Waking up to the reality of Hope(and something about Sasquatches)

Do I have to?   

Yesterday I found myself getting up on the wrong side of the bed.  Same side but somehow wrong. With a foggy mind, heavy thoughts and sluggish eyelids I labored through breakfast. My husband tried to band us together to knock out a few chores before beginning our day but I only managed minimal output while groaning like a Sasquatch(apparently sasquatch is a proper noun) all throughout.  Only a few short hours later I crawled into my preschoolers bed to try to calm his difficult emotions and to shut out my day.  As I lay there half in, half out of the land of the living my mind began to sing a worship song about waking up.  I laughed inwardly, barely awake with the song growing in intensity in my mind.

"Awaken my soul, come awake"

I continued to try to sleep as my mind kept singing,  "Spirit of the living God come fall afresh on me.  Come wake me from my sleep.  Blow through the caverns of my soul, pour in me to overflow.  To overflow."

"Spirit of the...."

"Alright, God I'm getting up."

Holy Spirit with a sense of humor?  I think so.

I've struggled and thankfully walked through and out of bouts of depression, unexpected intense anxiety and a trauma that at times caused post traumatic stress.  I don't say this to get pity(or to scare you from inviting me over to your house) but because I believe that these things are so common and yet so taboo to speak about.  There are chemical and hormonal changes that our bodies go through because of pregnancy, lack of sleep, improper nutrition, and many other regular, everyday things that can cause our minds some sort of imbalance.  There are also difficult life changes and stress that can overwhelm us causing us to be susceptible to mental imbalance, like a virus.  These things should not be taboo, should not be shameful.  They are all too common and treatable.  Even the scarier imbalances are still a medical condition, an illness where the root of the issue needs to be searched out and taken care of, where there is hope.  The problem may be simple or multifaceted but there is always hope.

It might sound odd out of context of a certain sermon but recently the phrase, "God doesn't negotiate with hopelessness;" has stuck in my mind.  Knowing I cannot do that sermon justice in a few phrases I'll just tell you that the phrase was referencing Gideon.  Pointing out that some of the negative, insecure things that Gideon was believing about himself were not true but that God did not even address that.  He just spoke to Gideon as if he had already overcome, as if he was always the warrior of faith that God was calling him to be.

What I see is that in the Kingdom of God and within God is all Hope.  Hope is the reality, not a chance with a large possibility of doomed failure.  So God is working from a perspective that we cannot always grasp.  Where Hope is tangible and Healing is not out of reach.  And hopelessness is like a tiny, little thought terrorist, stealing our joy, wrecking our trust and ability to move forward.  So God's not going to negotiate with it because hopelessness is just a lie wrapped up in pretty packaging that makes us identify with it, not question it.  So he just speaks truth and it alters our reality and allows us to see more clearly.  To wake up.  Ha, like the Matrix or C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair or that movie where you need bathtubs to help wake you out of dreams.  Except we wake up to see our real enemy and a much better reality where hope is real and heavens resources are endless(no bathtub needed).

Not real.  We're done now.

 In one of my hardest moments I was driving down the highway from my in-laws in what felt like the middle of a nightmare.  I was breaking at the seams and it felt as though my heart couldn't handle one more minute in my current reality.  I have no idea what I prayed but I think I asked, "God where are you?", my voice and thoughts flooded with anger and confusion.  I was clinging to the notion that God was Good because I could point directly back to places in my life where I knew he had come through but I felt myself slipping, grasping.  Then all of a sudden I felt lifted out of the darkness and almost placed on the other side of it.  I could sense there was another side, something I could apprehend past the pain and with that came peace.  No answers yet, just peace.

So here are some awesome verses:

Zephaniah 3:17 

“The LORD your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing."

Romans 8:37-39 

“Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Jeremiah 29:11 

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

And.......there's more.  Like this one!  Ba-Bam Scripture!

1 Corinthians 13:6-8

6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  8 Love never fails.

All this to say when you hear that whisper of hope listen closer.  Watch out for it, anticipate it because God is in relentless pursuit of our hearts.  Let it wake you from your weariness and let you see more clearly the hope of your calling, your hope in the darkness.  We all need a little waking up sometimes.

5 or 6 barrels of wine

So I don't know if you've ever felt this way but whenever I've read the miracles of Jesus I've felt as if the miracle of Jesus turning the water into wine seemed odd or maybe like a side random thing Jesus did.  Not saying I don't see purpose in celebration but this miracle is so different than any of his other miracles.  No healing, no demons driven out, just lavish celebration.  

As I'd read my inner self would scrunch up it's nose and say- "Oh don't worry about that miracle.  His mom made him do it.  Doesn't mean anything." (I'm questioning right now whether or not to get snarkier with my comments.  Just thought you should know)

So I asked God because honestly, it didn't make sense to have an "insignificant miracle" and now I find myself wholly taken up with a word picture of Christs purpose on Earth. 

I haven't been able to get this thought out of my head.  This thought that Jesus Is the water turned to wine.  John 7:37 & Mark 14:23-24  The living water and the wine!  You see as much as I know and have experienced father God/Jesus Christ/Holy Spirit as loving , joyful, wooing me to repentance, Christs blood as wine has reminded me only of the crushing pain Christ went through on the way to the cross not the joy that strengthened him to get there.  

Christs 1st miracle was more than a wine bottle given as a hostess gift though.

This was an extravagant gift, gallons and gallons of the best wine with the host being surprised and remarking at this extravagance.  Without knowing about the miracle the Master of the banquet says in John 2, "Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.". 

If you were to buy one bottle of aged fine wine, it could cost hundreds of dollars.

Jesus gave gallons.

Six stone water jars each holding from twenty to thirty gallons each!  This was like the feeding of the 5 thousand but with wine.  If it was just the 20 gallons a piece that's still 120 gallons of the best wine!  And for what?  A wedding where they had already been celebrating for awhile.  

I felt a quiet joy welling up inside at this thought that I still can't quite comprehend.  Jesus's blood as an extravagant incomprehensible outpouring that defies logic.  Why this price?  Why so much?  Wine can represent that crushing but it also represents sustenance, joy and celebration.  

And what our we celebrating but the union or marriage between the bride of Christ back to God.  All separations between us and God are removed!

And to top this off what water did Christ turn in wine?

 It says in John 2:6 that they were stone water jars normally used for ceremonial washing.  When Christ died, the curtain in the temple leading into the most holy of holies was torn from top to bottom signifying the removal of boundaries keeping us from entering into Gods presence.  No more trying to clean ourselves up in every way possible to be able have relationship with the most holy .  Christs blood has given us access, has washed us clean. 

He is the celebration and we are his.  He is our extravagant joy and we are his!  This is the joy abiding in him and set before him.  This is some good news.

Money, Marriage, Miracles, Oh my!

So I'm writing this because Travis and I have been complimented on our ability to handle money over the years.  I can honestly say I feel blessed to be in a marriage that can handle hard discussions and keep going.  After ten years of marriage we relate more and more to those vows we spoke out loud in front of friends and loved ones.  For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, crabbiness and joy( I hope that was one of them!).
 
 Anyways, somehow we've managed to get through a variety of money issues mostly unscathed.
Although it isn't because we haven't made mistakes.  We bought a condo when we didn't really have the money and got stuck with it for 8 years or so( our family growing, our place not).  We've bought bad vehicles that weren't cheap.  We couldn't afford insurance and then had an emergency that made us realize why we couldn't afford not to.  My husband has been downsized twice and we once went five months without income( which in retrospect doesn't seem long but it did then).
 
 I'm so thankful for where we are now, which is attempting to aggressively pay down my school loan but at times I feel the urge not to be thankful.  To want things that I can't have right now, to splurge, to not pay attention to our budget.  I ignore it though and thank God for all our financial breakthrough and favor( at least that's what I'm doing right now).  Thank him for the courage to use our tax money to fix and sell our condo when we really just wanted to run away from it.
 
 Our condo that we'd owned had felt like a hopeless weight trapping us in an increasingly uncomfortable situation.  In all actuality we owned next to none of it and I was afraid that costs of selling were going to outweigh what we got for it.  We did it though.  We prayed and put our money into it trusting it to sell.  By the end before we sold it we had 3 boys in the condo and just about all of our belongings in a storage unit so we could fit.  It sold the day before it was on the market officially!
 
 There have been so many times in our marriage like that financially that if I stop to think about it I can't help but feel blessed.  Bills being payed on time despite no money, a job with perfect timing so there was no lag in pay between the ending of another job which included severance money, large hospital bills being written off, health insurance being back paid, grocery bills staying at $50 no matter how much I got!  Praise God!
 
 Travis and I do have a heart for saving, budgeting, living within our means and total honesty in our finances.  For some crazy reason we enjoy it and at times staying within our budget feels like a game and the prize is financial freedom.  Every time we feel anxious about money or frustrated I find the best thing to do is look at reality, not how it feels, to talk and to pray.  At times it can feel personal and raw and uncomfortable because it's addressing needs, wants and dreams you may have for yourself and your family but you can trust God.  You can trust him with money and even with all the stuff that goes along with hashing it out.  Numbers are a fact but dealing with them can get messy. I'm so glad that God's held my heart as I've gotten real about this subject again and again.  How I'm scared, how I'm frustrated, how I just want some new clothes and a haircut for goodness sake!
 
 I'm going to come back and address some practical things because every answered prayer was not a miracle.  Sometimes it was just an urge to keep going and to steward what we had but for now talk and be honest.  Look at reality and don't turn away.  Be thankful when it's hard to be thankful and know that he's a faithful, loving and personal God who see's you.

About 7 years ago, in the midst of no money, mortgages, giant student loans and no jobs I sat in a service where the guest preacher shared a pretty random fact about the meanings of names before going on to preach an entirely different message.  I was reminded of a little laminated card I had been given as a little girl that said, Jessica- "Wealthy" and felt the Lord impressing on my heart that I was wealthy no matter how much I had and that he was taking care of my family.  I went and told the preacher after the service and when she asked me to share people handed me money afterward.  It wasn't my intention but it definitely blessed us( we needed it) and I went home to look up my name meaning.  My name was derived from an ancient Hebrew name and means God see's.  Just what I needed to hear.

He sees.

Windows

      So I heard a podcast this morning and felt as if clarity to my questioning was breaking through.  The title was windows and mirrors and the teacher spoke of looking internally to find ourselves, looking for a constant but finding a confusing, ever-changing thing.  He spoke of looking to God and knowing his truth, knowing him to really see our purpose.  I know this sounds like something we've all heard at some point.  Many times even but this teaching shed new light into dark corners.
      We must lose our life to gain it.  Not stopping to gaze at ourselves until we fully understand who we are to know what we should move forward on but pressing into Christ as he makes our path clearer and clearer.
As
We
move
Forward.

     For me I know that looking inward pulls me further in until I'm not sure how to make it back.  I begin to judge even the victories in my life until I see faults in everything.  I feel discontent and what do I do in response?  I look deeper.  Oh crazy, crazy me.  Turning into a pillar of salt, made immovable by looking backwards instead of where I'm heading.  In the teaching he spoke of the mirror becoming more like a hall of mirrors with distorted visions of ourselves shaped by how others have seen and spoken of us as well.
     I've heard that verse about losing our lives so many other times and thought about it intellectually, hearing but not quite understanding.  My life really does feels lost and my trajectory out of whack with myself, my thoughts, my logic at the center.  No matter how full of good intentions, I'm lost.  How can I stop comparing and live;  if at the heart of my self-contemplation is a desire to save myself apart from Christ?  Whether that's what I acknowledge it to be or not.

Looking out

    So how do I go about trusting in such a way that I leave the past and my future in God's hands?  All I can think is that I seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.  Seek to really know God and look outward.  See others.  Seek him in such a way that I am enthralled with his majesty and driven by the overflow.  Where my steps are naturally directed, not artificially manufactured.  Motivated by his beauty and his heart and my truest self taking shape through that.

Messy, impatient seeker of Truth,
Jess

Resurrection in the Rubble

        Inside my heart is rumbling a story.  I don't quite know what's inside.  It feels a bit uncomfortable and messy.  I know that what wants to come out will not be contained.  I've been sitting in church services with a discomfort in my soul as if there is a question in my heart that has not been answered.  A question that requires digging and long honest looks in the mirror.  Is it one question though?  I feel full of passion and fragility.  Am I enough?  What does it means that you are made strong in our weaknesses?  Is it too much to ask that I be myself, fully alive and fully submitted to you?  Oh God it seems scary to be myself around others and to love the way you've made me to.  Not a faded counterfeit tainted by compromise and comparison.

       Oh God I want to boast in my weakness and see you shine through till that's all others see.  I want you to shine forth like a bright light through all those places where brokenness and submission have made a way for great testimonies of your faithfulness, miraculous provision, healing and reconciliation.  Make me braver each day, regardless of past rejection or fear of perception.  Embolden me and teach me to write the words of your heartbeat.  

Birth    

for the barren

Resurrection in the rubble

You do these things 

while we still stumble

Green shoots.... 

up through the cracks

new life forcing it's way through

This is what You do

You hold our fragile hearts

in your rugged hands

strengthen us to sit

encourage us to crawl 

then hold your breath, while we get up to stand

Only

You

Can

Only you can

Heaven's breaking in

Jess

Brave Failures

Noah looked at me just now from his sandbox and said, "I wanna fail mommy."

I thought for a split second about trying to boost his self esteem and encourage him not to but I stopped.  I stopped because I thought I about all the times I myself have not done the very thing I desire to because I was afraid to fail.

So instead I said, "That's very brave of you.  Did you know that some people are afraid to fail and miss out on a lot of cool things?"

Noah was silent for awhile and kept playing.  After a few minutes of quietly pushing his truck around, picking up sand and pouring it out he replied.

"I'll do it Mom, I'll fail then," he said with quiet confidence.

And there it is, our greatest fears and accomplishments all wrapped up with a messy bow.  Failure.  It's brave and adventurous.  Gruesome.  Scary.  Exhilarating?  Necessary.

Yesterday a woman came into MOPS to talk about stress management and something she said really struck me.  She talked about playing a game against a computer and how the computer has an algorithm that knows all the different moves you could make and plays accordingly.  She was relating it to how God is in control no matter our choices.  He can anticipate the outcomes of our next moves and as she was speaking I remembered a speaker named Danny Silk and how he talked about God not being afraid of our failures.  God placed two trees in the garden and pointed them out.  He knew the potential for bad choices and yet gave Adam and Eve the freedom to fail.  And he had a plan.  I don't believe it caught him by surprise or threw him into a worrisome tizzy.

So I ask him for the boldness to love in the face of failure.  Mine, my husbands, my boys(oh those boys), friends, strangers.

And to create, dream and step into joyful desires willing to fail and fail hard.

Even at this post!  lol*  Hope you're failing triumphantly today.

Falling behind and running forward

So today I got my educators discount card from Barnes & Noble.  All I had to do was ASK!

Now if you know me than you might know that this is a dangerous thing for me to wield as I love books and games and tools for learning.  I love things that my kids might not give one hoot about.  Although that may be because they are not owls.  I digress.

Source: photobity.com via Erin on Pinterest

 Real (cute) Owl

So I was searching for something to challenge Owen in Math as he surpassed what we already had.  We've been working with money, time and fractions at home without a workbook and at one point we had a free trial for a challenging math program online called Dreambox.  It was good but it was $10 a month that I didn't want to pay.  

As my boys explored the toy area with Legos and a Train Set to play with I poured over curriculum of all kinds with mostly math as the focus.  

Goodness there are a lot of choices.  My brain felt like a computer trying to sort through what to throw out and what to keep, what would be engaging and what would not, what is too advanced or too remedial.  I settled in on a Brain Quest Workbook for grade 1 because it looked like fun.  It's not going to cover everything we'll go over in a year but it's a good jumping off point.  I didn't get something with only math when I saw this could give us some much-needed writing prompts and a short overview of a lot of subjects.  It's full of fun short exercises in many subjects and I'm hoping will be a good supplement to encourage confidence in reading, writing and math.  We'll still be doing things at home utilizing the library, the internet and projects or trips made up from our own creative minds but I think this will be a good addition.

It's funny that although I know Owen may be behind in some ways according to the public schools agenda for reading and writing we've been able to go much further in other areas like science and history.  Plus we get to talk about things like politics, compassion, self-control, current events and ancient religion keeps coming up again and again due to any history lesson.  Owen has even developed a love of cooking fun kid food this year and of course he is still building Legos voraciously.

I feel blessed to be able to choose new experiences based on interests and passions.  We're able to attend a kids class on nature science, robots, or animals as well as sitting together to read an easy reader.  We're able to touch dinosaur bones and not just read about them.  We can have recess with cousins or outings with friends.  Last summer we spent a lot of time picking leaves, berries, acorns and pine cones to identify trees.  I remember doing that in 6th grade science.  :)

So I am leaving the hurt I've held on to from negatives comments and experiences Owen has had in his struggle to adapt in public school, sunday school, his enrichment courses or even in playgroups and only taking the lessons with me.

A few weeks ago I read a church sign as I drove away from Owen's homeschool enrichment classes that said, "Mistakes are lessons too."  I think that has been one of the hardest things for me to resign myself with. I don't jump in just to fix everything socially or academically but I've let myself get hurt so badly watching him struggle and fail or hear other people talk about it.  Being with him has helped change my view to see the passion and compassion he's filled with although his self-control and emotional maturity can still be difficult.  I don't think it's fair to let it define him.

He is six.....and a boy......and was somehow born a very strong individual.  Hmmm....

I'm glad to be here to guide and support him through his hard lessons, reminding myself of the character it will help to build even if we don't see it to begin with.

Last week in his Monday enrichment courses I was overjoyed to hear my son made the choice to move classes from Fitness to Habitats.  He's been having a hard time with the fact that he's been in two gym classes back to back that have very flexible rules( but rules to be kept still) and the whole gym class social dynamic.  Each week he'd been given the choice to participate or not to.  He was choosing not to, almost every time and had been getting in trouble out of boredom on the sidelines with a friend.  So after weeks of talking about it, talking to the teacher, and getting utterly frustrated I thought;  "Whatever, he's only got four weeks left.  He can just ride it out until next semester when we'll change what we need to."

So I was pretty amazed when I let go of the situation( stopped trying to fix it for a moment) that my son made this choice.  We had discussed it a few weeks before but it was by no means resolved.  Anyways, that growth to me meant so much more than anything he would've done because I had stood there and made it happen.  We had disciplined, discussed and lectured but when he finally had a break and a little room to breath and think about it without my interruption he made a good choice for himself.  He's growing.  :)

So God please give me wisdom( and self-control!) for when to intervene, when to discuss and when to allow for freedom to fall or to succeed knowing that those moments help him to become much stronger than any safe, controlled environment ever could.  God I believe you err on the side of Freedom, please help me to get there.

And thank you for these strong-willed, rambunctious, amazing boys!

Help me to guide them as they race toward their destinies, sometimes being more sure of their steps than I am.