Invisiblity, part...3? The Facepalm...

Isn't weird how sometimes things that are so obvious take so long to register? 

Somehow, I have been reflecting over my current position(s) teaching the Girl's Ministry classes...and how long I resisted the pull to do that.  I'm thinking it was at least two years, and even when it became obvious that I was going to be teaching for at least a while, I prayed that God would send someone I could train to do it so I could get on with other stuff.  It took a pretty blatant word from Him before I recognized that it was, indeed, what I was supposed to do.

Do you know what my resistance was?  I had this gut feeling that if I went back to the Girls Ministries hallway I'd disappear.  Drop off the face of the church at large.  Go back there and never come out.

Become invisible.

And I didn't want that.  I didn't want to disappear.  I wanted to be Involved with The Main Thing...whatever that was.  I wanted...Credibility. 

It has only been lately; literally, during the fast, that I put that up against the word I had when we first got involved with this church that I was to be 'invisible' and realized that this was really what I was intended to do all along.

I just didn't get it.  I don't think I wanted to get it.  How else could I have missed it?

Now, of course, it is so obvious.  How could I have been so dull?

Because I wanted MY definition of invisibility...freedom to take a break, not be involved, not be responsible.  And I only wanted it for a season, while we caught our breath, found our feet, got refreshed.  Then I wanted to be visible again.  Doing.  Something that 'mattered'.

As if teaching young ladies didn't matter.  What a doofus.

There really is nothing that matters more than teaching young folks...getting them grounded and founded in truth.  It is the most influential position in the church...any church.  Let me tell you, that has been a paradigm shift for me.

Now I don' t know if I could leave.  For all its frustrations, this is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

Invisibility and all. ;-)

Day 41

So, technically I've come to the end of the 40-day fast.

Aside from being obedient to the call,  I really think it was good for me.

I have lost cravings for some of the foods that I know were bad for me.  It's funny...of all the things I put down for the duration of the fast, the only thing I found myself really missing was cheese.  Four or five paper-thin slices of really sharp cheddar cheese is one of my favorite snacks; that will no doubt make it back into my daily food routine.

But I'm hoping consumption of white stuff...bread and sugar...stays at a minimum.  I just can't go there.

I didn't get as in depth and retrospective in either my blogging or my prayer journaling as I had hoped, but the (almost) daily blogging here is a step in the right direction.  Again, I need to continue to press in to that even though the fast is over. 

I haven't missed Facebook as much as I thought; 'course, I cruised through a few times because that was how I had to communicate with some folks, but I didn't spend hours on it.  I flipped through my home page a bit today, but didn't feel compelled to hang out.  Maybe I can keep to minimal involvement there, too.

And the 862 blog posts waiting for me on Google Reader will most likely see a quick 'mark all as read'...just because I don't have time to catch up so many.  I will go back and read where necessary to understand what's going on now...but old news is old news. 

As I wrote in an earlier post,  I need to be careful about how much time I spend w/online friends vs. actual human beings.  I've missed a few of the blogs...but by and large...I learned I don't have to read everything everyone writes.  Which feels really hypocritical, because of course I want folks to read what I write. ;-).

But mom reads it (Hi, Mom!), so I suppose that's enough.  If my hubby and my kids don't think the blog is worth reading, I can hardly expect other folks to feel that way.  I just have to recognize that, first and foremost, I blog for me.  So as long as I'm finding it pulls and stretches me, then I will keep going.  Went I went into the fast, I wondered if I would discover that I should put down blogging and move on to other things; for the time being, anyway, I've realized that answer is 'No.'  It's still beneficial to me...and if it's beneficial to anyone else, that's just icing on the cake.

Actually, in many ways, the fast was just phase 1 of change implementation...it was about breaking bad habits.

Now it's time to work on building better ones.

Faithful Friday Faves: Revelation

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi.

Ok.  Wow.  Nothing like a skim through the book of Revelation to shake up a quite Friday morning.  I remember reading through it as a teen, thinking all that imagery was so wild.

But now, given the condition of the world and what is in the newspapers every day, much of it seems, well, not so far fetched.  It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to see the possibilities of those things that John saw and wrote about in the vocabulary he had available to him at that time.

So, what to pick from the summation of things which were, which are, and which are to come?  The encouragements to the saints, the promises of glory, the warnings to the unrepentant, the wonderful praises and poetic worship?

There is no one verse that can adequately convey the essence of Revelation; I'm very grateful that that wasn't my objective.  Just one verse from the book that speaks to me at this moment.  And what caught my eye this morning was a phrase that I hadn't even underlined yet...but it is stated and then repeated in short order:

This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints - Rev. 13:8b

 This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God's commandments and remain faithful to Jesus.  - Rev. 14:12

Both passages are discussing the time of judgement and distress.  I'm not going to get into who exactly those saints will be at that moment; this isn't the forum to discuss the intricacies of pre-trib, post-trib, mid-trib, Rapture or no Rapture.  It is enough to note that there WILL be faithful followers around when judgement is falling and life is unraveling and  everything humans have considered safe and secure is shaking and crumbling.

For the saints of God, the instruction is patient endurance.

I don't think this is stick-your-head-in-the-sand endurance, or go-hide-in-the-hills endurance, it is maintaining your faith in God and not trusting the schemes of governments or charismatic leaders for deliverance.  Which will likely go against the prevailing 'wisdom' of the day.

Don't. Give. Up.

The Offspring can Write

So, yeah, I'm off Facebook pretty much for the duration of the fast...at least, as much as possible.  I've checked in a time or two because I needed to communicate with some folks and that was the best way to catch 'em, but I haven't been spending time reading posts.

So The Actor walked in a couple of days ago and asked me if I had read the Note he posted to Facebook.

Um, nope. 

He really wanted me to read it; it had been generating some interesting comments.  I probably should've just gone and read it, but since I'm so close to the end I told him I would read it this weekend.

Then, this morning My Sweet Baboo sent me a link.  A blogging buddy of ours picked up on The Note and got The Actor's permission to post it as a guest post on his blog.

Not making any comment about spelling and grammar...but if you want some food for thought and a glimpse into his thinking, here's the link:

This is Christianity

The Leadership Institute is making a difference.   I am greatly encouraged.

The Cost of Restoration

I have mentioned from time to time about the, um, issues we've had with the sun porch that was added to the house some time before we purchased it.  First, it was a leaky roof, which we repaired as best we could, then a hail storm wrecked the repair and our insurance company paid for a new roof.  But the actual cause of the leaks wasn't the roof...it was the flashing around the skylights, which had been bent out of shape the last time the house had been re-roofed and would no longer seal.

So we spent a little extra money on new skylights.

But the water damage to the inside wall was still present, and we knew we'd have to deal with that eventually.

Early last summer, the in-wall  heat/ac unit (just like what you see in hotel rooms) died.  More research discovered that it was just about $150 more to purchase a complete new unit than it was to replace the motor in the old one.

So we ordered a new unit.

When we pulled the old unit out, we made a horrifying discovery:  it had been installed such that it tilted inside the house instead of toward the outside.  All the condensation from the unit had been running down the wall behind the wallpaper and pudding under the rug.  For years.

As we pulled paper down and carpeting back, and eventually sheet rock down, we discovered that the whole wall had rotted around the unit; the sillplate for the wall was rotted, and there was about a 6" hole rotted through the floor.

Scary.

We got a bit more money from the insurance company to cover the water damage from the leaky roof, but in post-April27-2011 Alabama, that number was figured very lean.  And we were on our own to cover the rot, and to replace the windows and sliding doors, which had all lost their seals and had moisture collecting between the panes.

So, we got estimates and borrowed against the 401k and proceeded to do what we had to do to fix things.  Not to make it fancy, but to just make it sound.


I'm not going in to detail, but we found as we continued that the same mentality that had set the AC unit in tilted backwards had pretty well built the room.  The farther the contractor went in pulling out bad stuff, the more bad stuff and incredible workarounds he found. The latest was dirt packed between the footer board and the patio slab...which had held moisture and fostered a huge worm colony and rotted out a goodly portion of the footer.

The upshot is that we have pretty well just jacked up the roof and demolished everything under it, one wall at a time.

We've run through all the funds we had amassed for the project; now, we're down to the annual bonus check My Sweet Baboo should get this week and hoping the tax refunds are not delayed.  After that...well, we may just have to tell our contractor friend that we're going to have to put the brakes on for a while until we can get some more cash saved up.

Now, none of this was in our plans when we bought the house.  Overall, the appearance of the house was good.  The home inspector found only minor things that needed work and gave us a good report. We did what we knew to do to protect ourselves against just this sort of scenario.

But the folks who owned the house before us were very big on appearances and very blase' about sound structure.  Nobody foresaw this. But now we've got this situation and it must be fixed.

I have seen many applications from this experience; the one that struck me today as we were discussing the estimated cost to just finish what HAS to be done is this:

The cost of fixing a poorly done job is always greater than the cost of doing it right the first time.

We humans messed up our 'first time'...and couldn't pay for the restoration.  But God loves us so much that He paid that cost Himself...at a much dearer price than we will end up paying for the repair of the sunroom.

If I can trust Him for fixing my fallen humanity, I've got to trust Him for fixing the falling down porch.

A Day off the Wagon

Prince Charming's birthday was last week; however, he was on a business trip so appropriate celebrations didn't happen in a timely fashion.

So we had a family dinner after church today to celebrate him.

By request, I made Chicken fajita soup (or Mexican chicken soup or Chicken tortilla soup or just 'chicken soup'...the recipe I got had no name on it and we just kind of call it whatever comes to mind first), and chocolate cake.

Now, I have taken the fast quite seriously and really pretty well stuck to my plan, although I had to modify it a bit after the trip to the ER, since it became obvious that I would have to actually eat food so I could take medicine I had to take.

But I feel pretty strongly about not fasting on feast days.  Celebrations are meant to happen (there are more annual feasts than annual fasts in the Bible).  So I had a dilemma.  Should I fix the party food and then eat yogurt and cottage cheese, or should I celebrate with the family?

I bet you can guess which one I picked....although I did hold off on the 'extras' that go in the soup, like tortilla chips and sour cream and cheese.  Points for that...then I lost the points by overindulging in the chocolate cake.  I started out with a two-bite piece, then I got another two-bite piece, and one more two-bite piece; I think I ended up eating about the same amount everyone else did.

Which goes to prove that I will have to maintain some pretty tough discipline on myself once the fast is over on Friday.  I can NOT go back to my old patterns and habits and indulgences. One day every once in a while for a celebration is not a problem, but I can't give in to cravings and desires on a daily basis.  I really have been feeling much better the last few days; I need to keep the healing going by continuing to monitor my food intake.

And I'm PLANNING to add some exercise to the regimen  starting next Monday.  That's gonna take more will power and determined discipline than watching what I eat; that will require getting out of bed when it's still dark and chilly in the house...not something I am good at doing at all.

But this is the best chance I'm going to have to get myself back into any kind of shape.  I can't let myself miss it.  I just can't.  (Hear that, Self???)

Checkin' in on the Survey...

About two and a half years ago, I posted about the Bible Survey we were preparing to start in the high school girls' ministry class.

Since I was still working on my 'read the Bible in 3 years' I'd started with the Middle School class, I didn't start my work on the Survey until about a year ago...I just squeaked in the last of my Bible reading while I was dealing with mononucleosis.

 I *mostly* finished the allotted portion of Scripture by the end of the Summer, only missing about the last half of Psalms, and I started in with the girls in August on the third of four portions of Scripture...which is Job, Song of Songs, and the Major and Minor Prophets.  I'm behind on my reading...but I'm ahead of most of the girls...as I'm just now starting into Isaiah.

To refresh:  The idea is to write a one-sentence summary for each chapter, then, based on those summaries, do a rough outline of the book and state the theme of the book.

It really is not difficult, but it does need some discipline to finish.  Last year, only two of the 4 girls in the class completed the scheduled chunk of reading...and they both crammed it in at the last minute.

I'm telling them that they really won't want to procrastinate on this year's portion; being 90% prophetic, it can get a little overwhelming.

But I'm enjoying what I'm reading.  It's a good counterpoint to the skim through I've been doing with the Faithful Friday Faves series.  It's still not an in-depth scripture study, but it is a good overview, and I think the girls who are really working on it are gaining some good basic scripture knowledge.

I remember the Flute Player commenting on something she read last year that she hadn't realized before, so, yeah, it's a Good Thing.

If I could just get them motivated to keep up with it instead of putting it off...Hmmm....Think...think...think...