From the Mixed Up Diary of Little Debbie

Can you stand just one more 1974 related post?

I hope so because I have one. 

You see, while digging through artifacts for that very pivotal year in my life,

 I came across this one. 

It's Little Debbie's diary, and it was written in 1974. I know that, not because she bothered to date it, but because on the very first entry on January 1st, she says this:  . 

I'm scared. We're moving to Georgia.

I don't want to go.

If  you think this is yet another blog post about the Great Moving Adventure though, you're wrong.  Little Debbie barely mentions that auspicious event again.  Her thoughts over the next month are occupied with far more pressing matters.  

Yep, forget the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Forget the national nightmare of Watergate. The top news story every day in Debbie Land was an update from the lonely hearts club. Poor Little Debbie just wanted one thing in her life; she wanted a boyfriend, and she couldn't seem to get one. Bless her heart. 

It all started with a boy named Frank. Now folks, try as I might, I can't conjure up an image of this Frank. Apparently, though, he was very important to Little Debbie back in the day.

She liked him.

He hated her back. 

But the very next day...  

Philip's not so bad...

Now, I might not remember this Frank boy, but Philip is another story. Little Debbie became twitterpated with Philip when he first showed up in the fifth grade, and she never really changed her mind. In mathematical terms, Philip would be known as the love constant.

Not to worry, though. There was plenty of room in her heart for two.  

Three even...

  

Remo

You have to give the kid points for loyalty.  Once a fellow got on her love list, he stayed on her love list. Little Debbie never was much for subtraction. She was more into addition, and apparently she thought it was time to add a little Italian to the mix. (At least I think Remo was Italian... maybe Greek. I'm not sure. )

At any rate, it was probably a good idea to keep her options open,
what with Frank hating her and all.  

And just a few days later....

 Troy. 

Now, though he may not be mentioned here, she hadn't dropped the Italian boy. She continues to pine over Remo... and Frank... and Philip.... and Troy over the next month. It's a dream team of four, and Little Debbie loved them all. 

See? 

It's at this exact point that the writing stops, and Little Debbie inexplicably disappears.  Looks like nothing much has changed in Debbie Land since 1974.

But lo and behold, six months later, she's back again, writing from her new home in southeast Georgia. You would think she had a lot of stuff to tell Dear Diary at this point, stuff about her new house with her new room, or her new school, or new church, or new friends, or a whole new culture.

But no.

Little Debbie came back to talk about the new boys.

And thus was the life of a Little Debbie, chasing from one boy to another. Boy after boy after boy after boy.
What a mess.

I kept reading Dear Diary until I came to the very last entry.  After the usual lamentation about how ugly I was and that no boy would ever slow down enough for me to catch him, I came to the very last sentence in the book.

 (Apparently, I was not only boy crazy but a lousy speller.)

I'm trying to find that God has someone chosen for me in my Bible. 

Now folks, the rest of that rambling Debbie mess made me laugh right out loud, but do you know what that last part did?

It made me smile.

And maybe,  just maybe, it made me a little misty-eyed too. Maybe it even gave me a lump in my throat and a catch in my heart.  Because, you see, I never did find that passage in the Bible. ( If you know of one, please share. I'm sure there are a lot of Little Debbies who would love to see it.)  I did, however, find something even better.

I found him.

And within days, I knew without a doubt that the chase was over. 

I realize that I get a little nauseating when I talk about Sir Lotsa Hair, but friends, that man really  is my knight in shining armor. No other man could fit me the way that he does. No other man would put up with me the way he does.  Indeed, God  had chosen that someone just for me.

He is immeasurably, abundantly, more than I could ask or imagine. 

And here's the thing:   If I had known what was waiting ahead for me, I wouldn't have bothered with all that chasing. I wouldn't have bothered with Frank or Philip or Remo or Troy. I wouldn't have bothered with Walter or any of the other 4,728 contestants on the Love Connection.  I would have spared my heart the sorrow and spent my time and emotions on the better stuff.  If I had only known...

Can anyone relate?

Probably.

We all *get* that, don't we?  We shake our heads at Little Debbie and her lack of belief.  We wish we could go back in time and tell her that what  God had planned for her was so much better than what she could see in front of her. We wish we could convince her that all that stuff she was chasing was well, just stuff.

And yet, here we are, all grown up and still chasing. 

Oh sure, it might not be the incredible ever- expanding boy collection, but we're still out there chasing after the stuff.  What's more? We're chasing it for the exact same reason Little Debbie chased the boys:

 Because we refuse to believe that what God has ahead of us is immeasurably, abundantly, more than anything in front of us.

One day, all the silly stuff we're pouring out in the journals of our hearts will be even less of a memory than poor, faceless Frank. It'll all be gone, and we won't even care.

 Because, friends,  what lies ahead of us is so much better than we can ask or imagine. If we can only convince our little hearts to believe...

No eye has seen,  no ear has heard, no mind can comprehend 
what God has in store for those who love him.`
1 Cor. 2:9

****

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But I am linking this to
 All Things Bright and Beautiful

Just For The Record...

... it's very difficult to Philippians 4:8 your way through Walmart. 

So said your friendly neighborhood blogger  nonblogger recently.   At the risk of stating the obvious, I was referring to this passage of scripture:

Finally, brothers, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are right, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, 

if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think on those things. 

At the risk of stating yet more of the obvious, I'll go ahead and spill it that I've been in a bit of a funk lately. Maybe you figured that out.  It has been quite a while since I posted regularly, and most of my recent posts don't exactly call to mind the words,  Rejoice in the Lord always.  (Also found in Philippians 4, by the way.)

The reasons for my recent trip to funky town can remain unyakked  for now.  As reasons go, they look a little bit more like excuses, anyway.

The truth? Things haven't been completely bad around here. Yes, we've had some major hurdles. The Duchess had her final surgery, and the hospital is just not fun. She's home, though, and  getting stronger every day.  A mom on the mend qualifies as good stuff, not bad stuff, doesn't it?

Yeah, I think so too.

There has been other good stuff as well.  We're basically  finished with not one, not two,  but three big house projects, projects for which we have waited a long, long, time.  On top of that,  Sir Lotsa Hair and I enjoyed an epic anniversary adventure thirty years in the making. 

So no. I don't really have a stuff problem.  

What I have is a fluff problem. 

As in the fluff  between my ears.  My problem, you see, is that I think way too much. 

Don't let the hair color fool you, folks, I'm actually quite the thinker. My thoughts are my constant companions. I wake up in the morning ready to think, and when I try to fall asleep at night, it's the thinking that gets in the way.    

You wouldn't believe the thinks  I can think. 

(Then again, maybe you would.) 

Maybe you believe me because you're a thinker too.  Maybe you're even more than a thinker.  Maybe you're a fellow ruminant.

Maybe you understand this scenario:

It's morning. The birds are singing, and the sun is shining. You jump crawl  out of bed ready to face the day. It's is a brand new morning, you say. Today is the day to start something different. Today, I'm climbing out of this stupid Think Tank.

And then, you turn on the news.

Or maybe you sit down at the computer.

Or get a phone call from just the right  wrong  person.

Or you take a trip to Walmart... 

The next thing you know, up comes the cud, and you start to chew.
And you chew. And you chew. And. You. Chew.

Until you have chewed yourself into a hot mess.    

 Can anyone relate? 

Please say yes. I really don't want to be the only cow in Blogland. 

A week or so ago, I decided that I had had a bellyful. .Life is just too short to waste on rumination, and besides, it wasn't making anything better. It was making everything worse. It was around this time that I got the same piece of advice from both a visible and an invisible blog friend.  

Focus on Philippians 4:8, 
they said.  

Now folks, that is really sound advice for a more sound-minded person. Need I remind you, though, that I am a hot thinking mess these days? Frankly, I needed something more concrete than that, something a bit blonder maybe.. something cut into bite-sized pieces.  

So that's exactly what I did.  

I cut it into bite-sized pieces.

I took that passage and diced it into individual words, words like finally... which more rightly means from now on.

From now on, folks,... think on these things. 

See? It's getting better already.

And then, there's the word think.  Some versions translate it meditate,  which is better I suppose. Still, it's not as good as the tasty Greek morsel that Paul used. That word means to reckon, to calculate, to count up.  It carries the notion of adding things together. You know, almost like a building a collection. 

Kind of puts a whole new spin on the phrase collecting your thoughts, doesn't it? 

It did  for me, anyway. Reading it that way turned Paul's good advice into a concrete, thought collecting mission.  Why, you might even go so far as to call it an adventure. 

So that's exactly what I called it.  

I dubbed it Debbie's Word- Of -The- Day Thought Collecting Adventure.  Then, since everybody knows that an adventure is  more fun when you share it with others, I invited friends and family to come along with me.

Every day for eight days, we focused on just one of the remaining words in Philippians 4:8. Then, we collected thoughts to go along with that one word only.

We started at the beginning of course. 

Whatsoever things are true...

Sir Lotsa Hair collected his thoughts from the road. The Farm Sister collected hers at the farm. The Duchess collected them too, even though her she can't go anywhere at all. Miss Whimsy and I collected them together.

And throughout the day, we shared those collected thoughts, one with another. We sent texts. We sent emails. Some thoughts were so good they deserved an entire conversation.

Over coffee.

Because it's a well known fact that good thoughts are made even better when shared over coffee.

By the end of the week, I had a pretty impressive collection of positive thoughts living inside this head of mine, thoughts that were true, and honorable, and right, and lovely. 

You wouldn't believe the thinks I could think. 

(But then again, maybe you would.) 

Maybe you're a Philippians 4:8 thinker too. Maybe you're something even better. Maybe you're a Philippians 4:8 thought collector.

But maybe, you're not, not right now anyway.  Maybe you're a struggling ruminant like me just trying to make it through the day, one troubling thought at a time. If so, may I suggest that you grab some friends and family and give the Word-A-Day Thought Collecting Adventure a whirl?

What do you have to lose?

Just take it one day at a time, one word at a time, and you, too, can be a Philippians 4:8 thought collector.  One word of caution, though:  You might find it goes a little easier to collect positive thoughts if you just steer clear of Walmart.

*****

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A Stone of Offense

It happened over a decade ago.  All these years later, though, I can still see the moment as if it has just happened.  I can still see his face.

I was standing in a corner of the church during our fellowship hour when a brother approached me.  If I could have figured out a way to walk away gracefully, I would have.  Frankly, I had little desire to talk to this man.  I had been avoiding him for nearly two years, after all.  Oh, I was kind to him. It wasn't a sincere kindness, though. It was that aloof and tolerant sort of kindness that we believers are guilty of employing when we're trying to cover a grudge.

Maybe you can relate.

There was no place to run, though, so I held my ground and waited for him to speak. I'm so grateful that I did, too. What followed was the most beautiful lesson I have ever been blessed to receive.

Debbie, he said, 

I need to ask your forgiveness.  

Then, he went on to talk about the elephant standing in the room between us. The details of  said elephant are unimportant. Let's just say that he and I had not seen eye to eye on something that had happened to me. It was something that he had the influence to change, too. He just hadn't seen fit to consider the elephant from my side of the room.

Honesly? It hadn't been all that important to him back then.  Back then, *it* had been more of an annoyance. It was  a blip on the radar screen, a bump in the road, a molehill that I was treating like Mt. Everest.

But then, *it* happened to him.

And do you know why it happened to him?

I believe it happened because  this man is a true man of God. Oh sure, he's fallible, but as one who enjoys the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, he is also teachable. God knows that. By allowing it to happen to him, God caused him to remember when it had happened to me.

And when  God causes one of his children to remember, He is always calling us to act.
Always.

And so, he did.
Nearly two years after the incident, this quiet man of God approached me to make amends.

It was a brief apology. It didn't require a lot of words, anyway. All it really and truly required was a heart to go behind them. He couldn't fix it or turn back time, but his face and his heart were so sincere that I knew without a doubt he would if he could.  One thing he said, though, I can still remember word for word.

He said, "I was a stone of offense to you."

A stone of offense.

In the New Testament, that's the word skandalon.

skandalon:  (σκάνδαλον)
     Any impediment placed in the path, causing one to stumble or fall, a stumbling block, occasion of stumbling, i.e. 

a stone which is the cause of stumbling.

It's amazing how one little phrase can have so much healing power.  Coming out of his mouth that morning,  it was like chemotherapy and radiation to the spiritual cancer that had grown inside my heart. 

 You see, his actions had indeed caused me to stumble. (Did you miss the part about the grudge?)  They had made me stumble in other ways too, the kinds of ways that you stumble when hurt goes unacknowledged and festers into anger.      

Maybe you can relate. 

I have never forgotten that day, nor the gifts of grace he gave to me.

First, he gave me the gift of forgiveness. Within a moment, the grudge I had been carrying was lifted off of my heart and carried completely away. In its place was a deep and abiding love and admiration for that quiet man of God. I thank my God upon every remembrance of him...

He gave me something else, too. He gave the gift of good example. I learned how to apologize that day. I learned how to acknowledge that my own action or inaction might have caused another person to stumble. I learned how to take the spotlight off their reaction and  on to the stone of offense which had caused it to begin with. 

You know, the stone with my name written all over it...

There's a reason for the ramble this morning. As you probably suspect, something happened in my life recently that has caused me to remember that quiet man of God.  Maybe this post has caused you to remember, too.

Maybe, you're remembering a time when you were on the receiving end of a much needed apology.  Maybe, you were the one who gave it.

Or maybe... just maybe... you're remembering an elephant in your own room, a time when your words or actions (or lack thereof) were a stone of offense to a brother or sister...

...and when God causes His children  to remember,

 He always expects them to act. 

Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift at the altar. First, go and be reconciled to them, and then come and offer your gift. 

~ Jesus, Matt. 5:23-24

(By the way, there's no statute of limitation on reconciliation. It's never too late until it's, well, too late. )  

...and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

*****

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But I am sharing at The Writer's Reverie for her new linky party, 

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The example of the quiet man was pretty wise and wonderful to me. 

When God Shops The ReStore

Can you stand another post about that coffee table? I hope so because you're going to get it. This one isn't so much about the craftiness of the thing. It's about the treasure I picked up along the way.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that we were studying this verse in my Bible study class.

Be devoted to one another in genuine love. 

Give preference to one another in honor. 

~Romans 12:10

I mentioned in that post that there was a nugget about that word honor,  but that would have to be a post for another day. Well, today's the day.  

Honor, after all, tends to be one of those squishy words. We all use it, and we all pretty much think we understand what it means. If we're asked to give a concrete definition of it, though, words kind of fail us. They fail me anyway. Honor is something that you give. It's something that you show, and it's something that you feel, but how exactly would I define it without using the word honor?

See what I mean? Squishy.

Fortunately for the Romans, Paul's word wasn't in the least bit squishy. When they read the words give preference to one another in honor,  they knew exactly what he meant. That's because Paul used a very specific Greek word here.  This one:

 τιμή  (timē) :  Value; the value by which a price is fixed or the price itself.

Funny that not a single translation puts it that way. Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to understand? To honor someone is to value them. It's to place a price on them based on what we believe them to be worth.

We get that. We live in a commercial world, after all. We know all about values and pricing. Just as the world places a  value on its stuff, believers are to place a value on one another.

We're just not supposed to do it by the world's standards.  The world places its value on the superficial and temporal.  You know... kind of like the way that old coffee table was priced at the ReStore.

Told you I was getting around to this...

The world looks at the surface damage and broken pieces and says,

Meh... 20 bucks.

But God is in the restoration business.

I have it on good Authority that He loves the hand sander even more than I do.

 His power tools have real power, too.  And those broken pieces?  

They're His specialty.

I don't know how you feel about that, but this old diamond in the rough finds that pretty comforting.

And that's not even the good part yet.

It gets better. 

Folks, if all we're thinking about is our makeover value, we're still stuck in the standards of the world. God's value doesn't really have anything to do with the makeover at all. It has everything to do with the price  He was willing to pay, surface damage, broken pieces and all.

I thought my ladies needed to remember that 

so I made some  price tags to stick on them.

Lest they ever forget how valuable they are to God.    

And in so doing, forget to value one another as well.

*****
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Honor One Another

I almost couldn't blog about this one, but I'll give it a try.

I had planned to write a little about our current class study this morning. We're still in the middle of that unit called Allelon: One another.  Last week, we studied this verse:

Be devoted to one another in genuine love. 

Give preference to one another in honor. 

~Romans 12:10

There's a wonderful nugget on the actual meaning of the word honor in that passage, and I was going to yak all about it this morning. Something happened this week, however, that changed my mind.  Something happened that made me want to talk about honor in its simplest form instead.  It came after a conversation with the husband during our walk the other morning.

It was a silent walk. 

Then, as if out of the blue he said, 

 "I didn't truly love her at the beginning, you know.

 I can't say that I loved any of them. 

I couldn't love them. I didn't know them."

He was talking about his favorite old friend. You might  remember her. She has been the star of the show around here more times than anyone outside of my family.

I yakked about my stroll with her through the grand old house.

And I yakked about her 100th birthday party
and all about her antique twinkle.

And then, I intruded on this moment.

The weekly rendezvous between the gray haired lady 

and the dark haired man.

I told you at the end of that post that I was married to that knight in shining armor.  I'm pretty sure that was the first time I called him Sir Lotsa Hair.  She just called him her fray~end. 

They all do. He has a whole bevy of friends in that wonderful Sunday school class, a group of young ladies now between the ages of 95 and 102 (soon to be 103). They are the bright spot in his week, the reason he rushes to get to church early every Sunday morning.

He truly loves them. 

The other day on our walk, though, he said that in the beginning he didn't love them.  He loved the idea of them, and he certainly respected them, but the love?  That didn't come until he got to know them. His relationship with them started because of obedience instead. I yakked all about it in THIS POST so I won't do it again, but in short, he discovered  by Providence that they had trouble opening the heavy back door into the church. He began to wait by the door to open it for them, thus beginning a decade of doorkeeping in the house of the Lord.

He told me on our walk the other day that he happened to be studying Acts 6 at the time. As he considered  those old widows trying their best to get to Sunday school, he realized that opening the door for them was a way of making sure they got their bread. 

And so he did it.

Out of obedience to the Word.

(And no, he's not a deacon. He's just a simple man of God.)

This *one another* thing all begins with obedience, he said.  If we'll just do what God tells us to do, his Word will not return void. Opening the door to those widows opened a door of friendship. The friendship opened the door to love. What started out as something he did out of obedience became something he was truly honored to do.

There's a reason for this ramble this morning, and you've probably already figured out what it is. You see, last week, our old friend took a fall.

Oh, she's fallen before, plenty of times, in fact. You don't reach the fragile age of 101 without taking a tumble or two. Then again, you don't reach the fragile age of 101 without having the resiliency to lift yourself back up again.

She's done that.  She's the Unsinkable Old Lady, after all, born the day the Titanic went down. We've never been able to hold her down for long. Sometimes, though, even the most unsinkable ones among us just get weary.  After a while, they sort of earn the privilege not to have to get up anymore.  Last week,  the Unsinkable Old Lady was given that privilege.

Not that she sank, of course. Nothing could be further from the truth.  The truth is that this time, God himself did the lifting.  I guess He liked the feel of her in His arms because He kept right on lifting until He had lifted her all the way home.

We got the news not long after it happened, and I can't forget the look on  his face when I told him. It was the face of man who has lost something very dear.  He was quiet, even for him, for the rest of the day. Then, we got another phone call, this time from her family, and I got to watch his expression change to one of deep appreciation.

Love, you see, is not unlike the Word itself. If you send it out, it won't return to you void. He loved his old friend very much.  Apparently, she loved him right back and wanted him to know.

And so on Friday, the dark haired man polished his shoes and put on his best suit, and he kept his date with the Unsinkable Old Lady. Then, he had the honor of walking her into church one last time.

Rest in peace, old friend. What an honor it was to know you. 

*****

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A Father's Fence

Some time ago,  Dayle @ A Collection of This and That  wrote a wonderful post about a fence that her father had built to surround his property. It was an enduring fence, she said, and had served as a  silent witness as her family had grown through the years. 

I loved that post, and it's the inspiration for my yakabout this Sunday morning. It made me think of a fence built by another father I know.

It surrounds this house which belongs to some family friends. 

It's a wonderful picket fence, lined with flowers and interrupted with trellises and enchanting little gates that lead who knows where and hide who knows what.

I love it. 

This isn't the part of their fence I want to yak about this morning, though.

This is.

This big old stockade fence predates the other one by about two decades. It's not nearly as whimsical as the picket fence, but that's OK with the fence builder. It wasn't built for whimsy. It wasn't built for privacy, either.  It was built because of the street.

You see, this home sits on corner lot in an older section of town. The area has blended with the commercial district over the years, making their street a busy thoroughfare and their corner a dangerous intersection.

And this man was trying to raise a family with four small children. 

 Wouldn't you have built a fence?

It took him a long time to build it, too. He's not exactly a hammer-and-nails kind of guy, not in the traditional sense anyway.  He's a pastor, and  he had exactly one day a week for fence building.  It took him months, but when he finally finished, he had built something really special for his children.

Do you know what it was? 

A spacious place. 

You see, without the fence, playtime was problematic. Without the fence, his children had to be watched every moment and kept on tight leashes. It wasn't that this father didn't trust his children; it was just that he knew his children. He knew that like all children, they were prone to wander.  He built the fence to give them a wide open space in which to play.

The father in him likes to yak about that fence. "I didn't build it," he likes to say," because I hated my children.  I built it because I love them." 

And then, the pastor in him likes to compare it to another fence built by another Fence Builder.  God's law, he says, is nothing more than a Father's Fence. He didn't build it because He hates his children. He built it because He loves us.     

Enough said. 

Let's face it folks.  This world is nothing but a busy thoroughfare and a dangerous intersection. Yet right smack dab in the middle of it, our Father has satisfied our adventurous souls by building a spacious place  for his children to play in freedom.  Make no mistake about it though,  we are hemmed in behind and before by the Father's fence.

Because we need that fence.

When was the last time you truly thanked your Father for building it?

You have not given me into the hands of my enemies 

but have set my feet in a spacious place. .

Psalm 31:8

*****

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Crafting in the Shadow

I got a little treat a few weeks ago. 

I got the chance to be a student in my own Sunday School class.  

I rarely get that chance. I generally teach the class unless I'm going out of town. This time, I had asked for a little break.

The lesson was about using our gifts and talents for the Kingdom of God. At the end of the lesson, the teacher asked the class  to share what they believed to be their own talents.

From my quiet chair in the corner, I studied the women in that room. What I saw made me sad. They shifted in their seats. They rearranged their Bibles. They shrugged and sighed and chewed on their lips. In the entire class, only two women actually shared something that they thought they could bring to God's party.

There's no good reason for that, either. Sitting around that room was a group of gifted women. They can bake and sew and decorate. They can sing and craft and organize. They have many talents. They just have one little problem. None of these women sees herself as one who shines. 

You see, they sing in the choir, but never sing the solo. They serve on committees but never serve as the chair. When a job needs to be done, they're the hands and feet behind the scenes. You rarely if ever see their face out in front or their name in the bulletin. They are the shadow people.

Can anyone relate?

I chewed on that scene all week long. I even considered doing a lesson to address it but went ahead with plans to begin a study on the Ark of the Covenant. We began with the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus.  It wasn't long before I stumbled on this:

 Then Moses said to the Israelites, 

"See, the LORD has chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts-- 

~ Exodus 35:30

OK...Am I the only one out there who has never noticed the name Bezalel before? 

If you've read the Book at all, you know that it took an entire nation to build and furnish that Tabernacle. What you might not realize (because I didn't) is that God only names two of them. One was Bezalel,  

And name him, he did. The actual rendering of that verse doesn't say that God chose Bezalel. It says that God called him by name.  

Now, I don't know about you, but whenever I read that God calls someone by name, I'm always curious to know exactly what that name means. I looked it up, and do you know what it means? 

In the shadow of God.  

Bezalel wasn't a spotlight kind of guy. He wasn't a speaker or a warrior. He wasn't a prophet or a judge. He was never going to wear the priestly garments and be covered in gold and precious stones. He wasn't going to blow the trumpet or carry the Ark of the Covenant. 

No, Bezalel wasn't a spotlight kind of guy. He was just a man with a craft and a heart for his God.   A few verses later we find out he had a heart to teach others the craft as well.  If he were alive today, I bet he'd be a blogger. 

But then again, maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would be perfectly content to do the job that God had gifted him to do, knowing that if God had called him to do it and equipped him to do it, it must be an important job to God.

By the way, it was. 

You just don't find out which job had Bezalel written on it unless you keep reading that wonderful Book. A few chapters later, Exodus 37 begins with these words:

So Bezalel made the ark...

That's right folks. Bezalel made the Ark of the Covenant, the treasure of Israel.  
Just think about it...
In the entire history of God's people, only two hands ever touched the Ark of the Covenant and lived to tell the tale. Both of those hands belonged to an obscure crafter named Bezalel, a man in a shadow of God.

So here's to you, shadow people.

 If you only hear one thing this morning, hear this:

The God who created you has gifted you with specific skills for a specific purpose, and that specific purpose has your name written all over it.  You may be crafting in the shadows, but from where God sits, you shine.

*****

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Keeping Peace

It's rough out there. 

Has anyone else noticed? 

There's violence in the Middle East, murder in Benghazi. crippling gas prices, and an economy that would rather mark time than march forward.  Just when you think things can't get worse, some Frankenstorm comes out of the sea, destroying homes and  ripping little children out of the arms of their mother.

I can hardly stand it.

I would turn off the TV and pretend it didn't exist if I were the kind of person who could do that, but I'm not.  Pretending never has worked for me.  I don't need pretense; I need peace. 

I don't need a regular portion of peace, either. I need a double portion. I need the kind promised in Isaiah 26:3.

You will keep in perfect peace, him whose mind is fixed on You

 because he trusts in You.

  Perfect peace.

In the Hebrew, that's Shalom, Shalom. 

If I'm going to have any kind of peace at all, I'd like the perfect kind, thank you very much.  I've tried the imperfect kind, and it just doesn't have any stay power. It's hard enough to keep that kind of peace in the easy times. I certainly can't keep it in the hard ones.

That's why God doesn't tell us to try to keep it. Read the promise again.  Perfect peace isn't the kind of peace you keep. It's the kind of peace that keeps you. 

It's a keeping peace.   

Lest you think this is some sort of warm and fuzzy verse that pious Christians toss your way when they really  just don't want to hear to your problems, it isn't.  Oh, it's warm and fuzzy, but it's actually a very practical verse as well.  Isaiah not only tells us that there is such thing as a keeping peace, he tells us exactly how to get it.  According to Isaiah, it's a matter of fixing the mind. 

I know it seems trite, but stick with me here.

The front line in the battle for peace isn't the heart. It's the head. Fix the mind, he says.   The Hebrew word covers the entire intellectual framework. It includes by definition, our thoughts, our meditations, and our imaginations.

Now maybe I'm alone, but around here it's that third one that generally disturbs the peace.

Let's face it. As wonderful as an imagination can be, it can also be the worst enemy of the chronically creative. Oh, the thinks I can think... I can imagine up just about anything if I have a mind to, and I definitely have a mind to.

Folks, if it's peace we seek, we're going to have to learn to rein in our imaginations.

That may be easy for some, but for those of us with imaginations set on autopilot, it takes self-control. It does absolutely no good to tell us to put something out of our minds.  It takes a decisive plan to fix our minds on something else.

Someone else.

Fix our thoughts on Him, he says. Think about Him. Read about Him. Talk about Him. Meditate on Him. Pray, not just to Him but about Him. 

That's probably the most important one of all.

Have you ever listened to yourself pray during those peace-stealing seasons? Have you ever noticed, as I have, that you are praying as if God needs a constant reminder of the situation?

Here's a newsflash: He doesn't.

No, really. He knows. Sometimes I think we forget that. Sometimes, our minds are so consumed with "it" that "it" even consumes our prayer life.  We think the call to pray without ceasing means to pray about it without ceasing.

And we wonder why we have no peace.

Wouldn't it be infinitely more productive (and certainly more peaceful) to make an all- powerful God the focus of our prayers instead?

Yeah, I think so too.

That's because something supernatural happens when God is the focus of our prayers: He becomes the the main character in our imaginations.

And do you know what happens when God becomes the main character in our imaginations?

He changes the story.

... and the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  

*****

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The Story of the Vanishing Blogger

I was upstairs painting in the closet when it all began.

I was interrupted by the telephone, and when I answered it, it was the Man of the House.  He was  calling from his cell phone and explained that he was actually walking up the stairs as he spoke, but he hadn't wanted to startle me.

I startle easily you know...

In fact, as I've confessed time and time again, my panic button is generally set on automatic. Fear and anxiety are my besties, and I don't go anywhere without them. I'm loyal like that. Therefore, when the Traveling Man walks through the door on a Tuesday afternoon when he is supposed to be in Florida,  I do not assume that he's passing through to share glad tidings of great joy.

He wasn't.

He's a man of few words so he just blurted it out. The entire outside sales force of his company had just been eliminated. In case you missed it, that's a fancy way of saying that he lost his job, effective immediately.

Friends, I could literally feel my reaction. It started as a churning way down in the pit of my stomach and worked its way up to my chest, and my throat, and my head. It was an overwhelming feeling.

And do you know what that feeling was?

It was peace.

No, really... I'm as shocked as you are. I mean, I teach  peace. I sing  peace. I pray peace. I like to talk it up a lot, too. That afternoon, though, I... we... did something altogether different.

We chose peace.

I'd love to take credit for the choice, but in all sincerity, I might have reached for my bag of fear had it not been for the man I married. Before I could move an inch, he sat me down, took both of my hands in his, and explained that we had a conscious decision to make.  As he saw it, we had three choices.  

 We could count the numbers.  

Let's face it folks, the numbers stink. 23 million people out there who earnestly want to work are looking for jobs right now. 68 people from his company alone had joined the ranks that day, all with the same skill set, too. On top of that, we're no spring chickens. He's 51 years old. No, the numbers aren't so good. We agreed not to count them.    

We could count on the world.

The world is all too eager for us to count on it, after all. All signs point to it becoming more eager by the minute, too.  Immediately after the unfortunate conference call, his phone began buzzing with calls from (former) colleagues, brainstorming and networking and just plain commiserating to the point of  noise.   (Actually, he used the word cacophony. He may be a man of few words, but they all seem to be worth ten dollars. It's annoying, but I digress...)

And then, it happened.

The still, small, voice cut through all that cacophony, and it said, "Do you trust Me?"

And there it was, the third choice. Trust, it seems, is just like peace. We teach about it. We sing about  it. We pray about it, and we love to talk it up. Then, life gets very real and it's a time for choosing. 

One thing these over-the-hill Bible teachers know, though, is that God never has allowed himself to be among our choices. If we choose Him, we choose Him alone.

So he reached over and turned off his phone.

And for the rest of his trip home, he just listened to God.

If we could count on anything, he decided, it was God alone. After all, we had been through this before, and He had been faithful.

For the next three days, he did absolutely nothing related to the job situation. We told very, very few people about it and asked them to respect our decision not to play this thing out on the public stage. It's not that we were ashamed. We weren't and aren't. We just felt called to silence. (I'm sure you can imagine how difficult that was for me.)  I'm a yakker, after all, and I love to tell a story.

But here's the thing:

Sometimes, God has a story to tell through you, and sometimes... sometimes... He has a story to tell to you. This was one of those times.

I couldn't have yakked it abroad if I wanted to, though, because within 24 hours, he had to return his blackberry and computer. He adopted Della the Demon Possessed Laptop as his own for the job search since beating the pavement has been replaced with banging the keyboard.

And that's where I've been this past month and why you haven't seen my flower cart meandering about in Blog Land. Oh, I tried,  but it just didn't work to invade his space.  Besides that, we worked nonstop on some projects around here to keep ourselves busy.

After all, 2012 was dubbed the year of Finding the Sunshine, wherever, whenever, and however God sends it. If God chose to send me a handy man around the house, who am I to argue?

Now folks, I don't know what happens when you jump off a blog cliff. I don't know if anyone will even bother to read this post. I decided to write it anyway, though, and try to explain my vanishing act as well as I could.

As to the end of the story? 

I'll leave that to your imaginations. The fact that I'm here today ought to say something.

Well that, and the fact that I serve a mighty God, one who is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. How do you think this story ends?

The Woman of Walmart

I saw her before I even parked the car.

It was no wonder, really. She was kind of hard to miss. Based on the wrinkles and crafted eyebrows and teased hair, I judged her to be in her late 70s, probably older.

It wasn't her face that I noticed, though. It was her face in relation to her outfit.

It wasn't just the brown Mary Janes with the white knee socks...
It wasn't the shorts that landed at least six inches above the knee...
It wasn't even the white shirt with the turned up collar.

It was that this white shirt with the turned up collar was left completely unbuttoned, revealing a white sports bra and an even bigger white mid drift.

I admit it. I instinctively reached across the seat for the shiny red Kodak. It only took a few seconds to realize that I didn't actually have the nerve to snap a picture, but reach for it I did.

I prided myself on my discretion.

Then, I pulled Ebenezer into the nearest available space, and for some oddball reason tried to catch up with her. It wasn't hard. If her wardrobe didn't match her age, her pace did.  She was only about six feet ahead of me when she walked through the door.

That's how I heard the laughter.

There, standing just inside the door was a gaggle of gorgeous co-eds.  When the Woman of Walmart pushed her cart past them, they literally fell on each other in a round of laughter so loud that other shoppers turned to see the reason.

For about a half a second, I had the audacity to be appalled by their behavior.  I shook  my head in wonder at a generation that would openly laugh at another person, an elderly person at that. I think my nose was raised about an inch and a half when I heard the voice.

You know the one.

This time, it sounded eerily close to my own voice, teaching a certain passage just a few short weeks ago.

Judge not, that you not be judged. 

(Matthew 7:1)

Riddle me this, Blog Land:

 What's the difference between the laughing co-ed and the snickering blogger?

The volume. 

That would be the earthly volume, actually. Somewhere in the heavenlies, a Father was grieving over the deafening sound of my laughing heart.

That's where all judging takes place after all. I had judged the Woman of Walmart just as surely as those giggling co-eds. I was just a little bit less honest about it. I had done what Jesus specifically warned me not to do. 

That's what Matthew 7:1 is after all. It's a warning.

Oh sure, it's technically a command. (The verb is an imperative for all the other grammar geeks out there.)  I like to tell my class to think of it differently, though. Think of it, I tell them, as the sort of command you give to your child when you say, 

Don't touch the hot stove.

That's a command, isn't it?  Depending on your child's proximity to said stove, it's probably a pretty strong command, too.  Every parent out there, however, knows that this sort of command is really a loving warning.

... because you'll get burned. 

And so it is with Matthew 7:1. That admonition not to judge is more than just a command. It's a heavenly plea from a loving Father who doesn't want us to have to learn the hard way what happens when we do. 

Judging others opens the door for us to be judged as well, not just by others but by God himself. 

If it's good for the goose you know...

I stood there for another second or two trying to wrap my head about the mini lesson that God had taught me in the short distance from car to door. I decided to make things right with the Greater Judge and take my licks with the lesser ones.

Then I tugged down the top hovering over last year's capris, sucked in my belly and ventured forth. I would have rearranged the underwear that had developed a case of the creeps as well, but it's not wise to do the panty pull whilst running the gauntlet.

How I was judged by the co eds, I do not know.
I only hope that I was judged by my Father to be a child who had learned her lesson for the day.

Don't touch the burner, friends.
You're going to get burned.

*****

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