New Life'n

I thought I hated being late

But I don’t. If I hated being late I’d stop. I’d change.

What I hate is how I feel when I’m late. Stressed, hurried, like a clod. See, it’s really all about me. So I find myself working on changing how I feel and telling myself not to stress and not to hate myself, so I won’t feel like a jerk for being late.

I do that instead of majoring on not being late!

Anything to avoid real change. 

I’d like to say that says something about the nature of change but I think maybe it just says something about me. 

An audience filled with people you touched

Sometimes someone dies and you didn’t realize they were still alive.  Art Linkletter was 97 and still alive – until yesterday.

When you’re sensitive and loving and sincerely care, people can tell.  And they remember.

A friend of mine said, “There may be no finer example of authenticity, humanness, and creating entertainment while valuing others” than these two great men.

Eight exclamation marks!

If you were told there’s a place in the Bible, really only eight sentences, and it’s full of exclamation marks, what would you think it’s about?

Commands?  (Do this!)  Warnings?  (Watch out!)  Anger?  (Those evil people!)  What would cause a writer to be so excited or agitated or burning that he’d fire off eight exclamations?

Praise.  It’s Psalm 150.  The last psalm in the book. 

I can’t imagine ever being so hot and juiced up about God that my insides would have to bust out with a wholehearted, fierce (not just Christian-talk), “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!”

My loss.

Effort

Twice in the last two days ducks in our neighborhood have taken off right in front of me, flying on a line directly away from me.  It was effortless and imperfect.  From the side, flying looks like a straight line; from behind, they wobble, a little crooked, not like a machine.  But their wings seem to flap automatically.  You can’t think about each flap.  It’s too fast.  The wings just go and you’re looking around and steering your direction.  But each flap has to just happen.  There’s effort, but you can’t concentrate on the flapping.

One time I arrived at work and was distracted from my routine and tried to think what the security code was.  I couldn’t remember it.  I do it automatically every day, but as soon as I tried to think about the digits and their order, I couldn’t.

Yesterday a friend at breakfast told another friend, “You have a peace that’s very appealing.”  He wanted to know more about that.  The peaceful friend didn’t say much, but told a little story of dealing drugs in high school and getting saved and having life crash and learning to trust Jesus.  He said it was all ongoing even now.  He didn’t tell the asking friend anything to do.

There’s always effort.  I planted knockout roses and daylilies last week.  I worked and got sweaty.  I had to know the plants and think which should go where and dig and add peat moss and get dirty.  But my effort can’t make them grow.  And when they do grow, I don’t think they’re self-consciously trying to do it.  They soak up the sun and push down their roots and then growth happens.

The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly.  Those are the lives that mold us. – Oswald Chambers 5/18

What family is for

One of the things, anyway.  If you’ll let ‘em.  (Yes, I know it’s supposed to be about seatbelts)

It's always someone

Who bugs you.  Get’s under your skin.  Rubs you wrong.  They’re hard to like, never mind love.  Life would be so much better if they were gone.  When they are, another one shows up.  It’s always someone.  Why?

God loved me not because I was lovable, but because it was His nature to do so.  Now, He says to me, show the same love to others – Oswald Chambers, 5/11

Oh.  God takes what He says about wanting me to be like Him way more serious than I do.  So I get to have someone who is to me like I was (am) to Him.  And then I get the chance to learn to let His nature take over mine and do the same for them that he did (does) for me.  That might be a lot of learning.  It’s always someone. 

And sometimes I'm the someone, too, to you.

Progress in the learning doesn’t change things.  It may bring even more unlovables to you, not for your training, but because you’ve been trained and now you can really do some good.

As I have loved you, so you must love one another – John 13.34

Feeling your way

It didn’t seem that foggy when I went out the door walking Delly this morning.  Turning the corner by the pond, though, you got into this --

Like one of those Monet paintings he did in London.  You feel slightly untethered, detached, insecure. 

Isn’t that the way it is?  You know there’s something there and you naturally strain to see it but you just can’t get there.  You know it’s a normal part of things, but you still want the sun to come out.

Clarity will return in it’s time.  Meanwhile, you get a holiday from details and the distraction of walking by sight. 

Six-year-old Stella stepped on a piece of glass

Two weeks ago.  She kept telling mom it was fine, but mom would see her walking on her toes on that foot, favoring her heel. 

Finally mom insisted on looking at it.  She sees a little wound and a piece of glass, “not a sliver,” and a subtle red stripe coming from it.  The red stripe is the part you don’t like.  Mom pulls the glass out – “it had worked it’s way to the surface” – and felt like the wound immediately started getting better.

The doctor gave Stella a horse pill for the infection and said she’d be fine. 

Stella doesn’t like horse pills.  It took five minutes to get it down.  She doesn’t like people messing with glass stuck in her foot, either.  It took two weeks for that one.

Two weeks of pain!  Because you don’t want to deal with the cure!  The pain’s worse than the cure!

But the pain is the known, and the cure is the unknown. 

It’s probably human nature to prefer living with a bad known than to risk something unknown, even when you know you’ll be happy in the end.  The pain is now and predictable – you can picture it and you know you can deal with it because you are.  I want the cure, but to get there involves something unpredictable and unfamiliar.  So I stay put.

Like a six-year-old.