So grateful to be grateful

As April 2020 comes to a close, the main thing I want to express is that I'm grateful to be grateful.

There were several moments (days? maybe a whole week or more?) this month that I could not rid myself of negativity and self-doubt, despite so much good going on around me, even during these times of social distancing amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

I may come back and add details about many of the positive things for which I failed to properly express gratitude. And perhaps I'll even offer details about how my perspective came unraveled, and what it took to start to piece my faith and hope back together.

For now, again, I just want to say, and to thank God, that I'm grateful to be grateful for every blessed opportunity to live and learn in April.





Meanwhile, I don't know whether these words Christian author Lysa Terkeurst posted on social media yesterday really fit here, but I like them and want to share them:

"Imperfect progress.... the journey doesn’t have to look exactly like we thought it would to be good. It doesn’t have to follow the plan we assumed it would to be good. And it can certainly be full of highs and lows but still be so very good.

"Imperfect is a guarantee.
Progress is what we can shoot for.
And seeing the collective good in the midst of it all, that’s a choice we can choose to make."

Ok, I'll add that key words to my attitude adjustment were from a counselor:

"Perspective can be a prison or a passport." 

She told me I can't control what other people do or even what the outcome of my actions will be. But she said I can control my perspective of these things. I think that's why Lysa's quote resonates so strongly. For today, I choose to see and be a part of the collective good.

Moments of clarity and grace

On Monday, I wrote in my journal:

Is pride the opposite extreme of shame? And is humility the balance?

Today, Wednesday, I read this in my Bible in One Year reading plan on the YouVersion Bible app:

“When pride comes, then comes shame; But with the humble is wisdom.”
‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭11:2‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

https://www.bible.com/bible/114/pro.11.2.nkjv

So, I guess the answer is yes.

Thank You, God, for answering so clearly. May I always trust You to provide answers and assurance when I need them. 

As I've chronicled on my blog, April has been a strangely difficult month, filled with self-doubt and negativity that I knew and kept telling myself was baseless but still could not shake off. All I could do was continue to read the Bible and pray for understanding and an open heart and willingness to know and do what God wants me to know and do, and to trust Him. Noticeable changes occurred yesterday. And when I read the Proverbs passage I had an unmistakable sense of God’s presence and power.

That was followed by a passage from John 1, with the Holy Spirit continuing to teach and guide me. I stand in awe of His presence.

I'm grateful that, for today, my mind and heart seem more open to understand these passages. (Maybe I needed to go through what I went through to get here.) The reading plan has helped.

I had not been claiming everything Jesus has made possible for me. I was feeling guilty and powerless. I had not taken possession of the forgiveness, new life and power of the Holy Spirit available to me.

Today I reclaim it. Thank You, Lord! Thank You for willingly becoming the Lamb of God to remove my sins and to allow me to walk in the freedom of God’s promises. Thank You for freeing me to again claim, trust and believe in the forgiveness bought for me, and to actively reject feelings of guilt, shame or unworthiness.

These words helped me see what God is saying to me in these passages: It is a proactive, practical, daily choice to claim the forgiveness Jesus has made possible for me. This affirms in Scripture something I finally grasped in counseling this week. I am grateful for the renewed sense of hope and purpose.

A fresh perspective

With God, all things are possible.

I AM WITH GOD. GOD IS WITH ME.

SO, I can do this!

If it's important to me, I will try again.

I won't give up.

I will keep working at it until the goal is accomplished or I learn what God would have me learn.

I do my part and leave the results up to God.

I know all these things, and yet I have spent longer than I care to admit stuck in old, negative thought processes.

The stress and anxiety of a pandemic likely shifted me into familiar but outdated patterns, and once they get started, they are hard to break.  It takes what it takes, and the main thing it takes for me is time, along with a fair amount of frustration.

For today, I believe even that can change. I don't have to spend more than two weeks or up to a month in negativity before CHOOSING to focus on what I'm grateful for, what is beautiful and good and true, starting with the power and presence of God in my life.

I'm not sure which came first, the attitude change or the morning's walk around the neighborhood park. Both were helped by an hour yesterday spent talking with a counselor.

As I posted on social media: For various reasons, I started today’s walk on the treadmill. I’m grateful my better sense prevailed and I headed out on the neighborhood trail. It occurred to me this beautiful lake and park were just a vision and a promise when we moved here 36 years ago. It is a true blessing these days. How can I keep from singing?!?!? And I met an Aggie dog and and Aggie dad, and I didn’t get stung by a bee! #socialdistancing2020 #socialdistanSing #howgreatthouart #texasaggies👍  @ Cambridge Neighborhood Park

The day also included donating clothes and other items to help out with a need related to the pandemic. I volunteered my skills as an editor and made plans to sing at church.

I can't explain why it's so hard for me to volunteer and actually do acts of kindness and service that God puts on my heart. I'm grateful that today I just did it.

As tempted as I am to say I hope I can build on this, I think it's better for me to just say, "Thank You, God, for today. Thank You for being with me and loving me, even when I'm stuck in negativity and find it hard to express gratitude and respond in loving service to all the good in my life. I love You, Lord, I trust You and I will rejoice in You. I pray to live my faith. Thy will be done."



 

April 19, 1995

Seeing a friend's memories of three four people who perished in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building sent me searching archives I had avoided until now.

I didn't yet find the names of Ashley Eckles, Luther and LaRue Treanor and the other person.

But I was stunned to see that I had written four stories on my own and contributed in major ways to two others in the newspaper coverage of the horrific tragedy.

I cannot even imagine the person I was to have been able to get that done.

I'm grateful for all the people who can still do what it takes to cover the tragedies as well as the triumphs of life.

And I pray to God that He continue to bless those who were forever changed that fateful day. May we never forget.

And yes, this is a placeholder .....

Praise God for this not-normal Easter

This Easter wasn't normal, largely influenced by social distancing needed to flatten the curve of a global pandemic.


And that's OK.

As Pastor Desi reminded us: We have been celebrating the not normal for 2,000 years -- ever since Christ was raised from the dead!

"Christianity isn't about being comfortable. (It's not) about the status-quo. Worshiping a risen savior -- a Christ who was raised from the dead -- is about turning the world upside down." It's about true life, life in the face of death, abundant life.

But like with the disciples, sometimes we have doubts. We need reminders of God's presence and love. We desperately need to hold fast to the truth that Jesus loves us and is always with us.


That's what Easter is about.

God so loved the world. This is the day that love reigned supreme.

God showed up and made a way, created a way no one thought was possible.

And now we are in a situation where we get to choose what a new normal will look like. We find ourselves in uncertainty, a time when society is showing up to see, bear witness, grieve our collective losses.

But don't forget to remember the rest of the story. The women who saw the risen Christ "with fear and great joy ran to tell what they had seen."

"Fear and great joy. It is possible to have both. Particularly on Easter morning. It is possible to know God is love. To know victory over death. To know Christ is risen, is risen indeed!

"Let's run and tell the news of the not normal to the world. And when we do, we will meet Jesus on the road ...."

Thank you, Pastor Desi, for your Easter message.

From the holiness of silence

Here I am again, wanting to write about this one-of-a-kind Lenten and Holy Week journey, before I awaken tomorrow to commemorate the Easter joy of Christ's resurrection from the dead.

And once again, I'm unsure what I want to write or how to express it.

I want to say I've been reminded (again) that I am at my best when I don't make plans or have expectations or try to figure things out. I just need to seek God through prayer and Bible reading and study and then do the next right things that present themselves.

But no matter how often I learn this or experience its positive truth, I have never been able to just let go and trust God on a consistent basis. I keep making it a struggle.

On this Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday that seems to have gotten a lot more attention this year (perhaps since churches and families and others can't be having Eggstravaganzas and shopping for Easter clothes and shoes and accessories and preparing for a big family dinner), I've read some commentary that provides hope and perspective.

One that I shared on my Facebook page was from John Ortbert, author of "Who Is This Man?"

Some of the paragraphs that resonated:

This isn’t Sunday. This isn’t Friday. This is Saturday. The day after this but the day before that. The day after a prayer gets prayed but there is no answer on the way. The day after a soul gets crushed way down but there’s no promise of ever getting up off the mat. ....

Saturday is the day your dream died. You wake up and you’re still alive. You have to go on, but you don’t know how. Worse, you don’t know why. ...

On Saturday, in addition to the pain of Friday, there is the pain of silence and absence of God. ...

What's a person to do? Ortbert offers three options. I prefer the third one, difficult as it can be:

You can wait. Work with God even when He feels far away. Rest. Ask. Whine. Complain. Trust.

 
This has been my experience. And in the waiting, if I allow my heart to be the tiniest bit open, I realize again that GOD is here, there, everywhere. And He is in control.

"Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!" (Psalm 27:14)

Holy Week progression (Resistance is Futile ...)

Sunday night, I felt compelled to compose a blog post and share it on Facebook. Sadly, I knew even before I started writing that my feelings about the highly anticipated morning of helping to lead online worship at my church for Palm Sunday during this time of global pandemic and social distancing had taken an unexpected and dramatic negative turn at a certain point in the day.

I felt compelled -- the sense I sometimes have of being prompted by God -- to write, to express, to share and to trust. I had a problem, however, because I try to be honest with what I write, and I also prefer to share positive posts.

After staying up much too long, what I ended up with met neither criteria. I posted it anyway, with a caveat: This isn't really what I expected to write at the end of Palm Sunday. (Perhaps a more accurate title would be "Resistance Is Futile for God Is at Work, Part XXX"; to be continued)

A couple of supportive comments from a family member and a church friend didn't soothe my soul's distress.

By the next morning, when I had traveled two hours with my husband to our farm where we had work to do, I had resolved to remove the link to my blog from my Facebook feed. So what if "resistance is futile"?!? I was resisting.

But even as I resisted, I surrendered and prayed.

My prayers led me to catch up on some readings in a 47-day study by Jim Denison titled "Empowered: A Guide to Experiencing the Power of the Holy Spirit." Although the study was designed to start on Ash Wednesday, I had picked it up much later. But the three-page, Scripture-based messages had drawn me in, and I thought I would be able to get caught up to end with the timely readings for Holy Week.

The catch-up readings contained words I needed to see and internalize, including, in an introduction to a section on the fruit of the Spirit: "They are the Spirit's fruit, not ours. We are not called to try harder to make more fruit. Rather, we are to stay surrendered to the Spirit, so He can produce His fruit in and through us."

The week before, I had read Scriptures and guidance that helped me understand better how to pray to receive God's Holy Spirit. As I had continued to do that despite my many shortcomings, perhaps a bit of fertile ground was available for some of the Spirit's fruit to have a chance to develop.

Even with some continued challenges, my outlook began to turn around Monday. Rather than getting stuck on the negative, the what-ifs, and the "what's wrong with me that I keep messing up and letting things bother me so much" mindset, I began to cling to and build on the positives.

I can tell you that was not my own doing; if it had been, I would have made that shift as soon as I saw myself slipping into frustration and self-doubt on Sunday.

One thing I recall about Sunday night is that awareness, as I wrote on Facebook, that God was at work. I didn't like how it felt and I had no idea what He was doing, but I held on to faith and hope that He was in charge and His plans for me are good.

Tonight, after a Maundy Thursday of Holy Week that included morning devotions and an evening love feast followed by Holy Communion, all shared with my husband and other Christian believers online, I feel the peace and love and presence and hope of Christ.

I pray to continue to let His peace and presence and love and hope, through His Holy Spirit, fill me, that I may be of service to Our Lord and Savior.

Palm Sunday confession

I was humbled and blessed and grateful beyond measure (or words to express) to get to help lead Palm Sunday online worship as part of the Celebration Choir Social DistanSing Quartet singing "Hosanna! Blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord" at Goodrich United Methodist Church. 

I feel certain every member of our choir and church misses being able to be in our sanctuary and join our voices and hearts in worship and praise and prayer and service. I am grateful for the faithful, skilled and enthusiastic leadership of Pastor Desi Sharp Brumit and others during this time. 

And believe it or not, I felt very connected to and grateful for those who were worshiping online at home. Somehow, being there with the small group made me miss everyone even more. 

As I write this, I must confess it didn’t make me feel closer to God this morning. Wow. As I realize that, I confess it to God. Do I love worship more than I love Jesus? Do I love singing about Jesus more than I love Jesus?

I've been praying this week to be filled by the Holy Spirit. I've been trying to lift up my shortcomings each day, to express my need of the Holy Spirit, to ask to be filled and to surrender my will for God's Spirit. And this is where I ended up today.

And so I begin the week that leads from Palm Sunday through Holy Week to Good Friday .... 

Convicted.

As Pastor Desi asked in her sermon: Who is Jesus to me?

He is my Savior, my Redeemer, my Hope, My light, My Salvation. He is Love incarnate. 

I know this. I believe this. I don't always feel it and act like it.

Come, Holy Spirit. Draw me near to Christ in His Passion that I may be transformed by His loving sacrifice into who and for what God would have me be and do.

No fooling. This is real.

March was strange. April will be even more strange.
We will get through this.
I am among the blessed ones.
And I pray that I will always know that I am blessed -- whatever my circumstances.