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patience

Shared Wisdom: There’s Always More

You all know that I love words.  I am so grateful to the many people who have gone before me and shared their words of wisdom.  I am so grateful that there continues to be a steady stream of wise and intelligent beings who share their thoughts on life and their personal life experiences.  Here are a few that I choose to share with you today.

 

-  “Feeling healthy and feeling good about yourself is not a luxury – it’s an absolute necessity.”                                  (Anonymous)

 

-  “I do not pray that you may be delivered from your pains, but I pray earnestly to God that He would give you strength and patience to bear them as long as
     pleases.”                                                                                                                                      (from “Safely Through The Storm)

 

-  “May your footsteps set you upon a lifetime journey of love.  May you wake each day with His blessings and sleep each night in His keeping.  And may you
     always walk in His tender care.”                                                                                                                  (Anonymous)

 

-  “In those times I cant seem to find God, I rest in the assurance He knows how to find me.”                                     (Neva Coyle)

 

-  “God walks with us  ……..  He scoops us up in His arms or simply sits with us in silent strength until we cannot avoid the awesome recognition that
    yes, even now, He is there.”                                                                                                                       (Gloria Gaither)

 

-  “To be simply surrounded by God’s love and presence is pure JOY!”                                                                   (Chuck Colson)

 

-  “Joy is not the absence of trouble, but the presence of Christ.”                                                                    (William Van Der Holden)

 

-  “Fear of trials often depletes more energy than facing them.”                                                                             (Beth Moore)

 

-  “If God accepts me as I am, then I’d better do the same.”                                                                           (Hugh Montefiore)

 

-  “Resolve to keep happy and your joy, and you, shall form an invincible host against any difficulty.”                         (Helen Keller)

 

And as I was writing these quotations, I realized that many of them refer to “God” and to “joy”, and I found myself thinking that those two topics are intrinsically connected for me.  Greetings from the road – New Lisbon,Wisconsin to be precise!                                 

Waiting For God

I have to write about this because it just seems to keep coming up in one way or another in my daily readings.  Patience is a virtue that I have had to work hard on acquiring.  Left to my own devices I’m a “I want what I want, when I want it” type of gal. (Partners well with that “fly by the seat of my pants” personality that I have!)  I love immediate results – yesterday!!

So when I opened my copy of the Daily Word yesterday and saw the topic was “patience” a small inner part of me groaned.  That seems to be my first response to anything that smacks of a personal lesson that I need to learn, or relearn, or reinforce!  Fortunately that response is usually short-lived and I am willing to dive in and look at the lesson.  I am grateful today that I am willing to be teachable.

The title immediately under the topic read: “I patiently await answered prayer.”  And I recognized instantly that I needed to go back in my other meditation books because I knew that I had received this message several times over the last couple of weeks.  Someone was definitely trying to get my attention!!

In the posting that I wrote yesterday, Return To My Spiritual Sanctuary, I quoted from the book The Power of Prayer by E.M. Bounds, (July 8).  Over a period of three or four days in the same book I found the following messages: “Persistent prayer has patience to wait and strength to continue.” (July 4)  And, “Even if God does not answer our prayers right away, we must keep on praying.” (July 6)

Imagine my dismay when I turned the page on July 10 and found the title, “Delays and Denials” and read, “We need to give thought to the mysterious fact of prayer – the certainty that there will be delays and denials.  We must prepare for and permit these delays and denials.”  So does this mean that I have to wait for God to answer my prayer in His time?  He’s not going to respond to my requests immediately?  I am going to have to wait!!

I returned to yet another of my daily books, Moments of Peace in the Presence of God published by Bethany House, where I remembered a title from about ten days ago. And there it was: “Waiting For God’s Timing”.  I took the time to reread this and I would like to share some of it with you.

“ ‘Truly my soul silently waits for God; From Him comes my salvation.’ Psalm 62:1

  No amount of worrying can make things happen, let alone make them happen the way you want.  Still, your human nature, bent on trying, rises to the challenge.  What’s the remedy for this all-too-common malady?  Oswald Chambers in his classic My Utmost For His Highest, wrote, ‘When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don’t fill it with busyness, just wait ….. If you have the slightest doubt, then he is not guiding.’

  The story of Abraham and Sarah illustrates the futility of trying to make a divine promise come about in your own timing.  Tired of waiting for a son, Sarah took matters into her own hands.  The result was disastrous.  God’s timetable always delivers an Isaac when the time is right.”

This reflection finished with the following prayer:

Slow me down, God, when I am in a hurry and you are not.
Help me to walk with you, not ahead of you.
Teach me to plant the seed and leave the harvest to you.
Amen

What a concept.  I need to make this prayer part of my daily prayers.  I need to remember to walk with God and not try to walk ahead of Him.  Imagine that, trying to guide God!  Only someone with the underlying egotistical traits of character that I have would attempt to do that.  So for the foreseeable future my lesson needs to be one of patience laced with generous dollops of humility.   

Musings: Back Again!

 

I am so tired of being sick this Spring.  It seems as though I have been dealing with unhealthy demons since about 20 February.  First my really bad upper respiratory deal that knocked me out for two to three weeks.  Then, after just one week of feeling good I was plagued by a bad cold/allergies (I never did decide which it was).  That dragged on for more than three weeks before I was hit by the gastric flu bug.  I am so ready to be done with all this and be truly healthy for the rest of this year!!

What really annoys the heck out of me is that sickness robs me not just of health on all levels, but also of time.  Oh I know I still live each minute that God gives me.  I don’t lose effective time.  What I lose is the time I would normally put in to all the various activities that make up the flesh of my life.

My garden lies in wait to be ministered to.  Outdoor projects for which I had a planned scheduled have to go on hold.  The weeds begin to sprout profusely in the flower beds, and just the pure unadulterated  pleasure of being out there working in the dirt has to be postponed while viral bugs have their with my body.

My writing is forced on to a back burner. No matter which part of my body is physically under attack, the Muse withdraws and hides.  My head seems full of fuzz and leaves no room for inspiration.  My arms and hands are sluggish, ravaged by fevers or infections or plain old weakness, and consequently they have no strength to fly over the keyboard in creativity.

My craft room sits in silence full of its colorful cardstock and inks, ribbons and stamps, glitter and glue and various findings.  But nothing there is able to penetrate the general sense of dis-ease that pervades my body, heart, mind and soul.  Not even a fast-finished product can elevate me from the murky depths that sickness produces within me.  The Muse avoids temptation!

And my wonderful husband patiently tends me, doing everything he can to alleviate the grayness that insidiously surrounds me.  And even there I feel robbed because I have no energy, nor am I in any kind of mood, to actively participate in our relationship.  And that is a loss in and of itself.

There is nothing I can do about this state of affairs.  Bugs and viruses for the most part have to be given their time.  I can only languish and try to be as positive as possible.  I practice patience and humility in accepting the situation for what it is.  But my inner child grows pouty, wants to go out and play, and longs for the company of Muse.

I have been very careful this week in my return to health.  No rushing out and doing everything it once.  This is difficult for me because I have a tendency to want to make up for lost time, to catch up.  But one thing I have learned: time once past can never be “caught up”. 

Today I have done a little in the garden: prepared and planted up three raised beds with spring onions, Web’s lettuce, and chard.  In another small flower bed I sewed seeds that I hope will bring a small wild profusion of blooms later in the summer.  I finished all that I had hoped to achieve before the rains came.

And now I sit in my lanai and listen to the thunder rolling in the distance.  One particular roll sounded rather like a Harley and for a moment I was amused as I pictured God in black leather Chaps and a ponytail rumbling across the skies on a sleek chrome machine!  And, joy oh joy, my Muse is back and here we go dancing across the keyboard in a game of catch-me-if-you-can.

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