As I have said many times. My life is crazy. One minute things are going well and the next it’s a horror show. At least it seems that way to me.
Being a constant worrier puts me in the position of worrying about everyone and everything. I know. I know. It doesn’t have to be that way. My family is very quick to tell me that. It just doesn’t work for me.
There are days when it seems like I am praying with every breathe. Other days I just plain forget to pray because my mind is so full of questions with no answers. That should be when I am praying the most. I guess I have to claim being human, don’t I?
I also forgot the right name and password to even get here. Somewhere I have it written down. I use to have a document with such things, but my computer crashed and all went with it. Just got into the grove last night when my friend Clem came and set me up again.
Anyway. No promises. But I will try harder to keep up.
A few years ago a friend of mine was talking about her older sister and all the wrong or bad things she was doing, or had done. My friend couldn’t believe it and made the comment that how could they be so different from each other, when they had the same parents. I told her, “But you didn’t have the same parents.” She wanted to know what I meant, “of course we did,” she said. She was the baby of the family. Her sister was the oldest, her brother was next and then herself, the youngest.
It had taken me a good number of years to see it myself. At the time her and I were talking about it, my youngest was in his teens and quite different from his sister and I realized how much I had changed the six and a half years between them. I wasn’t the same mother to my son as I was to my daughter. The mistakes I made were different, because I recognized that what didn’t work for one would probably not work for the other.
Not only do we grow older, hopefully we grow wiser, but I do regret not being the best mother I should have been.
It seems like a long long time since I have posted, and I guess for the most part it has. But my life has been flying by faster than I can keep up. I imagine many are living the same, but oh how I have always admired those that can keep up.
We had a cancer scare a few months ago. My husband finally went to a specialist who cut a quarter sized spot off of his scalp. Yes, it was cancer. Thankfully the doctor feels he got it all, although there will be visits to the doctor every so often, but it’s a small price to pay for living life.
Then last week we were blessed with another family member. I have a new granddaughter. She is cute and wonderful. What’s a grandmother suppose to say?
Another reason I have been so tardy is that I have been writing a short series about molestation, for my other blog. I had made peace and reconciled most of the emotions surrounding the molestations, or at least I thought I had. Feelings which had remained dormant have a tendency to pop out when you least expect them. But I felt I needed to write about molestation after I had studied and read the statistics. If I could help even one person, it was a good thing.
So those are my excuses. But then again, I always have excuses.
Lord, it’s me again
I love prayer. There are times I pray so much I wonder if God turns down the volume when he hears my voice. Does he say to his Son, well there she is again? It’s your turn this time.
All jokes aside, on most days, I pray all day long off and on. Something will come into my pea sized brain and I have to pray about it, no matter what it is. Sometimes it is the thought of someone I know who is in a crisis. Or sometimes it is someone I have heard about or noticed on a television show. I just have the need to pray.
I have woken up in the middle of the night with thoughts of a person and laid in bed praying. Since I have been this way I have noticed that I am more prone to hear or see what God expects from me. Sometimes I will be praying as I am walking through a store and encounter someone who looks so sad and I will just smile at them. They may stop a minute to notice and then, smile back. I think, maybe my smile helped them realize there really is something for them to smile about after all.
I am more apt to talk to God, in some respects than to say a formal prayer, although I do that as well. But the chatting was how I started to pray when I first received God into my heart and soul, so it is the most natural way for me to do it.
I am curious how others pray. Do they pray the Lord’s Prayer as their way to connect to God? Do they pray the 23rd Psalm? I do both of those on occasions. One wonderful gift I have learned by praying so much is I can shut out all the noise around me, not hear a thing and just talk and listen to my Father as others around me are far from my thoughts. That is such a gift!
Many many times my prayers are for thanks. I thank God for EVERYTHING. Even the bad things, because I know there was a lesson for me to learn. I almost always get it too. I have so much to be thankful for. No matter my past, my present is as good as it can be. Not perfect, but what would I do with perfect? Probably screw it up some way.
I also sometimes pray the children’s prayer, *Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. * I think it might be a bit scary for children, but it is says, just what I want to say.
I saw one of those signs today and realized how many times my opinons and feelings have changed about it.
When I was a youngster and traveling with my family I wasn’t sure what it meant. Was God just up ahead and we were going to meet him? I hadn’t attended any church at that young age but I did know there was a God. I would ask my parents what that sign meant and never got an adequate answer to my question. At least not one I understood.
As an adolescent I began to attend church and during times of traveling at that period in my life, the sign made me scared. Was I going to heaven soon? Is that how I was going to meet God?
As I reached adulthood and fell away from not only the church but God as well, I scoffed at those signs. To believe such a thing was preposterous and whoever was planting those signs along the highways and roads was obviously ignorant.
Many years later as I have become reacquainted with God and found a lovely church that has kind and wonderful people who attend, I think so differently. So today as I passed one of those signs I smiled. And of course that made me think of the journey I have taken to be at this point in my life. Through some almost unbelievable situations and problems, I have come to trust God so much that now I know not only what that sign means but that I have the faith to smile when I see it.
I think of different kinds of things when I think of passion. One that always comes to mind is the murder of a good friend of mine. We had known each other for several years and become good friends. Then my life changed completely and I got married again and moved to another town about 45 minutes away from her. I was still working in the town where she lived and my son was still attending kindergarten there.
I had called my friend on a Thursday evening to tell her I would be stopping by to see her the next night. She was excited cause she had a date for Saturday night and she wanted to tell me all about it.
My friend and her husband had been divorced for a few months. Their relationship was one of those tempestuous ones. They would argue and one would move out for awhile, but before too long they would be back together again. They couldn’t seem to stay away from each other. This went on for years. Their passion was so extreme they hated each other as much as they loved each other.
Friday after I left work and picked up my son from school we stopped at her house but she was not there. I thought that strange but wasn’t real concerned because she was always going or doing something. I drove farther down the street and was almost to the ramp that let to the interstate, I noticed a car beside me. where it didn’t belong. I looked and it was another friend of mine. He had been watching for me to tell me that my friend had been shot and killed by her husband. I don’t remember the drive home that day.
Her husband was convicted and went to prison. He died there a few years later. I can’t help but remember how they were both good people. Nice people, kind people, but their passion killed them both.
Passion can be such a wonderful thing. God would not have created that emotion in us if it wasn’t suppose to be good. Passion for music. Passion for art. Passion for others. Passion for life. Passion for our Lord. But it also shows me that good things can become bad things and destroy those who can’t see the difference.
