Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Sometimes You Gotta Just Laugh

I was going to write you today to follow up on what we've been talking about—praying for our children. Instead, I'll show you next time how parents can pray for themselves. So if you don't mind, I'm just going to sit here and laugh! My only regret is due to the limitations of blogging, you can't sit here and laugh with me :-) The older I get, the more I find to laugh about.

So what's so funny?

In a word...............LIFE!

I just got out my notes on seeing God in everything to prepare an outline for an upcoming talk. In the beginning of that talk, I say how one of the greatest obstacles to having unwavering faith is the difficulty in seeing God in everything. 

I'm not going to give you the points on that talk right now. I just thought, this might be a nice time for you to see another side of me so that there will be not an iota shred of doubt in your mind that I do not have it all together (a point many of you never doubted who either know me personally or have been reading longer than a few days!). 

I can't stand blogging for many days without a huge dose of reality mixed in so that I present a more balanced picture of life for you. It is so easy to pose on Internet, and that would cause me to blow my witness with you to let you think that I am something that I am not. God is still working on me, too. That is the main reason I write!

Thank goodness the faithfulness of God is not dependent on me—my part is to do the  surrendering and trusting. He is the one who accomplishes the work even when it looks like everything (that would be me) is a total mess!

Here's just a few of the typical kinds of things that have come up lately:

     I had laryngitis for 10 days leading up to speaking commitment. My voice is back, but for healing I'm supposed to be drinking a lot of water (I'm trying!) and talking breathy (Ha! I don't know how to do it!) and speaking "less words per breath." (You gotta try to do that one. I keep forgetting, then I remember and try to breathe and say 4 or 5 words instead of my normal 35 wpb and it is all quite unnatural!)

     Mary's bathroom had been leaking downstairs and it was raining in the kitchen, which of course had to be fixed. The painters misunderstood what they were to paint after the sheet rock was repaired, and I walked downstairs to what looked like a crime scene. The entire downstairs was covered in tape and clear cellophane paper! I had to call Terry who was in his beloved kettle bell exercise class and get someone to drag him out of the class and to the land line phone (there's a few left in the world, thank goodness!) because Terry doesn't take his cell to exercise since he doesn't want any interruptions. Oh well.

     My son's good friend had accidentally knocked into my son's front tooth when he suddenly jerked up—yep, my son lost the whole tooth (he's still handsome even with his fake tooth. I know, I know, I'm very old-fashioned and live in the wrong century and still say handsome;-)

If you are not totally convinced that I need God every hour, just you wait, and read on. I'm not even going to tell you about everyday sin stuff that needs to be confessed because I know you are surfing the web and not reading a novel (by the way, I can't resist dropping in a teaching point that daily confession as soon as we know is best so as to keep short accounts with God and a clear conscience—1 John 1:9. I learned to make that a practice early on in my Christian journey and it really helps so nothing blocks our fellowship with Christ! OK, since I'm reversing things todaylet's get back to the story...).

     I haven't seen my winter coat in nearly two weeks now. I lost it sometime literally right before what our weatherman said was "cold Arctic air rolling in from the north." I called every place I could think of that I had been to retrace my steps—school, church, store, restaurants, the doctor's office—googling their numbers then describing my black and white checked coat, only—no coat—no one had seen it :-( 

     I'm back, I just realized the assistant principal had not emailed me back so I emailed him again—so there's still hope it may be there! My dear mentor Elisabeth Elliot used to say to pray (I did) and look in all the logical places and then just go about your work and see if it shows up.

     Right on the heels of that, I grabbed Mary's violin case and picked her up at school only to get to her lesson to open up the case to see—I had brought an empty case! I actually gasped and scared Mary!

     Violin nights are our busiest nights so I had picked up Chinese food. After dinner I was deep in thought, thinking about if I missed any places I might have gone where I could have left my coat. As I was cleaning up the dishes, I decided to eat one of the fortune cookies instead of throwing them away as we usually do, because no one ever eats them. 

     I remember thinking it didn't taste as bland as I thought it would be. I told Mary that they had more vanilla in them than I remembered and that she might want to try one. About that time, I felt the flour had a strange paste-ee consistency in my mouth, but I fluffed it off—distracted by Mary saying she did not want a fortune cookie because she did not consider them cookies but she did however want to know what the fortune said. 

     I started to think (obviously the first time I had done that in a while) when it dawned on me that there was more to fortune cookies that flour and vanilla, and that I had not remembered taking the fortune out before I ate the cookie!!! I had been munching on the fortune! I know you're thinking right now, yeah Juana, we know what it would of said if you had not eaten it. "The one who eats this is pretty stupid." I'm probably the only person you know that didn't break the thing open first!

In Proverbs 31, we read a description of a godly, older woman. I want to be like her! Her heart trusts in the Lord.  She conducts business. She laughs. Her children call her blessed. She can laugh at the days to come! I think that sometimes God wants us to lighten up, and not take ourselves so seriously and enjoy Him for no other reason than He loves us! He adores us! I think He even laughs with us, because He invented laughter. 

I'm so grateful for God's faithfulness, constant love, and His word which is life-giving, true, and penetrates the soul! We read in Proverbs 1:7, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," otherwise we would have no hope! All our hope and confidence is in Him! I love you too, my Sisters and Brothers. We need one another to encourage each other in the faith as we wait for our Lord's return!
Here I am in my coat with my daughter, Blair, over Christmas.
The assistant principal emailed me back before I finished writing this blog... no coat:-(
But the good news is as I type... I hear Mary practicing her violin;-)
Walk by Faith,

1 comment:

  1. I'm back a week later! We had Chinese tonight, and I simply cannot believe that I ate the whole fortune last time we had Chinese. I now think a piece of it must have been stuck in the part I was eating, for there is no way I ate the 2 inch long fortune, so I guess that means I'm only half crazy. And on the tooth story, I mistakenly told you his tooth got knocked out, it didn't. The xray showed it cracked all the way through & the doc said there was no way to save it. He said the gum was the only thing holding it in, and it will keep falling till it comes out, so he easily took it out:-) Will someone tell the people that already read this? Ha!

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