random ramblings

it's late.

kitchen cleaned. small project done. Ruby been let out and water bowl filled. girls been asleep for quite some time.

lots going on in our little patch of this world. i wish i could freeze all of time around me for about a week or so while i get caught up! am beginning to wonder that being 'caught up' is not something that will happen till the kids are grown and gone :).

interesting how there are somethings that suck the life outa you and never give it back ... and there are somethings that fill you with life and never require anything in return. i prefer the latter :). actually, the balance of the two is not a bad thing; is probably a good thing. but too much of the one without much of the other can take it's toll over time.

been sewing again. not sure where i'm going with this, but it's fun being creative. i love the things i create and make. i get lost in what i'm doing and time flies away. need to get lost into folding my pile of laundry ;).

i have great kids; great kids! i love my girls :). i love this tweenager age ... but there are moments when i am thankful that it's just a season and won't last forever ;). am a little anxious about my youngest entering this stage before long ... shudder ... hummm ... i think somethings are best left in the future!

am understanding why so many have said it takes seven years to blend a family after the wedding. there's just ... sooo much, so much. of course, seven years from now has my girls at 17 and 19 and my step son at 19 ... eeeek! now THAT's a thought really best left in the future!!!

am continuously amazed, amazed, at the love my Country Man has for me ... his love, patience, understanding, endurance, gentleness, steadfastness. i am eternally blessed. we're like two peas in a pod ... like peas and carrots ... like peanut butter and jelly ... like buscuits and honey ... like bbq and texas ... like the sun and the moon ... like bees and pollen ... like flowers and sunshine . we're strong together, very strong. and that's a good thing b/c the winds and storms of life seem relentless at times ... and the forecast doesn't show much relief anytime soon :).

the next women's ministry newsletter is coming out december 5, right between the holidays. i'm thinking about writing a piece about single parents and the holidays ~ something very close to my heart. thing is, i don't think my words would be a waste on these people, so it makes it even that much more worthwhile to write. will pray about this some more.

am tired ... need to get to sleep. his mercies are new every morning! sunshine on the weather forecast for the morrow, working on a school project gathering food for needy families ... picking up a popcorn sales order for a friend, planning to head to rockwall for some great visiting time ... ahhh ... looks like a great day ahead! i think i'll get some zzz's so i'm ready to go!

g'night :)

I Am Sooo ...

... blessed!

My Country Man husband is wonderful! His love and perception into who I am amaze me.

Where my dad and my mom and my ex would get extremely angry with me or seethingly jealous of me, my Country Man sees my heart, sees who I am, meets me there, and loves me as-is. All my life I have longed to know this kind of love!

Thank You, God, for this amazing man you have gifted to me! Raise me up and enable me to be and become the wife You desire and he needs and desires me to be everyday. I love You, Ame

Empty Holes

I have some friends who have lived “perfect” lives … “perfect” defined as having great parents, families, kids, grandkids, full of lots of love and support and strength. Sure, they’ve had their struggles, I know them well enough to know of some significant ones … but overall, their lives have been pretty awesome. And in their struggles, they are not alone. They have parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and adult-children; they are never alone.

I caught up on some photos of one of those families tonight … corresponded with some from another family last week. Truly, I am so happy and blessed for them!

Still, there is a sadness deep inside me that I must deal with and move away from … a longing for what they have … a longing for the relationships they have with their own parents, and siblings, and families.

As I’ve mentioned before, I believe there is a “daddy-spot” and a “mommy-spot” hard-wired into each of us, and only our parents can fulfill that. If they don’t, they never get filled … empty holes in our hearts and souls. We find ways to live with them; God is our Provider. But somethings He doesn’t remove.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, with those holes all filled up … without ever knowing what it’s like to even have those holes. And sometimes … when catching up with my friends … the longing surfaces … and hurts.

This Place . . .

The more time I spend on this earth, the more I realize that indeed, God’s ways and my ways are not the same. I don’t quite understand that. I know that God says that if we desire Him, He will give us the desires of our hearts. I don’t think that our perception of “the desires of our hearts” and God’s intention of the “desires of our hearts” are always the same.

What I’m going to share can be a touchy subject. I cannot explain all of it, but I can say that God is working in me and healing me in places that I knew I needed healing … but He’s doing it in ways that are certainly not mine (or many others’ for that matter).

The institution of church has been a harsh subject for me for a long time. I have been deeply wounded by the institution of church many times in my life, but I think that the ways I have been wounded by the church since my ex filed for divorce have been the most painful. As I tried to plug into different churches since the divorce, things would happen, and I was not able to go back to those specific churches. I knew the truth of the scripture, and when a church violated that truth, I could not be a part of it. That is not to say those churches are all bad … it is to say I was at a place in my life where I could not be a part of it or expose my children to it. I found it was better to not attend a church institution than to be hurt, again.

My New Husband has a church home over here where we moved to be with him when we got married this past summer. I had developed an affection for this church because of how they have treated my New Husband over the time I have known him. The biggest thing they did was to be proactive in their relationship with him rather than passive, which I really liked. This is counter-church-cultural these days in the mainstream churches I’ve attended. The new thing is to be hands-off, not to impose on you, not to visit or call you unless you request it first. I don’t think this church ever got that memo.

Still, given my wounds, I have been very slow and leery. One of the first times we attended, I found myself to be very bitter, so I made a conscious choice to keep my mouth shut. This has been a good thing.

But one other thing happened the first time we attended. My New Husband introduced me to one of the Elders. This man has gentle eyes with strength, and he looked at me and said, “How can I pray for you?” I was taken aback for I have longed for people to ask this very question for years. I fumbled over my words before asking him to pray for my kids. Then he said, “I will pray for your kids, and I will pray for you, too.”

Because of many different variables, we have attended church very little since then. The odd thing is that I have not felt guilt, though I have wondered why this would be true. I have found that I have had a deep, quiet peace about it all, so I’ve let it be what it is. Now several months into all of this, I am seeing the Hand of God and how He is healing me in some very personal ways.

First, my New Husband and I have very little time alone. My ex picks up our girls every other weekend at 6:00pm on Friday and brings them home around noon on Sunday. Some of the weekends my girls are with their dad we have my Step Son. So when we actually have a weekend all to ourselves, we relish in our time alone … able to just be together, get to know each other, and get to have full conversations without being interrupted by kids! We have focused on all five of us blending our family, getting to know each other, and my husband and I getting to know each other. So we have enjoyed liesurly Sunday mornings and not attended church.

The second thing is that the church added me to their email list. This is a relatively small church but not too small. You can attend and not know or see everyone there on any given Sunday. But the church emails … are powerful to me given how I have been wounded. This church sends out requests for prayer sent to them for all of us to pray. They send out blessings and joys, announcements … and prayer requests. And sometimes, they send out needs. I have been deeply touched by how this church family really works together as a family, and then they sent out this need several weeks ago … a single mom is struggling financially, and she needs money to meet her bills, and the church UNABASHEDLY sent out her email, exactly as she had written it, requesting financial help. You coulda blown me over with a feather. I still cannot digest this completely, and it still brings tears to my eyes.

I told my New Husband, “I bet that when I was home alone, exhausted beyond belief, with kids throwing up during the holidays, that if I had been at this church and requested someone to come over to help, that they would have sent out an email request and someone would have come to help.” And I bet that we wouldn’t have been ignored during the holidays. And I bet that if they could not have accommodated us in their own homes, they would have brought us a meal. And somewhere deep inside, I know this is true about these people. And the painful tears flow, washing the hurt and filling me with healing … slowly.

The third thing that has happened is equally as powerful and in some ways more astounding to me. They have a women’s ministry at this church with a monthly newsletter. They sent out an email several times a couple months ago for submissions to their newsletter. One day I just naturally wrote back, to this woman I’ve never met, told her that my New Husband is a member of this church but that I am not (I don’t even know how to join this denomination yet), but I love to write, have written this piece, and if they would like to share it (an edited copy), I would be happy for them to do so.

The woman immediately wrote back, said she loved it, and she told me when it would be coming out and which Sunday I would find it. Of course, we never did get to church, so I never saw it … and I didn’t really think of it again.

A month later and the next email was sent asking for submissions to the women’s ministry newsletter. (I must add here that I am also slightly negatively jaded toward women’s ministries. I have helped begin one in a church and have been very active in them … and have my own history with them. So this does not come from being on the outside … it comes from being on the inside.) Anyway, I ignored the email b/c we haven’t been to church since then, and I don’t want to impose on these people who I really do not know, and I’m still not even a member of this church!

And then one day about three weeks ago, I get this personal email from the woman saying, “Hi Ame, am I going to get something from you this month?!” I was astonished and told her I would have something to her in a few days. I prayed about it and wrote this piece, which she loved, which will be in the next newsletter (although I still don’t know when it will come out). What is so stunning to me about this is that the churches who knew me, who knew my talents and gifts, didn’t want anything to do with me or my talents and gifts … but this church that doesn’t even know me loves what little I have to offer.

This is a long post, but there is more I feel should be shared. One of the things I am BIG on is daily reading my Bible and journaling. This has been HUGE for me and my sustenance through these last many years of hell. God has truly carried me. But about two years ago I hit a very deep, low place, a place I did not know I was capable of hitting, and I stopped reading my Bible everyday. It wasn’t a turning away from God, it was just, well, it was that I was in a place I could not do anything anymore.

This did disturb me, but there was this deep movement of God inside me, so I let things be what they were. And this is what I think God has been doing … I think God has taken EVERYthing of me out of the “us” of my relationship with God … that God has allowed me to be depleted of everything and anything that could possibly be from me … and in His way and in His time, He is filling me back up with Him … and as He’s doing so, He is healing me. HE is healing me. HE is coming to me, caring for me where I am, lifting me up, and HE is healing me. I am doing nothing; He is doing everything.

There will come a time when the institution of church, where daily Bible reading, where journaling, will become a normal and regular part of my life again. I can see it on the horizon, but I cannot see the timeline or the steps between here and there. All I can do is lean back and relish in the amazing awesomeness and gloriousness of Almighty and Holy and Sovereign God. I have been greatly wounded, beaten, and left on the road to nowhere. But God has never left me nor forgotten me. He has brought people, gently and carefully, into my life, to tend to me and care for me … to breathe healing into my very heart and soul.

I think that we tend to view people by what we can humanly see. What we tend to overlook is that there truly is a season for everything. And when one has been wounded, especially by the institution of church, there is a season of healing from those wounds. Those of us who are in that season of healing will not look like what church-people will think we should look like. I’m not sure what we will look like, but I am sure it is not what church-people, in general, think we should look like.

I also do not know why I was required to walk this path, but I do know that it was intentional and not without purpose.

May Sovereign, Holy, Glorious God continue to heal me … and in doing so, may He bring all glory and honor to His Name, to Him alone.

Amen.

Death, at Thirteen

I noticed my forever-friend who lives in another state was going through something, so I called her, and she returned my call Tuesday evening.
A 13-year-old boy of a family close to them committed suicide Monday. Something about a relationship with a girl gone bad, and she got hurt … girl and girl’s female friend began harrassing him on facebook and texts … took it to severe levels … parents got involved … kid wanted to stay home from school yesterday … parents told him he was going to school, so he went upstairs and shot himself. That cold.

She only had about four minutes to spend with me on the phone before she had to get off to care for her own children dealing with this tragedy, but there are some things that I find poignant.

1. Kids are greatly, greatly influenced by their peers.

2. Kids can be extremely mean and evil (pure evidence of our fallen nature).

3. Girls need to be taught to respect boys from the cradle.

4. Thirteen is toooo young to be in a “relationship.” (I have another story about a 14 year old girl at the park last week – that’s for another time.)

5. Guns should be locked up tight, and kids should NOT have the key or have access to the key.

6. Thirteen year olds are still kids.

7. There are some times we parents need to be more alert and give our kids a break. The pressure is tough out there. In my daughter’s Middle School, if a kid does not turn in ONE homework assignment the moment it’s due (and they have eight classes a day) , they have automatic detention. If they do not have all their supplies with them for each class, it’s an automatic detention. She’s a good kid and a quick, very bright learner; I am thankful. But I know she is stressed from fear … and this is just the administration, the technical part of middle school.

8. As parents, we need to know who our kid’s friends are. It’s why I have the slumber parties and the kids over and allow my house to be the one they ‘wreck’ … I wanna know these kids.

9. We need to be reading their facebooks and emails and have access to them. We need to be reading their text messages. There’s a privacy balance as they’re growing up … and there’s the part where parents need to know what’s going on in their kids’ lives. It’s tough as a parent. It takes an incredible amount of invested time before my kids begin talking to me about the ‘deep’ stuff. Probably 99% of our time is more on the ‘fluff’ side before they feel safe enough to spend that last 1% on the deep stuff. And even then we’re not guaranteed they will tell us what we need to know.

10. We can do everything right, everything, and life can still be bad. We live in a fallen world. The prince of this world is very alive and very active. Denying his presence is stupid.

11. My life is not just about me. I do not know anything about this boy or his family … never even knew they existed till Tuesday evening, and I am greatly distressed. We do not live our lives in a vacuum. If I teach my girls one thing in this life apart from the love of God and who He is and what He’s done for them … I want to drill into them that this life is simply NOT just about them. Thirteen is an extremely egocentric time in our lives, and I am certain this boy never could have conceived how powerful his life is … or his death.

12. I can’t hug my kids enough … I can’t tell them I love them enough. Every day I realize how quickly my time with them is passing … how quickly the days where I have influence and teachable moments … how quickly their peers will trump their influence over their momma. I have sacrificed an incredible amount for my kids in many more ways than I will ever share publicly, but I’d do it all again. I only have one shot at raising them; just one. It won’t be perfect, and I will get it wrong many a time, but if I don’t give it all I’ve got now, I’ll never get another chance.

13. Take the time to sincerely compliment a kid – you’ll never know how powerful that moment in time might be to them.

14. Life … is precious.

Mrs. T

There are times when God gives us a boquet of blessings from seemingly out of nowhere. This morning was one of those times for me.

My Youngest has several teachers who work with her in her Special Ed program. I have met all but one in her new school district, so when I delivered something to the school this morning (after taking my Middle-Schooler to school), I asked if I could meet Mrs. T.

Mrs. T came bouncing down the hall, huge, bright smile lighting up her face, open arms, and the first words out of her mouth were, “I am SO delighted to meet Youngest’s Mom! She is such a joy to work with! I just love her! You are doing a great job as a mother.”

We talked for about ten minutes, and I gave her an overview of Youngest’s life. She looked at me in astonishment for all I’ve gone through (that she knows of) and how I’ve worked with my daughter. There’s so much to all of this it’s even difficult to fill in all the details with my New Husband; there’s just so much.

I’ve given up and lost just about everything for my daughters. My Youngest has been and is an incredible amount of work, more than just about anyone knows except a very few, including my New Husband because he sees it everyday. My New Husband says she’s like five kids in one b/c she’s so much work, and she truly is.

Then there’s my ex who, to no avail, has gone to extreme lengths to try to prove I’m an unfit mother. He has not been able to do so because it simply is not true, but he’s put me through hell in the process.

So when this precious woman stated with conviction over and over what a GREAT job I’m doing, I was overwhelmed. I drove away with tears and gratitude. God is good. God is very, very good.

Sin . . .

. . . when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. That's a tough pill to swallow. What is conceived must, in one form or another, give birth, and Sin gives birth to death.

Now that I'm married to Mr. Incredible, and now that I can relax and not worry about being hurt all the time, and now that I don't have to live in "Survival Mode" all the time, my mind and body and heart and soul are beginning to relax into the safety of this great man I'm joined with for life. I am finding that this is the time after the war where I am looking over the battlefield and assessing the casualties, and I am reminded of the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett walked though the infinite rows of wounded soldiers. The difference for me is that I am walking through the battlefield in my heart and soul, and the casualties are not so tangible or visible.

I wish I had not grown up in such an abusive home ... I wish the divorce and all my ex has done to me would just go away, but the deaths from the sin remain. I am surprised to find how many parts of me died over the years. I was good until this last battle. I won the war with this last battle, but it cost me more than I can face some days.

They say that tough times make one stronger. That was true ... until these last few battles. Now I am weaker, more hesitant, more skeptical, a lot less trusting. My wounds are deep and many. I want to jump up and run forward with my new life! But my deep wounds demand time to heal. When going through the trials and the storms, I had to learn to lean into them rather than fight them. Now that I'm in the process of healing, I'm having to learn to lean into the process of healing rather than fight it ... or more importantly, rather than rush it. I want it to be done, over, behind me. It will get there, someday, as long as I relax into this season and allow God the time necessary to heal and not rush this process.

The world is so fast-paced. Favor is given to those who bounce back quickly! They are held up for all to see their greatness (or the greatness of God, depending on which circles you run in). For those who demand more time, patience is thin ... but not so with my Country Man :). What an incredible, gracious, perfect-for-me, gift he is from my Holy God. Thank You, God, for this great man. Few really know how wounded I am, but he does ... and he is not disappointed or discouraged; he is kind and gentle and patient and strong, with me. Raise him up and bless him and honor him for all the ways he is so unconditionally loving me. I love You, Jesus, Amen