It has a price. I don’t know anyone who has as much freedom as they would like to decide how to use their time, their day, even their money right now. It seems as if we are all trying to weigh one thing against another as there is little if anything left over at the end of the month!

It is causing me to think deeply about Christmas presents. What would really be appropriate and useful to the recipient, versus what hits me as a potential answer to the immediate ‘get something for somebody’ approach so I get it off my brain!

It seems to be one of the great benefits of this down economy. Everyone is realizing that time is as important as money, particularly when so many are picking up a second job just to try and equal the total they used to have with one income.

I don’t know about you, but I am really noticing when someone takes the time to help someone out, sacrificing their own time for another. No matter how much we have had our own reality affected by the economy, we don’t have to look far to find someone else who has been  hit worse.

May this be the year we all notice those ‘unnoticeables’, and do what we can to make it just a little easier for someone else. We all have the freedom to make a choice to help the persons we choose, to lift their spirits or, even if briefly, their experience to a higher level. The cost of compassion will be repaid to you ten times over. Believe it, and see if someone comes across your path this week with a problem for which you might just have the solution.

I am pondering the situation in which I find myself  and wonder, am I practicing patience and long-suffering? Or am I just postponing the decision to go all out in what I believe God wants me to do. There are seasons in our journey, to be sure, but I am realizing how it will take some discernment to give up the safety of a paycheck to return to my certain faith that God will provide all that I need if I am doing what He wants me to do.

I think perhaps He knew I needed to see the value of that which He has put on my heart, but also to see the value of how He sees me. In a place where my strengths are really under utilized and almost become weaknesses, I am learning that there is a place where I am able to do much more than just live through the day.

I have always been available to be an advocate, an encourager to those who were getting weary. I now see Him sending the same kind of missionaries into my life to encourage me. There is a “job” that needs doing and sometimes when you feel you have no job you are doing perhaps the most important one of all.

I was speaking to a wife and mother today who also spends a great deal of time taking care of her aging parents and I told her, as I had told another friend just last week, that God has to have some missionaries that don’t have daily 9-5  jobs… so that they can be available to show up when everyone else is at work or so tired after work they can’t drag themselves out of the house. Most of us at work can’t even answer our phones  if we were to get a call, so our timetable means that others have to put their needs on hold.

This made me think that  I may be trying to operate on my own timetable and not on God’s. I believe when I am in sync with God’s plan for my life, it doesn’t feel sad when I wake up and go to work nor do I feel sad at the end of the day when I come home. While I often had bills I couldn’t pay on time and didn’t know where my next paycheck was coming from or when, I had joy in my life every day from the places God sent me and the people with whom  He connected me.

I miss that sense of doing daily what He instructed and being led by His spirit. I feel like when I check into work I check out of His plan for that length of time. At the end of the day I feel exhausted and sad. I have never felt that way in the past thirty years, even though I have been stressed by lots of circumstances, I have had such strong faith that God was in control. It is giving me strength to reexamine my circumstances, and come up with the courage to leave the safe for the uncertain, and once again be working with God.

I have, at the very least, more awareness of why it is so difficult for many to leave the certainty of a paycheck, no matter how much they may not like their job. I am grateful, however, that I learned to lean on God for provision a long time before I saw the temptation of leaning on a paycheck.

What would we be caught doing? I often wonder, since God sees everything and He knows our hearts, what do we really think we are hiding from Him? And how often does He delight in catching us doing something He didn’t have to prompt us to do?

Today I was sitting at my desk with my phone off because I was at work, awaiting the arrival of my youngest, who was coming to get something out of my car trunk. I knew approximately when he might arrive, but got involved in something I was doing and missed a text saying he was there. Meanwhile, a young mother I had noticed outside was on the phone, holding her baby, and standing outside of her car.

She was having car trouble, as my son obviously noted, and he had pulled his car alongside hers and was proceeding to hook up his jumper cables to her battery when I noticed him.

She drove off shortly after and he proceeded to get the item from my vehicle and go on his way. I thought afterward how effortlessly he had stepped in to help where help was needed. I was very moved by what I saw when it hadn’t been me who encouraged him to do so, frankly I was way more impressed because I didn’t even see the need.

When we catch our children doing the right thing or a nice thing when they don’t know we are looking is the very best time of all! I remember reading a parenting book one time that exhorted: “Catch your child doing something right!” I remember taking that to heart and trying to notice all the things they did correctly rather than the few I was trying to help them improve.

I will bet you God feels the same way about His children, when He sees them doing something He didn’t even have to nudge them to do.

Because it is no longer well enough. I was having a spirited conversation with a spirited friend and that is what came out of my mouth. We can’t leave well enough alone….at the voting booth, at the dinner table, at our job. Things are not well enough for us to do that. We have turned the other way, gone back to our TV show, put our head in a book of fiction so long that while we weren’t watching, things happened that we cannot reverse.

If we continue to let others speak for us, decide what’s best for us, we will lose the right to speak up at all. I read a very interesting email about the women who went to jail to insure our right to vote. Their story may come out in a movie soon. It is truly amazing the lengths to which they were willing to go to provide something  we often find an excuse not to exercise. How often I have heard ‘I had to make dinner’ or’ I had to pick up the kids at gymnastics’, as a reason someone didn’t vote.

It is curious that I  am more likely to hear “it’s to die for!” referring to a dress or pair of shoes than something like our right to vote, or our freedom to worship as we choose.

I truly believe the time is nearing where we will have to choose what we are willing to die for. Where what we believe in our heart of hearts will take precedence over all else. It may not be everyone who is forced to choose this way, but I do believe those who enlisted early on into God’s army will have to make hard choices, where there is no middle of the road.

I hope, if and when that time comes, to know my belief is substantially more important to the future of my childrens’ children than a pair of shoes, and I hope to be remembered as a woman in their lineage who was willing to stand up for something she believed, no matter what the cost.

I had the very good fortune to have a lot of fun and happy moments packed into a 24 hour period two days ago, and I realized after that it is almost more difficult for me to process the happy emotions than the sad. How crazy!

I went from one great moment to another…a trip to Tampa for a closing and a concert after with a wonderful young couple I have been working with who were purchasing their first home. Because the date of closing fell on the night my son was to play in concert in Tampa, I invited them to enjoy it with me in celebration. We happened to have a notary closing (the only type that made it movable, and it was a purchase from a builder so the seller did not have to be present either). So we moved the closing to the hotel where we were staying  and closed between lunch with my son and dinner before his show!

It was only after I got home the next day that the tears of joy began to flow. I thought what am I crying about? I just had an amazing and wonderful time!

Only then did I begin to realize that while I have become very adept at handling the crisis that come in life, I am less adept at having fun and participating in the warmth of people around me and things going smoothly and well. I am used to always being ready for the thing that could jeopardize everything and I have become perhaps too vigilant being the lookout! I don’t see that as sad, but I am now aware that it happens to me. I now will be more prepared when tears of joy seem to come from nowhere.

Perhaps God wired me differently. I seem to find good in even the bad things that happen in life, but am I finding bad in the good? I don’t think so. I think I just recognize that life is indeed full of a lot of emotions, and sometimes they stay inside and sometimes they come out. Isn’t this why we cry at movies when sometimes our partner or spouse or friend doesn’t?

Always hard to explain to someone else, but just know it’s OK….sometimes we can be so happy we cry, or so sad we don’t. It’s all good and it will all balance out in the end!