Category: Random Musings

Feelings of pity and empathy engulfed me as I listened to their story.  My heart filled with an overwhelming aching sadness.  Before I knew it, tears began filling my eyes, building up until my eyelids reached their full capacity and the tears spilled over and began flowing down my cheeks.  As I was driving down the highway.  On my way home from work after a long busy day.  Listening to the radio.   Crying because the fictitious wife in the song blaring out of my speakers had found out she had cancer and her husband is promising to be there for her.

Has anything like this ever happened to you or am I alone in my insanity?  Is this the effects of having an over active imagination that can visualize the scenes in the song like they are actually happening and playing out in real life?  Or is it a ghost compassion because logically the couple in the song doesn’t exist? Then I justify this in my head, asking myself how many real, live, human couples have had to walk down this long, winding road through a valley?  What does this say about me mentally that I am having an emotional outpouring driving down the road?

I hope this means that I am a human being that can feel sympathy and compassion for the human race.  Is there something more to this outburst though, lurking in the background?  Am I really feeling sorry for myself and wishing for someone to promise to walk down my hard road with me?  Anything is possible.

Luckily for me, there is someone who promised me a long time ago, at the moment of my conception in fact, that he would be with me always and would never abandon me.  He reaches down from the heavens to hold my hand and guide me, if I would just stop and listen to where he is leading me to.

A few months ago while spending a weekend away with our youth group we ended up on a ropes course designed to help build bonds of trust.  The final exercise that afternoon was for the group to pair off, place a blindfold on one of the partners in each group of two, and have the other person give the blindfolded person directions for walking safely forward.  Did I mention we were in a mountainous, woody area?  We had to rely solely on the verbal instructions coming from our partners and trust that they would protect us from harm and help us to safely arrive at our destination.  Half way down the partners switched places. Everyone got to experience the helplessness of needing someone to guide them.  Blind trust in action.

Why is it that I didn’t hesitate  about putting on a physical blindfold and allowing another human being to direct and guide me down a winding hill path littered with rocks and sticks, but so often I just can’t seem to give this same blind trust to my maker?   Most likely because I am stubborn and want to buy into the human concept that I am strong enough to do everything on my own.

Some days I feel like an incredible hypocrite.  I know that God has placed callings on my life, and I try to follow them, but I am really making those the priorities in my life?  Or am I trying to dictate the outcomes I want in my life.?

When God says, ” My child, I want you to write,”  my response is, “Sure thing God, just as soon as I feel comfortable letting go of these other areas I am currently working in to serve you and your children,”  when it should probably be “Here I am Lord, lead me and I will follow.”

At the end of the day it all comes down to I need to let go and trust God more.  He will provide me with all the tools I need.  I need to trust that the Lord will open the right doors for me at the perfect times according to his plans and timeframe, not mine.

So perhaps I wasn’t really crying for pretend people after all, but for myself as I became overwhelmed by his holy presence filling my car.  God was talking to me through the music in the car telling me to stop my endless worrying and finally let him truly take over and lead me on my journey. Promising me he knows the way and He will take me all the way to journey’s end.  Time to put on that blindfold and follow him.

 

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

and do not rely on your own insight. 

In all your ways acknowledge him,

and he will make your path straight.

Proverbs 3:5-6

So I am sitting here doing some research on a couple of different Bible verses that have caught my attention lately.  My thought process is these can possibly be topics of upcoming posts.  I am doing some initial brain storming and using biblegateway.com to compare them to each other in different versions.  I also have my headphones on and am listening to Pandora, which just happened to be on one of my country stations when I turned it on.

You may be wondering why there are headphones blaring music into my head when I am working on a serious quest for knowledge.  Well the simple answer is we live in a very tiny mobile home so I don’t have an office, or even a normal size bedroom, to place my desk (whose name is Cordelia) in.  Instead it is in our very small living room.   If my husband is home when inspiration hits me and we are sharing the living room space, then the television is also going.  Normally when I am working on a post or a Bible study I will turn on music to help me center my thoughts in our little noisy home, and it tends to be instrumental versions of popular Contemporary Christian songs, similar to the music played at Hobby Lobby.  Tonight I was so engrossed in my research and totally lost in my thoughts and the words that i didn’t really pay attention to the music when I turned it on, it was just kind of going in the background.  Any one who knows me knows that I listen to a wide variety of stuff as testified by the rather eclectic collection of songs in my Ipod and the many different stations on my Pandora account.  All of a sudden it hit me that the song that was playing was an old Garth Brooks song — I’ve Got Friends in Low Places, not Contemporary Christian elevator music!  The sheer irony of the nature of my reading coupled with the idea of having friends in low places was not lost on me.  If ever there was a time to not take a coincidence as a hidden message from  Providence this would be it!

It is pretty safe to say that Husband thinks I am slightly more than a little crazy at this point.  He has had his suspicions all along but they have now been definitely confirmed.  When the above realization hit me instantaneous laughter bubble up and out of me.  The good, deep kind of joyful laughter that comes from deep down in your belly and brings tears to your eyes.  So maybe it was an “aha” moment from above after all.  Not one that had a calling or some deep meaning in it, but a simple reminder that I needed to take a moment to relax and unwind, and find my balance after a long, busy day.  It is necessary to take the time to stop all of the noise and just sit still, let it be, and breathe.

Life is a never-ending to-do list.  Take today for an example.  Wake up and shower, get Max up, ready and out the door, commute to work, work through an audit at work all day, commute home, make dinner, squeeze in a little time to start some research — perhaps my mind is going on over load.  Where do I make the time to just be?  Is all this busy-ness robbing me of the true joy that God intended for me to experience on my life’s journey?

There are a plethora of self-help articles out there that tell us that it is ok, even vital, to make the time to take care of ourselves.  They encourage us to find some time to unwind, pamper ourselves, focus on our needs, and forget about the rest of the world for just a couple of minutes.   They tell us we need to take the time to recharge ourselves.  What I don’t see in these articles very often is them telling us to listen for the whispers from the one with the great reset button.  If I don’t take the time to incorporate some quiet in my life, how can I hope to deepen my relationship with God?  Has society in general developed too far in the wrong direction?  I have access for instant noise 24-7.  I never have to be alone with my own thoughts or be available for those vital conversations with God that happen in the silence.

So the challenge I must accept is the one that involves me being more intentional about finding some quiet time each and every day.  A prayerful, meditative time each new day to allow my relationship with the heavenly father to grow.  I need to remind myself that in these quiet silences our Divine God will place balms of healing on my soul that will soothe and repair it, as well as encourage, motivate, and recharge me so that I will be ready to face anything that comes my way with wisdom, peace, and relative calm.  Sounds great! Right?  I think it does, but somehow I just can’t seem to get there.

Fear not!  God is loving and full of grace!  Even though I continue to mess up this simple thing, he tells me it is ok.  He is always available for me, in my busy-ness, in all the craziness, and in my silent times.  So as long as the sun comes up I will continue to try to incorporate some quiet times into my day, it only takes a few baby steps at a time.

Psalms 46:10 Be still, and know that I am God

It definitely wouldn’t be the first time and most likely won’t be the last.   A little over a year ago I began to feel nudges.  Not physical nudges like somebody was poking my arm, but those pesky little spiritual nudges that say our Daddy in Heaven has a new assignment for me.  Just like human fathers, it has become my belief that our heavenly Father likes to tease his children for a while before letting them in on his plans for each of them.   We are created in his image so it makes perfect sense that he has a sense of humor, mischief, and merriment.  He whispers to us, “I have a new, fun, awesome plan for your life!  Can you guess what it is?”  So I started to look for the little clues he was leaving me that would tell me what he had in store for me next.  Eventually, with the help of two wonderful people (one a pastor who is also a good friend that has moved on to follow a new calling of his own in distant lands and the other a patient lady with a great big heart who has sentenced herself to being my spiritual mentor), the conclusion was made that my next assignment was to write.

Pure excitement gripped my soul.  God wants ME to be a writer!  Memories of pretending to be Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder for hours on end all through out my childhood flooded my mind.  It made absolutely perfect sense to me that I should join the ranks of these fictional kindred spirits of my youth and become an author.  So I did the only thing a dutiful, loving child of God can do when given a new task by the Father.  I questioned him on his choice of assignment for me and tried to stall as I wrestled with self-doubt.

What was I supposed to write about?  Will the writing take the form of a book or an article or something else completely?  Where do I even begin?  I haven’t had any education in the writing arts what if i can’t do it?  Am I capable of writing anything another human being would find engaging?  How do I get started?  For months these questions rolled around while I delayed getting on with the task at hand.  Until I decided that the spec sheet of my assignment specified that I should pay tribute to a dear man by incorporating his legacy of poetry into a daily devotional format.  Armed with this new information I plowed ahead with more procrastination.  So maybe that wasn’t the plan after all.  Perhaps I had misread the memo and wasn’t really supposed to write after all.

Never fear!  He didn’t leave me to flounder around in the shadows of self-doubt.  Instead he brought new people into my life to advise and encourage me to pursue the writing road.  Renewed energy surged through me for my devotional project.  I even came up with a name for the project, then stalled again.  On the advice of a new friend who is a gifted story-teller and writer I compiled a sample of the dear man’s work and eagerly sent it off to three folks that had never met him to see if his poems had any appeal outside of the family circle with sentimental attachments to the words.  Oddly enough the reviews came back with positive feedback for the poetry, but two of the three reviewers said they wanted to hear my voice, and asked what is God putting into my heart to share with his children on planet Earth?  One of them suggested I start small, with a blog.   As a result Wisdom Wanderings was born.

Awesome! Mission complete!  Task finished!  I have become a writer!  Now I can be done, right? Not exactly.  Plans for further writing abound and continue to be at the front of my mind.  There are a couple of drafts started for new blog posts, and ideas for books to review in future posts are running around in my head.  The classic movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner brought us the epic line “If you build it, they will come.”  So I am going to choose to trust in God and that he didn’t assign me a pointless calling and continue to publish new posts on a regular basis hoping that if I write it, followers will come.  If you are a fellow human being and you have found your way to my blog in its infancy stage, thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings!

But wait there’s more!  The time has come to take the next steps in this call to write and branch out to magazine articles.  I have chosen the magazine and gotten the requirements for submitting items for publication to the editors.  While I haven’t begun the actual writing of said article there are a couple of topic ideas running through my head that I have plans to begin researching.  One is on two important female characters that had very important roles in the Old Testament, despite the fact that they weren’t Israelites.  Another idea involves taking a look at when and why the angels were created, and comparing the fallen angels to the fallen humans in the Garden, if that is possible.

It has been said that I don’t dabble at anything, so in true Pixie fashion I am also planning to try my hand at writing curriculum for the new Mennonite Sunday School curriculum, Shine as well.  Providence seems to be in agreement with me as it led me to an issue of the Mennonite World Review where I ran across an article (want advertisement) that was looking for people to write curriculum for year three of this new program.   Of course I clicked on it and now have all the information needed to submit a sample to be considered as one of the said writers.  Unlike the blog posts or plans for magazine article submissions, this idea includes a built-in time frame.  All samples must be submitted for consideration by the middle of December.   So I guess I better get busy!

So have I bitten off more than I can chew?  Possibly, but I serve a  God who is greater than me, and through him all things are possible.  If this writing thing is indeed a gift he has graced me with, then he will also give me the wisdom, words and abilities needed to be successful at it.  The exact audience he is intending me to reach will be reached, as he will see to it that the needed opportunities arise to make it happen.  After all, He is a gentleman,  and he will open the doors needed for me if I just have faith.   So buckle up!  I am embracing this new calling and looking forward to seeing where this journey will lead me.

During my nightly perusing of my Facebook news feed I scrolled past a quote that caught my eye.  It was from noted money advice guy Dave Ramsey, and it said, “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.”  Wow!  It caught my eye as the screen was scrolling by, and I had to back up to make sure I had read it correctly.   That is worth another WOW!  I couldn’t help but reflect over my life and the impressions I had of what I needed to buy in order to obtain my American Dream.   Then I realized that I had already  more or less figured this out over the last couple of years and have seen my priorities change, and my ideas of what we actually need, as opposed to what would be nice, have gone through a drastic change.

Magazines and blogs are full of articles on how to organize our stuff.   They are also full of articles on how to declutter our stuff.   It seems like a vicious cycle.  We buy the stuff, we store the stuff, we get overwhelmed by the stuff, we get rid of the stuff, then we replace the stuff with more stuff — what are we really looking for?

Are we looking for approval, possibly from a parent or some other close relative?  Hoping beyond hope that the stuff we have acquired would make them proud of us and our successes? Buying stuff to be able to show them how well we have done so that they will realize we are worthy of their  affection that we believe is otherwise lacking for us?  Trying to perhaps measure up to some imaginable standard that in reality most likely does not exist.

Are we looking for friendship, using the stuff as our “dues” to get into the group we think we most closely identify with?  Why do we doubt that the qualifications of our character, intelligence,  sense of humor, and compassionate hearts aren’t enough to get and keep friends?  Is our society really that fickle that we choose friends based on outward appearances and possessions instead of on what is on the inside?  When did the make and model of someone’s car become more important than the knowledge that said friend would come to pick us up if we ever needed to be rescued?  Let’s start a Love Revolution instead and try to top each other with acts of kindness, not brands of stuff.

Are we looking for acceptance from our peers or co-workers, perhaps our in-laws, because we are convinced we have to prove we are capable, competent and worthy of what ever position we are holding, be it office worker or wife?  Obviously SOMEONE has chosen us, hired us, married us, because they think we fit the bill exactly right.  Let’s own that!  It’s time to put away the prizes for the best stuff, which gives us more stuff that we don’t need.

Are we filling in the holes in our lives with stuff that we should be filling with a relationship with our God and creator?  I can’t answer that for you, but for me I think the answer was and IS a definite YES — human insecurity plagues us and we feel less than.  The cures we tend to choose in this broken world are the ones we find here on Planet Earth.  However, I am learning that with every step I take to deepen my own personal relationship with our God in Heaven, the less incomplete and  undeserving I find myself feeling.  Not saying the dark days don’t come to me, because boy do they ever, but I am starting to look to Heaven for the hope I need to realize that I am doing ok, and that I am worthy and enough just the way I am.