What do I mean when I say, "I'm trusting God"?

So, a few days ago I had surgery. It was, in some ways, an elective surgery, but it was one of necessity for health issues. It was something I had put off for over 20 years for many reasons. But as usual in my life, all the reasons were fear. 

Fear is something I live with every single day of my life. Fear has dictated a lot of decisions in my life. When I was little my grandmother used to say to me, "I don't know why you are afraid. When it's your time it's your time and there's nothing you can do to change that, so why worry about it?" Still, fear continued to haunt me. 

So, I had put this surgery off for all these years because of fear. Fear of not surviving the surgery. Fear of the outcome. Fear of the pain of recovery. Fear I would not like the results.

Finally my family asked me to face my fears and look into the surgery for health reasons. Of course I would do it for them. I decided that I needed to put my trust in God, which is where it should be anyway, and go forward with the surgery. 

I boldly proclaimed that I was trusting Him with all the details! I prayed and told God I would trust Him with the results. And so on Tuesday, April 16, 2013 I finally faced my fears, put myself in God's hands and had the surgery. 

When I first woke up I was a little concerned about the results, things didn't look the way I wanted them to, but I reminded myself that I had said I would trust God and so I would. 

The recovery has been much easier than I had feared. The pain is very manageable with the meds they gave me. I am not nearly as helpless as I feared I would be. 

However, two days after my surgery when I finally saw the results I was devastated! My worst fears in this area had been realized and I was very, very unhappy with the physical results. I spent the rest of Thursday in a state of sadness and depression. How could God have done this to me? I had trusted Him! I had put myself in His hands and asked Him to take care of every detail. I had told Him I would trust Him with the outcome. How could He have allowed a bad outcome?! 

That is when my struggle with the above question began to form. What did I mean when I said I was trusting God for the outcome? Did I really only mean that I was trusting Him to give me the outcome I was looking for? Sadly my answer was, Yes, that is what had I meant.

There were many unknowns with this surgery. There were no guarantees of the outcome, or of whether I would be happy with it. And once it was done, there was no turning back. Whatever the outcome, I would have to live with it. And so, for the days before surgery, I prayed and gave it to God. I told Him I would just trust Him to give me the right outcome. And I meant it, or at least I thought I did. But in reality, what I meant was that I was trusting Him to give me the outcome I wanted.  

In every way my surgery is considered a success. First of all is the obvious, I survived the surgery! This was not really a risky surgery, but there are always risks with any surgery and that is always the biggest fear for me. The surgeon is happy with the outcome. The reasons I needed to have the surgery have been taken care of and the medical part of it is a success. The only thing so far is the physical outcome. I really won't know the physical outcome for awhile, but so far it is NOT what I wanted. In fact, it is everything I didn't want. 

So now the question is, what will I do with my disappointment? With my devastation? I keep reminding myself that I am trusting God with it, but really I'm walking around unhappy and miserable, regretting my choice. So, that means I am not trusting God with it at all! I keep trying to figure out why God allowed this result. Possibly because He knows that in the end other things will change and I will be happy with the outcome. But that is really only me trying to make the results fit into my version of what I wanted. 

In the end I have to do what I said I would do. Trust Him with the outcome, even though it isn't what I wanted! And to do that means I can't regret my choice, I can't walk around unhappy and sullen. I can't sit around hoping that once everything is healed it will be better, before I choose to be happy. I need to make the decision to be happy with the results, whether I like them or not, because that is what I signed up for when I told God I would trust Him with the results!! 

As I walk through this journey of discovery about trust, I realize that it's not my first time around this mountain. In many other areas of my life, at many other times in my life, I have had this same struggle. I have told God I was trusting Him but then I was disappointed when I didn't get the results I wanted. Sometimes that disappointment has led to frustration, even anger, sometimes to unhappiness, sometimes to downright depression. As God has shown me now, each of those times I had not put my trust in God to accept HIS outcome, I had put my trust in God to make the outcome be what I wanted it to be, and that is not trusting God at all. That is trusting that MY outcome is the best and God is the magic genie that will ensure my outcome happens.That leads to superstition, which is the subject of another post that God has been working on with me. 

But this one is about trusting God, really trusting God. Trusting that He is true to His word. His word says He will always work things out for my good, that even when things don't look good, they are good. The real point of trusting is that when things don't look the way we want, we trust they look the way God wants. And we trust that is good. Even though it doesn't look like it. 

What's funny to me is that this is exactly the opposite of what church has taught me faith is. For years as I've struggled with this walk of faith and trust, I have known that really trusting God is knowing that He will do what is best but it might not look the way I want it to. When I talk about that people tell me that I am lacking faith. They have told me that faith means believing God will give me what I want! But God keeps teaching me the exact opposite! 

As Christians we often quote this scripture. We say we believe it. We boldly proclaim it! But what do we really mean when we say it? I always think I mean exactly what I say. When I say I trust God to work it all out for the best, I honestly think that is what I mean. But what I really mean is I trust God to work things out the way I think is best! And that is not what His word promises.

Faith is knowing God will do what is best for me. But what I think is best and what God knows is best, are not always compatible viewpoints. This is because God knows the end from the beginning, He knows me inside and out. There are many reasons why God's best does not always look the way we think it should, but trusting Him means trusting that He knows all those reasons and has chosen the best outcome. 

So, today I must choose to be happy with the results. Not because they are what I wanted, but because they are what God wanted. And in the end, that is what this walk of faith is really about. Trusting that what God wants is more important than I what I want and that His way really is better than mine. 

Be Blessed, 

Colleen

The Blessings of Sons

Our two sons with our oldest grandson in the center. 


There are many blessings of having sons. Too many to count actually. But today I am thinking of the particular blessing of perspective. My heart's desire is to be a Proverbs 31 wife. However, sometimes I don't even see how I'm falling short. But my sons, who see things from a man's perspective, do. And I'm thankful that they point it out to me. 

There are many times when we women speak and think nothing of it, but to a man, those words cut like a knife. There are many ways we don't even realize that we are demeaning them. There have been times I think I'm saying something about myself, but what the men in my family hear is me putting down my husband. For instance:

One of our family's most famous stories is the story of the car air conditioner. I get very sick in the heat, so when I am driving I like the a/c to blast out of the dashboard onto me. My husband doesn't like that. He has sinus issues and the air blasting on him like that bothers his sinuses. Also, my husband is usually driving the car early in the morning when the windows are all fogged up from the morning cold. So, when he drives he almost always sets the vents to the defrost setting so the air blows up onto the windshield. When I get in the car and turn on the a/c it takes me sometimes as much as an hour to figure out why the air isn't blowing on me. I get frustrated and upset thinking that the air conditioner must be broken. It almost always takes me at least a half an hour to figure out the problem and by then I am not feeling well. I have to admit in the early years it has taken me as long as two or three hours of driving to realize that it is just the vent setting. I don't understand why, when I know that he always sets the vent to that position, that it takes me so long to figure this out. EVERYTIME! We've been married for 25 years, how is it that my first thought is not, "Oh I need to change the vent settings."? What in my brain has not clicked after all this time? I KNOW how he likes the vents set. I have shared a car with this man for most of 25 years, how is it that I STILL think the a/c is broken? However, when I share this story, my husband and my sons hear me saying that there is something wrong with my husband for setting the vents on the dash settings. That was never my intention in telling this humorous story. It was really my astonishment at myself and how I can go through this time after time after time! Whenever I told the story, my women friends never thought I was being disrespectful to my husband, they all understood that I was laughing at myself for not catching on after all this time. But men heard me blaming my husband. 

Was it the story itself? Partly, but for the most part it was the way I was telling the story. The way I tell it today makes it clear I am talking about myself, but in the beginning something about the way I worded it made it sound to men as if I was saying my husband was at fault for changing the settings. When my sons first pointed it out to me I was offended. But God showed me that it didn't matter what I was trying to say, if the way it came out was offensive to my husband, I was being offensive to my husband. 

Last night we were all working in the trailer to get ready to head out on a camping trip. I already had a couple of rolls of paper towels opened and two kitchen towels sitting around the kitchen area. My husband had washed his hands and not seeing any of the open paper towel rolls said, "I guess I'll just open up a new roll." I grabbed the roll from him and said, "No, there are plenty of open rolls and regular towels you don't need to open up a new roll." I didn't even realize that my words or tone were disrespectful or harsh, but our older son spoke up and said, "Ok Mom, you don't have to give him a tongue lashing over it." Wow. How differently men and women hear things. I had not meant to be disrespectful to my husband. But looking back on it, I see that I was. I didn't need to say it the way I did. Partly it was my tone, which was tired and exasperated, partly it was my words which were not honoring. I could have just softly said, let me find you a towel, or let me get you a paper towel, but I let my tired flesh get a hold of my tongue and it was dishonoring to my husband. 

Now is this one incident a huge deal? By itself no. However, if left unchecked it could quickly become a habit of how I speak to my husband. If strung together with other incidents, it would become something that tears my husband down rather than builds him up. That's not the wife I want to be. So I am thankful for my sons who are willing to lovingly point out to me how things sound to a man and offer me that different perspective. 

Lest you think my sons are being disrespectful let me assure you they are not. They work hard to live a life that is obedient to the Fifth Commandment. They also know how important it is to me to be a woman who builds up her home and family and does not tear it down, so we have carefully cultivated a relationship of accountability with one another and I am thankful for that. 

Be Blessed! 

Colleen

Linking to:

A Wise Woman Builds Her Home

Wholehearted Home

http://wholehearted-home.blogspot.com

Walking Redeemed
http://walkingredeemed.org/2013/03/wednesday-link-party-13/

Tis the season to prep

We have been off the road now for a month. Just a temporary settling to allow us to prep our lives for an even bigger change. As I've written before, we are full time RVers, and while I thought I would blog a lot about that, it seems the lifestyle leaves me little time for blogging. I am working on that. Right now we are blessed to be settled for a short layover to take care of much family business and have all four of our children and our future daughter in law all with us while we focus on a season of intense discipleship as a family and reprioritizing our lives and belongings to begin another new chapter that has been 16 years in the making! I know this all sounds rather vague, I am struggling to put my thoughts on "paper" as it were.

Sixteen years ago God gave us a word that we would travel and teach, speak and preach His word as a family. We thought it was a word for that time and were very confused as it didn't come to pass. But now, sixteen years later it appears His timing is coming about. We are working together to put together our ministry and church and take it on the road.

While it is exciting to see this dream coming to fruition, it is also a bit scary and overwhelming. As often happens, the dream had about died for me. I was ready to start doing other things, when out of nowhere God suddenly sprang this on me again! I was ready to start our homestead dream again. Ready to settle onto another little farm and begin another dream. Suddenly God not only decided it was time, He planted the seed into other members of our family.

Now is the time that I have to really make some decisions about what to do with all of our stuff in storage. I know many will say, "It's only stuff!" And it is, only stuff. But it's a lifetime of stuff collected while we built our lives and raised our family. It is a lifetime of stuff that belonged to my grandmother, my mom, my mother in law, etc... It is a lifetime of memories made up of things I love. My teapots, my tea cups, my furniture that my grandfather built for me, family pictures, books I've had since I was a child, books I read to my children, dishes that we ate off of for years and years of holiday celebrations. You get the idea. So, yes, it is just stuff, but it is stuff that is dear to me and that I struggle to get rid of.

So the good news is that I have managed to get rid of one storage space. The bad news is I still have a very large storage space full of things I have to make decisions about. I will be honest, I don't foresee me getting rid of it all. I just don't. But I have to make it more manageable at least.

In addition to going through getting rid of stuff, we also have to make room to add 6 people to our RV. Now when we bought it, I specifically chose it because it would sleep 10 people! I wanted it to accomodate our entire family, because I was believing God to bring our entire family to a place where we would need an RV that size. Now He has brought us to that place! And I am thrilled! But when we bought it, I saw that 10 could sleep in it, I forgot about 10 people bringing along their clothes and other stuff that goes with 10 people! lol Details, details. I know that God will work all of these things out, I know He will. I have seen Him do much more than this! But what can I say? I am a person who sweats the small stuff, but I'm working to let go of it. I am still, after all, a work in progress.

Have a blessed day!
Colleen

Tumultuous is the new normal

Tumultuous is the best word to describe our lives. I keep waiting for normal, but it continues to elude us, leaving me to ponder whether tumultuous in our normal. The key is finding God's peace in the midst of the turmoil. Hanging onto peace and joy in the midst of the trial that begins before the last one is quite over. Just when I think things have settled down to a nice little roar, the next wave hits. But through it all, we must learn to not lose sight of Him and the peace He grants in the midst of the storm.

I think about the disciples on the boat and the storm raging around them. Jesus was right in the middle of it all, but they were still frazzled, until they sought Him out. Jesus is in the middle of my life also, but He brings me no peace in the storm until I seek Him. Sometimes I think the mere fact that He's in my boat will bring the peace I seek, but no, it's not until I go looking for Him, seeking after Him, that the peace and strength come. I pray for you, peace in the midst of whatever you are going through today and that Jesus would be in your boat!

God Bless,

Colleen

Little House, Little Housework?

The other day I came upon this picture on Pinterest:

The caption the pinner had added was: Little House, Little Housework. That pin has been on my mind as I've struggled to get our little living space back in order after the past tumultous couple of months we've had. A lot of people are under the impression that the less space you have, the less work you have to do. I find it to be quite the contrary.

In a smaller living environment you must be diligent about cleaning and organizing. You muse be diligent about getting rid of stuff. We used to live in an almost 3,000 square foot house and now are in approximately 600 sq ft. While a large space will accomodate some clutter and mess with little impact, a small space will not. What would be a little clutter in a large home or apartment, becomes an episode of hoarders in a small space. It takes a mere day or two of neglect and your space looks like surely you are the survivor of some horrible natural tragedy. Otherwise known as the good old adage, "It looks like a tornado went through here!" That was a favorite saying of my grandmother's and trust me, the rooms she was speaking of couldn't hold a candle to the mess you find in a small space that has been neglected for a couple of days.

So, before you go wishing for a Little House, Little Housework, type of life, be forewarned. There is a LOT of work involved in keeping a little house livable. There are no days off. There's no putting off laundry because you have something more fun to do, or you're not feeling well. You don't dare leave the dishes undone, because your sink only holds the contents of one meal comfortably. Everything else spills out all over the counter, which is only about 2 sq ft of space, so now you have nowhere to prepare your next meal. In a regular size sink you can leave the dishes go for the entire day and not have a mess to look at. But in a small space by the time lunch is over you can't find the faucet to turn the water on. Think you can just go shopping and bring home your wonderful new haul with no consequences? Think again. My closet is not large enough to accomodate one third of my old wardrobe, and forget it if you think you're going to be Imelda Marcose in a small home. I have one pair of cowboy boots, one pair of sneakers, and two pairs of sandals, and they are constantly in the way. Are you the type that likes to stock up on groceries? Forget about it! My pantry is now contained under my tiny sink. And don't even get me started on the miscellaneous stuff that a family tends to accumulate.

All that being said however, if you are great at organizing, cleaning and have the mentality of some of my children, which is "less is more", a small space may be just the place for you! My oldest daughter could easily live a tiny space and have no problem whatsoever! She has a gift for organization and can walk into a room and have it sparkling like a television commercial in less than half an hour, no matter what she starts with! My sons could do it easily, they would happily live with their Bible, one pair of pants and a t-shirt if I let them. So, I have to assume the problem is me and the rest of our family. But even a few things can create a mess in a small space. And it happens in a hurry too!

Still and all, living in a small place can be a blessing. Just have realistic expectations. I guess you could say, Caviat Emptor, Let the buyer beware.

No matter the size of your living space, I hope it is a blessed space that you enjoy.

Have a Blessed Day!

Colleen

Photo Credit:
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

Linking to:
Time Warp Wife:

http://time-warp-wife.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-build-long-lasting-yoke-and.html

Life Can Change in the Blink of an Eye

It's been 9 weeks since my mother in law first got sick. So much has happened in so little time. It was Valentine's Day when we got the phone call that they had to take her to urgent care and less than a month later she was gone. It has been a crazy time in our lives. So much has happened it feels like forever, yet in reality it's been just over 2 months. Through it all I have seen God's grace and mercy run deep in our lives. I am so thankful for His strength, grace, patience and love. I am so thankful for the strength, grace and love He has poured out through me. It's funny to me that no matter how many times you experience God's amazing Grace, it is always surprising again. It has been a difficult roller coaster of emotions, but through it all God has been at my side keeping me going. Tomorrow we leave for a couple of week and then will come back to stay again. Right now our schedule it to stay here two weeks and then go back to our home resort for two weeks and back again. I am having pangs as I think about leaving him alone, but I know he needs this time and I have to trust God with him. It's funny, as I find myself in the position of feeling about him much the same as I feel about my kids.

I hope all is well for all of you and I hope to get on more regularly to post.

The Waiting Game

So, I've been missing from the web for a bit while we play the waiting game. My mother-in-law was rushed to urgent care awhile back suffering from severe dehydration. Two days later she was in the ER with constant vomiting and severe abdominal pain. It turns out she had a blockage in her small intestine which was the cause of the dehydration. The next day she underwent surgery to clear the blockage and after surgery she was unable to breathe on her own. She has been on a ventilator ever since. She is 83 years old.


I sit here now in the waiting room of the CCCU waiting til after shift change so we can see her again. We wait to hear how her pneumonia is doing. We wait to hear if her blood pressure is regulated. We wait to see if today will be the day she can breathe on her own again. We wait to hear if her white blood count is down, if her blood gases are good, if her fever is under control. Waiting is the toughest part of life. As we wait, we sit with another family who wait for their wife, mother, sister, daughter to heal from an aneurysm, she was rushed into the hospital the same day as my mother-in-law. We all sit and wait. We talk a little, pray a little, try to offer comfort to one another, encouragement to one another. We laugh together, try not to cry in front of each other, sharing our lives in this strange way. Strangers sharing this experience of waiting. We ache with each other, for each other, pray with each other, for each other. We sit in the room together, yet separate, together, yet alone. And we wait. And hope.


Blessings,
Colleen