Barrels and Cones

If you go anywhere in Augusta right now, you're bound to see orange barrels and cones alongside of whatever roads or thoroughfares you take to get where you're going. The DOT has decided to work on just about every road (including a huge expansion of I-20 that's going to give Augusta its very own spaghetti junction - - - if you aren't familiar with that, I guess it's an Atlanta thing because they have one everybody knows about), traffic lights are being added left and right, lanes are being widened and narrowed, opened and closed on a daily basis, and literally every store I shop in is under renovation. Cones and barrels abound. In the name of progress, we're all required to deal with the aggravation and eyesore that it all creates. Sometimes they even put up a sign: "Pardon our mess while we update our store for you." This, somehow, makes it okay, and having been warned that we are going to find a mess, it's excusable.

I was thinking about it, though, and - as I often do - was able to find a spiritual application for that. Yes, even orange construction barrels can be used for a spiritual lesson.

The cones and barrels are there for what purpose? To let all of us know that the road is under construction - that it's a work in progress. It's not finished, and until it is, there is some degree of danger. Bumps, broken places..... The hideous orange things are there to let us know that it's not done. There's more work to be done before it's as good as it can be.

Here's my thought: we should all be required to walk around with barrels or cones. Not literally, of course, but something along those lines would be nice. I think there was a movie a few years ago where a character said that everyone should be required to wear a sign around their necks, so others they meet will know what they're getting when they meet them. This is what I'm proposing with the cones and barrels idea. We should all have to wear something that reminds the people that we meet that we are not finished. We're a work in progress. There's more work to be done on us - some of us (like me) may require a LOT more work - and until that work is done, there is the danger of bumps and breaks and rough spots. Having seen a cone or barrel, others would remember that what they are about to encounter is not perfect, and that they should not expect perfection.....not yet, anyway. Someday, yes. But not today.

I think, too, that those cones would remind ourselves that we're not quite as put together as we sometimes think we are. If we had to get up every morning and put on a huge orange cone, it would be hard to forget that we're under construction. My cross necklace is like that - when I put it on, it's easier to remember that I'm not finished. I'm a work in progress.

Anyhow, that's my thought. It's just an idea.

What Babysitters Think About

If you use the logic applied several days ago regarding the lawn mower definition, this sounds a little grotesque. If a lawn mower is one who mows lawns, a babysitter would - logically, by definition - be one who sits (on?) babies. Curious as to whether this definition stood up to the test of Dictionary.com, I checked it out.

sit (v) informal. to serve as baby-sitter for: A neighbor can sit the children while you go out.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed. I have always been one to seek out things that are wrong with the English language. I love when things don't make sense, and those signs that require people to put up each individual letter separately make me crazy. I was really hoping that the definition for babysitter was going to be illogical, but apparently babysitting is a big enough part of our culture for it to be included in a dictionary definition.

Anyhow, this babysitter was thinking about something in particular to start this whole thing. On the way home from watching the girls the other day, I saw a church sign with one of those little messages. (Are those as popular where y'all are as they are here? They're everywhere here, and although they do require putting the separate letters on, I like them.) In any case, the sign said: "Elements of a Christian life: faith and charity." So, with about 25 more minutes to drive on my way home and having already decided that I wanted silence and not the radio, I started thinking about that. Is that all there is, really, to a Christian life? Is that what is all boils down to?

I looked it up, and "faith" is, as I expected, believing or trusting in something when you have no proof that it is true. Hebrews 11:1 says so. That's a rather simplified definition, I realize, but it really is pretty basic. If you have faith - in anything - you're believing in something that may or may not be true, but you are choosing to trust that it is. With or without proof, you have reason to believe it and live as though it is true. That's faith, and in living a Christian life, you have to believe that what the Bible says is true. You have to have faith that God loves you and sent His son to die for you to reconcile you to Him by forgiving you of your sins. You have to trust that by believing in Jesus and who he is, you are saved and are made right with God. You have to believe that you cannot live without Jesus....and that you don't want to. Whether you come to that belief through years of Sunday school attendance, one random church service one time in your life, or the prompting of the Holy Spirit, you have a personal testimony that makes you believe. That belief is what drives you to live the life you live, and it is what makes you do the things you do. Faith is obviously the first and most essential element of a Christian life. Without it, your life cannot be "a Christian life."

Now. Charity. That's defined as giving to someone or something that's in need....without consideration of what you may or may not receive in return. Charity. That's what Jesus' life was all about - selfless, always giving, always loving, and never thinking of what it might cost or what might come back to him in return. Scripture calls us to follow him and live our lives like he did....which, in its simplest form, is charity.

Granted, our lives are human and infinitely more complicated than two words can describe. The thing is, though, that maybe that should be all it's about. Sin is what complicates things, and sin is what makes it a big mess.....makes faith so hard sometimes, and makes charity so difficult. Faith becomes a science experiment requiring proof, and charity becomes a selfish thing done only for personal credit. A Christian life is not without sin, because regardless of what label we put on ourselves or our lives, we are still human. We'll mess things up and we'll stray from Jesus' footprints, but the thing that distinguishes us, I think, is that driving force of faith and that desire for charitable living. Without those, we're no different from anyone else.

What Lawn Mowers Think About

This summer, since I don't have a job outside the home, I've kinda taken it upon myself to do the yard work. I kind of figure that if Scott is going to go off to work all day, every day to support our little family, the least I can do is to make the house and yard look nice when he gets home. It makes me feel productive, makes the house look nice, and gives me some much-needed exercise and fresh air, so about once a week I go out and tame the yard. That being said, I spent the better part of today outside cutting the grass. All of it. It takes a couple of hours and wears me out, because the yard is thick and not at all shady and just hilly enough to be irritating, but nothing beats the feeling of looking back over the whole yard as I wheel the mower back into the shed and seeing what I have accomplished. So yes....as you might have guessed, the lawn mower in question here is not the big red Craftsman push mower with which I spent my day. The lawn mower here is me, and these are my thoughts. Silly. Machines don't think! =)

I've been thinking a lot about my situation lately. Looking for a job, waiting for the call, and hoping beyond hope that something will come through.... As I mentioned last week, I've been dealing some with the idea that rather than trusting God to fix this, I might just be rationalizing my own laziness. I feel better about that now. I've prayed about it and have come to a sense of peace that at least for now, I'm doing what I should be doing. I've had several people tell me lately - without me even mentioning the troubling thought that I have become a lazybones - that I should wait for something good to come along, because I didn't go to college and work that hard to just be miserable doing menial things for someone else. Scott says he wants me to be happy wherever I am, and he doesn't want me to settle for just anything. I'm okay.

I babysat for our two youngest nieces yesterday morning. Carlie is just a little over a year old, walking now, and is showing so much curiosity about the world. Jesse, her big sister, will be 3 in December and is in the middle of that famous 2 year-old's independent streak. I don't want to call it the "terrible twos," because I don't think it's a terrible thing when you realize what essential life processes they're going through at that point in their development. In any case, Jesse - while adorable and an absolute doll - is definitely exercising her independence and testing the limits of everyone around her. At lunch yesterday, for example, all she wanted were her grapes and apple juice. She showed no interest in any of the other food on her plate and, while her sister devoured everything on her own tray, insisted that she was finished and wanted to get out of her high chair. I persisted, though, telling her that she could only get down once she ate something because I knew she had a doctor's appointment that afternoon and would get hungry in about a minute and a half if all she ate was grapes. In response, I got many persistent cries of, "NO!" and emphatic shakes of her head. Yes, her autonomy was in full swing. I finally relented, though, and freed her from her high-chair bondage when she got creative about what she would do with her food. Her little fingers are just the size of her nostrils, and when she demonstrated this to me I said (sounding like quite the adult), "Fingers out of the nose and food in the mouth, Jesse Claire." I turned back to Carlie for one second and when I looked at Jesse again, she had a humongous piece of turkey hanging from her nose. She apparently listened just enough to what I had said to be able to confuse it completely. In any case, she won her freedom with that little maneuver.

I, always seeking spiritual applications for things that happen around me (I think it's the youth minister and devotional writer that live inside of me) thought today about how I - at 25 years old - am not that different from Jesse. No, I don't hide food in my nose and I don't test the fit of my fingers in various facial orifices, but I do have a streak of independence in me that sometimes can get me into trouble. I think a lot of us are like that. Even if we say we are followers of Christ and pray regularly for guidance from God, I think we often test our human independence and remind everyone of our God-given free will by screaming (even if only internally) "NO!" and not doing the very thing we hear from all directions is the best thing for us. We are stubborn....and of course, when I say "we," I mean me. I want to work, I want a family, I want to be superwife and someday supermom, and I want to do it all perfectly. I want this life I've envisioned for myself, and I cannot fathom that maybe - just maybe - that's not what's best for me. In thinking about this, I was reminded of a testimony given Sunday during open-mic time at church. A lady was talking about how she had been trying to get back to work for a long time but that she kept "running into brick walls," as she put it. Nothing was working out as she thought it should, and she was getting more and more frustrated with her situation until one day it dawned on her that maybe God didn't want her to go back to work. She had prayed and prayed that God would make the job work out for her, but she had never stopped and asked Him if He wanted her to go back to work to begin with. The brick walls were God, and He was trying to show her that working isn't what she needs to be doing right now, but she interpreted it all as a test of her own perseverance.

This rang so true with me, and seemed consistent somehow with Jesse's insistence that turkey wasn't what she needed yesterday (unless it was in her nose). Not to make a dangerous comparison of myself with God, but to make a point, I - like God - knew that what Jesse needed to do was to eat her food, or else she would get extremely hungry at an inopportune time. Jesse, though, was only concerned with her own agenda. All she knew or cared about was that I had interrupted her play time to try to get her to eat, and that if she refused to eat she could get back to her merriment. Similarly, God knows what we need - whether it's food or work or leisure or simply to be taught a lesson - but we make it difficult for Him to take care of us when we insist that we know the better way. I don't think that God doesn't want me to work. He has shown me in many ways that I definitely need something like a job to occupy my time, both for the health of my mind and our checking account, and I know that He wants me to work somewhere. It never occurred to me, though, to actually ASK HIM what He wanted me to do, or to ASK HIM where He wanted me to be. I interpreted feelings and "signs" as I wanted to, and have seen the opposition I have encountered along the way as God's way of teaching me patience and of introducing me to corporate America. It never occurred to me until Sunday when I heard Sherry's testimony that maybe I've been having selective hearing when it came to listening to God, and I never realized the uncanny resemblance I have to a 2 year-old.

I don't know if that makes any sense whatsoever. Maybe I was out in the sun too long today.

Sublime Trust vs Blatant Laziness

What's the difference between trusting God to provide for you and simply being lazy? I ask this for a reason, of course. Here I sit, in the 3rd month of my job search, and I'm wondering which it is that I'm really doing. Am I being lazy and stubborn by not actively pursuing other jobs in other places because I'm so set on working at MCG? Or is the truth that I'm genuinely led to work there and am trusting that God is going to work it out for me? It's hard to say.

If asked, of course I'll tell you that I'm trusting God to make things work out for me. I'll say that in a second, but how true is that? I'm still anxious about it, though it's not keeping me up at night or making me cry every day like it was. I still am dying to know what's going to happen and am plagued by impatience, but I think I'm trusting God to put the pieces in place for me. I think I am.....or am I just convincing myself of that, because it clearly sounds so much better than saying that I've just been lazy by not doing anything?

When I went to that Joyce Meyer conference last March, one thing she stressed was that yes, all things are possible with God, but He's not going to do things for us that we could just as easily do ourselves. He will pick up where we leave off when things become impossible for us, but He's not going to do it all. Is that what I'm doing here? Is there more I should be doing, or is my apparent inactivity evidence of a peace inside that leads me to wait on God? It's so hard to tell, and it's so important to figure out so that I can fix it if I need to. If I need to get up off my couch and do something, I want to do it. I do, because this is a huge thing and I want to open doors for God to do the things that are impossible for me, but I don't want to try to force something and show that in reality, I'm not trusting Him at all. Does that make any sense at all?

Uncertainty

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." (Jeremiah 29:11-13)

My mind is restless tonight. For once, I actually went to bed with Scott, which hasn't happened much since California since I was able to catch up on my sleep quickly while it took him longer because he immediately had to jump back into his work routine. I went to bed, settled in, closed my eyes, and my mind ran rampant. Thoughts of my future and the uncertainty of it all just ran back and forth in my mind, and there was no stopping it. I tried the usual approaches of thinking about calming things and counting backwards and slowing my breathing, but that did nothing. Around and around my mind ran, thinking about things that I hope will someday be true but for now - at least - I can do nothing about. I finally gave in to the wanderings of my mind and got up, fearing that my own restlessness would disrupt Scott's badly-needed night of good sleep.

It's overwhelming, you know? I'm thinking about work - both my seemingly endless quest for work and recent situations that have arisen with Scott's work - and how life somehow centers upon that. There are things I want for our future - namely, to have a family - but I can't rush that on because I know that there are a lot of unsettled and pending issues that have to be tended to before that is really a viable option. Namely, I need a job. That has been hovering over my head like a flimsy travel umbrella during the rainy Sevilla spring - always there and yet never quite doing the trick. It will be resolved, and I trust God to take me where He wants me to be. I do. It's the timing issue I'm having issues with.

There's that, and there are womanly thoughts that run through my head on nights like this. For those reading this who don't want to know too much about me and my personal life, stop reading here. My thoughts run rampant, with no logical order or obedience to the rational part of my being. "Will we want to know the sex of the baby?" "Will we want to tell people if its a boy or a girl, and will we want people to know the name before he or she is born?" "Will I stay home, like I want to, or will I be in such a fantastic job that I'll actually reconsider my dream of staying home and raising my children?" "I like this name......does it go well with 'Bolyard'?" "Scott will be such a wonderful father....I can't wait to see him like that..." Completely illogical because it's nowhere in our near future, and completely terrifying because I always fear that my maternal thoughts will frighten my "not ready for children yet" husband. Yet the thoughts persist, and there's just no stopping them.

I came out here and started up this post with the intention of writing something that would be like a devotional for any of you who are uneasy about your futures, and now that I'm writing I fear that it's just sounding like a journal entry opened to the world. I got up in order to seek solace from God's Word - as He always knows what to say to me to get me to relax and go to sleep - and as such, I'm going to turn to His wisdom to resolve this. At least temporarily.

But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:33-34)

The Lord will reply to them: "I am sending you...enough to satisfy you fully." (Joel 2:19)

I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27:13-14)

I know God has a plan and He will see it through to its completion. I know that He has planted dreams in my heart and delights in seeing them come true in my life. I know that He has my own wellbeing in mind and will not do anything to harm me. I know all of that.....but it's the things I don't know that keep me up. It's the wondering if/when I'm going to get a job. It's the wondering what will happen if Scott loses his job. It's the worry that we'll never be in a place where we can feel good about adding to our family. It's the fear that something else will keep that from happening. And then there's the fear that I'm losing it completely. There is no reason for this to be keeping me up tonight, yet here I sit, wide awake and feeling no indication of sleepiness.