Whispers of Truth

After having spent all but a handful of years of my life steeped in learning and/or enforcing the rules of classrooms, walking away from those rules and the position of governing a very small kingdom as a lesser ruler has been difficult even though I left the classroom three years ago now. The money I earned was far easier to walk away from than the feeling that I controlled my small kingdom of a classroom in an area of expertise. My flesh keeps rising up in rebellion as I keep stepping off the throne of my paltry life and stepping down into the quicksand of this world. Those the least bit familiar with the Bible probably know the verses Jesus spoke about the difficulties of a rich man entering heaven (Matthew 19:21-24). Somewhere in me lives the absurd picture of a camel straining hopelessly to pass through the eye of a tiny needle. As a quilter, this hits home, as I can’t even thread my needle nowadays without my bifocals, and even then it still doesn’t come easily to me, so the abs...

The desire to be accepted or reconcile can sometimes ruin seemingly good sense. One of those times in my life that I have probably mentioned before because it was formative was my twelfth birthday party, when I invited a huge cross-section of friends to spend a Friday night and all day Saturday with me celebrating and playing together. Needless to say, I was young and lacked a great deal of any sense at all in wanted everyone to like me and just enjoy being together. I was a bridge that was not to be crossed living somewhere in the realm of the distant outside of being truly close to anyone in my class at that time. I played softball (poorly) with the athletic group and participated in band (eagerly) with the others and pulled in a few people on the periphery who didn’t have affiliations with either all while subsidizing my life with imaginative literature.  Maybe one would say I liked everyone and just wanted them to all get along—wishful thinking at best, destructive at worst....

Early this morning as the plane I was in flew high out of Montgomery tracking towards Atlanta, I noticed (not for the first time) how much water there is in our neck of the woods—streams, ponds, rivers, tributaries, lakes, swamps—such an abundance of water. It’s ubiquitous.  Seeing all that winding water made me wonder why the rivers meander so. Why did God not make them to run in straighter lines? I had to look up why rivers meander when I had a chance and found it interesting. So I will share.  “Meanders,” or a river’s winding over land in a series of loops, is an actual label given by geologists to describe the phenomenon one can clearly see from the air. Steven Fentress speaks of this in an interesting online article with pictures to illustrate for those uninitiated ( https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/why-rivers-dont-flow-in-straight-lines.php ). Fentress says meanders occur “whenever there’s a steady flow of water over nearly flat land of fine-textured soils...

Maybe I’ve walked in your shoes, but more than likely not those exact shoes. Even though I am a woman, my struggles are my own, and my battles look different than yours. My successes differ as well and have not come by my own efforts, although they’ve sometimes been hard won. My circumstances, like yours, constantly seem to shift, and as I grow older, I am finding that the warp and woof of my life are creating a unique, changing texture, and in His way God has used and is using and will use those circumstances to mold me into conformity to His will, to grow me up into Him.   Often, I find the women I speak with struggle in particular with the busyness of their lives and the seemingly-impossible task of finding quiet time to spend with God, to sit at His feet in worship, to learn who He is, His nature, His attributes. Because of this, women often feel defeated, and the hard things in life sap the little energy they do have, and the world becomes a welcome distraction in that tiredn...

  I pick up the petals as they fall And keep them in plain sight But I am unable  To keep them alive I see their vibrant colors fading I watch them shrivel and dry And wonder at how short a time I get to enjoy them alive I prop up the little note You wrote me with your bold hand So I can see it nestled among The shriveling petals where it stands alive The living words planted in my heart thrive much longer than the fading flowers of this world Alive