Coveting true health for my soul!

Learning to refresh and recreate yourself, on vacation.  Women’s rights and women’s health and women’s issues must include mental health breaks and emotional support of one another.  The emotional support to give eachother a nudge and comfortable affirmation that personal breaks are in order, from time to time.  Often it is too late, by the time we realize that we need a break.  Like minded women and service oriented women must give eachother space to recreate.

Teaching women to love their husbands and love their children has been my theme for these 40 years of marriage, sometimes to the loss of my health and sanity.  Teaching women to use some of their time to learn to thrive in the unswerving environment of constant contact with work and world is a somewhat more difficult task for me.  Always connected to the phone and internet can become like a 24 hour nursing schedule which only a mother of a newborn usually has to endure.  Always on call for this or that item.  If you are not careful your care of self can go on the back burner if not in the trash.

I was reaffirmed by some photos of women reading and lounging in Nantucket.  This is a place I have never been to, but it doesn’t have to be Nantucket to be a place for refreshing.  Put away the cell phone and the news and the internet.  Maybe not the computer, so that you can write what you learn from God on your journey to the inner sanctum of your soul.  Where is my soul?  Where is my heart?  Where are my affections fixed?

We think because we make it to church on Sunday and pray and read that means all is well.  It may well mean that, but it may mean that you are a good faker and more attached to the schedule of the usual than the true refreshing of attachment to God.  Lord, forgive me for placing my reputation for godliness above the true relationship with you.

Seen praying?  Seen Praising?  Are you? Am I like the ones who delight in the being seen as a worshiper when my heart is all out of sorts.  I must dig into the recesses of my soul and find out.  I must get alone with God to know if that is the case?  Healing is in your Wings, dear Lord, but if my eyes are on my bellybutton and on my aches and pains of heart and body, I am not reaching for the hem of your garment in your presence.  How many women were well in body and didn’t reach out for Jesus?  The need created the impulse to press into Jesus.  I must be aware of my need to touch his hem for healing.  

Heal me, Oh Lord!  It’s me, It’s me, standing in the need of prayer. And refreshing and healing and heath!

New York times article

Christmas In Connecticut

 Here I sit in my sunny living room on a Sunday afternoon meditating on the generosity of God to a sinner such as I.  That is not hyperbole.  

It sounds surreal that God would allow us so much of His mercy and grace.  It is not like Christmas in Connecticut a fake story. It is reality!

I haven't grown any citrus trees, like Martha Stewart.  My praise and worship has grown and withered and grown and I am grateful for the seasoned expectation that I have of the presence of God, here in my early 60's.  

We are here in Huntersville, North Carolina and the cultural presence of God has been startlingly awestriking to me for these years of living here.  Common Grace and fear of God seen in the regular living of life.  Not an armored defensive faith but a settled expectation of God's pruning and fertilizing.  I have learned much.

putting on the whole armor of God is against our personal propensities to sin, not against our neighbors.

"Jesus ready stands to save you, full of mercy and love and power"

The beauty of the Church doing it's work in the community is beautiful.  We should expect it. In our souls and in our communities we should expect to see the growth and blessings of the church in action.

My father used to say that in an unbelieving way.  "If the church is so powerful, why are the drug dealers all up and down that neighborhood?"  I never knew how to answer him.  I never knew how to defend my church that I loved and sang so triumphantly about.

The Church's one foundation?

I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord?

What Sacred Fountain Yonder Springs?

We Never Need be Vanquished?

He stood as a constant reminder that we were inept in our duty to our community there.  Sin was rampant, but I never thought to say to him that could he imagine how bad it might be if that church weren't on every corner?

Not until He was gone could I see that.  One of the deacons gave his testimony, who was my father's age and told how he ran in the streets and sold drugs and might have been killed and a praying woman who became his wife helped deliver him from himself.  I hadn't imagined deacon So and so as being my Dad's age and having run with him.

It was latently consoling.  Too late to share with my one missionfield, but not too late to comfort my heart.  He was gone and God is sovereign I couldn't imagine any other way than the way it had gone.

Now there are many great and shining lights of churches in New York and they have done many wondrous things throughout my city and I am grateful to have seen neighborhoods and communities transformed and lives renewed, but saddened that my dad wasn't there to see his pittance of a tithe that he put in the offering plate grow to a great and beautiful cathedral.

Jesus, the powerful name is enough, but with what measure we engage ourselves to aspire and exalt ourselves on resumes and in articles about us.  We find superlative words to exalt ourselves and yet we only refer to He who built the lofty skies as YOU.  I am inept!