So I am not going to lie. This week was UNEXPECTED!!!! The last thing on my mind was spending an extra week at camp. BUT the kids and I are here We were handed a detour for at least part of this week. so here I sit at my computer, the kids are resting in our camper (we just finished a pontoon boat ride around the lake) and I am sitting here at our rest stop on this detour. But in all honesty it took both hubby and I awhile to get to this stop on the detour.
We got home Saturday after having two great week away, here at our home away from home. It was relaxing and enjoyable and refreshing and both hubby and I came away ready to jump in head first into ministry if. As if we stop when we are on vacation. If you know either one of us well you know that we breathe ministry. It is just WHO WE ARE! So the whole time away our brains work to plan pray and seek God’s direction for what He would have us to do! We are fed. We grow. We come home and jump right back in……but not this time…this time had some detours!
What Happened
When we hit the city next t our town we stopped at Was-Mart to make a purchase because we were given a heads up on Thursday that there was an issue in our house, so we were coming into the situation prepared…or so we thought. Detour #1 leaving Was-Mary and half way home, we noticed our brakes smoking ..our big truck has this problem every six months with the brakes. So that needs to be fixed. Check Continue reading “When Life Hands You a Detour…TAKE IT!”→
Unexpected things happen ALL the time…Have you every heard the expression
“When it rains it pours”
Well, yesterday it was a monsoon. I laugh now as I look back at the unexpected happenings.
So yesterday started out in its normal crazy fashion…Up at 5:30 (First day back after Spring Break I might add) Yeah that was easy!! Ha!! Lunches made kids fed, three of them on the bus at 6:25. Whew!
Finished up my study Questions from “You Are Loved No Matter What” by Holley Gerth (THAT BOOK IS AAZING)
Bus alarm goes off a second time ..Fourth child out at the bus for a 7 50 pick up.
Back inside:
Blogging
Bible Study
Reading
Normal household chores
Then I did something that is completely normal and it led to something SOOOOO completely Unexpected. I went out to the garage to get chicken to thaw for dinner….the unexpected was that the upright freezer door wasn’t shut all the way….UH OH! yep, so the rest of the normal plans out the window and I collected all the thawed gross things from the freezer that now resembled that of the abominable snowman fro Monsters Inc….WELCOME TO THE HIMALAYAS was all that ran through my mind! well after my hands we frozen and completely sticky…my sweatshirt and my pants doused int the conglomeration of mystery liquids……I had all the Ick taken care of….found chicken in another freezer and thawed that, put it in the crockpot and what’s that? the alarm for group #1 of our kiddos returning from school with #2 returning soon after group #1. Did I mention I was having Bible study with a teen from our youth group around the same time? Hubby was picking her up.
Hubby and I had realized that the freezer had been ajar since we left to visit family on Thursday YAY! Hubby also informed that while he was on a run to deliver a tractor (normal) His glasses broke and feel apart while he was driving (UNEXPECTED and dangerous) he made it taped them together BUT now had t run to the eye place we get our glasses prescriptions filled. At that point he offered to take the kids with him and to pick up groceries (Normal and AMZING) But half way through his trip the fan in our van wouldn’t shut off…even when the van was shut off and key removed (UNEXPECTED but isn’t can trouble almost always) I finished my bible study, her dad picked her up, I finished dinner and I sat down on the couch.
Everyone cam rushing in and quite frankly if you have read Hope for the Weary Mom or seen Mom’s Night Out you will get what I am about to say.
I had a moment…..And my kids ate dinner in silence…and I felt horrible (after all hubby’s sermon was coursing through my brain….Saying” you blew it”!!
Hubby left for a meeting, saying that if it ended before a certain time he was going to run to the store to get the part for the car. Ok off he went I gave the 45 minute warning till bed….
Homework
Chores
Reading
Child #3 asks “mom can I get my shower?” (NORMAL)
” Yep you can”
10 minutes later….As he stands at the top of the stairs , “Mommy why do you have your razor in the shower?” Ummm because it’s my shower and it’s hanging up above your reach!
Umm no it’s not and I think Im bleeding everywhere . (SO UNEXPECTED that it took a few seconds to register, but I snapped into nurse mommy mod) e. let’s add to this that this is the child with Autism AND he is JUST out of the shower.
So after some minor freaking out (on his part) my little army of three non injured kids snapped into a well oiled machine f helpfulness. And I could not with all the pressure I could get the bleeding to stop. I had to call hubby.
Hubby came home….Off to urgent care….To sit and sit and sit some more . Usually our urgent care is very quick….Not last night. They finally got him in at 10-ish. due to how his foot was cut they had to create an imitation scab. When they left, the battery in the car was dead from the constantly running fan (Unexpected, kind of) they came home at 12:30 am. (UNEXPECTED)
SLEEP (normal)
Now this morning had a few unexpected things like oversleeping and leaving child #4’s math homework on the table, but compared to yesterday it was a breeze!
Thankfully in all of the UNEXPECTED events of yesterday, it could have led to major strife and minus the MOMENT I had unrelated t all the rest going on, it’s those moments that show our true colors. Does our responses point to a Savior who is in control of every detail, or do we get bent out shape and let everyone know it , that it didn’t go according to our plan. I know it wasn’t in my plan to smell like a garbage can. Do we moan and groan about how awful these circumstances or do we whisper a prayer and say ok LORD it’s not about me. There has been a lot in my life that has been UNEXPECTED, soon good, some not so good and some just horrible things. Thankfully God doesn’t expect us to be perfect through it all, he wants us to rely on Him, for everything!
This is my journey to finding my confidence. I’m not sure I have really experienced true confidence. I can fake it well enough! Not the kind of confidence that I have in myself with, but the confidence I should have in my relationship with Christ! This is a journey I am currently on. I have not arrived, nor do I have complete understanding. Will you join me on this journey and we will begin by unflattering confidence?
I have this filling cabinet, it sits in my living room. It looks all nice and neat around it. BUT I almost never open it. Do you know why? BECAUSE I knew what the inside looked like! It looked like two years of paperwork crammed inside of it. It was overwhelming to even consider the amount of work it would take to get back into it and make it use-able again. It haunted me …it called to me from deep within me. There was no more room in it so the papers that were most recent were siting in mostly neat stacks…on the piano, on the couch, on my desk…and on the floor. That is until last week. And as I sat for HOURS every day,Sorting, and tossing, a thought crossed my mind….
The thought was this
This filing cabinet is really as my mind and heart have become over the last two years as I stuffed emotions, and thoughts and…well anything else you shove into every crevice of our hearts and minds saying, “I will deal with this tomorrow or not this week I’m just too busy! ” It’s not a matter of it being to busy, it really is a matter of being too uncomfortable. It’s too painful to deal with the hard places so we stuff it. Just like my filing cabinet, I stuffed so much stuff into it that it started overflowing other areas. And that is what happens with our hearts and minds, stuffing things leads to negative overflow in the rest of our lives….It can lead to angry outbursts or even negative health effects llike high blood pressure and physical illness.
as I prayed the beginning of this year for God to show me my word for the year I asked Him for it to be one that would change my life, change me for the better and that at the end of the year I would be closer to Him than ever before. About a week after praying for that, the word CONFIDENT came to mind. All the other years words were already set in my mind in November BUT this year it wasn’t until the second week of January. I felt lost. I felt as though I no longer knew who I was…at all. I felt as though I had to be all things to all people and I just could not do that anymore. I was at a crossroads with a slippery slope straight ahead of me . So as soon as I got my word I was off digging in scripture. It took me two days searching God’s Word looking up verses and cross referencing them. I went deep and I continue to do so. My verses for the year to go along with my word landed me in the book of Jeremiah. Here is what it says:
Jeremiah 17:7-8
But Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. They will be like a tree planted by the water, that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”
But my study hasn’t ended there. God directed me to various books. Stripping away the years of clutter that had accumulated in my mind and heart muddying the waters of understanding as to who I was in Christ and who he created me to be. I had lost my creativity. I had lost my passions to pursue things that I loved. I have asked God to reteach me , to show me who I really am in Him, And to show me who He created me to be. I’m learning a lot and I have found a new sense of peace.
Am I there yet? BY NO MEANS! But where I am at this moment in time is knowing that I AM HIS. My circumstances do not define me…HE DOES! And that is exactly where he wants me to be at this moment.
As for my filing cabinet, it is organized and back to working order!
How about you? What is your word for the year? Do you have some heart and mind clutter that needs to be stripped away? And if so, have you taken that to God and given it to Him? If not I challenge you to do so TODAY!
Next week We will discuss what the difference is between Confidence and “Godfidence”
Well I am still here, and I am still alive…and now I am well. and Every Monday I am going to post random ramblings about our lives….this maybe one of the longer ones…it spans months but it is to keep family and friends up to speed on our day to day lives, from the perspective of our faith as a family intertwined as it is who we are, not what we do!
So Onto todays Ramblings….
Let’s start at the latest bit of crazy and the least unexpected of all. Nearly two weeks ago….I found myself in the ER waiting for emergency surgery….MY gallbladder to be exact. Let’s just say apparently I had been a lot sicker than I realized. It’s amazing at just how well I feel since the surgery, it has been kinda hard for my poor hubby to keep me down. I have learned my limits though…like bending. I gave up bending over a week ago!! The back pain that I had been experiencing for literally months went away as soon as the gall bladder was gone and has not been back since. And during this time God really struck me with some new thoughts….now that I was feeling better And that I had to be resting it was the perfect time to read and write and read and write and write and read some more…and I have done just that. It is during these moments that God and I have worked through some REALLY tough stuff….NO joke. Part of what we have worked on is this lack of confidence thing that has haunted me for 2 1/2 years now. but Im going to be blogging on that regularly now.
The next oddity is that this has been our absolutely sickest winter since our oldest child was in preschool…he is going to be 12 in just a few short months…we have gotten 6 illnesses that have hot almost very person in our family. the most recent was child #3 getting the flu… yes he had the flu shot. this has not been easy. We have not had 1 whole week since New Years without at least 1 kid home sick from school….it’s not a two and a half months I want to revisit anytime soon.
And perhaps the craziest of antics of all actually happened in October. we had a friend and her three small children move into our home. yeah so we grew by four…if you are keeping track that is 10 all together and 3 cats and a dog…..no exaggerations. . Their apartment (in our house) has been mostly done since just before Christmas and in just about a week and a few days they will be moving into their own place. It has been a stretching experience but we are glad we did it!
We also said goodbye to hubby’s Grandpa in October and then his uncle VERY unexpectedly almost a month later.
Im really sorry it has been so incredibly long since I have written. it has not been my intention And I will be discussing on Mondays my struggle and explaining my journey with my word confidence, so place on jumping into that next Monday. I can say this….God has given me the desire and gift to write…or so I am told, so I will write. I am not going to hide any longer. My confidence is not in men but in Christ….and I am not doing this for anyone else but HIM to bring him glory through what I have to say! Thanks for sticking with me! and I look forward to getting to know each other in the near future.
Sometimes it comes in the form of a diagnosis that we believe ends in no good for our future. I received such a diagnosis at ripe old age of 16. I had been diagnosed since the age of 13 with age-related Macular Degeneration. You may ask how on earth could you be 13 and have anything age-related? But the dilemma came with the type of Macular Degeneration I have. There are two forms, Wet and Dry. Juvenile on-set is Dry. however Age- related is either Dry or Wet, Well I have wet, and since the age of 13 I have had the eyes of a 65 year old. Minus a year and a half after I had surgery but I still had a shadow. An ever constant reminder that something could and did show back up again. At 16, or the month before I turned 16. All I could think about was the freedom that came with a car. Then I got scared. My freedom stripped away. Who wanted a damaged girl.? (My husband of now 13 years did that’s who.) What had gone wrong to make God mad at me? I heard nothing about grace in the church I grew up in. All that echoed through my head was countless Sunday school stories that said if you sin, bad things happen. And bad things happen, when you sin. I thought my life was over. And in all honesty there were days I thought about ending it all. I would be forever legally blind.
Then there are the phone calls people dread….all people. You know the ones, I’m sorry honey but Gram passed away. Did I mention that it was phone call #11….in a year!
And then there is the moment you hear the service coordinator (you have already worked with the previous two years) as you explain what’s going on (what you already know in your soul) as she says, oh Mary I am so sorry I think we missed it. I am pretty sure he has AUTISM.
So I am not going to lie. This week was UNEXPECTED!!!! The last thing on my mind was spending an extra week at camp. BUT the kids and I are here We were handed a detour for at least part of this week. so here I sit at my computer, the kids are resting in our camper (we just finished a pontoon boat ride around the lake) and I am sitting here at our rest stop on this detour. But in all honesty it took both hubby and I awhile to get to this stop on the detour.
Brokenness comes in all shapes and sizes.
