most difficult. Let us continue to hold them up in prayer first, last and always, as God truly knows best. And for those of us He may have asked to go into a difficult or unknown place, breaking God’s heart by refusing to go where He has asked us to go would be the deepest hurt of all.

I think this could all have been said much more succinctly, but as I am working it out as I write, I will  probably come back and make more sense of this. God is always acting as proof reader and nudging me to make changes, so usually I publish right away and make changes for the first one to five hours after. If I didn’t publish right away, I would probably think of a million reasons never to publish it at all. Once done, it just gets modified a bit. Kind of the way God works with us in everything . It all boils down to the best thing any Christian can offer anyone else is the extension of God’s grace….in any circumstances, in any place or any time. That is the gift that keeps on giving, that is accepted by everyone, like the perfect credit card! No one ever returns it, they just pass it on. How cool is that? Probably food for another blog thought…this one is way too long. They are getting like book chapters, hmmmmm, God’s next?

I recently had occasion to visit a friend at their home several hours from here. This friend is very much a Christian, and attends Church on a regular basis.  Bible study is also a part of their weekly practices. This person is very careful about their finances, and it brought up some interesting points for me to consider.

There is careful, and there is stingy. Which one, if either, represents our stewardship of God’s money? I believe that while this is very much a matter of our own personal relationship with God, we must be careful that we also represent the way other perceive our faith and reliance on God. On the other side of this coin I have Christian friends who are way too generous with what God gives them, and never worry about taking care of themselves, being very willing to take care of others. Which is a better advertisement for our Lord, or is either one really accurate?

Another thing I noticed about this particular friend was how they unplugged every single lamp or appliance in their home when not in use. This supposedly conserved energy and also cut way back on the electricity bill. What I noticed, as a guest in their home, was that when I awoke early and wanted to read my Bible study for the day, I was bumbling around in the dark, trying to find not just a light that could be plugged in, but also an  outlet to source the power to it.

It occurred to me that this way of conserving power and currency was also a way I perceived this person’s faith.They would ‘turn God on’ when they decided they needed to. Certainly not in every situation, nor one where they had their own agenda for how things were to go. They would ask God’s blessing on their food, and thank Him for His provision. When it came to how to spend or how to choose most things in their life, they were very much OK with the way they personally decided to do it.

There is something about being poor enough to have to turn to God for almost every provision in your life. It becomes more of a habit. When you cannot afford to make a wrong choice, you really want God’s help in making the right one. This isn’t always the one you expect or even want, but if it is in the direction He is taking you, then you might as well get on the train going to that station as on one going the other direction. In the end, there is so much more ground you have to recover if you went the wrong way!

Many of us have found this to be true and as a result have found the older we get, the faster we turn to him for directions. Unlike my GPS system, I have rarely found God’s directions to be incorrect. I have never thought He got it wrong. Also unlike my GPS, I have yet to end up on a dead end street going “What???” I usually go “Ah ha! That’s why you sent me this way instead of the way I was going to go!”

I see so many friends struggling with directions for their life right now. I am right there with them. The only difference is that some of us are actively seeking God on a daily basis to see if we should “Turn right, then stay on the motorway.” Sometimes His directions are only given one step at a time and we don’t have anything that will show us how many miles we have to go or time until we reach our destination.

The wonderful thing is, we will never regret those moves that had everything to do with Him and His plans for our life. I ask the question, are we plugged in to the source all the time for our marching orders, or only when we feel lost or in unknown territory? Are we bumbling around in the dark when we have total 24/7 access to that source? And are we conserving His energy for when we need it more? If so, why? Did He ever tell us there was a limited supply and we need to conserve it?

Like God’s love for us, the more we turn it on, the more there is to give away. The more we accept and receive, the more we have to give willingly and freely to others He puts in our path. He is the source who never raises His prices nor looses His power. Our light will never be turned off…. unless we do it ourselves. So my question remains, are we plugged in?