This summer, my husband, kids and I attended our annual family reunion on my husband’s mom’s side of the family. My husband’s grandparents gather us there together every year. Each year, we play a game to help us understand and remember Grandpa and Grandma’s background and the decisions they made to get them where they are today. Many of those decisions included Grandpa’s proposal to Grandma (despite the fact that she was engaged to someone else), the cars they bought, and what led them to sell the dairy farm they owned for many years. (Many more family secrets that I shall not divulge :))
One of the things that struck me this year is that we all were sitting there in that room because of their choices.
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A few years back I was in direct sales and had the opportunity to make cold calls, which means calling people you barely know and asking them to have a party in their house to help pay your bills. This, of course, was not my favorite part of my job and I realized quickly that I needed a new perspective on what I was doing.
One of the things that the leadership of the direct sales company I worked for told me (being experts in the word no) is that when you see and hear the word no, it is really a step closer to a yes.
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Oftentimes, when my husband leaves for work in the morning, he will tell the kids that he wants “a good report” when he gets home. It is, as you can imagine, always very helpful to me as I can remind the kids of dad’s words throughout the day.
No, my sons; it is not a good report that I hear spreading among the Lord’s people. 1 Samuel 2:24
There was a man in the Bible, a priest, who did not get a good report about his sons while he was away. Eli, the priest over Samuel, found out that his sons were not honoring God in their offerings and they were also sleeping with women who served at the Tent of Meeting.
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I have found a sweet spot with my ten-year-old son. The time that he will actually talk to me and tell me the deep things of his heart is at night before he goes to bed. He does not always want to talk, but usually if I am exhausted and ready to drop into bed fairly quickly, he is ready to do some heavy chatting.
Tonight, we started talking and he said that he either wanted to be a preacher or a game producer, meaning he wanted to make new DS games available to kids. I told him that whatever he should do, the Lord would make it clear to him and that the Lord could use him in whatever career choice he made.
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Wow! I feel like I just went to the movies and watched the all-time Summer Smash Hit! The movie was cheaper and better than I have seen in a long time.
The movie title, you ask? . . .
4 Days in Genesis.
Huh?
When is the last time you took a couple of days and read through a whole book of the Bible–especially Genesis? I promise I am not trying to make you feel guilty because the Lord knows that this is the first time in a loooonnnng time that I have done anything like this.
One of my co-workers emailed everyone this week and wanted to know if we wanted to be her accountability partners in a 90 day Read-through-the-Bible challenge.
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Awhile back I was really frustrated with my husband. We were outside in the yard and I honestly cannot remember what I was mad at him about (I’m sure it was huge at the time, but probably petty in the big scheme of things) but I said, “You know you are a lot like God.” He looked at me and I could tell he was kind of puffed up at the thought of being like God. I said, “Yeah, you are a lot like God because you never change!” We laugh at this moment now, but at that point I was not laughing.
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I am a garden fanatic. I love to buy plants. Come to think about it, maybe I am just a shopping fanatic and flowers are just a pretty outlet. Anyway, my garden is kind of my baby and each year I go to the garden center to find many flowers to fill my empty soil. This year I planted all kinds of things like morning glories, verbena, zinnia and lots of herbs. They are all just gorgeous and the smell of the herbs is amazing.
I work from home part time, home school one of my kids and do all of my mom/wife duties from my house so basically I see my house like a big work pit!
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Oftentimes when my kids (ages 9 and 7) are cleaning their rooms they will come to me and chime, “I’m done.” Now it’s not that I don’t trust them to do a good job; it is just that I think they may have overlooked an area, like sweeping or putting their laundry away. My response to them is always, “Go look again, pretend you are mom and look through mommy’s eyes.” They run back to their rooms and I see them getting a broom or staying in there for another thirty minutes or so.
I think this is what God wants us to do sometimes when we go to Him with a particular area of struggle and say, “I’m done.
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