Hiking In Grace & Capturing My View

No Middle Ground

02.20.10

Sometimes the Truth is often hard to face. We know it is there and avoid it, knowing facing it is going to cause some necessary pain.
Some Truth I had to face recently was this:

Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.

Proverbs 10:12

Notice anything?

There is no in-between, no middle ground.

You fall on one side or the other. If you are not forgiving and passing over the hurt done to you by others (or even what you perceive as hurtful though not intended by others as such) then you are dwelling on the other side of the proverbial equation, which is where Hatred lives.

Hatred holds the grudge and keeps broadcasting how much you have been hurt, telling everyone around you instead of only sharing it with Jesus, the only one who can heal our hurts.

Me? Living in Hatred? Yup. That bent in me caused by my need to constantly defend my-insecure-self is, well, pride-driven. It sure isn’t pretty to look at but there it is because “only by pride cometh contention” (Prov. 13:10).

Christ forgave us a whole lot of hate. We were his enemies and he died for us anyway because he loves us. We are to follow His example and do the same. If we are unforgiving then we need to examine which has the upper hand: pride or humility? What are you broadcasting in your daily conversations?

We are to over come evil with good…

…and that takes a whole lot of love and humility.

Long Overdue

02.18.10

I blogged a long time ago about being in a crevice and getting a hand up.

I have found myself at the bottom of a crevice. I had refused the hand up and decided to camp out a while instead. I would not advise it. It is not a great place to stay. It gets cold and lonely down there and it is dark. You can grow very cold stubbornly sitting there. I had been residing down there with Bitterness as my companion longer than I want to admit.

God’s grace and long-suffering is amazing to me. I had been told I had gotten bitter. I shrugged it off. I have found that when God is really trying to get my attention He often uses several unrelated avenues to bring the gentle correcting. I am thankful for his faithfulness, that he does not walk away from us shaking his head in dismay. He stays with us and keeps working on us. I am thankful for the avenues that he used to get my attention. It had been a long time since I was warned that I had gotten bitter and so I asked God if I really had become bitter. YES. Point blank. All the signs were pointing to related things: Bitterness escorted by an Unrepentant pride-driven attitude and her companion Unforgiveness. (Yup, that was me ranting on someone else recently about being unforgiving… realizing I was … is very humbling.)

I have taken the hand up this time and am slowly finding the footholds in the Rock to cling to as God guides me out of this crevice I was choosing to sulk in. I am seeking as David did for the Lord to restore unto me the JOY of my salvation in Christ.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God;
and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence;
and take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation;
and uphold me with thy free spirit.”

~Psalm 51: 10-12

Flashback Friday: Still Developing

02.12.10

I’d been running into him in the darkroom all semester.

I was a goner for the red hair and crooked smile as I stalked him watched him from a distance.

Quizzing my friend, who had gotten to know him, revealed that he was new to the college. He had been in the Air Force, and he was good with a camera. I did not know his name.

Near the end of the semester, as President of the Student Art League, I was responsible for organizing the end-of-semester Student Show. As I typed out labels for more than 150 pieces of art work on an old fashioned typewriter (without the blessing of white out). I ended up typing a certain label about 5 times. I kept spelling the name wrong, forgetting the quotes for the title, or forgetting the entry number.

I was not very good at typing back then. (Judging from my score on Typing Maniac, I am still not very good at it.)

Who is this person and why had it taken me so many times to get the label correct?

When the show was juried and I was preparing for the show opening, the name came up again. Apparently this person, whose entry tag I had gotten to know so intimately, had won First Place in Photography.

The evening came to distribute awards and I was really paying attention when the person, whose name I could not seem to type, stepped forward to claim his award.

That was nineteen years ago.

Now I know how to spell it forwards and backwards and can type it really well.

There was more developing in that darkroom than photographs.

Now there are four little ones developing in our home.

This is an entry for Flashback Friday hosted by Mylestones. Click on over to read some more Flashback Friday posts!

Tuesdays Unwrapped: Sledding

02.09.10

Sitting here, up to my ears in homeschooling. Trying to motivate kids to concentrate on work so that they can go play in that white stuff that keeps falling from the sky around here. (And more expected today/tomorrow!)
My husband comes in and asks me to come outside with him so I can join him in enjoying the fruit of his recent labors. He has been outside preparing a sledding hill for the kids. Packing it down and making a track. I pulled on my boots and put on my coat and hubby and I went for a slide down the hill. We were kids again. It was as if we had stepped back in time to when we were first dating.
I am so thankful he wanted to share this with just me. The first run down the hill. That stolen moment in the day…

…that small blessing unwrapped…

… produced a smile and a happy heart and a quiet reassurance that I am indeed married to my best friend in all the world. I am thankful beyond what I can put into words.
Click on over to Chatting at the Sky and join in sharing the blessings others are unwrapping today!

Termites to Ladybugs

01.30.10

Are we moving up in the world?

In the Philippines, termites always came out at night. As a form of entertainment for our kids, weird though it may be, we would make loops of duct tape (sticky side out) and each kid would put one on their hands like tacky mittens. Then the fun began: see how many termites you could catch (or get stuck) on your piece of duct tape. Hey, in the middle of no where, you look for all kinds of new wonderful ways to pass the time.

NOW, the house we live in has an abundance of ladybugs. So each night just before family devotions with the kids and bedtime stories are read, we have more of a team effort kind of “fun”. We see how many ladybugs we can gather, throw in the toilet, and flush them! Yeah, exciting huh? Most of our kids are used to bugs of various types and sizes, having lived in the tropics. However, our youngest, at age two doesn’t remember too much of that and so never got over the “scream for your life it’s a BUG!!” stage. We go through this nightly ritual so she will settle down and sleep better while the older kids just love finding all the ladybugs. (please don’t report us for ‘cruelty to animals’) She is slowly overcoming her fear of bugs and now she stands there as Daddy flushes them each night and makes sound effects while they swirl around, then disappear. So now we hear, “Wooo, wooooo, woooooo”, as Daddy commits his nightly “swirly” of the ladybugs.

On a side note, we have found them not to be so “ladylike”. They STINK almost as much as a stinkbug!!