As a Sparrow Alone

It's nearly zero this cold, snowy morning on the prairie.

My hubby has turned on the furnace and fixed the wood stove as everyone is getting up and around.

I had wakened an hour and a half or two early, thinking and praying.

And I sit on the edge of the bed by the window with my Bible now to begin the day.

It's Psalm 102 today.

"I lie awake, and am like a sparrow alone..."

And yes, I had lain awake, and now I look out the window at the tree and the snow, and this is what I see.

How did God know?

How many times has God comforted me with the sight of a sparrow?
Like the time when I was about 20, and had been invited to travel to China with friends to share the gospel and Bibles.

I had been sitting in the attic of our big old farmhouse in PA, and was feeling afraid, after hearing about the Beijing massacre. 

But that day, I was reading about Christ saying how sparrows are sold for a little bit of nothing, and how much more He cares for us.

And just at that precise moment, a little brown sparrow landed on the windowsill of that attic.

How did God know? How did it happen at that precise moment as I was reading about a sparrow?

There it landed--right on the windowsill.

It took one look at that astonished girl sitting there and flew right on its way.

But I knew that God knew. 

And that He had sent the sparrow to let me know it was okay to go. 

That He would be with me. 

And He was.

And once again, on a snowy morning in Colorado, He sent sparrows to bring His Word to life. 

When I went back later, the birds were gone. 

It seemed they had been there just for me!

"He shall regard the prayer of the destitute," that Psalm had said,

and shall not despise their prayer."

"From heaven the Lord viewed the earth, to hear the groaning of the prisoner, and to release those appointed to death."

And just when we think our dreams and hopes are dead,

He brings something to life again. 

Just when we wonder if anything in our life is worthwhile, He reminds us that we are just a vessel in the hand of a Potter. He sees the pure heart's desire despite the imperfect ways we are,

just as we love our children for who they are, 

and admire their work and hang it on the frig to let them know they are valued, 

and so is their work, even though it isn't without mistake yet.

We may feel like a sparrow alone, but God knows even when the single lonely sparrow falls to the ground.

 

 He is there to pick it up, to fluff its feathers so that once again

it can  sit on its branch in the frosty morning

and sing.

Just When You Think You Have Life By the Tail

About the time you think you have life by the tail...

 it runs away with you!

 Just when you are enjoying ultra beautiful and warm weather, 

the next storm blows in, sinking the temperature twelve degrees in ten minutes,

and almost sixty degrees in a few hours.

 At least that is what happens here in Colorado, like it did Monday.

Sometimes, if you are watching the signs or the forecasts, you know storms are coming. 

Then you can reschedule morning classes for afternoon and head out to repair the snow fence, move more wheelbarrow loads of topsoil from the pile by the corner of the house, move pumpkins indoors, batten down tarps over hay, clean up the yard, bring in wood and kindling, unload Sunday's stuff from the vehicle.

By evening or the next morning, over the way, you see the neighbor's horses with coats on.

 So the storm hits, and your husband meets you on the edge of town where you are dropping a daughter at a house cleaning job

to take your little girl the rest of the way on bad roads in his four-wheel-drive truck to the hand and wrist doctor for a final X-ray.

So the storm hits, and drives you out of your comfort zone.

 And that is when you are grateful for the comfort of hooded coats, mittens, and boots and scarves.

You linger a little longer in the warm grocery store, peaceful compared to the bitter and snowy cold outdoors, and you notice the long line at Starbucks.

We all need something to comfort us when the storm hits. Will it just be coffee, or will it be

our Refuge, our Rock, 

and our Shelter from the storm?

Will it be just fresh doughnuts, made during the cold evenings when the temperature is near zero,

 or will it be savoring the promises of a faithful God?

As my favorite blogger, Ann Voskamp says,

"Anybody can be a cynic. Cynicism is laziness in every way. 

The real heroes are the ones who never stop looking for the possibility of joy.

They are the ones who feel again all the ways He loves.

Even during the storms.

When Things Go Bump in the Night

You are sleeping peacefully, and suddenly you jerk awake.

What was that?

Your sleepy husband lets you know it was the helium balloon on the ceiling. 

There's this sudden soft bumpety, bump, bump, bump!

 Hannah had put the balloon close to the wood stove to heat the helium, and then the leftover balloon puffs up and rises to the ceiling again.

  Little by little, it floats all around, just like uncontrolled thoughts in your mind that just float around wherever they please until you grab the string and pull them under control.

 Hurts, dreams, worries--some of which can really get blown out of proportion in no time flat.

 Worries about things which might never happen--ending up like a ballooning gourd that's really all hollow inside.

 You really could be sleeping peacefully or going about your daily duties with a thankful heart, 

but those pesky balloons go bump in the night and the worries gotta nestle up close every time you try to notice the beauty at hand.

 What about remembering that you can choose?

There will be lots of bumps in the night from runaway balloons, and there will be lots of hollow dreams and worries and wonderings about what is going to come next.

You can choose to trust God and  just do the next thing.

  You can set out the fruit and the sugar and the jar of granola and the pitcher of pretty leaves, and prepare for a nice breakfast next morning.

You can stand in awe as the children shout that there is a butterfly inside the house and how did it get there?

Wings unfolded like a beautiful hope--folding and unfolding and waiting for its day of release into the blue autumn sky.

Like the real beauty of hope and patience and perseverance through trials--

qualities that always find their reward in time.
Not the artificiality of a puffed up runaway balloon
 with the words "Thank You," scrawled across it,
but the real beauty of real, inward, living thanksgiving and trust in God--
because you will never be where He has not already been.
Because as Corrie ten Boom reminds us, there will be no hole so deep that His love does not go winging deeper still.

When There's Always the Sieve of Opinions

Unless you are a hermit, you're likely to discover that everything you say and do ends up going through the sieve of other people's opinions.

Unless, like I said, you become a hermit, and then, be sure people will have opinions about that.

Don't worry.

The things other people say and do go through the same sieve.

It's not the sieve that matters so much as the quality of the pumpkin going through it. 

When your actions and words and attitudes have all been chopped to pieces,

bubbled, and boiled,

skinned,

mashed, smashed and squeezed through the sieve,

will the end product be gold--or dross?

It's not the sieve that matters.
It's the pumpkin.
The black horned mon-steer can chew the pumpkin to bits, but it's still pumpkin.

It can come out transformed into meat, or milk, or eggs, or sausage.
Or it can be dumped in the compost heap as garbage--and still be transformed into something useful down the road. 

It's really not so important the grade that people give you--
people who can only read faces and dresses and nose tilts and trembling chins and narrowed eyes and furrowed brows and smiles and voices that miss the beat,
but who can't read what's inside the heart.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3, confronted a fledgling church where there were squabbles and jealousy and divisions;
but in the very next chapter, he chided those who thought they were of such spiritual stature as to be even greater than the apostles who brought the gospel to them.
They thought they were gorgeous,  Cinderella pumpkins...

compared to the common, ordinary, despised apostles who really were rather dumb, uneducated, defamed, un-illustrious, funny-shaped ministers like Paul who had some sort of embarrassing thorn in the flesh to buffet him.

 Matthew Henry writes, "He that would make it his chief endeavor to please men would hardly approve himself a faithful servant of Christ. He...must despise the censures of men for His sake. The best of men are too apt to judge rashly and harshly. It is a comfort that men are not to be our final judges."

Thus he cautions the Corinthians, and us as well, against censoriousness. To judge out of season or to judge "the secret springs and principles" of others' actions is "to assume the seat of God."
And have we not all at times felt like someone was acting like God over us when they judged the motives of what we have done or said?
Henry goes on, "We should be very careful how we censure others, when we have a Judge from whom we cannot conceal ourselves.

 "Christians may well be patient under unjust censures, when they know such a day as this is coming. But how fearful should they be of
 loading any with reproaches now
 whom their common Judge shall hereafter commend."
The gold in the clouds of the censures we may be receiving is this comfort--
that God is a just Judge, and also a merciful One.

Perhaps when we are judged, it should remind us of how others feel when we put their actions and words and attitudes through the sieve.
What if we reached out to help when they are in the sieve, instead of deciding they are sinful or carnal in how they are dealing with a situation?
What if we lifted the load that they are falling under instead of loading their backs
with reproaches and criticism on top of everything else they are carrying?

What if we consider to be just a bunch of pumpkin
what God is refining into gold?

When A Day Turns Pumpkin Orange

 It's wonderful when there is a bright, happy day like one we had this week when Sam discovered free pumpkins on Craig's List...

to make up for the other days that turn into toothpaste all over your kid's clothes.

That kind of thing usually happens about ten minutes before you are supposed to leave for revival service.

Someone announces that your little son sat on the toothpaste. 

How, may I ask, did he do that?

And you hurry into the bathroom, and sure enough there is this huge blob of toothpaste on the sink, and you can't imagine how he sat in it up on the sink,

and your littlest daughter is asking how much toothpaste costs, and you wish all you had to worry about was how many dollars' worth of toothpaste was in that blob on the sink.

Somehow, taking a picture of your son who is giggling ferociously and fleeing up the stairs, 

is your chosen method of dealing with the situation for one fast, fleeting, and frumptioudilious moment. (Don't ask me what frumptioudilious means, but it sounded like a suitable description.)

Anyway, as I was saying, it is nice when you can drop everything and go fill up your van with humongilious pumpkins to feed your steers, pigs, goats, and chickens,

because there are other days like today when you have to turn in a DVD to the library that your kids left in the computer, and you accidentally turned in the case to the library without the DVD inside.

And then when you got the first notice by email, you forgot about it.

And then there was the second notice--letting you know that if you don't return it, you will be charged $30.00. At best, you are going to be charged the fine for all the days it is overdue.

So you take it into the library, and the library man disappears into the back room.

And after a very long time, he returns with another lady, and by the time they get to you, there are three library workers staring at you with the looks that policemen give you when you have committed a crime. 

You know you haven't tried to steal anything, but you can feel the heat creeping up your face.

And then after you are told that your late fee will probably be around $10 on top of the fine, you go to the grocery store and your littlest kids have this problem with the car cart they are blazing around the store in, where the single front wheel is jammed under in some way such that you have to put all your weight on the cart handle to lift the front of the cart up just so you can--

head out of the store again. 

It's just not worth looking for markdowns today, thank you, when you still have more errands to run.

And so happy days full of Cinderella pumpkins for pies and gourds for birdhouses (says Timmy)

kind of help make up for days full of toothpaste and library fines and "Didn't you really mean to steal this?" stares on people's faces.

And you remind yourself, "This is not the end of the world. I am not the first mom to have to take in forgotten DVDs and pay fines, and I am not the first mom to leave the store before you start shopping. Like a book I refer to often, Telling Yourself the Truth, says,

it is uncomfortable, but it is not terrible. 

It is not horrible. 

You can take your now empty CD case home (which you put the library DVD in to keep it safe) and put it on the shelf, and you can put the whole ordeal  on the shelf

and just enjoy the rest of your day.

Because pumpkin days happen to everyone, and so do toothpaste blob and library fine days.

It's part of the total human experience--and it's okay to just grin and post another picture of a beautiful sunset on your blog.

How Can I Give Enough Thanks?

November is the month set aside for giving thanks.

How can I give enough thanks for something as ordinary as water?

But when our cistern regularly runs low and we have to carry water from a neighbor or from town,

we can't take it for granted.

Especially when God works a special miracle for us like He did last fall and winter.

 For about seven months, during which we were under some unbearable issues, something miraculous happened with our cistern. 

It never ran out.

We could not figure it out in any human way. 

All we knew was that God was providing water out of the rock to supply our needs.

And then at about the same time that relief came in the situation,
the water suddenly ran out again.
How can I describe the sense of comfort in seeing how God provided in such a tangible way to let us know that He knew, and He cared for us.?

********

And then there is the blessing of milk.

Ever since we got our milk goat, our girls have never had to cry because their tummies were hurting like they were on a daily basis when we were using store bought milk.

It was a huge decision for a mother of seven children and a baby just a month or two old to make the decision five years ago to buy a goat.

Jonathan thought it would be too much for me, so I had to make the decision myself. I knew it would mean a lot of work, but I felt we needed to give goat milk a try, and we could always sell the goat again. The older children learned how to milk in two lessons, and have taken turns milking faithfully twice a day since. 

Almost miraculously, our one goat just goes on producing milk without having to have her bred every year. A neighbor said he knows of a lady who had a goat that milked over three years, but that was almost unheard of.

Until our goat came along! 

Once again, God keeps providing for us in almost miraculous ways.

*********

And do we give enough thanks for daily bread?

 And for daughters who step up to take Crystal's place while she is gone back east.

Here they are making spaghetti and green beans for supper.

 Pumpkin for pies and desserts...

 bubbling on the woodstove.

 

And health and strength to work outdoors...

or climb Grandpa and Grandma's evergreen tree,

and hang upside down therefrom.

When I called Grandpa to ask if Sam could help him with anything while the other children were at Kids Klub, he said the yard could be raked and Sam could help him with cutting some lumber for a project they needed to do before they move. 

We all went along at first for a while to help rake the leaves so Sam could help with the sawing projects.

It was such a blessing to have the fun of working outdoors where there was actually green grass

and leaves under trees!

There's nothing like the warm, moist smell of sunshine on grass and leaves!

Or on purple cosmos and aspen!