Prayer

"Regarding Prayer -- Circumstances may not change but you will be unrecognizably transformed." 

  Wish I could give credit to whoever said that in my presence.  I know roughly WHEN it was said and am sure of where but not a clue as to who.  It's in the margin of my bible, the one I used in college, in Intervarsity.  Intervarsity was the first place where I saw people writing in their bibles and not just a little bit but a lot and I have lots of little notes in the margins...nuggets that were thrown in my direction, reminders of a campus ministry that supported and sustained me in my undergraduate days. 

  Years have gone by and this statement written down in the margin of my bible a long time ago speaks total truth to me. Unrecognizably transformed...the result of prayer.  I've been engaged in a lot of conversation about prayer lately, have been reading a lot on the subject and that one statement says it all.  Circumstances may NOT change, but you will.  Prayer changes our hearts, it realigns them with His and it deepens the level of intimacy in our relationship with the Holy One. 

  My life is not what I had planned, nor what I wanted when I lifted up my prayers a year ago but I am unrecognizably changed, even to myself and the intimacy with Him is rich.  What more could I ask?

Grace for you journey,
Leigh

Alarms, Panic and God

I had a moment of panic this morning.  It probably wasn't helped by the fact that I need to be up at 5:30 a.m. each morning to make our mornings flow smoothly and the clock was saying 6:19 a.m. when I first opened my eyes.  How could I have forgotten to set the alarm clock??  Eric had a moment of panic too when his frantic mother burst in and told him we were late and to shower fast.  In retrospect it wasn't the most loving way to wake your son for a mom.

As soon as I had Eric on the bus and I reached for my coffee to get centered, panic spiraled.  I'm going back to school next week, how do I make it fit in and how am I going to pay my part of the tuition in the long run and how this and how that...  So I opened my Bible, mine falls open pretty naturally to Lamentations because I live in that book, I devour that book.  And there it was..."The Lord is my portion..."  How could I not have remembered that when I was panicking over time?  How could I so panic myself about the future that I worry about bills for tuition that haven't even arrived yet?  The Lord is MY portion.  The LORD is my portion.  The Lord is my PORTION.  The Lord IS my portion.  No matter where you put the emphasis that statement speaks truth...life giving truth. 

"The Lord is my portion, says my soul."-Lamentations 3:24

Life is going to bring mornings where alarms don't go off, it's going to bring car repairs unanticipated, jobs ended, all forms of grief, it's going to bring bad days and good days and all the in between days.  It's going to bring...LIFE and we all know it and we all live it.  But the Lord is our portion and we are held and we are LOVED.  If God has grace for us, what more can we ask?

If my alarm had gone off properly I wouldn't have spent the morning reaffirming this Great Truth that is mine.  The Lord really is my portion.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh

Gentleness

When Chris died and I found myself sitting in my pastor's office, I remember asking him "So am I crazy or are you supposed to feel this way?"  You can fill in the blank for what I was feeling.  WHAT I was feeling doesn't really matter so much actually, it was just all new and I felt so helplessly at the mercy of feelings that were swamping me and I was so very much needing grounding.  Well, I have not only a good pastor but an EXCELLENT one.  He gave me the advice, the admonition actually, to be gentle with myself.  So I then drove home tossing in my mind the definition of being gentle with oneself.

In the last six months I have learned a lot about being gentle with myself, about the nature of all of us and our need to care for ourselves as human beings.  The first thing is that things take the time they take and we grieve what and when we need to grieve and it's all okay.  I've learned to say when I can't do things and I've learned to pursue the things that are healing.  I think we naturally gravitate towards healing.  We gravitate toward healing best, however, when we feel the hurt and lean into it enough to let it teach us.

And I've learned a lot about prayer.  God can handle ANYTHING I have to say and its important for me to say it.  It's easy to sit back and say "Well God knows everything so He obviously knows my heart and I can't say it right anyway," but I NEED to say it.  In laying my heart out before God and crying out to Him I let go of my own need to control and direct my life and give that to Him, where it truly belongs.  That's a part of being gentle with myself too.  I can't guide my life, I can only align my heart with God and go with that.  Gravitating towards healing is gravitating towards the God who heals.

The immature part of my soul wants to say "Make my life easier" and yet the call is simply to surrender my life and realize that easy or hard, it's given over to God.  The real challenge in life isn't to ask for better circumstances, it's to engage God amidst whatever circumstances we have and be honest about them.

God has this very graceful way of meeting us in the hurt and bringing genuine peace...it's the Living Water thing.  And things take the time they take and protecting your soul's need for that time is pretty important.  God is at work...just stay in relationship with Him...and He will transform your life.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh

Six Months...

Remembering...
Lovingly held by the Great Mystery...
Six months of the deepest submersion into the reality of the Total Love that is God...
Touching on glimpses of the Promise that is for all of us...
Rejoicing with Chris that he SEES, that he KNOWS, that he is truly HOME...
Missing him immeasurably still...never forgetting.

Six months of a journey.  Grateful for one another.

We love you forever Chris!

Grace for your journey,
Leigh