GO Tell it on the Mountain!

Have you ever stopped to think about all the action in the Christmas story? There is so much going on that makes me want to get up and go!

First, Mary and Joseph TRAVELED to Bethlehem. What a journey that must have been on a donkey! Then Mary DELIVERED baby Jesus. That really took some effort and strength!

But it’s the shepherds that amaze me. To be out on that dark countryside and all of a sudden have an angel standing before you…WHOA! That must have either scared them or surprised them at the presence of such a heavenly being. Maybe it was a little of both.

It says that after they heard the message they CAME WITH HASTE. How fast is haste anyway? I think they ran! Of course, they couldn’t leave their sheep out there in the countryside alone so they must have had to hurry the sheep along with the men in the middle of the night.

Then there is the part about after they saw baby Jesus. It says they MADE WIDELY KNOWN the things they had seen and heard. I can only imagine them going through the streets of Bethlehem telling everyone they met about Jesus. He’s here! The Savior has been born! Now that’s the kind of action that excites people.

How about you? Have you gone with haste to tell anybody about Jesus this year? Have you made widely known to anyone the news of your Savior’s birth? I think God put all this action into the Scriptures to give us a great example of how it should be done. TELL EVERYONE and DO IT QUICKLY! I want to be like those shepherds this year. I don't want fear to cause me to miss something great that God has planned for me to experience. I want to GO and TELL!

The Unthankful Years, Part 4, (The finale, but surely not the end!)

One day 22 years after my oldest grandson was adopted as a baby, I came into work and turned on my computer. There was a single email that caught my eye. It said, “Hello, my name is Michael and I think you’re my grandma.”

I can’t tell you how hard my heart was beating or my head spinning when I clicked to open that email. Could it be? Was this my grandson whom I hadn’t seen since he was three days old? The answer was a resounding YES!

Michael had thought about contacting us when he was 16 years old but had decided to wait. He was now married and in the armed forces serving overseas. In his words:

I wish to let both my birth parents know who I am so they can have some closure, and know that I am safe, and was raised in an amazing family....and I would like to know my lineage and where I come from, this has plagued my mind since I was first told I was adopted.

At this point I was crying so hard, trying to breathe and regain my composure but after waiting for 22 years it was definitely hard. My employees were watching me through my office door window and wondering what was going on!

Michael was searching. We were searching. But God knew where he was all the time. Those years of praying so hard were coming to an end. Unfortunately, if he had contacted us when he was 16 he would have met his grandfather, but that was not God’s plan. Michael would have to learn of him through us, a new part of his family.

Since that time we have had a reunion of sorts. My son and his wife, Michael and his wife, his entire family, and I all came together to talk about what had happened all those years ago. It was more than a reunion, it was a healing.

My first glimpse of Michael was astonishment. He was built just like his dad. Thick and strong and powerful. He was musical like his father. He played and sang us some songs on his guitar and harmonica. Two instruments his father plays! Other than my marriage and the birth of my children, it was one of the most amazing days of my life! My only regret was that my husband was not there to share it with me…or was he?

God’s hand was in every day we prayed through those 22 years. God knew our hearts and heard our pleading. I remember memorizing Romans 8:18 during those years and wondering when that verse would come into play in my life. “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.” Now I know.

Thank you, LORD, for hearing, for waiting, for rewarding. May I never be ungrateful or unthankful for another day of my life. Each one is in Your mighty hand and I am in Your heart.

The Unthankful Years, Part 3

Fortunately, in God’s plan, there is a purpose for everything. In part two of this series I explained the feelings and emotions we went through after our college-aged son got his girlfriend pregnant.

Late in December during that rough year, our telephone rang at two in the morning. A baby boy had been born! We waited to wake our son from his sleep and told him in the morning. Then we went to the hospital to see the child.

That day, everything changed. It was no longer about any of us, but about him. God had already shown my husband and me that it wasn’t about our jobs in church or our feelings or other people’s opinions of us. It wasn’t about what Satan was trying to accomplish either. It was about the child.

He was so small, but very beautiful. He looked like my son and his girlfriend. Now what to do with the baby? Would he be raised in her home or ours? Would we get that blessed opportunity?

After considering all the options, the parents decided they were too young to be a family. They gave the baby up for adoption. For three days they held him, loved him, and took pictures. Then he was gone. I remember thinking and crying with my husband that our first grandson had disappeared. Would we ever see him again? Would our son ever have a relationship with him at all?

Years went by. We prayed and begged God to show us where he was. Was he okay? Did he have good parents and grandparents? We even wrote to the adoption agency when he was about 16 to find out if he had living grandparents and if we could be a part of his life. The answer was no.

The years of praying were over for my husband when he died suddenly at 60 years of age. It would no longer be the two of us praying for an opportunity to meet our grandson, only me.

Then one day 22 years after his birth, I came into work and turned on my computer. There was a single email that caught my eye. It said, “Hello, my name is Michael and I think you’re my grandma.”

The Unthankful Years Part 2

I will never forget the phone call. After being a stay-at-home mom for 18 years, I enrolled in a local art college and was in class when the message came. Call the youth pastor from your church, the note read. I ran, not walked, to the phone and called that number.

My pastor told me I needed to come home and he needed to talk to me. I told him that I was not hanging up the phone until he told me what the problem was. Did someone get in an accident? Were one of my children injured? Was my husband okay? What was going on?

I don’t remember much that happened after his next words. I don’t remember getting my stuff from class and driving to my in-laws’ house or driving with them the hour ride to Lansing, Michigan. I don’t remember calling my husband to meet us there, (he was on the road as a salesman). All I remember were the pastor’s words to me: “Your son has gotten a girl pregnant.”

I could actually leave the rest of this page blank because that’s how I felt. How could this have happened? We had just taken him to college a few months before and he was fine. He was brought up in the same home as all my other kids. What kind of a decision was this? Didn’t he know what that would do to OUR reputation at church? My husband was a deacon, I was a children’s ministry worker. What was he thinking? I was so selfish in every thought. I wasn't thinking of my son or his girlfriend. I was thinking of myself. It was one of the most terrible times of my life.

We never had to deal with anything like this and didn’t know how to handle it. The senior pastor of our church didn’t know either, so it was swept under the rug. Nobody knew why I looked like I’d been crying for weeks or why I didn’t even want to come to church anymore. No one asked why my husband was considering dropping out of the deacon’s group or quitting the choir director’s job. Doesn’t the Word say something about a person who doesn’t know how to handle his own house shouldn’t be in a church job or something like that? We were devastated. Undone. Was there no help for us anywhere? And what about those dreams for our son, where did they go? Didn’t anyone know how to bring something good out of this awful situation?

God did have a plan but it didn’t come into play right away. It was yet to be revealed. I can honestly say I was not thankful for that awful year of our lives until a day in December when everything changed. (to be continued)

The Unthankful Years, Part 1

To say that I have been thankful for every year of my life would be a lie. When I was a young believer, I was unthankful for many life events. I wasn’t mature enough to know how to be thankful. I just hurt.

I remember being about 11 years old when I first realized I was a little different from most kids. I was taller, chunkier, and I thought differently. My teachers called me a troublemaker, but I knew I was not a bad kid. I just thought about things in a round-about way and didn’t know how to explain my thoughts to other people. If someone told me to look at the black spot on the red square, I would instantly look at the red square and then the black spot. It all seemed crazy to me to do it any other way.

In junior high, I realized that I had another ability that made me unusual. I could listen to music and then just play it, whether I was playing my clarinet or a piano. I tried to take piano lessons but the teacher gave up on me. Really! He said I acted like I already knew the music and played it like I wanted to. Was there something wrong with that? I thought I was weird.

To top it all off, my mother didn’t think much of me. I remember her crass comments to me about wearing deodorant. She did not take me aside and say, “Listen, honey, you need to begin to use an antiperspirant.” No, she waited until we were sitting next to our camper with the whole family present. She lifted up my arm and said, “You stink! Now, go do something about it.”That was not a real confidence builder. In my later years I did forgive her for that comment.

So you see, I haven’t always been a thankful person. When you think you’re weird or have been ridiculed, you tend not to be too thankful.

How hard is it for you to be thankful this week? For some, it may be next to impossible. I know some other children who may think that same way today. But today I can say that I have become an overcomer of un-thankfulness. I have learned to be thankful in all things. Like Paul in Philippians 4:11, “…I have learned in whatever state I am to be content.” It took a while to get there, but praise God I’m here!

We Still Have the Memories

I remember being a young married gal thinking that my life was just about perfect. I had a loving husband, a home full of kids, a great church family, a house to live in, and a car to drive. How much more perfect can life get?

We created so many memories in a house we built on 10 acres out in the country. The 600-foot driveway was dirt until we could afford to lay cement. Yes, we laid 60 10-foot squares in one summer! We mixed the cement by hand and everyone pitched in to help. We hauled water, shoveled gravel, and pounded forms into the ground. That’s how I learned to float cement. Not a job I loved, but like the rest of my family, we knew if we did it ourselves we would save money.

Little did we know how shoveling cement, enduring gravel-speckled knees, and cleaning our grimy, sweaty clothes could be such a bonding experience! We laughed and worked so hard our muscles ached at the end of each day. When the back-breaking project was done, I remember driving up the completed driveway and just praising the Lord for not having to worry about getting my station wagon stuck in the mud again. It was a wonderful feeling after working so hard!

Now my son lives in that home with his four children and he’s creating memories that will last his lifetime and beyond. Sure, we still laugh about things that happened in that house when he was younger, but the kids love the fact that it’s their house now. Over the years the driveway has turned into pavement and it’s so easy to clean the snow off with the tractor!

Ah, the memories of young married life. Let me challenge you with this if you’re a young parent. Never miss an opportunity to create a memory with your kids. Never be too busy to stop and play or read a book or go on an adventure with them. Sure, life takes over sometimes but that’s not the times they will remember. They’ll remember the times together with you doing pretty basic things like making cookies or costumes for a play, or even the summer you laid cement for a 600-foot driveway! 

Opening Day

Here in Michigan, there’s one holiday that some people celebrate with gusto: opening day of deer hunting season. Grown men and women jump with glee and act like seven-year-olds with their Roy Rogers gun and holster.

There’s something about not taking a shower so you can smell more like nature and wearing camo on every part of your body inside and out so you look more like the woods (try that with my 6’5” sons!). Then there is the part about hauling yourself, binoculars, a tent, and a gun up the side of a 40-foot tree so you can hang from a flimsy metal seat. That always sends a question through my mind. WHY? Can they not see that falling is a great danger—especially falling with a gun?

The ultimate goal is to shoot a deer, or should I say, THE HOPE is to shoot a deer. When and if you do it’s a reverse process of dragging down every single piece of what you hauled up the tree. Where is the logic?

Then, the wonderful process of gutting the deer begins (gag reflexes kicking in here, folks). Oh, did I mention you need to bring a shovel so you can bury the yucky parts? Yet another item to haul up and down the tree!

The trophy is horns if the deer has them. Or you can do like some hunters I’ve known. They go out in the spring and find ones that have fallen off a deer and mount them. Now that seems like a whole lot easier to me!

Well, I guess it’s a fun sport for some. Today my three sons, my daughter-in-law, and two grandkids are out there on opening day walking through woods and fields…with guns. All I can do is pray that they’ll stay safe and have a good time. Oh, did I include the part about hauling the doughnuts and coffee up the tree? Yeah, they’re doing that too.

Now it's time for YOU to chime in!

I've been writing this post for about five years now. I've received some great responses to stories that moved you emotionally and spiritually. There have also been comments about how your situation was similar to mine and how you reacted differently.  What I'd really like from YOU is to know what you would like to read about? What subjects are more meaningful to you or strike a cord in your life right now?

I have about a bazillion stories that are still to be told from my side of the desk and I can write forever. Just let me know what you'd like me to write about. OK?

Leave your comments on my FB page. Sound like a plan? I can't wait to hear from you.

Soothing Words

Soothing Words

I love honey! I love not only the sweet taste, but also the consistency. When I go to a specialty store, I always look to see what kinds of honey blends they have. Recently, I found a delicious combination that blends my favorite fragrance, lavender, with honey. I don’t know how they did it but it’s really, really good.

The Bible speaks of honey often in Old Testament stories. Like in Proverbs where honey is likened to the words we speak. Proverbs 16:24 says, “Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones.”

I have been spoken to with words that felt like honey on my soul. I remember my grandmother soothing me after a certain trying situation. I will never forget the tenor of her voice and the calming words she said.

Other times I have been the recipient of the bee sting of words that pricked my soul. Those words hurt and pummeled me with accusation to the point of making me want to run away. I remember thinking I would never forgive that person for saying those words to me. Thank goodness I learned about forgiveness from my Savior. In my pride, I think that I’ll never use piercing words with anyone, but in reality I know I have.

God, wash my mouth out with the sweetness of words like you say to me so that I can say words that heal others. Help me not to use words of accusation as swords that hurt others. Keep my tongue from becoming a tool of retribution and pride. Create in me a clean heart (Psalm 51) and renew a right spirit in me. And may my actions and words be those that soothe and heal. Amen!

There Are No Orphans of God

As a 65-year-old, I became an orphan this month. Both of my parents died within 13 days of each other. It was hard to watch and even harder to experience.

There were some days I had never felt more alone and others when I had never felt more loved. I received so many sympathy cards from friends and extended family; they filled my dining room table and peppered my living room end tables.

During my parents’ last few days, my kids were at the hospital with me regularly. While this helped tremendously and calmed me, there was this nagging sensation in my soul that marked the end of something great. I believe it was the finality of the relationships I had with my parents.

Growing up, I was not the closest with my mom. It’s a long, long story, but one I hope to write about someday. As she grew older and dementia set in, I no longer felt tension when I spent time with her. I only felt pity for a short time and then forgiveness. The forgiveness was freeing for me as I saw her with God’s eyes. A helpless, lonely, little old lady who pushed those away she loved. It was difficult seeing her digress so quickly into not knowing who I was. Then, watching as her body gave in to the disease, and she refused to eat or drink.

On the other hand, my dad was a tall, lanky guy with a sharp wit and intelligence. I loved to take him for rides to places he’d never been. My kids came to see him and would bring him his favorite chocolate malt or chocolate kisses. I loved that man with a passion. He always represented silent strength to me. Watching him go from that to a stroke victim with a broken leg overnight was devastating. He could no longer talk; he could only communicate with us by squeezing my hand in response to yes or no questions. After three days, that ability was gone, too.

Losing both parents in a short amount of time left me feeling that I’d been deserted or orphaned. Oh, I know I have many around me to comfort me, cheer me up, and soothe those feelings. But I’m praying God heals this section that feels like a hole has been unplugged and a part of me is seeping out.

There are no strangers, there are no outcasts
There are no orphans of God
So many fallen, but Hallelujah
There are no orphans of God
(Lyrics from Avalon)