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I was given a rose in church yesterday. A deep red, curled up bud just starting to unfurl.

I'm not much of a rose person. I prefer wildflowers - a bright mish-mosh of colors - or lilacs or daisies. But roses are culturally appropriate for Valentine's Day. And I'm not ungrateful. The bud vase of roses on our table is a sight more attractive than the no-decoration-whatsoever we usually look at.

I fingered the petals; brushing them out; opening the bud. Not really interested. Not really inspired.

And a whisper came unexpectedly to my soul.

 I made that with my finger.

And my touch was suddenly reverent.

I was touching something made by the finger of God.

Sisters, that's how close He is to our everyday lives.

Like Michelangelo's painting of The Creation of Adam, we come every moment of our lives into contact with the finger of God. We touch what He touched. We experience what He designs. We live in the word of His power.

How easily we lose that wonder of living in our Father's world!

When the snowflakes fall and catch, stop and remember from where they came. Each one designed by the all-knowing God who decided that it would snow at that very moment before time began.

When you brush your hair, so briskly and unthinking, stop and remember that every strand is numbered by your ultimate Father who knit them together when He placed you gently in your mother's womb.

And when you interact with those in your daily life, remember that, Christians or no, they are deeply loved by the Creator of all, who is completely aware of everything about them that we cannot see and also not willing that any should perish.

It's easy to look at the ocean, the Grand Canyon, the mountain ranges, and be awed by the majesty of God. But those things don't permeate our lives on a daily basis (at least, not most of us!). The majesty of God is bursting into our everyday lives at every turn. His hand meets ours in everything we touch. And He alone has opened our eyes to see and understand that He is the source. Our hearts know who to worship because He Himself has placed that knowledge in them.

How utterly dependent and yet how utterly safe we are!

"And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything. Rather, He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else." 
{Acts 17:25}

Love,

My New Baby

So, as you all know from the fact that I posted about this a week or so ago, God surprised me with another job and I am so humbled and amazed by how He works. If I never believed in the power of specific prayer, I do now. Many times while I was sending in applications and so on and so forth I prayed and asked God for specifics. I asked Him for something close, something Christian, and preferably something that was four hours a day, and not at 5 in the morning and something that would allow me to spend time and vacations with my family and please, please, please something that I could handle (which basically meant that I didn't want to go with a job where I'd have to endure the dreaded 'morning rush' (getting a million residents up in the morning for breakfast by 8).

God didn't send conclusive evidence of an answer right away and I got a bit worried. I finally forced myself to accept the fact that I would probably have to get a 2nd shift CNA job (which meant that I would be working 8 hours into the night and spending about 1-1/2 hours at home on weekdays due to my other job in the morning) and completely cut myself off from normal living.

Not the most welcoming thing to contemplate.

And then God comes along and works it out so that I am now employed to take care of one young and wonderful Christian woman for 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, in a setting that is more comfortable to me than an agency, and she lives 7 miles away. Don't anyone ever tell me that God doesn't listen to specifics or care about every detail.

And the first thing that my dad said when I told him I got the job was "you need to get a car."

Erg.

Let me begin by stating that my interest in cars is about nil. I had a few preferences and little to no knowledge of what I was getting into.

That ended the minute I started looking.

To get down to the point, I basically told God "You dropped this job into my lap, it's fifteen minutes away from my house and I need a vehicle to get me from point A to point B without taking a bus. Please either drop a car in my lap or give me the wisdom to see the right one when it comes along."

I was figuring on the wisdom.

So I began my search.

My dad and I traipsed through car lots, my brother and I traipsed through websites. My dad and I took a road trip to a dinky little car dealership only to find that they had just sold the car we were looking for. We went to another lot and test drove a car that fit my criteria almost perfectly but my dad ruled it out because it made to many unidentifiable noises.

I was getting a little discouraged.

All I wanted was a four-door car for 6 to 7 thousand dollars with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer that had a cd player, air conditioning, power windows and remote entry and preferably in a sane color. I was even willing to give up the windows and entry to squeeze in a possibility.

I went into work last Monday, after another round of car-less-ness had occurred over the weekend and one of the guys who works for my dad asked me (naturally) if I had gotten a car yet. I said no and he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and said "I've got one for you" (or something like that. I'm not going by the gospel of the letter right now when it comes to recording conversations...).

His son-in-law was upgrading and selling his old car for an extremely low price. I looked at the paper and immediately figured it was another wash because the odometer read 105,000 miles. But my dad said we might as well look at it because it had everything else I wanted and was several thousand dollars less than I had expected to pay. I said why not. I had already been disappointed once, so what did it matter?

We went in and looked at it, took it out for a drive and my dad said we'd be fools if we didn't take it. It was really a neat little car - a little more sporty, perhaps, than I would have preferred, but beggars can't be choosers - and I could come up with no real, legitimate reason to say no.

We shook on the deal, and picked it up yesterday. I got plates for it this morning and here it is! (Yes, my camera and I are still estranged; I was lame and took this with my phone. I hope no one wanted interior shots.)

(Yup, and that's my house in the background...)

And that's my testimony for today on the provision of God. Thanks all for reading!

Till next time!


P.S. Take a gander at the new blog design. Rachel over at Rainy Days Blog Design and I spent a good...erm...many hours working through the rigmarole of HTML and Gimp and stuff (I wasn't much help with all my picky opinions) to get this on the page. Hope it suits!
JR

I Know Who Holds The Future...

I recently heard my pastor say something that struck me as incredibly interesting because I had never heard it (or heard it and taken it mentally to heart) before.

"Satan doesn't know the future. Only God knows the future."

It struck me as interesting because I had always assumed (in a I-never-really-thought-about-it-before way) that Satan could freak me out about what was going to happen in the future because he had some sort of way of knowing how it was going to go.

Ha!

He doesn't.

Satan knows as much about the future as I do, so it does make it rather ridiculous to believe the things he says *might* happen. He tells you all sorts of things that could happen in the future - all those horrible things that are going to happen that'll ruin your life - but the truth is that it's all speculation. He has no idea what God has in store for you! Satan will tell you anything - anything - to get you to abandon your trust in God's promises. No matter how outlandish it sounds. But he doesn't know. Only God does.

Praise the Lord!

"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." - Jeremiah 29:11-13

Till next time!

Five - The Number of Thanksgiving

One Thanksgiving our entire family was gathered at my grandparent's house for dinner. The table was set and the food was cooking when I walked through the door and everything smelled (as usual) absolutely delicious.

After taking off my coat, I wandered into the dining room and as I walked past the table, I noticed something different.

At each place, next to the water glasses, were five kernels of dried corn.

Thanks to my Christian history books, I knew what they represented.

When the Pilgrims were in America for their first winter, they ran out of food. They were so low on supplies that, towards the end of the season, they each received five kernels of corn for their daily meal.

And when they had the first Thanksgiving, they put five kernels of dried corn at each place to remind themselves of God's provision.

That was the only Thanksgiving I remember where we had those symbols of God's goodness at the table, but I'll never forget it. For some reason, those little kernels seemed to add something more to the celebration that day.

A reminder of God's providence and how truly blessed we all were. And also a reminder of how often we fail to take a moment to thank God for His gifts.

This Thanksgiving, I hope more than ever to remember what has been sacrificed for this country and what Jesus sacrificed for me - and to be truly thankful for the blessings I take for granted every day.

"What if you woke up this morning and found the only things you had left were the things you thanked God for yesterday?" - Terry Shock

Happy Thanksgiving to you all; I am so thankful for every one of you!

Love Like That

I've been thinking about posting this for a while, but haven't had the time or the words to do it. Now I'm free and I might as well give a stab at getting it down in a semi-readable, semi-understandable way. 

We'll see...

To begin, a little background : 

It's no secret, I guess, that for almost eighteen years, I've been wondering how on earth all my friends have been able to say "Oh, I'm SO in love with God!". And they are. I can see it. But for me, it's always been a struggle. 

I've been a Christian since I could understand what being a Christian was about. I've taught Bible clubs and Sunday School and VBS. I've mentored friends and sisters. I've done countless Bible studies and devotions. I've read books and pored over my Bible. I've been memorizing Scripture since I could read it. And I've prayed again and again for God to open up my eyes to His love - and nothing ever happened. I began to feel like this was it. There wasn't ever going to be that exhilarating knowledge of God's love for me. It was always just going to be an endless drone of "Jesus died on the cross to take away our sins because He loved us so much." 

I'd heard that so many times it lost its meaning. 

I was starting to lose hope when journal after journal was blotted with frustrated rants at God because He wasn't showing me the real meaning behind His death and how I couldn't grasp the meaning of the verses that said that "God's love is unfailing" and "For God so loved the world" and so on and so forth. I felt trapped when year after year passed and I still seemed stuck at the same bland plateau that I had always been on - inches away from grasping the true meaning of my faith and yet still falling short of feeling God's love wrap around me. 

I started giving up because I figured that maybe this was reality and no one really "fell in love with God" and they were just pretending to look like good little Christians. I wrote a letter to a friend once and said that I had realized that this was how it was going to be for me. I wouldn't ever have that heady experience of God's love; instead I would have just a steady knowledge of the love that Scripture assured me was there. 

But as that sank in, I realized that it wasn't enough. If other people had this exhilaration, I wanted it to. But I couldn't figure out how to grasp it and hold it. There were moments, yes, when I knew without a doubt that God loved me and my heart would jump and I would laugh with pure joy. But those moments were few and far between and they didn't satisfy the hunger I felt to know God and fall securely in His unfailing love.  

So I kept stumbling and praying and crying out to God that it wasn't fair and that I didn't understand and that I needed His help. 

But, as usual, nothing came. 

I grasped at solutions that didn't work, I tried this and that and the next thing, I delved into every single idea I could think of that would force me to open up my eyes to God's love and none of them worked. I was right back where I started. 

Frustrated, discouraged, and helpless. 

And then I started a course of joy. Through the writing of Ann Voskamp, in her book One Thousand Gifts (which I have referred to many times lately :D), I began to realize that thankfulness was the only way to fully realize God's love because that is how He shows His love to us anyway. Through the gifts He pours out on us every day. 

I started (ok, I attempted to start - it's really difficult to change old habits and start thanking God for everything!) the list of one thousand gifts and that didn't go to well (I'm still going at it, but one thousand is a looong way off  :-/ ) but another thing that did go better was that I started reading the Bible in a different way. 

Instead of just reading to read, I started paying attention to what I was reading and made more of an attempt to understand the meaning of what I was reading. I was amazed at what I found.

One verse especially hit me. 

Psalm 50:23 - He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.

It was exactly what I wanted. To be shown the salvation of God. To know and fully realize why He died on that cross besides the Sunday School pat answer "to save us from our sins". 

I wanted to know why He cared that we were saved, why He went through the suffering and rose from the dead, why it made any difference to Him that we went to heaven instead of hell. I had a hundred whys and no answers. So I figured that I would prepare the way for God to show me the meaning of His salvation. 

I sacrificed thank offerings in the form of prayer and praise. And I know that makes me sound really holy and all that, but, to be honest, I still forgot to thank Him over and over. 

Praise God for His forgiving spirit...

The answer came with swiftness that knocked me off my spiritual feet. 

He showed it to me in Hebrews 12.

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)

I had read and heard this verse a million times (exaggeration added) and I had never seen the answer to my questions buried inside it. 

Who for the joy set before Him endured the cross...

It all sort of dawned on me in an instant. One of those flashes when suddenly you realize how stupid you've been. Or, as my friend says, "a real "duh" moment".

Jesus died so that we could be forgiven, yes. But there was another reason. A much bigger reason. 

The joy. 

The joy set before Him. What He was looking forward to. 

And that was the sin barrier crashing down so that He could enjoy real communion with us. So that we could draw near to Him without our sin getting in the way and spoiling the sweetness of the relationship He longs to have with us. 

And when I realized that, I realized the worth I have to God. I'm not just one of the millions whose sins were forgiven by His blood. I'm a personal reason for His death. For the joy of communion with me, He suffered and died. 

And that's a humbling and honoring thought at the same time. 

And it makes all the difference in my view of God. 

That He died for the joy of a relationship with me. That that was the joy set before Him that He died to gain. 

Just thinking about it makes me feel so incredibly small and yet so incredibly awed. 

The King of Heaven died for the joy of drawing me near to Him. 

Where else can you find love like that?

'Till next time,

Sing to the Lord...

for HE is highly exalted. The horse and its rider HE has thrown into the sea! (Exodus 15:21)

Hoorrraayyyy!!!! I passed my first set of skills!

School went from 8 in the morning to 2:45, I wore my royal blue scrubs (which my brother had the tact to tell me that I looked absolutely horrible in...lol) and I learned how to wash my hands (very serious procedure), how to put on and take off PPE (personal protective equipment: i.e. gloves, mask, and gown), how to clean up a blood/body fluid spill, how to make up an unoccupied bed, and how to make an occupied bed (that was the most difficult, since I had to literally change sheets, blankets and all that jazz with the person IN bed). What fun! I, obviously, made a few mistakes, but those are expected.

I'm just glad it's over.

Praise the Lord, for HE is faithful.

Till next time,