This has been a very busy week! I've been feeding my VBS family. It has been such a joy to hear the laughter of children and teens and adults as they play games, sing, do crafts and eat together. There are so many was people are connecting in both formal ways such as worship and introductions and informal ways by laughing together and singing together -- gentle conversations and fleeting glances in passing.

It has has set me to thinking about this bible verse from Psalm 68:6: God sets the lonely in families.

We have a family of birth that sets us down at a point in family history with parents, grandparents all the way back to what we think of as ancestors and all the way down to children yet unborn in our family lines. Even people who think of themselves as "alone" have cousins in related lines that share parts of our history. Then we have families of choice: neighborhood or community families, church families, military families, school families, work families, bar families, bowling families, homeless families, PTA families and dozens more with which our ties have varying degrees of closeness and loyalty.

We are created for connection. We long to share our stories, reveal our true selves, help and be helped, love and be loved, sing our heart to trustworthy folks who will sing theirs to us. God has provided for us both human connections of blood, law and choice. But even more important God invites us to embrace our connection to our who is Love, does love, loves us unconditionally.

I think one of the biggest lies people believe (and this damages us all) is that loyalty is about love and hate. If we are truly loyal, we can be loyal without hating the person, group or nation that is opposed to us. If we are standing on the truth, we need fear nothing and without fear there is no hate. Does this mean we should not defend ourselves? Of course not! But it does mean that we can do that without demonizing the other side.

Jesus said that what we do to the least of God's children we do to Jesus too. So if we must defend ourselves from danger, we must take care not to loose our own humanity in the process. That is a plenty difficult position to be in without feeling the price in self-damage+ has been too high.

So look around and see this huge, diverse, quirky, challenged, and challenging family of God, those who realize God is their father and those who don't yet. Pray for them. Laugh with them. Love them. Care for them. And when the opportunity presents itself to worship with them, thank God with joy.

Our Raytown Campus is hosting a VBS for the first time a several years. It is delightful to see children learning how much God loves them and how trustworthy God is!

But it is also true we adult helpers are blessed in unexpected ways. We are serving dinner for families prior to the VBS program and I am both delighted and deeply blessed by a friend since pre-school who is helping me update my catering skills. We pray together for the children and workers and the children we hope will come. Such a joy!

I'm also getting a chance to get to know other volunteers a bit better and meet folks from the neighborhood. We had a great first night and are looking forward to feeding, loving and enjoying the rest of the week.

Will you pray with us for those who might bring their children and let our hearts sing to their hearts as we seek to be part of a growing sense of community? This area that has experienced some challenges in resent years and it is wonderful to see the work of the folks who live in the area paying off.

Today I'm thinking about how we are called to serve God. As I am filling out forms to volunteer for Prison Fellowship and be considered for ministry training through my church, as I schedule training dates for participation in a Kairos Outside and Women's Emmaus Walk ahead of events in October, as I embrace the possibility of being a two car family again and think of the new opportunities it will open and I am filled with joy and hope and love and I wonder why I ever fear to answer yes.

But I also remember times when I have said "yes" too often and come to realize looking back that I had not waited for God's call and wound up over extended and burnt out. And for a period of time I was not generous with my time because I had learned the wrong lesson from these experiences.

But three years ago I had a rather shattering experience...in this case shattering in a good way. I signed up to attend a 72 hour weekend with the Walk to Emmaus community. I had been to retreats before and found them nice and I thought my husband would enjoy it. Yes, I went because I thought my husband would enjoy it. Little did I know! He attended in May and I attended in September. He did enjoy it very much and is a strong supporter of the community. I will say that for me, it lead to profound differences in the way I live out my faith. 

Part of that change is to be fully willing to say "no" if, having prayed about a ministry opportunity, I do not believe it is what I am called to do. No, God does not send an email, text me, phone me or mail me a written set of instructions! But as I have embraced opportunities to draw closer to God, I have found a sense of peace plus excitement (or sometimes near panic) at embracing an opportunity and conversely a sense of dread and a decided anxiety at the specter of doing something else. And sometimes I don't feel I get any kind of answer which seems to mean, not yet or something else is coming. And often It is not so clear and I would LOVE an email laying it all out in minute detail, but each time I work to find my path, struggle to match my will to God's Will, I draw closer to Him and understand more deeply how utterly reliable and consistent is His Love and patience the greater my joy and peace. If I get it wrong, He helps me work through that too.

So if you are longing for a deeper or more connected relationship to God, contact me (contact link above), send a Facebook message or ask me at a meeting and I'll be happy to share more. If you are in the Midwest, we have a men's weekend October 8-11 and a Women's weekend October 15-18. If you are an alumni of Emmasu, El Camino, Tres Dios, Crusillo, Torch, Journey, Kairos or any of the other fellowships in this tradition and a longing to be a servant, let me know that too!

One last comment, if you are looking for a "top of the mountain experience" I can only say that was not my experience. If you looking for more quiet joy and deep grounding, THAT was my experience.

If not this, or if not now, I hope you will still be aware of the many ways God offers us connection with God, ways to minister and serve each other, ways to learn and worship our way to full fellowship with our Creator and Lord.

One "small crime" and so many are affected. 

We have had another child affected by crime. In fact the child is the perpetrator of the crime and, because of being only 16 years of age, is protected from some of the normal aftermath of such an incident. We have little information how this Sunday morning mistake happened: distracted driving, lack of awareness, emotional upset, all of which I was certainly guilty of as a new driver. Yet her error resulted in a car accident that lead to a pedestrian death. Is she remorseful, defensive? Is her family tending her wisely? Is she working with a mental health professional as well as the attorney? Because of her age we may never know, but pray for her I do.

One of the positives in the situation is that with no information printable about the driver, the focus has been on the pedestrian killed: a man in his 40s whose errors in life have been broadly reported along with stories of his renewed faith, a life on the mend and a generous heart. For each of us who has prayed for a wayward child to find his way back to a productive life, it is particularly poignant. So thoughts of his mother and family call forth prayers from my heart.

This story touched my heart in many ways, but every newspaper is filled with people whose lives have been disrupted by their own errors or the errors of others. So often churches are good about helping half of the hurting, but shunning and judging in ways that are harmful to the other half. When I read this story I find only people who needed love, care, tenderness and healing. 

As followers of Christ we are called to offer comfort, hope and truth to all of God's children. Some of us are more lovely than others, but all stand in need (and by God's Grace have a legitimate call upon each and all of us) for what God has given us in such abundance: reconciliation, redemption, renewal and a life of hope and purpose.

Have you attended a church where you were treated unkindly? Don't you want to make sure that someone who is looking for hope, forgiveness and a new life have good people to meet them at the church door so they might have a better experience than you had? So keep looking for a church where you can BE the person doing God's work of welcoming, accepting, instructing and loving. 

We so desperately need each other to be the hands and feet of God for each other.

Won't you pray the news this week and consider how you can be Jesus in someone else's life?

Hebrews 10:25 We must not quit meeting together, as some are doing. No, we need to keep on encouraging each other. This becomes more and more important as you see the Day getting closer.

How often when I find myself whining or feeling frustrated, it is really about things that are not so important. Today we have been car shopping...one of my least favorite activities. 

But when I think more rationally, I have to be so grateful that I have the resources to make car shopping possible. Then the Web, which rather overwhelms with information, does allow me to research cars (two serious issues have saved me from two cars that seemed fine until I did my research) and I can check out lots of cars from the privacy of my own home. Such checking, however, did not prepare me for the number of small cars that are designed so I can not see the front of the car from the driver's seat! We need more short female engineers in the automotive industry.

So we shall keep looking and make a serious commitment to keeping the blessings in focus while we persevere.

All Knowing and Everywhere Present God, thank you for the blessings of resources, health and many choices. Help me to be a patient and reasonable consumer, keeping my frustration checked that my Pastor might not be disconcerted if he overheard my conversation. Help me to trust that You know perfectly my needs and will match them with the resources You so generously provide. AMEN

King David was an up and down sort of guy. He was the author of the Psalms, beautiful and heart-touching songs about his relationship to God. He was also a man who used his power to seduce a married woman and then had her husband killed by ordering him to the front line of a harsh battle. He laid the foundation for the nation of Israel but watched his children's bad behavior destroyed them. Maybe that is why I love the psalms! They were written by a pretty normal kind of guy who had and used great gifts, but whose passions and ego caused damage to his relationship with God leading to some pretty awful stuff. But he also kept coming back to God, repenting and receiving God's grace to allow him to tray again. This is a pattern I can relate to.

That path seems so narrow, between the perfection I can not achieve in this world and the life of sin that has proven so unsatisfying and even frightening. But God is not narrow. God knows us and loves us and asks us to keep trying again, rejoicing in baby steps. It is not God who says, "You are too broken to have value." It is not God who says, "No one could ever find you truly worthy." It is not God who says, "You have messed up so often God has lost patience with you." You will find nothing like that in the Bible!

When God was rebuking the Israelites, the people He chose to be refined and corrected so they could be light and salt to the World, it was not because He hates them, but because He loves them. God never gives up on us! But there are many who would prefer we believe that He does. These are people who want something from us, not love freely given, but things they fear they will loose if we understand our true worth. Listen to your heart. When someone speaks to you, are they longing for good things for you? Or are they just afraid that if you walk away they will be left with the noise in their own head? Or they are demanding allegiance from you, money from you, subservience from you for their own puffing up?

God is not like that. We have nothing that God needs. God has everything that we need and longs to show us how to open our hearts to God's good gifts like healing and hope, redemption, restoration and renewal, and love, laughter and a life lived with purpose and joy.

Almighty and Loving God, You have plans for us, not to cause us pain, but to free us to enjoy the blessings of our relationship with You. We can bring any sorrow or temptation or habit to You and You will help us when we are ready to let go of our old song in order to make room for Your new one. Woo us, Lord, with persistence and power so that we can pry our dying fingers off the things that are killing us and free our souls to live in You. Teach us to sing a new song. AMEN

Psalm 961 Sing to the Lord a new song;

When folks volunteer to minister in prisons the commitment is more than an hour a week. Even if you add in travel time to a facility there is also preparation time, time committed to a mentor or small group to stay grounded. 

Folks in Kairos make a year commitment when they volunteer. There is six months of planning, -team building, spiritual grounding, learning prison rules and program guidelines, practicing music and coaching each other on the talks they will be giving. Prayer is important too as they pray for each other, for the folks that will attend, even before they know who coming; for the families of those who will be attending; for the inside Kairos team that will be serving; for the CO and prison administrators, chaplains and wardens. In Florida we even asked for blessings on the coming weekend in the form of workable weather because rain can shut a weekend down, not to mention hurricanes! 

They often commute long distances to the facility, and may stay in church camps or volunteer homes and commit to very long days in order to listen to the participants and minister to them, pray with them and worship with them, and teach them how to build or join the inside community of faith so that what they learned over the weekend will continue to be nurtured and supported.

Then the volunteers return periodically over the next six months to continue encouraging, supporting and instructing the inside Kairos family. When running at full speed they will have a 2nd team operating in parallel so there will be two inside weekends a year. Leaders are limited to lead one team in five years to insure that it is always Jesus' show rather than leaning on a single charismatic leader whose death causes more than normal grief.

On July 25th the full team will begin training for the fall Kairos #4 at the women's prison where it was my very great blessing to serve two years ago. It is now 18 hours distant from me and I am finding new ways to serve where  I am planted, but my heart is certainly with these dear women who travel so far to answer their call to serve.

Won't you join me in taking time on July 25th to support this team with your prayers?

I have a sign posted by my desk. It is a paraphrase* from Ephesians 4:29, Dear Lord, Do not let any unkind talk come out of my computer, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it benefit those who listen.

A few months back I ran across a more conventional translation of this and was struck by how much it spoke to my heart, to the deepest desires of my heart when I began blogging here.

It was about a year ago that I began to set-up this web site so that I could write what I hoped might speak the kind of comfort and hope I had been seeking some years ago when my youngest son was incarcerated. I've had some very kind words come my way in the past months and my numbers are growing modestly but steadily so I'm now fairly certain it is not just my sweet family that is reading my words.

As is so often the case when someone writes, I have to think and study as part of the process and this blog blesses me this way every day. When I say something that helps, praise God! If I say something that itches, it might be worth thinking a bit about why that is. If something I write causes pain or anxiety, please accept my heartfelt apology for I am most certainly trying very hard to offer hope, not heap hurts on top of hurts.

In this world, even among God's people, there are so many hurts. Some are caused by our own errors, foolishness or willfulness. But plenty of it is simply part of the brokenness of the world, our nation, our communities, our churches, our families, and, that hardest to acknowledge, ourselves. But it does not matter if our pain is the result of our own actions (good or bad) or the actions of others or the power of nature, our pain is our most common experience.

But God is much bigger than any mess we find ourselves in, any challenges we face, any pain we know. Whatever pain you know today, God is standing with you and longs to offer you His comfort, His peace, His hope.

All Knowing and All Powerful and Ever Present God, comfort us each and all today where we know sorrow, pain, fear, hopelessness and longing in our lives. Teach us to accept Your love, trust You fully and surrender to Your loving arms, because You are both committed to our highest good and fully able to help us on that path. AMEN 

Finding balance seems both desperately important and consistently difficult. I don't want to be too afraid to speak up against meanness or foolishness, but I don't want to provoke harm to the child or elder I want to protect. I want to be helpful to a young mother struggling with tired children in the check-out line, but I don't want her to feel judged or vulnerable. I want to offer kindness to my neighbor without being a busybody. I want to be the best employee or volunteer I can be, but with appropriate acknowledgement for others whose variety of gifts were essential to the good outcome.

And, I would prefer to do this in a manner that does not leave me feeling frozen between the choices or so exhausted from the struggle I am too frustrated to actually do what I eventually feel might be helpful.

Life was less exhausting when I was more certain I knew what needed to be done in any situation I faced. But there was definitely collateral damage when my Idea of how to help proved less than perfect.

So my trip from "knows it all" to "knows nothing for sure" may be called enlightenment, but it left me no further forward in finding and embracing purpose in my life.  I found some comfort in this: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven," written in Ecclesiastes 3:1. Yet this book of Ecclesiastes has as its major point the fact that nothing on this Earth is more than second best to our relationship with God.

So I am very grateful that when I am able to bring kindness or information or a message of hope to someone, I do not have to do it perfectly, because God is able to shut their ears to my errors and make my simple gestures or words bring blessings. This is not because I am so smart or strong or gifted, but because as God pours love on His children, I enjoy the great blessing of Grace when He allows me to be used in His service.

Sometimes the struggle itself becomes sin when we let our fear become an excuse for not growing more fully available to be kind, generous or helpful because we might do it wrong. Part of faith is trusting God to fix us as we go. 

I believe that truth provides safety. Oh, I also believe that speaking truth is dangerous and was the Earthly cause of the death of Christ on the cross. So maybe I need to explain.

When we tolerate lies we invite an environment where danger breeds. The most dangerous (and hardest to root out) are the lies we tell ourselves. Usually we do this because we are focused on what we want (and often feel strongly that we need) to the point we close our eyes, stick our fingers in our ears and sing loudly to keep from having the most obvious truth enter our hard little heads. No where are we more guilty of this than in our relationships whether in seeking life partners, or as we travel from child to adult child in relationship to a parent, or as we deal with our own children.

So here is a little test that tells you if you are (1) being loving and (2) being loved. While we have NO CAPACITY to make anyone love us (please reread that if it seem odd to you, because it is the gospel truth), we have, by the Grace of the Spirit of God, great capacity to grow in being loving. So consider this:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous, it does not brag, and it is not proud. Love is not rude, it is not selfish, and it cannot be made angry easily. Love does not remember wrongs done against it. Love is never happy when others do wrong, but it is always happy with the truth.  1 Corinthians 13:4-6

If you are not being treated with patience, kindness and trust, if your are being treated as an inferior person or less than a person, if you are the focus of anger for small mistakes or even made up stuff, if there is no deep and honest forgiveness and no simple happiness in a relationship IT IS NOT LOVE. It might be infatuation; it might be a crush; it might be enchantment, it might be lust, but baby, it ain't love!

If you are not being patient, kind and trusting, if your are belittling, demanding or controlling, if you are angry about things that have only happened in a conversation you had inside your own head, if you are constantly angry, manipulative and waiting for someones else to "make you happy", It IS NOT LOVE.

Love does not tolerate any kind of violence in a relationship: not mental, not physical, not sexual, not financial. Love takes a step back and is willing to release the relationship if it is causing damage to the parties. Love is also brave enough to keep praying for people in our lives and remains willing to engage in safe baby-steps to rebuilt trust, not because we need to be loved, but because we have God's love in us to pour out on others.

Almighty God, Loving Lord, thank You for loving us in ways that no human relationship can match.  Help us to let You fill us with Love that we might be strong in loving relationships, kind in the face of anger, patient in the face of anxiety, grounded in the face of hate. Help me to be more concerned about how well I offer hope and model joy rather than what I am "getting" from Your children, my sisters and brothers, in this life. AMEN

This morning I was walking toward my car in a rather empty parking lot when movement behind the car caught my eye. My first impression was a skinny dog walking on the other side of my car and I slowed down since I was in an area where I had never seen a stray dog before. A moment later I realized the "dog" was actually a half-dozen small birds jumping around as they dined on bread crumbs a neighborhood person strews for them in this parking lot.

I was reminded of how little I can see clearly from my little corner of the world. Even when I can get beyond my own needs, wants, assumptions, biases and vantage point limitations I can never see more than I can see. I mean, I don't know what goes on behind closed doors or what people say or feel whose life is different than my own and I sure don't know what anyone else is thinking, remembering or fearing at any moment.

I know I deal with this vast unknowing by trusting that God does know and that, because God loves us and has promised to always help us work toward our own highest good, I can stay calm in the face of the vast unknowing that far outpaces what I know -- or think I know.

But how do folks face a world where there is so much we can not know if they think it is all on them? Or is all capricious? What if these folks are in a scary and dangerous place like jail or prison? How about if they are involved in a lifestyle that appears to be prison bound? How about if they are trying to recover from prison and find their way in this great unknowable world?

If someone asks you how you keep your emotional balance or stay positive or live with all we do not know, have you got a plan to reply? Are you prepared to have a conversation if someone asks? 

Will you share your faith, hope and experience with a fellow traveler along life's journey?

Why am I so complaisant when things are going well? It seems it takes a challenge or fear that a challenge is coming for me to be more intentional about doing the things that I know benefit me.

This is true for healthy diets and exercise, but even more so for being consistent in spiritual disciplines that I know, f-r-o-m  p-e-r-s-o-n-a-l  e-x-p-e-r-i-e-n-c-e bless me: make my sleep more restful, my days more productive and my life more sweet in general. Yet I must keep restarting, relearning, remembering again and God keeps calling me back in love. I feel that I'm making only baby steps and I am frustrated with myself with such small victories.

Yet this verse (Zephaniah 3:17) makes my heart beat faster and my sight blur with tears.

"The Lord your God is with you,..........................................The Lord my God is with me
    the Mighty Warrior who saves.........................................     The mighty Warrior who saves
He will take great delight in you;..........................................He will take great delight in me
    in His love He will no longer rebuke you...........................     in His love He will no longer rebuke me
    but will rejoice over you with singing.” ............................but will rejoice over me with singing.

The idea of God singing is rather breathtaking in its own right, but to sing over me? I can only say, "Wow!"

Dear God, Thank-You. Thank-You. Thank-You. Thank-You. Thank-You. Thank-You. I love you. AMEN

I'm not sure if it was what was said to me, or only what I heard. As I have gotten older I realize that there is often a large gap between the two. 

Sometimes it is using short hand that is not clear to both parties. (i.e. PTA stands for Parent Teacher Association and Plain Text Alternative and 87 other things familiar to a wide range of folks). Sometimes it is assuming a common set of experiences such as at a family reunion where someone says, "It is just like Uncle Frank's teeth" and everyone laughs except a new bride who has not yet heard that family story and a child just now old enough to ask what that means. Sometimes we are simply not listening closely enough to our co-conversant to realize we are talking at cross purposes.

But however it happened, I heard the negative when I was taught this passage from Galatians 6:7: You reap whatever you sow. When I hear this I tend to think about not sowing anger or discontent or lies, each of which is appropriate to avoid like the plagues they are. But, honestly, I struggle to "not do the bad thing" because then I'm too focused on what I'm NOT needing to do. Maybe this is why I was drawn to this change in perspective:

I have been thinking about "reaping what I sow" considering equally my need to be sowing good things. I need to be planting kindness, courtesy, patience, honesty, sharing perspective gently, being available, being generous, doing the better thing, expecting a good outcome while accepting with mercy that something less is completely possible. Just doing a little more of these good things can make my life better, even as it offers a bit of love or hope or joy to someone else's day.

Dear Lord, I will never in this life completely eliminate all weeds from my garden, but I thank You for Your persistent Good Will for my highest good. Help me to avoid sowing weeds into my life. But also teach me to actively and intentionally sow the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) into the nooks and crannies of my day and life. Send Your Spirit to enlighten and empower better choices that I might surrender to Your kind plans for my day today. I love You. AMEN

For someone whose patience is as limited as my own, watching a butterfly emerge from the chrysalis is less awe and more anxiety. I hope I'm doing better, but the whole "mother" in me longs to help just a little. But I realize this is fatal to a lovely butterfly who needs every bit of the struggle to be strong enough to live.

So it is with children, parents, friends, folks we mentor: finding that sweet spot between coach, mentor, cheerleader and fellow traveler is a daily struggle. It is a little easier when the person we love is all fired up to do well and learn what they need to be independent and productive. It is much harder when trying to gently kick the young adult chick out of the nest. 

And every step between is fraught with the temptation to be over helpful alternating with not helpful enough. I really want a manual with detailed notes and plenteous examples of how best to proceed.

But instead I find all this is a reflection of my relationship with God where I try to figure out how to live like Jesus lived and love and serve as Jesus loved and served. 

So today I ask the Spirit of God to pour out on me patience, wisdom, restraint, enthusiasm and love, persistently calling me to walk more closely with Him and let my actions speak louder than my nagging.

Today our family will gather to rejoice as we celebrate the baptism of our youngest family member. Our oldest family member longs to be with us, but his frailty my prevent that. I know his prayers will pour out upon us all of his days.

Each member of our family comes with strengths and abilities, dreams and hopes, and enough challenges to keep kind and helpful. This week I have been so blessed as folks have adjusted schedules, made family a priority, and practiced patience and kindness and generosity in ways that bless us all.

Here is my prayer for families everywhere:

King of Kinds, Lord of Lords, Spirit of God, we thank you for the abundant blessings of this day, as families gather to worship You. Sometimes they get to do this in the same town or building, but other times they are separated by great distances. But in You we are all a part of Your Kingdom and bound together in You. Today we remember families embracing rites established to help us remember that the simplest things are often the most important. So for folks being baptized, marrying, burying, worshiping, and communing at your table we ask your blessings on the events that bind us together as your people, as family of birth, law and choice, and in truth, hope, and love.  AMEN 

Family: love 'em like crazy and try not to be crazy. We have and recently have had lots of folks we love in from out of town over the past few weeks. This week is particularly busy with our youngest grandchild here from outside the country with a baptism in our near future and lots of laughter and choosing to be calm and cutting folks some slack and asking for a little slack too. Two weeks from now we have a beloved granddaughter with us for a week that turned out to be Vacation Bible School week. I thought summers were busy when my children were small, but keeping up with a gaggle of grandchildren is proving delightfully diverse and busy.

The family of God also is very diverse, from young men in prison working to become ordained ministers to the university PhD whose face as it looked in kindergarten tends to make me giggle even as he does important work well. We all do some things well and some things poorly. When we realize we are doing them poorly we have a chance to be more intentional in the choices we make, the hope of achieving a better outcome for the future. 

I have no sufficient desire and am of a sufficiently advanced age and girth that I do not expect to ever again go to the batting cages with the hope of being less gangling on the softball field. But I am glad to report I am getting better in some ways...I don't think I've burned a pan trying to relearn cooking with gas--for several weeks at least!

And I have come to appreciate the good...the good in people, including struggling people, the good in the natural world, even while picking up from the aftermath of high winds, the good in healthier eating and activity choices. I am enjoying the habit of seeing the good. Plenty of things still leave me with sadness or concern or a longing to do better as a person and a church and a community. But I have learned that focusing only on what I want to change does not give me the energy, the perspective or the wisdom I need to reach out.

So today I'll walk the dog, rock the baby, enjoy the conversations flowing around me and the memories stirring and thank God with such a full heart for my abundant blessings and opportunities, and resting in God's most tender and generous care.

I've quit trying to figure out what is good news and what is challenging news so I'll just say we have a rather fluid situation at the moment and I'll be out of the blogging business for a day or two as we make a quick trip out of town. 

Prayers of thanksgiving for God's abundant Grace in our lives are appreciated!

I remember when I was much younger that I believed there would come a time when I would have my act together and that would be when I was an adult. Now I have no expectation of ever having my act together in the sense that I make few mistakes, am consistently wise and strong, and always know what is the best thing to do.

I am a work in progress.

Now I think being an adult is expecting to have bad times as well as good, being willing to grow and learning what I have authority over and exercising it. With God's help I have authority over my own actions, my attitude and my willingness to try something new if what I'm doing isn't working. I no longer expect to get "it" wholly correct, or "arrive" or be perfect. But I do accept that I can learn from mistakes, grow stronger by doing the right thing more consistently and see myself as the beloved child that God sees, created for a purpose, wholly renewable and worthy of forgiveness, beloved, and valuable.

We moved into a 20 year-old house last year. It had been rehabed and we had hoped that would mean the first year would be low-maintenance. Maybe if the house had been in the care of more reliable workmen it would have been better, but in truth when you have a house, the house owns you. There is always a need to watch for insect invasions, things that need updating, paint that has been pinged, things that wear out and that is pretty much the way life is. We need to keep checking to see if we are becoming the person we want to be and if not, adjust course. We can't decide to be "a little selfish" without looking back and realizing we have harmed those we loved.
We can't be "a little dishonest" and then be surprised that we've drifted where we did not intend to go.

This would be pretty intimidating if it were not for this: Psalm 46:1 records, "God is our protection and source of strength. He is always ready to help us in times of trouble." On my own, I'm frustrated, painfully aware of my own brokenness and constantly trying to get it together. But I am not on my own. My God is never out of town, phone lost or out of juice, uninterested, distracted or out of patience. When I fall I am confident that I can do better and that God can heal me, teach me, restore me and God always, always, always loves me.

This is one of those days when I am particularly grateful for God's Amazing Grace.

When my son began having legal problems I was hundreds of miles away. The immediate focus was on how to get him help, but, looking back, I had a wrong set of priorities and it cost us all. I wish I had been more focused on his brokenness that caused and exacerbated the problems and less on "fixing things" for him; more focused on my own brokenness, over which I have authority. Because he was not ready to address his brokenness, I have no reason to believe the legal outcomes would have been different, but the damage to those who love him might have been different. 

It is hard, when someone you love is spinning out of control and you see the brick wall coming up fast. But eventually I learned that I was not in control and if I had been, I would not have been wise about what needed to happen. I only knew what I wanted to happen...MAKE IT ALL OK! 

But it was not OK before the legal problems started and, looking back, without the legal problems the other problems might have killed him. I understand that MY way of helping might have caused his death.

Eventually I understood that we had very different and separate journeys into this nightmare and I could not learn for him, grow for him or "fix life" for him. I came to understand that God traveled with us both on our separate journeys. I came to realize that God loves us more than we can ever love each other. I have come to trust God in new ways. Truly I can not "help" my son in the way he needs to be helped. And because I found God so faithful in tending me on my own  journey.

This morning reading the New Revised Standard Version translation of Psalm 118:13 took me back to that time in an instant:  “I was pushed hard, so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me.” I wish I had noticed or found or understood this verse earlier, because it so wholly speaks to the experience of having a child with problems outside of our control. But then, all of the big ones are. But it is not too late to make it my new favorite verse.

God of Love, God of Hope, God of Healing, thank You for loving my child as much as You love me, caring tenderly for my child and for me, healing my child and me. Help me to surrender fully to you my child's care and my own, solidly grounded in trust in You, and resting in Your peace, AMEN

Today our friends are awaiting lab results and we long to understand how we might help. Also an adult child is fly in tonight with his young family and we are so excited about having family time.

It is so difficult not to anticipate difficulties or let excitement drift over into anxiety that everything goes smoothly, which of course it never does. This living in the moment thing, whether the moment is "good" or "bad" (and most things are some of both) has been a lifelong challenge for me.

But to the extent I have learned to be grateful at all times, in all places and circumstances I have known more peace and been better equipped to be my best self. I have read quite a lot about grief over the years, trying to understand loss and moving forward and healing. I remember reading that even good things have an element of grief in them: joyful new babies come with little sleep, new homes come with lost neighbors, and new jobs come with loss of close contact with co-workers and mentors. I have learned that even the challenging things come with blessings: sharing the care of an ill beloved one with others who love and value them, experiencing loss of job or relationship and being reassured that we have people who are in our corner, cheering us on.

So, my friend, whatever you are waiting for today, I commend to you this verse

Philippians 4:6-7 Don’t worry about anything, but pray and ask God for everything you need, always giving thankfor what you have. And because you belong to Christ Jesus, God’s peace will stand guard over all your thoughts and feelings. His peace can do this far better than our human minds.