Can Hope Stretch Another Day?

The winter has felt so very long. Cold weather. The season of tireless sorrow and dreary time. The woman who can always tell a story of hope and recovery has lost her edge. At least for this moment. God had taken her familiar comforts and people from her reach for whatever reason he deemed necessary. That simple fireplace space is absent to write and unload in the current home. The dream of that short lived excitement thinking a new blog .com page, now faltered and laid dormant. Watching and feeling 5 deaths. No 6 in one year. What a sad way to start a blog.. I am sorry but I have to clear my spirit of the intoxicating hope-less-ness. Can you bear with me a bit as I work this out?

I have been so sick. How sorry can we feel?  It has rolled over me again and again since December. Worn me out. Tipped the sad scale. Dropped me to the sheets for too long. I had not really known the depth of it all as it pushed out the good things. Holding it together for others and encouraging others. Watching precious people mourn and weep as they watch their dreams disappear wishing they could have done something in the past to change the outcome of their current sorrow. Feeling the no answers leak through their eyes in liquid form. I feel their bottom. Saying to those I love, it will be ok as they hold a sick child or two. Hearing the sorrow in the voice of my daughter and my grand as they lose their dream of a baby. 

Reminded that Christ always pulls it out for us month after month. Yes, he does but it has been far to long to just breath a sigh of anything like relief. Just this over and over helplessness. The same ole living.  Have I flunked Gods test for 12 years since my mom passed? I see all of the promises hanging in the air out of reach. Hearing those friends say again, "I thought this was going to be your year."  Watching my husband give up his passions. Seeing sadness in his eyes as a job ended that we thought had a miracle potential. Loss of income and that thing called joy. I need joy. This house needs joy!

                                                    It   all   stacked   up. 

                                           Joy   comes   in   the   morning   right? 

                 I know I felt the tears start to emerge this week as I slept the flu, infection, headache and fever away all week. 

I need another kleenex can you tell and a new view? I have been happy for each new piece of news of others new relationship, a new home, a great promotion, a new child. a time of rest. We all deserve those long awaited victories. But I selfishly wish for happy news that’s for my husband future or my planned out journey. A victory dance! How selfish that sounds. But I am  so very human. I desire a rescue from my tired soul. A reminder of warm light from above. But truth be told its not just the winter season of real time but the eternal waiting my soul has been in for years. 

As I read a post this morning at 1 a.m. my bottle of tears must have fallen to the floor and cracked opened. Was the lid really on that tight for so long? It dawned on me I have no idea if good things or despair were in my dreams these last couple of weeks. Lacking my usual encouragements I personally seek. Being isolated has taken a hit. I dreamt I asked for my old life back that had that security and sweet lilac bushes on our property on Long Circle or Cheetah Winds. I want a dry empty tear bottle and a vase that is filled with tulips that aren’t frozen in the close position that I recently bought myself and tossed.

As I have slept for the last 2 weeks I wondered what has been deposited in my spirit? Have I slept through a dose of hope? A correction? A God healing after 3 doctors couldn’t clear toxins from my body. Or my soul?  A moment of being aware of Christ around me and in me? I guess I just need to spill the sorrow in my heart of loss. Loss of hope.

The funny thing is God can tip the scale whenever He wants. He knows your breaking point. The point he can get you to hear in whatever way He wants. God is mysterious but really He speaks to those who can reach you when you can’t reach yourself. He uses these who listen to break open your sad bottled up self that was getting fossilized. My room and life had been so quiet as my husband came in and out caring for me. 

                          Out of the blue, God awoke my tribe.

It all started as my youngest son was leaving at 4 am for YWAM. He came in and hugged me goodbye as he left for 3 months again. I was sad. I had not even had the time I had desired with him.

My hair dresser texted and said she hoped I was ok. She was thinking of me. A friend called in the morning and prayed for me on her way to work. I needed that. A different girlfriend called and said she felt something was wrong and told me to take care of myself. My oldest son called out of the blue and said, “He hoped I was feeling better and to, Make it a great day!” His trade mark phrase. He never calls midweek, in the middle of the day. Then a persistent cousin reached out and renewed some hope in a good deed that really should not have been possible. She heard from God. She was obedient. She’s the one who just lost her brother. She had time for me? My prayer partner texted when I confessed I was stuck and I had not been praying,  She said, “She was praying like crazy for us.”  And then at 1 A.M. this morning I read Beandkeepbeing Instagram post. She wrote simple truth. The words open my tears up. It unload my darkness. I am undone which is a good thing. Here are her reminders of God’s word that are exchanging fresh air into my soul. It called out to me the fresh word of God. The things that usually bring me comfort that I usually grasp on my own forced my lid to come off the contained tears from a fellow writer I have never meet..

Winter ends and spring will come.

Weeping last for only a night and joy comes in the morning.

Our God redeems what is broken.

He repays us for the years of what is loss and suffering.

Don’t give up.

Hold tight.

Wait for the promises.

Drink deep from the deep intoxicating well……..

I want all of those overcoming words to come forth like Jesus out of the grave. To celebrate for days like Esther’s victory party. To have our walls rebuilt for the future. I so badly want to throw off the old sack cloths of despair to a new victory. I want to kick those locust back at the enemy and tell him to gag on em. 

Our situation has not changed this long night as I wrote this blog. God has not changed, He is still God. It’s all his call. He just called on his faithful people to open the way. My people. His people, My tribe. His tribe.

Spring will come and eventually something of that long awaited joy will bring that which we have waited years for. God is for us not against us, I told my husband hours ago as he fell asleep. We sometimes allow the enemy to lie to us. And we believe him. Christ has overcome for us. Thats the true unselfish victory.

So when the Spirit whispers to you. Heed the call. Be obedient. You are doing something by your one small deed. As many little deeds and acts of kindness make a breaker anointing possible. I truly felt it all. One bit at a time. From each of you my friends.

 He has stretched my hope for another day. 

Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Psalm 126:5

Pancakes that topple.. Feet that touch.. Love that Last!

Life can be so super duper challenging at times. Sometimes the difficulties are just one simple problem. Before the week is over they become stacked on top of each other. It looks like a rush of heavy carb loaded pancakes just waiting to topple. The difficulties one by one are not so tough. But when the difficulties are stacked and they tumble into your lap, that is when the burden feels uncontrollable. The heaviness brings on the darkness. We all have at one time experienced this cold, dark, needy pit. But I am talking the darkest of holes.

Who do you turn to or allow to pull you up when those overwhelming places enter your week and intensify?

I turn to the friends who have values, perspective, a life of prayer. Those who know me the best. Those who are very wise. Those who hear the Lord. Yes, I have several. I choose them!

What happens when you burn those people out and they are worn thin? What ensues when you listen to too many voices? What occurs when they are really truthful and you only hear your inner trapped voice and you think you have no way of escape?

                Darkness and the souls of men can pull you into such a vortex of hope deferred. Proverbs 13:12

  

In this last long season of repeats, I visualized a grain hopper. Where life is poured in the top and comes out looking quite different than when it went in. You think on the second try it will change and look different from the first since you thought you cleaned up the fray. Do you think it might be a pretty single pancake with sweetness deserved and not a heavy toppling stack!

I am referring to a 2 cycle season of really tough times in the last 11 years. It has lasted longer than we imagined and has stretched us, changed us and worn us down and given us a great prayer life. Health issues over and over. Financial issues over and over. Job changes and second jobs that helped the wallet and bandaged the soul. Family issues where the more we stayed out the more we were drawn in. Times just intensified and circumstances piled up. Long standing friends just could not relate or maybe watch. I do understand it could play like a horror movie where you cover your eyes. Maybe if they turned off the swirling movie it would go away. Poof! Who needs to watch that? Ha! At times the silent thoughts of you wondering if they were judging or perhaps thinking God was. We felt that too. Was Christ defining us? Disciplining us? Shaping us for our future? Those who stayed close to us, questioned as did we.

Oh, and did I mention God? He viewed it before we were made, and loves us still!  

There was those moments in the heavy darkness before the light streamed in when the clock said 3 a.m., when I felt so very grounded. Surprising huh? I felt my husband next to me and the true comforter of God himself in the spirit.  

“Do not be afraid for I am with you” Genesis 26:24

Recovery or repeat? Oh, that road so worn. As we started the second go around in 2013 we prayed and we asked and we listened. We so badly wanted to do the recovery right. We thought we were making the right choices. But we felt like we were spinning through that hopper with our foot out. We should have been able to put that leg down but it just was not stopping. The thing is, many times the spin feels comfortable and its the stillness when your sitting on your butt with the fall out of the grain on top of you that it wakes you up. Grain is very heavy. So is the darkness of the enemy of hope deferred.

Being on the ground is cold, lonely and dark unless you will allow yourself to be touched.

“The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” John 1:5

So we thought we had the comeback in place. The harvest was going to be sweet. But last fall my husband had a accident that had again taken us to the dark place. You know its bad when you are sitting in church and tears are streaming and the pain is on your spouses face. You know when those closest see the pain but don’t really feel what only you feel? And the enemy of you soul and mind speaks loser to you. Yep! That place! When you sit and stare into nowhere, with nobody and you're allowing satan to dump words and thoughts on you, and you just can’t move out from under the dirty, heavy grain! 

Pressing through the testing to breakthrough.

Then, more needed reality filters into the hopper by words from someone who loves you. Tough love words! It made me fall off the merry go round and skin my knees deeply. Eventually my spinning stopped. The spinning was replaced with days of tears… and more days of cleansing sorrowful heavy tears. I did not feel grateful for tough love in the pain. The tears are not done and the fear of the unknown has daily emerged. Again. 

I thought heavily of others and their sorrows and troubles and wondered how they managed?  Those without the peace of God? That’s how I got to grateful even in the darkness. Falling on the floor praying for my husbands pain and praying for others in other parts of the world going through intense persecution or even on this side of hell and heaven.

 “My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, 

where is your God?” Psalm 42:3

I floated back and forth from dark to distilled light for 3 days saying. “Really.. again Lord? “But in the dark of the night there are two touches I search for. I find each night I wait and rest for those moments to emerge. First, my husband then the spirit.

“By day the Lord directs his love, at night His song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.” Psalm 42:8

Seeking answers when one spouse is leery and one is trusting of something and you pray and pray. Then you flip the coin and one is trusting and the other is leery and you pray and you pray. How do you attempt to make the right decision? How do you re-structure the structure that was the new structure? God says, “All things work together for good for those who trust is in Him”

So here we sit again in our own reality show shoveling heavy grain off with another long stretch in front of us. We are exhausted! In their love our kids are exhausted! Our closest prayer partners are pooped! Now that we are on our bottom so to speak, we look at some of the ramifications and the advice we thought was sound and shake our head. We are going to figure this out and not use our usual means. Somehow God will be bigger than our choices. He promises a way out!.. Right??

I go to bed awake and in the darkness, with prayers on my mind, I fall asleep. It seems I must be praying nonstop in my spirit all night. I awake in the morning with the words on my brain. “Father save us, Lord help us, Jesus come. Holy spirit can you speak louder? Let me hear you!" 

 “He who forms the mountains, creates the wind, and reveals his thoughts to man..the Lord Almighty is His name”        Amos 4:12

In a text one night at midnight last winter one of my high school girlfriends blessed me with hope. It's those messages that encourages you. She said, “I pray you will be like Job and the second half of your life will be more than the first!” May it be true! That is what we wait for, that is what we dream. 

Granola centered happiness! Is that really healthy? :)

So tonight when I go to bed before my next hard day emerges, I know I am next to the one person who shares this pain that others only see. I will feel his touch in the middle of the night. Possibly several times. It’s the touch of my husband’s feet searching for mine or mine for his. Oh the familiar.. It feels right, even when things are wrong! Then the spirit will touch me and I will sleep.

Everything will be ok I am told. If I will just stop and kick the fear out and dream of that one beautiful light pancake! No stack of toppling carbs. No heavy grain falling on me. Just awaken to a good thing. A God answer. A voice saying it will be alright.

I love you with a everlasting love!

Cherish the moments of love, even in hard places.

So stay with us as God continues writing our story even if it’s at a distance.We understand. Even if it appears to be the part of the intense movie where you cover up your eyes. While you are there say a prayer for those people around you in tough circumstances and those on the other side of the world. Do a hidden blessing of prayer. And know I pray for you also! 

We will eventually see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living and it will be a great harvest!