June 2019
DEVOTION June 26, 2019
28/06/19 14:08
Greetings!
The sainted husband bought a new car….. First real new car we have had - I can only think of one other really new car we have had over the last 40 some years and that car was a necessity because we needed a car whee there was plenty of room between the back seat and the back of the front seat! We had two children (I wish we could say we had two children in car seats but when my two oldest children were babes and toddlers car seats were a luxury item that few people had. Those of you who had little children during these years probably can relate to the ‘unsafe’ ways in which we ferried little ones around!)
Anyway, we had a small compact car - a Chevy Nova (not the big muscle car version of the Chevy Nova but the later model which had turned into a small, very small, family type car). We did have a friend with the fast moving sporty Chevy Nova but while that would have been nice that just didn’t seem practical with two small ones…..
But it is true that small ones grow and we didn’t quite take that into consideration when we decided to take a family vacation and travel the journey from WV to Colorado to visit the sainted husband’s brother and his wife and of course to see the sights along the way in the small little Chevy Nova. However, the sainted husband took off the halo during this trip because he went into ‘gotta get there’ mode and the sight seeing trip became a few and far between sight seeing trip.
We thought we were well prepared for a trip of that magnitude with two toddlers. We had snacks and books and (remember this was a whole bunch of years ago before tablets and internet and movie screens in the cars) I thought I had scored big time when I found a package which had a cassette player, books, headphones and an audio recording of those books on a cassette tape. Bam! A way to keep two toddlers occupied as we zoomed across the country….
And yes, for a good majority of the trip the cassette player/cassette tape/book/headphones entertainment system worked very well. Of course there were the few squabbles about who would liste to which book at what time and the inevitable "She's touching me" moments but not bad considering..... But what we did underestimate was the size of the car and the amount of space between the back of the front seat and the feet of the toddlers. Now toddlers aren’t very big and we had two pretty small children size wise and you would think there would be enough room for two tiny toddlers to sit on the back seat and not disturb the parents in the front seats…..
My husband has really long legs - I on the other hand have pretty short legs so we very carefully positioned the children so the one with the longest legs - the elder, the son - would sit behind the short legged me and the younger, the daughter - would sit behind the long legged husband. We thought we had the thumbs up for smart parenting - right positions in the car, snacks, entertainment…..
But we did not take into account wiggly children in the small car….. entertained children will sit still won’t they? Ha! you say - parent fail. Even entertained children wiggle and entertained children strapped into seatbelts (yes even in the stone ages without car seats we did have seat belts!) only have certain parts of their bodies that can move freely - legs and feet. So the entertained children spent most of the trip very well absorbed into their cassette player/cassette tape/book/headphones entertainment system - and kicking their legs.
Which meant that in this small car the kicking legs and feet connected on the back of the seats of the parents in the front seat over and over and over and over...... We took their shoes off… we stopped the car once and had a discussion…. And it wasn’t long until the “Quick kicking the seats!” became a futile endeavor - admittedly I gave up long before the haloless sainted husband but eventually it did happen and he drove a lot leaving forward so his back wasn’t against the pummeled car seat!
It was a long trip in more ways than one.
How many times has God tried to get you to listen? How many times has God tried to lead you to ways that are more productive in your life? How many times has God stopped the car and had a ‘discussion’ with you?
How many times have you paid attention to God’s message to you? Or are we just like children with headphones absorbed in something else and disinterested in what is going on around us; disinterested in what God is trying to tell us? Figuring we can just keep on doing whatever it is that God knows is not good for us, or good for those around us, or that we need to do for God or for ourselves or those around us….
Being a follower of God doesn’t mean we can just go along our merry way and do whatever we want…. being a follower of God brings with it responsibility and God’s call to us to pay attention to the one who created us, to the one who loves us, to the one who knows what is best, to the one who chose us to help do the work needed to be done. We can only do that work if we listen..
So quit kicking the back of the car seat and listen to the word of your God for you!
Amen!
The sainted husband bought a new car….. First real new car we have had - I can only think of one other really new car we have had over the last 40 some years and that car was a necessity because we needed a car whee there was plenty of room between the back seat and the back of the front seat! We had two children (I wish we could say we had two children in car seats but when my two oldest children were babes and toddlers car seats were a luxury item that few people had. Those of you who had little children during these years probably can relate to the ‘unsafe’ ways in which we ferried little ones around!)
Anyway, we had a small compact car - a Chevy Nova (not the big muscle car version of the Chevy Nova but the later model which had turned into a small, very small, family type car). We did have a friend with the fast moving sporty Chevy Nova but while that would have been nice that just didn’t seem practical with two small ones…..
But it is true that small ones grow and we didn’t quite take that into consideration when we decided to take a family vacation and travel the journey from WV to Colorado to visit the sainted husband’s brother and his wife and of course to see the sights along the way in the small little Chevy Nova. However, the sainted husband took off the halo during this trip because he went into ‘gotta get there’ mode and the sight seeing trip became a few and far between sight seeing trip.
We thought we were well prepared for a trip of that magnitude with two toddlers. We had snacks and books and (remember this was a whole bunch of years ago before tablets and internet and movie screens in the cars) I thought I had scored big time when I found a package which had a cassette player, books, headphones and an audio recording of those books on a cassette tape. Bam! A way to keep two toddlers occupied as we zoomed across the country….
And yes, for a good majority of the trip the cassette player/cassette tape/book/headphones entertainment system worked very well. Of course there were the few squabbles about who would liste to which book at what time and the inevitable "She's touching me" moments but not bad considering..... But what we did underestimate was the size of the car and the amount of space between the back of the front seat and the feet of the toddlers. Now toddlers aren’t very big and we had two pretty small children size wise and you would think there would be enough room for two tiny toddlers to sit on the back seat and not disturb the parents in the front seats…..
My husband has really long legs - I on the other hand have pretty short legs so we very carefully positioned the children so the one with the longest legs - the elder, the son - would sit behind the short legged me and the younger, the daughter - would sit behind the long legged husband. We thought we had the thumbs up for smart parenting - right positions in the car, snacks, entertainment…..
But we did not take into account wiggly children in the small car….. entertained children will sit still won’t they? Ha! you say - parent fail. Even entertained children wiggle and entertained children strapped into seatbelts (yes even in the stone ages without car seats we did have seat belts!) only have certain parts of their bodies that can move freely - legs and feet. So the entertained children spent most of the trip very well absorbed into their cassette player/cassette tape/book/headphones entertainment system - and kicking their legs.
Which meant that in this small car the kicking legs and feet connected on the back of the seats of the parents in the front seat over and over and over and over...... We took their shoes off… we stopped the car once and had a discussion…. And it wasn’t long until the “Quick kicking the seats!” became a futile endeavor - admittedly I gave up long before the haloless sainted husband but eventually it did happen and he drove a lot leaving forward so his back wasn’t against the pummeled car seat!
It was a long trip in more ways than one.
How many times has God tried to get you to listen? How many times has God tried to lead you to ways that are more productive in your life? How many times has God stopped the car and had a ‘discussion’ with you?
How many times have you paid attention to God’s message to you? Or are we just like children with headphones absorbed in something else and disinterested in what is going on around us; disinterested in what God is trying to tell us? Figuring we can just keep on doing whatever it is that God knows is not good for us, or good for those around us, or that we need to do for God or for ourselves or those around us….
Being a follower of God doesn’t mean we can just go along our merry way and do whatever we want…. being a follower of God brings with it responsibility and God’s call to us to pay attention to the one who created us, to the one who loves us, to the one who knows what is best, to the one who chose us to help do the work needed to be done. We can only do that work if we listen..
So quit kicking the back of the car seat and listen to the word of your God for you!
Amen!
Deoviton
20/06/19 11:59
Greetings!
It has been raining….. and raining…… and raining…….and raining…. I could go on and on and on and on and on because it has been raining quite extensively. It seems like it is has been an entire year of rain but maybe not quite - but almost…. there has been lots of rain!
We did have a couple rainless weeks but they were short and quick and there was actually a day when I think I mistakenly said something like, ‘Wow, my garden needs some rain” and I shouldn’t have said that because the every day rain has begun once again…. that is a lot of weight to carry on my shoulders knowing I caused the raining to begin again.
The rain varies from nuisance rain - you know that rain where it is just raining enough that you can’t really do anything outside and you have to run your windshield wipers on your car but it is not really raining hard enough to be be ‘raining’. And then there are the raining gully washers where you think that all the rain in the world has settled over top your house and it is all coming down at one time…. The rain where you are sitting on your couch and you look up at the ceiling because it is raining so hard you figure it must be coming through the roof soon!
Now I know rain is necessary and my little garden truly appreciates the rain - but I think that even my little garden is probably complaining in its little garden way that it has plenty of water and would appreciate a few days of sunshine.
What brought on this diatribe against the rain happened yesterday as I was out running errands and doing work things and picking up some necessary items at the all purpose anything you need store. It had not rained all day - kind of refreshing - and when it hasn’t rained all day there is a part of you which lives in this hope that the entire day will be rain-free.
But too much optimism…. After I had completed my last stop and I was walking back to my car guess what happened… these little sprinkles began to fall. Now in my cup half full dream world I was thinking that this was just an anomaly and that all this moment of rain was going to be - a few minutes of nuisance and then it would be over. Not to be.
I did make it to my car when I noticed the rain was starting to fall a little bit faster… and then a little faster…. and then a little heavier…. and then a little heavier….. and then a lot faster and then a lost heavier…. until there was one of those gully washer deluge rains where there are just sheets of rain falling on your windshield and I had already committed to driving on the highway - otherwise I would have just remained in my parking spot to endure this bucket emptying water falling on my car.
So now I am on the highway, rain is falling so hard that with my windshield wipers wiping their little hearts out there is still no vision in front of me except sheets of water cascading down and I am driving down the highway with other cars around me who are in the same predicament….
Which is when I thanked God for taillights on a motor vehicles. Because even with the veil of flowing water across my front car window, and even with everything else pretty well blocked out, I could see the taillights in front of me - and remarkably I could see stoplights.
However this still required two things - well actually one thing in two different forms - this required me to trust the car in front of me with the taillights I could see to be rational and make competent decisions regarding driving in the rain and it required me to trust that cars coming from multiple directions at the stop light locations were also able to see the stop lights and would stop and go accordingly.
And they did cause I made it home.
Life sometimes feels like we are in a car with water cascading down and creating stressful moments as we don’t know where we are going or where our lives are headed and we don’t really know who or what to trust as we blindly move along…
Which is why God keeps telling us over and over - ‘I will never leave you or forsake you’. Remember he doesn’t say, “I will never allow it to rain in your life”, God just says he will be with us and help us maneuver through the blind spots and the rainy spots and even the rainy years and will always get us where we are suppose to be.
We just have to trust that…….. and we can without a shadow of a doubt.
Amen!
It has been raining….. and raining…… and raining…….and raining…. I could go on and on and on and on and on because it has been raining quite extensively. It seems like it is has been an entire year of rain but maybe not quite - but almost…. there has been lots of rain!
We did have a couple rainless weeks but they were short and quick and there was actually a day when I think I mistakenly said something like, ‘Wow, my garden needs some rain” and I shouldn’t have said that because the every day rain has begun once again…. that is a lot of weight to carry on my shoulders knowing I caused the raining to begin again.
The rain varies from nuisance rain - you know that rain where it is just raining enough that you can’t really do anything outside and you have to run your windshield wipers on your car but it is not really raining hard enough to be be ‘raining’. And then there are the raining gully washers where you think that all the rain in the world has settled over top your house and it is all coming down at one time…. The rain where you are sitting on your couch and you look up at the ceiling because it is raining so hard you figure it must be coming through the roof soon!
Now I know rain is necessary and my little garden truly appreciates the rain - but I think that even my little garden is probably complaining in its little garden way that it has plenty of water and would appreciate a few days of sunshine.
What brought on this diatribe against the rain happened yesterday as I was out running errands and doing work things and picking up some necessary items at the all purpose anything you need store. It had not rained all day - kind of refreshing - and when it hasn’t rained all day there is a part of you which lives in this hope that the entire day will be rain-free.
But too much optimism…. After I had completed my last stop and I was walking back to my car guess what happened… these little sprinkles began to fall. Now in my cup half full dream world I was thinking that this was just an anomaly and that all this moment of rain was going to be - a few minutes of nuisance and then it would be over. Not to be.
I did make it to my car when I noticed the rain was starting to fall a little bit faster… and then a little faster…. and then a little heavier…. and then a little heavier….. and then a lot faster and then a lost heavier…. until there was one of those gully washer deluge rains where there are just sheets of rain falling on your windshield and I had already committed to driving on the highway - otherwise I would have just remained in my parking spot to endure this bucket emptying water falling on my car.
So now I am on the highway, rain is falling so hard that with my windshield wipers wiping their little hearts out there is still no vision in front of me except sheets of water cascading down and I am driving down the highway with other cars around me who are in the same predicament….
Which is when I thanked God for taillights on a motor vehicles. Because even with the veil of flowing water across my front car window, and even with everything else pretty well blocked out, I could see the taillights in front of me - and remarkably I could see stoplights.
However this still required two things - well actually one thing in two different forms - this required me to trust the car in front of me with the taillights I could see to be rational and make competent decisions regarding driving in the rain and it required me to trust that cars coming from multiple directions at the stop light locations were also able to see the stop lights and would stop and go accordingly.
And they did cause I made it home.
Life sometimes feels like we are in a car with water cascading down and creating stressful moments as we don’t know where we are going or where our lives are headed and we don’t really know who or what to trust as we blindly move along…
Which is why God keeps telling us over and over - ‘I will never leave you or forsake you’. Remember he doesn’t say, “I will never allow it to rain in your life”, God just says he will be with us and help us maneuver through the blind spots and the rainy spots and even the rainy years and will always get us where we are suppose to be.
We just have to trust that…….. and we can without a shadow of a doubt.
Amen!
June 19, 2019
12/06/19 19:57
Greetings!
My sainted husband and I were on one of our many road trips. This one was to parts unknown as we were going somewhere we had never been before. But undirectional road trips are not unusual for us. When we were first married, young and free and pretty foolish most of the time, it was a normal occurrence to just jump into the car or truck and go somewhere for a day or two - somewhere we had never been that was within driving distance of where we lived. It was fun and educational and exciting as we often never knew what we might find.
Then when we had kids we would take a Saturday now and then and each child in turn would give us a direction and we would just head that way and see where we would end up. We got to see some pretty nifty sights that way since at each fork in the road we would ask a child, right or left, and depending on what they said we would go that way - sometimes ending up in some really interesting and sometime some really bizarre, locations!
We rarely went on Interstates or even 4-lane roads and fortunately we lived in an area where there were plenty of back roads and side roads. Usually we would draw the line at gravel roads - although occasionally we did get rather adventurous and go on a gravel road….. humming the ‘Deliverance’ tune as we ventured into some pretty isolated and strange looking areas.
The positive result of all of this adventurous traveling did lead to some fascinating sightings - the deer on the side of the road with a bandana tied neatly around his neck like she was getting ready to go somewhere special; the 4-way stop signs at an intersection on top of a mountain at least 6 or 7 miles from any type of civilization on a gravel road; the scary time we stopped at a store on the side of the road to get a beverage and a snack and realized it was a KKK product store; there were more equally peculiar spectacles.
Well I could go on…. but these little trips were a lot of fun and somewhat educational and allowed the children (and us for that matter) to see things they would have never seen or experienced had we not had the ‘which direction do you want to go’ Saturdays. Sometimes we would even make an overnight excursion of these child led journeys and really travel far afield.
But then as the children grew older and started to be involved in various activities and multitudinous sporting activities and happenings with school friends, these ‘which direction do you want to go’ journeys became fewer and fewer. Our weekend driving trips became more designated driving trips as we had to go to specific places in order for children to participate in their sporting activities.
And while we still got to go to some new places, our weekends were less about exploring and learning and being surprised by what we may come across and more about ‘we need to be here in this place by this time so we can warm up for the game’…… It is just not as alluring to have to be at a certain location by a certain time than it is to just twist and turn and wander.
Maybe that is why some of the mystery and majesty surrounding our God is missing. We have so boxed God into specific times and specific places. Oh we can say, “I know God is everywhere” but in our thinking, God is in that building we go to every Sunday morning and too often God just stays there when we leave and go on our merry way to our own activities and our own lives.
Instead of allowing the wonder of God to lead us out of our buildings and into the world around us, we keep God ‘where God belongs’ in the ‘church’. But think what great adventures we could have if we really listen to what God tells us, and believe the promises of God to always be with us, and allow God to guide our steps and our pathways.
Imagine the wonder our lives will take if we truly let God be the one who leads us on the journey of our lives!!
My sainted husband and I were on one of our many road trips. This one was to parts unknown as we were going somewhere we had never been before. But undirectional road trips are not unusual for us. When we were first married, young and free and pretty foolish most of the time, it was a normal occurrence to just jump into the car or truck and go somewhere for a day or two - somewhere we had never been that was within driving distance of where we lived. It was fun and educational and exciting as we often never knew what we might find.
Then when we had kids we would take a Saturday now and then and each child in turn would give us a direction and we would just head that way and see where we would end up. We got to see some pretty nifty sights that way since at each fork in the road we would ask a child, right or left, and depending on what they said we would go that way - sometimes ending up in some really interesting and sometime some really bizarre, locations!
We rarely went on Interstates or even 4-lane roads and fortunately we lived in an area where there were plenty of back roads and side roads. Usually we would draw the line at gravel roads - although occasionally we did get rather adventurous and go on a gravel road….. humming the ‘Deliverance’ tune as we ventured into some pretty isolated and strange looking areas.
The positive result of all of this adventurous traveling did lead to some fascinating sightings - the deer on the side of the road with a bandana tied neatly around his neck like she was getting ready to go somewhere special; the 4-way stop signs at an intersection on top of a mountain at least 6 or 7 miles from any type of civilization on a gravel road; the scary time we stopped at a store on the side of the road to get a beverage and a snack and realized it was a KKK product store; there were more equally peculiar spectacles.
Well I could go on…. but these little trips were a lot of fun and somewhat educational and allowed the children (and us for that matter) to see things they would have never seen or experienced had we not had the ‘which direction do you want to go’ Saturdays. Sometimes we would even make an overnight excursion of these child led journeys and really travel far afield.
But then as the children grew older and started to be involved in various activities and multitudinous sporting activities and happenings with school friends, these ‘which direction do you want to go’ journeys became fewer and fewer. Our weekend driving trips became more designated driving trips as we had to go to specific places in order for children to participate in their sporting activities.
And while we still got to go to some new places, our weekends were less about exploring and learning and being surprised by what we may come across and more about ‘we need to be here in this place by this time so we can warm up for the game’…… It is just not as alluring to have to be at a certain location by a certain time than it is to just twist and turn and wander.
Maybe that is why some of the mystery and majesty surrounding our God is missing. We have so boxed God into specific times and specific places. Oh we can say, “I know God is everywhere” but in our thinking, God is in that building we go to every Sunday morning and too often God just stays there when we leave and go on our merry way to our own activities and our own lives.
Instead of allowing the wonder of God to lead us out of our buildings and into the world around us, we keep God ‘where God belongs’ in the ‘church’. But think what great adventures we could have if we really listen to what God tells us, and believe the promises of God to always be with us, and allow God to guide our steps and our pathways.
Imagine the wonder our lives will take if we truly let God be the one who leads us on the journey of our lives!!