The things we hear

In our house we hear lots of interesting words, sentences, and conversations that we take in stride, not even thinking how they might sound to someone outside our little world. Every now and then, though, I stop to think about how weird some of our conversations actually are.
Case in point–I bet you didn’t hear any of this at your dinner table last night:
“Catherine, please stop chanting ‘pee-pee,’ and Elisabeth, we don’t howl at the dinner table.”
“Elisabeth, get your fingers out of your drink.”
“No, sit in your seat, not on the table.”
“Oh, he just decorated his shirt with clam chowder.”
“Elisabeth, get your fingers out of your drink.”
“Wow, that fruit looks really good in your hair, bud! Better than gel!!”
“Elisabeth, get your fingers out of your drink.”
“Oh, yuck. Honey, you can’t open your mouth until after you swallow your milk!”

Just a few examples. Anyone with little kids could give more. And these were just what we said, and it doesn’t even count all the funny things they say each and every day. Oh, the things you never imagined you’d hear on a regular basis. Having kids changes everything.

A few fall pics, as my apology for not posting much

Over the hill? Nah.

Well, I’m officially 30.  No more “2″ in front of my age.  I guess this is a big deal.  I’m not really feeling that it’s a big deal.  Being 30 doesn’t really make me feel old.  Having a child that’s already 6 and closing in on 7 is what makes me feel old.  It doesn’t seem right that I should be 30, though.  I still feel like a kid playing house.  Is it really possible that I’m a grown-up, living with my husband in our own house and have four children?  No way.  One morning I’ll wake up and still be a teenager and it will all have been a dream, right?  Well, if it is a dream, I hope I don’t wake up any time soon because I’m loving it.

I can’t say that I’m exactly where I dreamed of being, at this point in my life, because I never would have pictured the path my life has taken.  When I remember the ideas and plans we had as we looked into the future, it just makes me laugh now.  We were so clueless, as is everyone when they’re dreaming out their lives.  You get out on your own, and life smacks you around a little, and then you grow up.  Sometimes the path God lays out for you seems better than the one you imagined, and sometimes it seems worse.  But it’s always best, and I am so glad He vetoed many of our grandiose schemes.  I love where 30 finds me.  The blessings and mercies in my life far outweigh the trials, and always have–even when the trials were all I could see at the moment.

“The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.  The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance….Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure…You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”  Psalm 16:5-6,9,11.

Over the hill?  No way.  I scoff at the hill.  Life is good, and since the Lord is my chosen portion and it is He who pours my cup, it can only remain good.  Bring on the 30’s.  I can’t wait to see what He has in store along this new path in my life.  After all, the best is yet to come, right?

Astonished confidence

At the Beth Moore conference this past weekend, her main text for the three sessions was Exodus 34:6-7, where God, after being asked by Moses to show Himself and refusing, gives us a beautiful description of Himself.  He calls Himself “‘The Lord, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…’”

As I listened to her teaching on each of these attributes, and then continued to mull them over in my mind over the past couple of days, my heart was just filled with the realization that I haven’t fully embraced some of these attributes of God.  God describes Himself as merciful and gracious–meaning not only does He withhold the punishment that we do deserve, but He bestows incredible favor upon us that we don’t deserve.  He says He is slow to anger and forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, which assures us that He’s not just waiting for us to mess up so that He can zap us.  He tells us that He will keep His love steadfast, or maintain His love, which is a promise that He will guard His love for us and keep it ever constant, regardless of our actions or failures.  What does it do to your heart to see God describe Himself in this way?  I’ll tell you what it did to mine.

It made me realize that there is evidence in my life of unbelief in some of God’s attributes.  He showed me that I carry so much guilt over our past poor stewardship in the area of finances, that it colors the way I look at current circumstances.  Because I carry that guilt, I see every new thing that comes up that will require unplanned expenses (and life brings a lot of those situations in a family of six) as just another consequence, or maybe even punishment, for our past failures.  But the Bible teaches that when God forgives, He throws that sin into the sea.  This doesn’t mean that there will not still be consequences for sin, but He does not continue to look for ways to punish us for past sin.  Why?  Because for believers, our sin has already been punished once for all on the Cross.  Therefore we can live each day with confidence.  Confidence that, even though it is bound up in our human nature that we will mess up, God has promised to be slow to anger.  Confidence that He loves to pour out mercy and grace upon His children.  Confidence that He abounds in love and faithfulness.  Confidence that He has promised to guard that love, keep it steadfast for a thousand generations.  And confidence that He will indeed forgive our failures.  Yes, there may be natural consequences that God allows us to face, but even in those consequences, He pours out His grace.  Just to go back to my personal example–we are still making relatively large payments on our credit cards, but each month He is faithful to provide.  He has not just abandoned us, even when our situation is due to our own sin.  He is faithful, He provides, He keeps the promises of Who He says He is.  So I will persevere to retrain my mind, to not just immediately sink into discouragement with every unplanned expense, to shake off the guilt and step into a walk of faith and trust and confidence that God will keep His promises to me.

But I also realized that confidence alone is not the proper response to these truths of God’s nature.  Confidence alone could lead to being careless with God’s grace, being careless with the knowledge that He will indeed forgive.  Confidence alone could lead to living like grace gives us a license to sin.  Paul addresses this type of thinking in Romans 6:  “What shall we say then?  Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?  By no means!  How can we who died to sin still live in it?”  (v 1-2)  If the only mindset that comes from understanding the attribrutes of God is confidence, then it will be too easy to just carelessly and knowingly sin, in an arrogant confidence that God will forgive anyway.

No, confidence must be accompanied by astonishment.  Astonishment comes from the heart of one who knows the depth of their depravity, and has yet been told that God loves them anyway.  Astonishment looks upon God’s mercy and forgiveness and unmerited favor with awe, with reverence, with pure worship and gratitude.  Astonishment alone is not enough either, because without confidence, astonishment could lead to disbelief in God’s promises and the assumption that they must not be true for me.  I think this is where I’ve been living lately.  I knew I had messed up, and although I never would have said it out loud or agreed with someone else who did, my mindset showed that part of me believed that God wouldn’t forgive that sin.  I was astonished that God would forgive me, and because I lacked the confidence to grasp that promise, I’ve been living under the weight of doubting God’s words.

But when astonishment meets confidence, God’s promises will be received and believed with the proper mixture of awe, reverence, worship, and true freedom from the chains that have been broken.  One who receives God’s promises with astonished confidence will never take them lightly.  He will feel the weight of the cost of the grace being bestowed on him–the cost being Calvary.  He will never abuse that grace by sinning freely under a guarantee of unlimited forgiveness.  But he will also never walk under the weight of guilt over past sins.  He will truly live like one forgiven.  Even if he is still paying the natural consequences for his sin, he will understand that God’s love and grace is still present.  He will realize that God abounds in love for him, and has promised to guard that love and never let it fade.

If you have one without the other, it will require a re-training of your thoughts to get out of the rut in which you’ve been walking.  Preach to yourself.  Repeat God’s promises straight out of His Word.  Ask someone to hold you accountable when you start slipping back into old thought habits.  A child of God should not be walking around under a cloud of guilt because he lacks confidence, nor should he be walking around being flippant with his own depravity and the sacrifice of Christ at Calvary.  Let us do whatever it takes to discipline our minds to receive the love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, and faithfulness of God with astonished confidence.

What happened in Memphis…

…apparently isn’t staying in Memphis since I’m publishing it here for anyone to read. But some of our memories were just too memorable to keep to ourselves. I know most of you reading this not only didn’t go on this trip but also have no clue who most of these people are, so just bear with me.

We had a great weekend at Beth Moore’s Living Proof Live in Memphis this past weekend. We took 13 ladies plus baby Rylee (Samuel’s future wife), and we truly had a great weekend, in spite of some crazy circumstances. A few of the more memorable moments…

* arriving at the Fed Ex Forum later than we intended (of course), walking as fast as we could the block or so from the van to the doors, then having to continue walking all the way around the building…in the rain…with a baby…and a lady in a wheelchair…and a blind girl…because all of the doors were exit only and we could not find an entrance. We finally found the entrance to the parking garage, and an event worker helped us pull the wheelchair up and around the ramp to get into the building.

* having to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud at Courtney’s whispered comments during the first session. Courtney, you crack me up.

* being struck by the awesome creativity of our Almighty God, when, as we stood waiting for our group to come down from the nosebleeds and thousands of ladies were crowding past, we immediately were able to pick out from the crowd of thousands those few faces that we knew. How creative our God is to make each face distinctly different.

* Pushing Courtney’s wheelchair back to the van, banging her into the signposts, then running her through the puddles in the parking lot.

* Getting to our hotel in Memphis, where 13,000+ women from 32 states are staying in hotels, only to see a woman from Salem as soon as we got into the lobby.

* Finding out that not only did the hotel give us rooms with only one bed and a sofabed when I had reserved two double beds, but the sofabeds did not have pillows and the hotel was out of extra pillows. Nice.

* Finally going to sleep about ??:00 only to have the alarm beep at 5:30 am.

* Being excited to actually arrive at the conference just in time for the doors to open, thinking we would have better seats, but then getting held up by the t-shirts, the camera confiscators, the difficulty of maneuvering a group of thirteen women–including one in a wheelchair and one blind–and a baby through a crowd of thousands, and the lack of accessible elevators for our “special needs” crew, and finally ending up in the exact same section we were in the night before, up so high we almost had altitude sickness.

* Thrilling to my very core as she described the scenes in Revelation 4 and 5 when the Lamb is found worthy to open the scroll and the Plan finally comes to fruition.

* Rejoicing in the faithfulness of God as He describes Himself in Exodus 34:6-7.

* Realizing that we had to go back to the hotel–a good 30 minutes away–because Scharlene’s Bible not only got taken in the hotel accidentally and without her knowledge, but it also got left in the hotel accidentally and without her knowledge.

* Taking a good half hour to make it out of the center due to the same slow-ness inducing issues described above, heading back to the van, deciding to do lunch at the mall right across the street, deciding just to drive a block or two over to park closer, and finally getting parked at our destination about another half hour later. Driving around downtown Memphis can be confusing.

* Having more issues finding our way into buildings. In the parking garage we went up two levels looking for the walkway into the mall, then decided maybe it was on the bottom level, went back down to the bottom, and found the elevator group inside the garage, the stairs group out in the alley with the dumpsters behind the garage, and realized we were separated by a locked gate.

* Finally getting reunited around the other side of the garage, finally making it into the mall, reading the restaurants off the directory, making our choices, and heading into the mall to discover that all of those restaurants were actually not in existence. The only choices were Maggie Moo’s, a chocolate factory, and Jillian’s, where we almost decided to go until we realized that one of our group won’t be 21 until next month.

* Deciding to try TGI Friday’s down the street, being told they had an hour wait, sending Tricia to plead our case, and finally getting seated to eat lunch about an hour and a half after the conference ended.

* Hearing the phones ring as husbands started calling to find out how close their wives were to being home and hearing the wives tell them, “Um, we’re still in downtown Memphis and we still have to go back to the hotel before we head home.”

* Finally getting out, getting the Bible, and stopping to gas up the van and potty up, and learning that the women’s bathroom was out of order.

* Getting on the road, starting to make good progress, and then sitting in construction traffic for about an hour.

* Arriving home a little after 9:00, only 2 1/2 hours after the time I had estimated we would be back.

* Spending two days with twelve awesome ladies (and Rylee) with whom I loved getting better acquainted, sharing experiences that only we will think are funny a few months from now, and triumphing over irritating circumstance after irritating circumstance by having a blast in spite of them. Even though it seemed for awhile that our way was being blocked at everything we attempted, we didn’t let it ruin our party, and I feel truly blessed to have been in the presence of those twelve ladies for those two days. Thanks, girls!!

A thousand thanks to my selfless hubby who without hesitation encouraged me to take this weekend away months before he even knew that Grandmama and Poppaw would be able to come help him out, and thanks to Grandmama and Poppaw for helping my crew fill the hours without Mommy. Looking forward to the next Salem Baptist Church Women’s Outing, whenever and wherever it may be!!