Employer: God

When I get caught up in the changes of the organization I find myself getting irritated, frustrated and (as my coworkers are quick to point out) my eyes get big as saucers.

What is the problem? I forgot who I was working for.

• God is my Director, principal and father
• I'm his employee, agent and daughter
• Today went much better after I remembered that.

The problem in my head isn't completely solved, I'm working through the extraneous stuff, but I do feel as though I've been useful today, and I cannot change what is, I can only look to see if this is a continual pattern that I must accept, or seek to change what I can.

I wish I was as sane as all of this when I was in the middle of the fight, but alas, I was making all the right noises (even if my face didn't reflect it) and I got into a place where I could pray soon after.

Prayer brought out what was most important. The rest... will work itself out in time.

Simple things (because now that Chris suggested it, it seems a good idea):

• My co-workers encouragement written on a white board behind my desk "Yes, you do."
• Another co-worker's encouragement hung on my bulletion board "...Dear Jess, I have never seen an eagle carrying plates." with Isaiah 40: 28-31 quoted.
  
• Clean smell of cold air.
• Leftovers for lunch
• Being able to complete a couple of tasks on the to do list
• E-mails from friends
• Phone calls from fellows
• My husband's love and support
• Well timed (Coincidence or God) e-mails from friends as follows
  

Stress

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, Raised a glass of water and asked; 'How heavy is this glass of water?' Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g.

The lecturer replied, 'The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.'

He continued, 'And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, As the burden becomes increasingly heavy, We won't be able to carry on.

'As with the glass of water, You have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden. 'So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work or whatever is bothering you down. Don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens you're carrying now, Let them down for a moment if you can. 'So, my friend, put down anything that may be a burden to you right now. Don't pick it up again until after you've rested a while.'

The simple things

Chris at Enchanted Oak had proposed a wonderful gift and simple challenge.

The Simple Things Challenge is an easy way to keep your blessings flowing to Haiti. Today and Sunday, Chris and her family would like to celebrate the simple pleasures of life with you.

For each person who participates with a list, a poem, or a prose piece about the joy of simple things,
their family will donate $2.00 to Heartline Ministries for their medical clinic and other programs in Haiti.

MY SIMPLE THINGS:

• Songbirds singing me awake in the morning
• Clovers growing just outside my front door
• Puppy heads in my lap with big brown eyes looking up in love
• The smell and taste of fresh coffee
• The smell of herbs and wildflowers
• Dolphins swimming in the creek
• Pelicans in flight overhead
• The smell of spring and fall just after a rain
• Books
• Celtic music
• Pinetrees
• The Tufted Titmouse
• My husbands hand at the small of my back or just around my waist (simple warm support)
• Chickadees
• The memory of grandpa brushing my hair
• laughter
• laugh lines
  
• Truth

God shows up before we even begin to believe he can...

A wonderful and exhuberant new friend had an experience the other day after we talked about some depressing thoughts and ideas she was having, I sent her just a different perspective that might be considered... she seemed to appreciate that perspective, enough that she said she cried and felt full (she had been praying for God to fill the hole) well this perspective I shared was through an e-mail I sent, she was so moved by the e-mail she got into her car to go to print it out (She wasn't near a computer with a printer). On her way, she was behind a slow moving truck, while it was irritating her she looked at the license plate:


She texted me, amazed and shared this experience as it was happening. She told me what the license plate said and asked, do you think that might be some kind of bible verse or something, I knew that indeed it was, and that God was moving...

^{1 John 4: 7} Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

What an awesome experience, and how blessed I am to have been asked to share it with her!

Step 2: Came to believe in a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Seriously how DOES God talk to you?

If God is my dad and my dad's genetics are in me, if I am genetically inclined to God then there should be works in my life that demonstrate that genetic inclination toward the Spirit of the Universe. If I trust that God is that Supernatural, all powerful, all knowing and miraculous being, and if it is demonstrated that my family who came before me inspired even greater inventions, innovations, and stuff... then it follows I will be able to do even better with what I was given....right? Because my parents, my mentors, my friends and those historic figures who inspire me, are giving me the same work, the work of achieving my dreams. I can count on it.

Wouldn't it be great if I could really feel that truth to my core, that from now on, whatever request I make of this all powerful being of who I believe he is and what he does, then I can do it!

"That's how the Father will be seen for who he is in the Son. I mean it. Whatever you request in this way, I'll do." "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does."

(Side note: There are times when my flesh is crawling but I have this knowledge this inner yearning to be able to do ANYTHING without worrying about what people will think, how people will react, how circumstances have come into my life and proven that humanly because of all the crap I've done its impossible, but... I have so many teachers, so many mentors, so many stories from people who have talked about how they were able to realize a God who is bigger than that, I just keep thinking... in my heart and in my gut... I really do believe it happened for them... I DO! Could it be possible for me?

What if I am the practical demonstration of miracles, what if the daughter can do only what she sees her Father doing and whatever the Father does, I can do? What if I can?

How does God talk to me, a friend suggested a few ideas to me that I'm working through:
The Word
Spirit (paracleet) an outpouring... overwhelming presence or feeling... inspirations...
Heart (words, pictures, true imagination) Think about your mom... you're probably not getting a list of words, your having a memory, some symbols or pictures come to mind, that's the heart memory, images.
Senses (heightened awareness)
Verse or word pops in your head, its like a mental highlighter goes off.
Dreams and Visions (akin to images in heart but also literal visions and dreams)
Angels weird coincidence of people showing up to help, to speak, to be there at just the right time
Creation/Creative works, ideas (sunrise, sunset, seashells, new born, spring, laughter, paintings, pottery, weaving, sewing...keep adding to this list I bet ideas are coming)
Voice an audible voice or a supernatural voice Circumstances People Animals Strong conviction Inner peace Impressions

There's a large list and I see more of God in each of these suggestions each day.

I wonder what I could do if I just believed...

Breaking the silence

I had the most wonderful weekend. There is much to process and I surely cannot do the actual experience full justice in words. It was MIRACULOUS!

I'm grateful that I was given opportunity to steal away from the world and just get really really quiet and small in God's world for a weekend. It taught me, it moved me, it convinced and convicted me, and it blessed me.

I'm still processing some of it, but...

I went to the woods on a hike, as I hiked in it was dead quiet. About 15 minutes in the trail was flooded. I stopped a minute, a chickadee began to sing, I looked up to spot it. In that moment a memory flooded back to me from childhood. When I was a kid I used to go out in the woods wandering and just lay down to watch the world above.

I thought, maybe even said out loud, "God, I'm gonna lay down now, just like then."

And I laid down.

Suddenly, one after another a whole charm of chickadees came twittering and playing above me.

I heard all kinds of birds then. It was a symphony of voices. A symphony of sounds together yet each distinct.

The chickadees began to dissipate and a new group of birds came,
Robins? No, that can't be, it must be a different bird... I shrugged it off and just enjoyed the concert and the play.

I sat under the trees just soaking in the wonders of nature and the birds and the beauty, the second host of birds dissipated and it was back to full on silence.

I got up and moved on to another trail and later that afternoon we gathered to end our retreat, the rector of the camp came to close the weekend and talked about a "weird" experience that he felt led to share. He had opened up to participants to share their experiences if they felt comfortable, I stayed quiet, though the birds came to mind. He said he had seen something odd, and wasn't sure if it was a God thing, but he's learned to share that coincidental stuff because more often than not his "odd" is God - a prophetic sign for others.

Then he talked about coming out to walk to the chapel and finding a huge flock of robins outside his door chattering. He said it's not odd to have birds around, but Robins yes, quite odd. In fact he's never seen robins there before. He, a naturalist by education and said he wasn't sure their migratory pattern hit's the Coastal Carolina area at all. Anyway it was an odd and first time experience at this camp. Well I began to tear up. There are some signs that are coincidental and some that build, I cannot begin to relate the story of the whole weekend in enough detail to portray the full miracle of the weekend. The robins however I can at least shed some light on. I'm a native Michigander where the state bird is the robin. Those birds are very special to my heart. When I was 21 and just getting married, my best friend got married a couple weeks before me, the time of the wedding was difficult for me emotionally, I was scared, I was really really scared. My dad wasn't happy, I felt like my fiance was well forced (and I believe I did force it), my dad wanted nothing to do with the wedding (I'd been living in sin and had run from every direction my dad had pointed me in) I was trying to make everything ok in my own sick and weird way. Well on the day of my girlfriend's wedding we went to the reception hall to decorate, her dad (the manager of the hall) had the lawn mowed that day and the groundskeeper had run over a nest of baby robins. One lived, it was very very very new, newly hatched. Well I took it home, she didn't want that baby robin to die on her wedding day.

My dad thought I was insane. No one can raise a baby bird, especially one that tiny! It would never live!

I was sure it would. I was confident beyond reason that this bird would live!

I took great care and pains to keep that bird warm, fed, comforted.
Great pains and care. I carried it to work and back with me, carried it everywhere.
I was up all hours feeding it (BOY WAS IT LOUD!)

And ... in a few short months, Cock robin was a healthy red breasted boy, vigorous and strong. He began to take small flight laps around the apartment.
Then, I knew that I had to let him go. I made some calls and I gave him to a wildlife refuge in the area where I lived.

Robins have a special place in my heart. And I believe God was giving me a wonderful sign to seal up the whole experience of the weekend retreat.

The robins, by the way, were at the entrance of the camp as I left my weekend retreat... seemingly saying so long for now. Cheering me on in this amazing and miraculous life.

It was one of the MANY gifts received over a very silent weekend.

Was it a coincidence or sign from God, was that robin given to me way back in my younger years an insane project or a gift from God to allow my focus off of me and the problems and keep me moving in a direction, a loving direction.

Some of you may still wonder... but I know!

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

"From the winds we’ll catch a bit of that wondrous feeling, that comes not from seeing, but from being part of nature.” ~Gwen Frostic~

The retreat coordinator shared that she felt like there was one more thing to share. She said since the robin story was shared she was contemplating the different bird's voices, the cacophony of sound that happens in the woods, she said she felt like God views each of us like we hear the birds, if we listen we hear the distinct differences in their tenor, their voices, their calls, it's very unique to each. Sometimes when you listen to them all in symphony it's a lot of noise, but when you are in love with the sounds, when you want to hear them, they are distinct, unique. God hears us that way too. Each of our voices are unique, distinctive, he hears a symphony but easily picks out each voice, the distinctive call to him.

God hears you. Can you hear him?

I believe I do.

Joy of the Weary

Joy of the Weary I am, Music to the Heart I am, Health to the Sick,
Wealth to the Poor, Food to the Hungry, Home to the Wanderer,
Rapture to the Jaded, Love to the Lonely.

There is not one want of the soul that I do not supply for the asking,
and to you too, I long to be all.
~exerpt from God Calling - Jan. 28~


Today I am still "under the weather" but,
driving to work this morning I saw a shooting star.

Today I am still weary but,
I find that friends have sent messages of love and laughter as I open my e-mails
and glance through facebook.

Today I long for more sleep more rest but,
I also feel useful as I create my list of things to do and begin to accomplish the tasks before me.

GRATITUDE:

• Sitting at my desk in the wee smas of the morning and as the sun comes up, i glance out my window to the the Boeing building next door GLOWING pink with the sunrise reflection
• I listen to my Deuter Pandora station as I work through my e-mails and contemplate daily readings.
• I pray for coworkers and friends who come to mind
• I think how lucky I am to have a husband who cooks for me almost daily
• My heart fills with hope for those women (K) and men (T) who are feeling lost, depressed and angry right now at the circumstances of life and their inability to control them. I pray that God meet them where they are and drag them kicking and screaming into the light.
  
• I look forward to my next 5th step and the prayer retreat that begins tomorrow after that.
  
• I savor the coffee in my cup... "good to the last drop"
  
• Feel enthusiasm growing as I receive excited text messages from a newcomer who is seizing the program and being as honest as she can who is experiencing hope and excitement.
• Receiving messages from my husband always brightens my day, I ask God to help me be a better and more loving wife daily.
• I remember words of books I read as a kid and the encouragement they provided, even when I wasn't aware.
  

"Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen.
We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds."

"Some people go through life trying to find out what the world holds for them only to find out too late that it's what they bring to the world that really counts. OR It's not what the world holds for you it's what you bring to it"

~Anne Of Green Gables~

Try: To select, sort, examine, determine... to grind, or rub. To put to test or trial.

To subject something to undue strain, excessive hardship or provocation.

Let: To permit; (did you know this is also akin to a lithuanian word Lenas: tranquil) to cause to make known, to give opportunity to, to introduce a request or proposal; to free from or as if from confinement, to abandon self-restraint.

Are we trying this way of life or are we letting it be demonstrated through us. I heard the story of someone yesterday who, sharing his experience with the 9th step, said "I haven't got the spiritual part of the program."

I've heard that one before, and I feel sad. I believe now that there is no spiritual "part." In fact, my belief in that is certain. It IS a Spiritual life I live now all of it. If we are honestly in this program, then the spiritual is built right in to every piece. Therefore all experiences are spiritual in their core nature. What I believe is that this man has no recognition or perception of the spirit that is working already. I pray for that to be revealed to him. I also pray that my awareness of this fact stays steady and true that I might be a demonstration of His truth.

I'm going to be honest here, when I "try" things there is this back door that I have opened so that I can escape if it goes wrong....just in case... When I try, I leave room for failure because I know I'm flawed and I know the damage "I" can do. Amazingly, God has always moved beyond my damage-abilities and just continued to create out of my rubble, my failure, my ideas of wrong. I'm glad my inventory has taught me that I am not the end all and be all of experience or life. 'Cause that responsibility IS overwhelming.

Trying (Grinding/Rubbing) vs. Letting (Tranquil)

Someone early in my recovery introduced me to the phrase: "Let Go and Let God"

I contemplate that phrase today... letting vs. trying
I don't want to figure it out, I just want the experience to flow through me that I might feel it palpably and recognize it as it grows.

“I’m not a bit changed—not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me—back here—is just the same. It won’t make a bit of difference where I go or how much I change outwardly; at heart I shall always be your little Anne, who will love you and Matthew and dear Green Gables more and better every day of her life.” ~Anne of Green Gables~

And that, is how I feel today, I feel like I'm not changed a bit really, just pruned down and branched out. The REAL me, back here, is just the same. It won't make a bit of difference where I go or how much I change outwardly; at heart I will still be God's little Jessie, who will love God and all of you more and better every day of her life!



Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts. Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice. Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always. Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles...

Lunacy commissions and faerie queens

A SONG FOR GABI!

A friend S, sent me a text that said, "You know the song Lunatic Fringe? That's where I am right now."

YIKES

I was floored because when I thought about that, I wanted immediately to make her feel better which is great but, I feel that way too.

Is it in the water?

So many friends are struggling lately. How can you give someone power to feel better?

Grief, nuttiness, anger, depression. Things do not seem to be going our way ;oP

What is the core cause or condition? I'm contemplating the things that I believe are "out of line."

And for me I'm getting a VERY FIRM SUGGESTION from many directions ...

PUSH!

I went to a speaker meeting last night where the woman who spoke read a parable at the end of her talk (PUSH - Pray Until Something Happens) Don't continue to fight it because experiencing struggle and difficulty means your working hard against the power that makes all things right when we surrender.

I also received an invitation to a contemplative prayer retreat on the day last week that I would consider the "worst" day I've had in a while (just the right time, just the right invitation).

Today, as I woke feeling tired and worn and struggling with a sinus issue. I got down on my knees and prayed, I also added prayers for health and being freed from this weariness.

I opened my daily readings, the first:

Height of the storm

"it is part of my method to wait til the storm is at it's full violence"

I am with you both. Go forward unafraid. Health and Strength, peace and happiness and joy - they are my gifts. Yours for the asking. In the spiritual (as in the material) world there is no empty space, and as sefl and fears and worries depart out of your lives, it follows that things of the Spirit, that you crave so, RUSH to take their places. All things are yours, and ye are Christ, and Christ is God's. What a wonderful cycle because ye are Gods.

Be not afraid, fear not.

It is to the drowning man the rescuer comes. To the brave swimmer who can fare well alone He comes not. And no rush of Joy can cbe like htat of a man toward his rescuer. It is part of my method to wait till the storm is at its full violence. So did I with my disciples on the lake. I could have bidden the first angry wave be calm, the first gust of wind be still, but what a lesson unlearned? What a sense of tender nearness of refuge and safety would have been lost.

Remember this - My disciples thought that in sleep I had forgotten them. Remember how mistaken they were. Gain strength and confidence and joyful dependence and anticipation. Never fear. Joy is yours, and the raidiant joy of the rescued shall be yours.

The other daily reading was a verse - Mark 4: 37-41

A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, 'Teacher, don't you care if we drown?' He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, 'Quiet! Be still!' Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, 'Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?' They were terrified and asked each other, 'Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!'

I guess I have my answer.

P.U.S.H.

God is there, waiting for the plot to climax to ride in and rescue those who ask him to.

Ya know, when I was little and fell in love with all those fairy tales and stories of princesses and pirate queens... I was in love with the idea of rescue, of being that girl who, though she was strong and independent not the prettiest girl in the crowd but striking in a way that was palpable, always had one fatal flaw, the idea she could conquer the world always left her at a small disadvantage, and it was then that HE came in to rescue her, they worked well together the Hero and the heroine. The stories I loved the best, the heroine I related to best always had that character and those flaws. And I LOVED her for them. She was always falling in love, she was creative and firey, she had strength and vulnerability.

She was always rescued and wound up with the desires of her heart in the end. The story didn't look like the one she had planned in her head, it was better for the adventure. And for the grand rescues that were in each of her adventures and the friends she collected along the way as she pulled others into the story. She carried a Spirit that people couldn't seem to resist.

God I ask today that the friends who are struggling receive the brilliant and beautiful signs of your presence and love today that I am receiving. That we together find the joy in these days and spread it like wildfire through the ranks of people we are aligned with. I ask for the strength and health that we need to see this adventure through, and more importantly, for your rescue from the stormy seas when we jump too far into the adventure and forget how powerful and omnipresent you are. Please grant strength and health to those, like me
who are weary and aren't sure of the footing.