Stuck in the Muck

Last week, Sam got our van stuck in the waterlogged pasture as he tried to hitch up the trailer to load our pigs. 

So Jonathan had to pull the van out with his truck, and then he tried to back up his truck to hitch the trailer to it--and he sank it to the axles in the mud.

The more he tried to get out, the deeper he sank--

and how many words do I need to use to say, "Does that sound familiar?"

You might even ask other people for help in seeing things from a different perspective,

to help give you a push out of your stuck place. 

Other people might help, or they might hinder.

Often, if they aren't wise, they just muddy things up even worse.

Most people aren't that great a help in digging you out.

Just like you aren't usually that great a help when someone else is stuck.

You can dig around in the dirt (which usually just makes a pile of mud and doesn't get to the root of the problem anyhow)

and push like crazy 

but sometimes things just won't improve.

You have to just step back, lean on your shovel, look the other way for a while

where the geese are calmly swimming freely in the pond,

and "Be still and know that I am God."

There are times when the only One Who can deliver us and help us

is Somebody Bigger Than You and I.

And He has to come from a standpoint of the solid ground of Truth,

and not from the shifting sands and waterlogged mud of human opinions. 

How good it is to have a neighbor who "happened" to be using a backhoe in the next property over, who saw our helplessness and came to see if he could help.

And how near the Lord is if we'd only call on Him!

"He's only a prayer away,"

as close as a breath, like a neighbor just the next property over.

"God shall help her, and that right early."

He has the greatest backhoe in the world,

and all the equipment necessary to pull us out of the deep miry clay of sin, of discouragement,

of confusion, or of unhealed hurt.

Sometimes the deliverance happens suddenly, sometimes in increments.

The backhoe shovel would pull the truck a few feet, and then our neighbor would have to back up and reposition and start over.

And finally the truck came free!

We whooped and cheered!

It was the second time in just five days that one of our vehicles had gotten stuck. 

Snow was pelting on our way home Friday from Carrie's violin rehearsal, and Jonathan said it was the worst possible kind of snow. He was way back in town delivering a new pump to a home with a water issue while I was driving our van home--and started fishtailing.

Mercifully, I managed to pull off the road onto a pull-off, 

and the driver behind me gave me a thumbs-up. 

But I could not see, and as I tried to back out into the road again, I instead backed right into the ditch!

(Where was the guy with the thumbs up?)

There I sat--helplessly stuck!

 "You could have tried to park us less sideways!"

the girls teased, as they tried to keep from sliding down their seats.

 We were in for a long wait as Jonathan said on the phone that he'd have to first stop and buy a tow chain or rope.

I was so thankful that despite being almost sideways in the ditch (well, not quite)

we were at least well off that slushy, slippery road.

After about half an hour, Hannah was getting restless, and I suggested we sing.

And it was just then that a rancher in a big truck with a long horse trailer on behind

pulled up by my window and asked if he could help.

 I couldn't help noticing that it was just after we'd decided to sing--

instead of to complain--

that help suddenly appeared. 

Would thankfulness and praise bring victories to us sooner if only we would be that simple?

 I took him up on his offer, and he backed up and pulled over by my van, fishtailing in the snow with his huge trailer loaded with at least three curious horses. 

He pulled out a big chain and connected it to my van.

Despite hearing him use a swear word, I thought he might as well have been an angel.

"Let me do the work!" he advised. 

"Just give me a little help!"

And in our helpless, stuck situations, we really don't have any choice but to rely on a Stronger One to pull us out.

"Just let Me do the work!" He's reminding us. (We can't do the work anyway, stuck in the muck like that!)

"Just give Me a little help!" He adds.

There was something about feeling that ranch truck's tug.

And we will all recognize the tug of the Holy Spirit when He is getting ready to pull us out of a stuck spot. 

He can't do it without our cooperation. 

We need to respond.

When we sense that tug that comes after we've surrendered a situation completely into His hands and taken our hands off the wheel,

we need to be willing to "step on it,"

take that step--just whatever little step the Lord wants us to do.

One small step, with Him at the wheel and His power in control, may be all it will take to get the situation out of the muck. 

That may be all it will take before the rainbow of hope appears again.

One small step may be all it will take to be able to look up to the sunshine again.

Tu-Lips to Praise

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote,

"Let us resolve: First to attain the grace of silence;

second, to deem all fault-finding that does no good a sin;

third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise."

Sammy graciously stopped the van so I could take a picture of these tulips before pulling out of the street where we had dropped Carrie for her violin lesson.
Her teacher's apple tree was in bloom.

And more tulips were blooming at Faith Covenant Bible Church in the Springs where we attended several convention services a couple weeks ago.

It's easy to praise God for tulips and hyacinths and pretty little girls.

It's not always easy to praise Him for mud and musty smells and little girls who bug the daylights out of her bigger brothers, for vehicle problems and computer crashes and misunderstandings and wounded spirits.

But part of living a Spirit-filled life is to give thanks in everything. 

Jonathan and I put that into practice last week as we discussed some issues we were dealing with--and how I'd read that praise can make the difference.

Together we bowed and submitted to the command to give thanks in everything.

We thanked God for all the hurt in the situation--believing that He was working it for good.

It was not easy--and tears choked me up.

It did not seem smart. It seemed silly and stupid to say, "Thank You for all this hurt."

But God did not want us to be smart. He just wanted us to be simple. 

He didn't want us to be perfect. He just wanted us to obey.

And we are watching His transforming power at work!

Again the next morning something hurtful that someone had said long ago came back to me.
I did the hard thing--I said, "Thank You, God, that they said that!"

It seemed stupid. Maybe I could have worded my thanks so it sounded smarter.
But I was just trying out this idea of actually thanking God for the difficult thing. 

I just obeyed what I had read about, and what I discovered a little later was that choosing to give thanks for the accusation enabled me to give it to the Lord--and I promptly forgot about it instead of having it gnawing at me.

I'm not saying I always do this. I don't. Something else came up that I struggled with for a while.

But I just know that there were a couple incidents in the last couple days where giving thanks worked for me. So I am sharing that and plan to share more.

Carrie celebrated her "Sweet Sixteenth" birthday.

She made a "Grandma's Cake" that had pineapple and banana in it.

Her friends Emily and Joanna came to spend overnight with her. They had a ball!

Carrie is getting ready to open a couple of her gifts.

Carrie's violin teacher gave her a bouquet of flowers from a funeral

(we had to forget the funeral part)

and we stuck a fresh sprig of lilacs from Grandma Lucas in with it.

Floods Upon the Dry Ground

Sometimes we feel as parched as a thirsty prairie,

and as burnt out as the heating element in our water heater which Jonathan had to replace a week ago.

 After years of drought or near drought conditions,

it has been refreshing to experience heavy rains--even though the rains bring their own set of problems!

Like I read recently from "Murphy's Laws,"

"Every solution breeds its own problems!"

 But we get to choose to focus on the problems or on the answer to prayer--

God sent rain!

After helping one afternoon when our church basement had flooded, we ran an errand for Jonathan that took us over this bridge over raging Cheyenne Creek in town.

 At home we all celebrated the rain by going out to our pasture to see how much water had accumulated in our seasonal pond and gully.

 We stood there and thanked God for every little bit of water in this pond,

but little did we know how much more God was going to send!

 Of course, the Jersey loves to be curious.

 He also loves his face scratched.

 The next evening we celebrated Hannah's sixth birthday.

 Hard to believe my littlest girlie is six.

 She had a lot of fun helping the girls and me decorate the yummy chocolate chip cupcakes

with pastel icing and sprinkles and real violas.

 I had gotten this cupcake stand on clearance at Safeway for Carrie's birthday.

 Grandma and Grandpa came out to help celebrate.

 And that weekend the rains just poured and the snow pelted.

And even the dams the boys and Jonathan built to try to keep the water under control

weren't able to contain the floodwaters.

 Once again, we visited the pond

and you can see how much it had swollen.

 Even though the rain's side effects left our basement soggy in places and window wells filling up,

we were so grateful for this wonderful answer to 

specific and fervent prayer that God would please fill up our pond!

 Here is what it looked like from our house.

 And the God who knew how starved a Pennsylvania girl was for streams and splashing water

sent not just one but two streams of water gushing through our pasture on Sunday.

Thus does our God pour water on him who is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground.

Last week in the convention at Faith Covenant Bible Church in town,

God poured water on thirsty hearts.

It was a blessing to us to have two more of our children stand up to testify for the first time.

How good God is!

Mother's Day Flooding

For days we've been blessed with rain--too much, in fact.

And then there was hail and snow--so much snow on the road last night that on our way home from Carrie's violin recital our van landed in the ditch.

But that is another story.

The north side of our house was plastered with snow.

And our basement has water seeping in from several places, flooding into carpet, etc. 

And the sump pump suddenly quit.

We spent hours Saturday moving boxes, bins, and stuff to dry places and moving shelves and furniture, rolling up wet carpet and using shop vacs to sop up water.

But anyway, after a late night and Jonathan and Sam taking turns getting up to turn on a pump in the window well and dip one out by hand,

we woke to a very special Mother's Day!

When I pulled up the blinds, there was a whole flock of these colorful yellow-headed blackbirds

in the austree just outside the window.

The males of these birds have yellow heads, and the females have yellow throats. 

The first thing I did was go check the basement and slurp up two shop vacs of water which had run over the "dams" Jonathan had built on the floor last night.

He has drilled a few holes in the concrete by now, so the water seeping in will drain into the foundation drain and that should take care of most of the water in the basement. 

But after that,

 all morning there were colorful birds all over this tree and the south side of the house and pasture.

We were unable to go to church because of the flooded mess we were in, and the exhausting night,  but I felt like God sent some colorful messengers of His love and care to this mother 

who has been literally pining for streams and trees and flowers and pretty Pennsylvania birds.

 Jonathan and the children don't understand how I feel because they were all born or raised in Colorado, but for someone who was born and raised with the woods and flowers and colorful birds of Pennsylvania,

there are some things that I miss a lot.

And so it just seemed that God understood that, and He sent one colorful bird after another into the heavy, wet snow on Mother's Day morning out here on the prairie. 

There were robins and red-breasted finches and two kinds of yellow birds.

 I just reveled in the sight of all those birds as the snow plow went by on the road.

I don't think we would have seen all those birds if it hadn't been for the snow keeping them off the ground and from being camouflaged.

 "Why do so many bad things have to happen?" Hannah whimpered last night after spending nearly half an hour in the van in the ditch in the pelting snow before a kind rancher offered to pull us out, and then creeping home on those awful roads to a flooded property and to a big mess and several children having to sleep on the floor upstairs since their bedrooms were in a huge upheaval.

It did seem that quite a few things were going wrong all at once.

But we prayed and thanked God for bringing us home safely, that we had a dry upstairs, and a daddy who was taking care of us. 

It had been a fun couple of hours at Carrie's violin recital which most of us were able to attend.

                                    

She was part of the beginners ensemble.

 Their first song was "Hickory, Dickory, Dock," a very cute piece in which they plucked their strings.

 Carrie's teacher is a very sweet lady from a family of 12 children and originally from Kazakstan.

                                     

Carrie also played with other older children accompanying the children who sang "Edelweis," "Amazing Grace," "He Lives," "Over the Rainbow," and "I Will Sing of the Mercies of the Lord."

 We loved watching the cute little children singing. The little girl in pink is a twin to the little boy in a black suit beside her, children of Carrie's violin teacher.

 At the end of the recital, the children were given roses to give to their mothers for Mother's Day.

 And each of the participants received a certificate and a rose. 

Here Carrie is receiving a rose and certificate from her teacher.

 The participants posing for a photo.

 Carrie is second from the right in the back row.

 Teacher Natalia presented with flowers, too.

 The beautiful red rose Carrie gave me last night, with her own white one.

 I decided to give my children gifts for Mothers Day--something for everyone and some things to share.

And a photo album about our 20th anniversary and 20 happy years together

for Jonathan which I had meant to give him for his birthday and forgot about.

Outside there were a few beautiful scenes if you aimed at just the right spot

and missed all the flooded and muddy areas.

The sun was melting most of the snow this afternoon.

 But the northern side of this tree kept its snow even after much of the rest of the snow melted.

 This looked like Pennsylvania!

We all went for a walk this evening wearing rubber boots through our flooded pasture.

 And I couldn't help feeling so thankful like the Lord really cared about a mom who has been

starved for streams and trees and colorful spring birds

and so He sent a big snow and a flooded basement to keep us home on Mother's Day

so I could enjoy all the streams and birds and 

know it was God's gift.

At least that is how I interpreted this event.

God is so creative in how He cares for His children's needs and even wants--

and He can use what could seem like something bad

and turn it into a blessing if we have 

eyes to see it and a heart to receive it.