As we think things out in His presence, God guides our minds.
“As we think things out in His PRESENCE, God guides our minds.” – J.I. Packer
As we think things out in His presence, God guides our minds.
“As we think things out in His PRESENCE, God guides our minds.” – J.I. Packer
As we think things out in His presence, God guides our minds.
“As we think things out in His PRESENCE, God guides our minds.” – J.I. Packer
Helpful Hint to Ourselves for Packing, plus Bees’ Wings…
I can snap PHOTOS of beloved mementos, and keepsakes (snap photos of family photos in frames, for example!) as I pack lifelong bulky treasures away into boxes, for storage that will go on for future months or years. These photos I can keep with me, on my phone or computer.
It’s a little way of easing the processes of transition. Another little thing I’m doing to manage my stress level right now as we get ready to move continents is I’ve written a few of my many favorite Names of God, found in the Bible, out in marker on colored slips of paper and have taped them all over the apartment, in places where I spend time. Above the kitchen sink. Beside my “desk” table. In the living room. “Inspirer”. “Healer”. “Nourisher”. “Faithful”. “Slow-to-Anger”. “Peace”. “God-with-me (Emanuel)” .When my eyes fall on these little labels my mind and emotions are led into worship, thanksgiving and prayer, for a few seconds each time. “Kind”. “Defender”. Ass I move around in the apartment sorting, cleaning and packing, I breathe, and I say thank you. “Queller-of-storms”. “Desire”. “Satisfier”.
I know that MANY PEOPLE face MUCH transition in modern-day life in our world, for a huge variety of different reasons. There are “transitions” on many different levels. It’s not just moving house, it’s not just traveling, and it’s not just me. I hope these two little ideas help somebody else to deal with transition in their life, today, with less stress, the way the little ideas and practices are helping me. We’re companioning each other in this day, which also reduces stress…
Contentment, for me a huge Key to Joy
By that I’m not saying that I think this woman should be content necessarily with having to wash clothes in such labor-intensive fashion. I’m just using the photo as a general, over-arching illustration of the value of contentment in allowing peace and joy to come in, sit down, and make itself at home in a person’s life. The concept’s related to the oft-repeated phrase, these days, of “being mindful”, “being intentional”, and “being in the moment”.
The Joy and Health of Making Things Ourselves
We went to visit family in Guatemala, and during our time with them we went to this place where people had made these by hand in a tiny room with very simple tools and ingredients. We watched women and men and teenagers making these and I noticed how absorbed, peaceful and joyful each craftsperson seemed to be as they worked to create these items of beauty and usefulness for their fellow human beings.
I think there’s something healthy, satisfying and joy-producing about each of us MAKING things with our hands, hearts, brains. The things we make will be completely different one from another. Never compare yourself to others in this and never believe the LIE that YOU can’t make something beautiful and useful for God.
I think God made us each differently one from another, so that there are many different ways of “making something” beautiful and useful to our fellow human beings. Often we think of artists and craftspersons and maybe envy their abilities to create and restore objects of beauty and use. There are many other ways to “make something beautiful for your God”! One of the most noble and challenging is parenting. If you are in the health professions and doing it for God you are helping to make HEALING for people. If you are in a teaching profession and doing it for God you are “making” young people or older people stronger, fitter and happier through offering them priceless knowledge and helping them to apply it in their lives. If you are in finance , business or some other profession or occupation that contributes to society, and doing it genuinely for God and if you’re giving to other aspects of God’s work from the money you make then you also are “making something beautiful for God”. I think one of the greatest things about post-modern life is the way people of all ages and backgrounds can, if they want to badly enough, change their occupations and professions, receive further education or training, self-educate or train throughout every day they live, or add occupations and professions onto the ones they already have.
Getting Started and Gaining Momentum
TODAY as I marked my ragged piece-of-white-paper-calender after jogging inside with music and doing a half a plank or so, I realized TODAY marks MY FIRST EIGHT WEEKS COMPLETED of re-becoming and staying, A RUNNER. I want to learn to mark self efforts more, celebrate little accomplishments more, learn that it’s okay to pat myself on the back, quietly, sometimes. For progress. And even when there’s not. So, that’s what this blogpost’s about. I mark it down on my raggedy piece of paper that I carry with me as we are home, or travel cities, travel countries. Or continents. Or cross hemispheres, sometimes more frequently south to north these days than east to west. About seven weeks ago I tried keeping the log online with one of those GPS map locater things – thought it would be fun and motivating, and interesting to see the map printouts from my city in the center of South America. But the GPS apparently could not find my streets and neighborhoods in Cocha so, I resorted to the raggedy piece of paper and the pen.
Yeah! Well! I focus on WEEKLY amounts, not daily, and I build in Rest Days. Each week’s mileage totals aren’t very much yet, and two of the weeks had as many as THREE REST DAYS. But this past week I only took ONE!
My back started hurting, well, really it was more my hip, so I slowed down even more for a couple of days…
Weighed myself on their machine as we cruised through a Wal-Mart yesterday and, I have not lost any pounds yet.
But I have not gained any, either.
I am content. And determined to continue…
Thinkable Quotables #1.
from Adele Calhoun via her Spiritual Disciplines-Practices that Transform, IVP – “People in a hurry never have time for recovery. Their minds have little time to meditate and pray so that problems can be put in perspective. In short, people in our age show signs of physiological disintegration because we are living at a pace that is too fast for our bodies.” – ARCHIBALD HART
As we think things out in His presence, God guides our minds.
“As we think things out in His PRESENCE, God guides our minds.” – J.I. Packer
Becoming Quiet
The quieter you become, the more you can hear and the more you can heal…
Creating Bread or Writing or Lots of Things
“Whether you are a beginner or a selling professional, you should write so much material, on a set schedule, every day or every week, almost without fail.” -John Jakes
home made French bread, by a young French couple visiting Cochabamba and selling this, and crepes, in the Saturday Morning Feria of Cala-Cala
Don Panchito
Today’s post is in tribute to Don Panchito, who was the caretaker for over 15 years, eleven kilometers out of town at the Quechua Radio transmitor/antennae site. He was only 38 and he died four Saturdays ago, suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically. Surely shatteringly, for his family.
He hadn’t been feeling well for about six months, and had gone several times to the hospital in Quillacollo, where he’d been told he had a lingering chest cold.
Turns out he was actually in the most severe stages of longterm tuberculosis, which never got diagnosed. Never got treated.
There are SO MANY PEOPLE in Bolivia who die before their time and, as a dear friend mentioned to us recently, it all kind of goes below the radar. We have a lot of tuberculosis in Bolivia, even still.
Quietly, the death of a young adult, the death of almost anybody, leaves a quietly hurting family behind. That hurt doesn’t go away fast.
My brother in Christ had a humble but incredibly important full time ministry for the Lord. He loved Mosoj Chaski Ministries with his whole heart and took personal pride and ownership in rising at three thirty a.m. daily to turn on the transmittor, check all the dials and settings, and make sure that God’s Word of personal love and salvation offered to every individual in South America, in this case one hundred percent in the Quechua language, was going out on schedule and as it should.
Don Panchito, we are missing you.
Beatrix Potter and ART and transferring the concept of ART from drawing to WRITING.
” It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye. Why cannot one be content to look at it? I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things, worse than queer sometimes. Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.” – Beatrix Potter on her own drawing and painting.
I feel the same way, not about drawing and painting, though I wish I could (!), but about WRITING and PHOTOGRAPHY!
The Textile Museum in Sucre (the first one). (before it got taken down, moved and diminished.)
Step #2 for using aloe, “au naturale” to relieve sunburn or for other ailments
Put your stalks of natural giant aloe plant, without roots, into a bucket of water. Take a sharp knife and run it along the outside edges of the stalks, stripping off the tiny thorns and opening up the edges of the stalks to reveal the gel layer in the inside. Then take your knife and slice the aloe stalks HORIZONTALLY, all the way down their length, and leave them soaking in the water for about one hour. Dump this “first water” off the aloe, and repeat the soakings, two times more, each time with fresh water placed in your bucket.
Beginning Notes on Daily Work..
My Bolivian sister S. started this work, and I now have the incredible privilege of coming alongside her and others and serving in it. First, let me tell you a little about the neighborhood in which we do this work and in which all the children live. Things look rather normal, for here anyways, on the outside of the neighborhood, but the dozens and dozens of brothels begin in the street right behind our street, and continue for miles all around. Many of the children live right in the brothels with their mothers; others live in tiny rented rooms a few blocks away. Some of the mothers sometimes “give away” (sell) their newborns. Sometimes it’s the older women who do daycare for the moms, who are involved in the selling of the children. Some of the mothers become addicted to drugs, with the most common drugs being the blocks of cheapest, most impure cocaine (known as “base de cocaina” around here, and not being real cocaine at all, but just the rough substance from which real cocaine is then fabricated), alcohol and yellow glue. S. says that all the moms she’s met so far are younger than she is, and that these mothers often die young.
Presently there are 57 children of these mothers in Word and Deed, ranging from the ages of 3 to 18. One of the activities we do with the kids is helping them with their school homework.
Favorite images for prayer found in George Herbert’s Little Poem of the Same Name
The poem, entitled simply “Prayer”, by George Herbert of the 17th century, has only fifteen lines. Packed into those fifteen lines are 27 different images for prayer! Here are my ten favorite:
1. the church’s banquet
2. heart in pilgrimage
3. sinner’s tower
4. reversed thunder
5. a kind of tune which all things hear and fear
6. Heaven in ordinary
7. the Milky Way
8. the land of spices
9. the soul’s blood
10. softness, peace, joy, love and bliss
Thank YOU, Lord!
I mean it, “Thank YOU, Lord!”
We’ve been having, for one month, an enjoyable, satisfying, almost a bit OVERLY stimulating little season of stuff which has involved daily constant travel and literally sleeping in different places every single night.
It’s truly been great, and I mean that, but it was punctuated by a minor accident I had where, because of jet lag and because of being in new surroundings one morning, I was not watching where I was going and, a widespread brick patio area had two irregular, shallow, unmarked steps in it.
I fell.
Somehow, (and it hurt like the dickens!) I managed to sprain both ankles and one knee, the toes on one foot, plus the top-right of one foot, plus scrape both knees and badly bruise one leg between knee and ankle.
I mean, this fall was spectacular! If one’s going to fall and hurt oneself, then might as well do it right, right?
Of course, we were really focussing on our THANKFULNESS that nothing was BROKEN, and of course we still are.
What I hadn’t counted on, was that relative immobility in cars, needing to be ON my “pins”quite a bit between car rides over this past week, and more limited opportunities to ice pack the legs, ankles and feet……would not be ideal.
Late last night we were able to stop our nomadic life and rest, for a good long period of time now. God has given us a resting place for these next weeks, from which we can continue our work but in which I can have my legs up as much as I need to, can have ice packs on them, and where I don’t have to be riding in cars for long periods of time.
God is taking care of us! He’s taking care of ME! He even cares about my fall, and my sore legs, knee, ankles and feet!
Please know that, today, in this moment, and ALWAYS (since God is UNCHANGEABLE) He loves you too. He’s taking care of you, also. He is the source of every good thing you have, and you are. It’s all a gift from God. He wants to, longs to, be in personal relationship with you. Will you let Him? If you want to, but you are not sure how to, you could read JOHN, the first section called that, in the New Testament. It’s a good place to start, for that.
Deuteronomy 33:12 “Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in HIM, for HE shields him all day long, and the one the LORD loves rests between HIS shoulders.”
For HE shields him all day long…
Deuteronomy 33:12 Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders.
Eleanor Roosevelt said…
Eleanor Roosevelt said, ” Happiness is not a goal. It is a by-product of a life well lived.”
David Thoreau said, “I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
“If you want to be happy, be.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek the happiness of others.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jesus said…
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:13
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