As I began yesterday’s blog entry I wrote regarding how much God cares for each of us.  That is such a nice thing.  Yet, today in my scripture reading from Zephaniah, God is telling him how much He loves His children and wants to care for them.  Well, what drives caring is love.  God LOVES us and wants to CARE for us.  We have to be awake to God’s love or we miss out on His caring.  Sometimes, maybe many times, God is caring for us and we don’t even know or recognize it.

This morning as I was journaling about my day yesterday and writing to God about somethings on my mind I concluded as I do asking what He wanted me to know from Him for today?  He seemed to tell me as He often does to “be still and know that He is God”.  My body may look still but it is hard for me to have a “still mind”.  This is what I often need to spend time controlling.  Then during the day I am busy completing things I care about.  The work I do is usually regarding things I care deeply about and they are the work with schools, ministry work for recovery, singing, and things for family and friends.  These are primarily driven by the fact I care for them or care about them.  At the conclusion of God speaking to me regarding what He wanted me to know from Him for today, immediately this statement came to my mind–“I love you son.”

Do you know what it is like to hear these words out of nowhere?  No wonder God cares so much for us–He loves us–you and me!  When I heard this message this morning I about lost it.  It took me a few minutes before I could continue writing.  I’ve never heard them before in my human life that I recall.  My Father loves me!  I am learning that God loves me and I’m also learning how much intimacy is tied to this deeply important emotion.  I do get caught up in DOING driven mostly I’d say because I care.  However, I’m seeing more clearly that deeper than caring is loving.  I love seeing teachers who know they know how to teach well, principals who know they know how to lead a school well, people who say they are no longer bound by the chains of sin, family members who say how much they love God and serving Him, sensing the worship and love of God during a time of singing, and so much more.  Hearing God say this morning, “I love you son,” makes me never want to stop.  God called me “son” which makes me His.  Wow, isn’t God amazing!

It is always amazing to me just how much God cares for us.  Somehow I forget easily that God created man for fellowshipping with Him.  Life is about relationships.  One of the ugly sides of this human life is selfishness.  This is a direct result of sin entering into humanness right from the beginning.  Now that I’m at the age I am, I’m beginning to see what selfishness looks like from this time in life.  When I was growing up and even in my younger adult years, I’ve always thought it would be nice when one gets to the age that he doesn’t have to work daily and he can do what he wants. Life teaches this in our country.

Taking this class on abuse:  Mending the Soul, I am finding a continuous temptation to walk away from it and believe that, “I’m ok the way I am.  After all, I’m older and I’m helping God already through Celebrate Recovery.  Why do I need to dreg up this past yet again?”  I truly want to just be selfish and let good enough be good enough.  Satan would love for me to be content with the partial freedom I’ve found.  God on the other hand is right here saying in His confirming way that He has a freedom I’ve not known.  This is not only a freedom for me but it is His intended freedom for each and every man.  In the last couple days I’ve been needing to start the morning with this determination.  I’ve known from the first time I looked at this curriculum that I needed it.  Now that I’m in it I’m not letting going to believe the lie that partial freedom is good enough.  Even at my age there is greater freedom and I will stay the course until God is done.

The drive within to find this freedom is strong in the morning when I have my time with God and His Word, but what is even stronger is the drive to help others find this freedom for themselves.  God has given me a charge to not only find my own freedom from sin’s bondage, but to help others keep their resolve strong in finding theirs.  To God be ALL GLORY!

It is the day after.  Yes, it is the day after elections and in some cases the votes are still being counted.  However, for me personally, it is the day after last night’s class.  For whatever reason I had not even looked at last night’s lesson until yesterday early afternoon.  I hadn’t even thought about it.  I had struggled a good deal with my learning the week before which had helped untangle the grip of sin resulting from neglect.  But, as I saw the title of yesterday’s lesson–sexual abuse, I knew there was more to be untangled.

We have a licensed counselor who comes every other week to our sessions and he floats in and out of our groups as we invite him.  Last night, due to the recent lessons and our conversations in class, I invited him to come to our group.  The participants kept him busy the entire 1.5 hours helping us see God’s purpose in bringing to us the blatant side of abuse in the various forms the class content has been revealing.  As I was journaling about all of it this morning I began to see clearly the entanglement of sin through abuse.  A young child has no ability to face abuse.  So, when it happens in various forms, one develops coping skills which we in the class are all now addressing.  Facing these giants is no easy task.  However, having walked this path for over 10 years now my stamina to persevere is much stronger.  The others in the class have their own stories and it also helps to know we are not alone in this journey.

Celebrate Recovery often reminds us to not quit until the miracle happens.  It is very helpful to be reminded of this during times like last night.  It is sometimes hard to be grateful for this class, but as I take one step away from it I can see God’s healing Light penetrating the blackness of sin and its effect on us.  The Serenity Prayer reminds us “…to take one day at a time and one moment at a time accepting hardship as a pathway to peace.”  This is exactly what is happening right now.  God is Good and Faithful!

It is a critically important day today–election day.  I am not a politician and not one to campaign.  But I stand firmly on the rights given to us as countrymen to vote.  So, do not let this day go by without expressing yours.

Yesterday, as I went to the school I had journaled that God would make it clear for me why it seemed I enjoyed the administrator I worked with, but why did I sense something strained between us?  It wasn’t tangible, but nonetheless present, and had been for a few weeks.  At the end of the day we needed to spend the last hour with his leadership team to develop more of the work which needed done for the State Dept of Education.  There is a good deal of this work to do and a timeline for it.   He and I had talked through a plan for the meeting which we did.  At the end of it we needed to inform them of some upcoming work with the next two meetings and what needed accomplished.  It was then that I saw something I needed to see.  I had spoken up to inform the team of this forthcoming work.  The principal jumped in which I thought was fine and did some additional explaining.  About bedtime I got an email from him apologizing for his “rude” behavior at the end of the meeting.  He had interrupted me rudely he felt and wanted to apologize.  He also said he was trying to protect his staff from too much information and from overwhelming them.  I accepted his apology and thanked him for it and said I hadn’t felt the least bit “rudely interrupted”.

I awoke in the middle of the night with some clarity I hadn’t expected.  The superintendent of the district does a learning style profile for his administrators.  He shared this with me when I first started working with them.  I had done the same one many years ago with all my staff so we could better know how to work with one another.  It hit me in the night that this new administrator is completely opposite of me in a different profile I’ve taken but I doubt he has.  I am the type who needs to know the whole picture for what I’m working with.  If I don’t have it I can’t function as well with the work.  He on the other hand feels strongly he must limit how much information is given or it is overwhelming.  Neither is right or wrong, just how we are wired personally.  I’m going to talk with him about this so we can balance one another out.  We seem to be polar opposites in this arena and most people are somewhere between.  Knowing this we can always talk this through before entering into our meetings.

So, what’s this have to do with my journey?  I just thanked God for being so interested in our details of life.  He really is!

A good friend wasn’t at church yesterday morning.  In inquiring with his wife she told me he had passed out during the night in the bathroom banging his head.  He was dizzy and nauseous.  A couple in our church are both medical doctors and she talked to them.  The advice was to go to the emergency room and check this out without waiting.  They had their granddaughter with them so when church ended I went to their house, got him to dress and took him to ER.  His wife took the granddaughter home and met us at the hospital.  As it all turned out, there was nothing wrong with the heart and by last night he was better, just a rumbly in the tumbly (as Winnie the Pooh use to say).

This particular friend is one who has been at the top of the friend list since we started college together.  We have sung together for 50 years and still greatly enjoy each other’s company.  This one moment of fragility was one of those wake ups God gives us.  This earthly life is temporary.  How much I want to remember this and not let opportunities to express love and appreciation slip by.

Today is Sunday.  It is the Sunday to sing a song which praises God in spite of all that is happening in one’s life at the present, anything that may be tormenting one from the past, or anything one is worrying about for the future.  Praising God is a step in TRUST and FAITH.  I said yesterday that I’d determined this song today would be my last time to sing one like this–the pressure is too great.  Yet God is reminding me as He started yesterday, showing me how He is always in charge and that He lovingly wants to have His message delivered.  His messages are almost always ones of hope and mercy.  Yes, there are the messages of doom, but well ahead of the doom He has offered tremendous opportunities to grasp His Mercy and Love.

Mercy and Love are what I know God is wanting to offer us.  He asks that we lift Him up in praise TRUSTING and BELIEVING He is God Almighty.  It has taken me a lifetime to learn to do this and I’m only beginning.  The temptation to let anxiety be present and stymie me are ever before me.  However, God is asking me to BELIEVE and that is exactly what I will keep doing.  I’m not stopping what He asks of me until He stops asking.  Today, ALL PRAISE will be RISING!

This morning God has been helping me deal with an issue that has haunted me since I was a senior in high school–50 years ago.  That year at Easter time the cantata No Greater Love had come out.  Our church choir was singing it and I had the role of Christ in it which entailed several solo parts.  It was being performed on Easter Sunday night in April, 1968.  That day my older brother Ralph had come for dinner with his kids.  He was divorced at the time.  He began to tease dad about his pronunciation of a few words and dad denied it.  Mom and I both concurred that he did pronounce them incorrectly.  After Ralph left dad informed mom and me we sure knew how to make a man feel like a heel!

I started the milking a little early that evening as I needed to get to the church.  No one else was going from our family.  As I’d finished and ran into the house to dress and clean up I was asked by dad what I was doing?  I told him I was headed to Deer Flat for the Easter cantata.  He said I wasn’t going anyplace!  I told him I had the role of Christ and I had to go.  He said I could rant all I wanted but I wasn’t going.  I went to our phone to call the pastor to tell him I couldn’t be there but dad grabbed the phone out of my hand and slammed it down onto the phone’s cradle.  He then left with the pickup and took the car keys so I was stranded.  The next day at school I asked the high school principal if I could call long distance to our church and he let me.  I told the pastor what had happened and he said it was ok that everyone knew my dad.

Tomorrow I am singing a solo with our church choir.  The song is:  All Praise Rising.  We are also prepping for our Christmas program which will be in early December.  I’d decided in my head this will be the last time I do any of this.  The anxiety is too great anymore.  However, this morning as I was having my devotions I asked God if there was something in my past generating this intense anxiety?  He instantly brought to mind the story I told above.  He said it was time to let His Son bury it at the cross.  He said He wanted me to sing this song tomorrow praising Him, not hiding behind these intense insecurities.  It is amazing how God works! He told me His timing is perfect and now that I’m doing this class on abuse I can let these times go which still have a grip on me.  Christ is wanting to bury them and I can rejoice in freedom instead of hiding from unworthiness.  The gift of God’s Holy Spirit is Who God wants seen tomorrow so I’m going to step into this with a new heart!  Praise God from Whom ALL BLESSINGS FLOW!

Yesterday I spent time with the Jr/Sr high school I’m working with.  Little did I know they had such history of dispute, hurt and separation within them.  However, as I was searching to find some important information for the work of the day I stumbled into some records defining this time in their recent past.  There are only a couple folks still with the district from then and so I asked them to inform me.  I got teared up listening to it and knew even more why God has us addressing this work.  I told her we were going to unite and this would be a new day for their district.  God is in this work this time.  Later in the day as I was working with one other a similar experience happened.  God just doesn’t want us to start doing something new without cleaning up what was done wrongly in the past.  This is true for our personal living as well as for what we do in our daily work lives.

Last night one of our own men gave his testimony for Celebrate Recovery.  He is one who had porn and male “touching” happen to him as a boy about 7 years old by an uncle.  I knew this about his story already but it was the first time I personally realized the sexual abuse by my brother was the same as introducing me to porn.  In my class for abuse I’m presently working through God is awakening so much I didn’t want to see.  But, in seeing it now, I can let it go.  I’m not needing to stuff it back down and tell it to go away.  It is utterly amazing to be able to identify these items as “in my past” without sensing the guilt and shame from them also being within me still.  I am so grateful God led me and us to the present classes we are doing.

Today the three brothers living here in the valley are getting together at the one’s home who broke his pelvic bone last August.  We are splitting his winter firewood and stacking it in his shop.  I use to brace myself for these times even though I’d enjoy some of it.  The teasing would turn into torment that I’d hide and endure.  However, now I look forward to these times of togetherness.  How good God is!

Today I see this journey my life having different parts to it but it is still one journey.  All of my life I’ve used what I do in the secular world which is my educational work to attempt to create my worthiness for the spiritual world–my church involvement.  As I’ve needed to drill down deeply into my belief system which drove this thinking and my actions, I see a boy (now man) trying to find his value someplace, somewhere.  The past several weeks of working through the lessons in my Abuse class have helped me see this so plainly.

This morning God has been pointing out how He wants me to carry His Light (Purpose) into the work I’m doing with the schools.  Right now this looks like helping the ones involved see the value of their present tasks.  We are deeply into the work of assessing all the areas influencing why each site is scoring so poorly in their students’ learning.  It is painful and it comes at the same time each teacher and administrator has to also do their daily work.  It feels like more WORK.  This morning God has been showing me how this process, even though it has a secular application, is the same process He has been taking me through emotionally and spiritually.  Little by little, getting all of this garbage out of myself, God has begun to show me the person He originally created.  I’ve always believed the work I’ve needed to do secularly and/or spiritually is due directly to who I am (a failure) rather than what God has me doing.  My work was a consequence of my lack of value instead of being a consequence of my worth.

As I’ve been able to let go of some recent negative beliefs, God showed me this morning that my daily living is to become of one focus,  His Alone–not secular and not spiritual, but His–period.  He has never separated what He has had me do or what He currently has me doing into spiritual or secular.  He is God in all of it and I am His servant in all of it.  I for the first time this morning saw the issues of my past as tools which no longer own me but as tools which I can state and use to help others unravel their crises so the crisis no longer owns them.  I feel so much freer as I attempt to explain this right now.  God never ceases to amaze me!