I heard (read) someone suggest the other day that books on prayer are easily a way to postpone the actual act of praying.
After wading through a (large) selection of books about writing, I have to say the same thing about them. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2006
Answers to prayer, and a curious difference.
Jay found my Palm (PDA) yesterday. Thank you Jesus! It’s been missing for several weeks. I had assumed it was only buried somewhere, but we’ve cleaned the house a few times since it was lost and never found it. It was in the car. *sigh*
My “currently reading” is the other answer to prayer. I’ve been needing a new book/topic for H.S. Sunday School, and this (Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Brand and Yancy) looks like it’s going to be our choice. I’ll be reading ahead to pick and choose, but I’m enjoying it for me too. I might say more about it later.
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Jay and I learned a new difference between us we hadn’t noticed before:
- I’m ready for action when I plan the details– since I do most of my thinking and weighing of options (pro and con comparisons) before I get to absolute details.
- Jay begins to do his thinking and weighing after he has the details in front of him.
The reason we noticed this is that we spec.ed-out a laptop together last Wednesday. We spent more than an hour looking and discussing specifics, and ended up with a machine we both liked (though part of the point of this is to have a machine of my own…). I felt excited, and asked (I thought rhetorically), whether he was ready to get it.
To my surprise he said no. And that’s when we had our little revelation.
By now I think we’re both planning to do it, we’re just waiting on the timing.
From Anderson’s “The Nightengale”
I had to type this segment up for another project, and even though it is an incomplete story, it is still neat/thought-provoking, and maybe will remind you of the real-thing.This is an excerpt from Has Christian Anderson’s “The Nightingale” and begins in the emperor’s palace, just before the emperor hears that bird sing for the first time.
Everyone was dressed in their finest clothes and they were all looking at the little gray bird, toward which the emperor nodded very kindly.
The nightingale’s song was so sweet that tears came into the emperor’s eyes; and when they ran down his cheeks, the little nightingale sang even more beautifully than it had before. His song spoke to one’s heart, and the emperor was so pleased that he ordered his golden slipper the be hung around the little bird’s neck. There was no higher honor. But the nightingale thanked him and said that he had been honored enough already.
“I have seen tears in the eyes of an emperor, and that is a great enough treasure for me. There is a strange power in an emperor’s tears and God knows that is reward enough.” Continue reading
Expectations
(Originally posted on Xanga)
My husband is amazing. He has always had the type of maturity (I seem to lack) that sees something needing to be done, and does it. But especially lately, as I’ve been getting more and more run-down by this third pregnancy, he’s been stepping up to the plate and batting for both of us.I am so thankful for him. And proud of him too.
My mom thinks pretty highly of him also, and he recently told me about an e-mail she sent him listing all these great qualities she saw in him. He was having a crummy day, and when he read it he felt hugely ambivalent.
Naturally it’s encouraging to have your positive traits noticed and commended (I would think this is especially true if it’s your mother-in-law doing the noticing), but the big “drainer” (to him) was that he suddenly felt he had this standard he had to measure up to. (He seems to frequently react this way if he is complemented while down.) Naturally this is a tough place for me to fall into, b/c it sets me in the spot of trying to build him up without digging him deeper. Touchy job.
But fortunately I had been thinking about a similar situation earlier that day. Or maybe you could call it an idea that relates. If only in my own mind: I’m a good mom. I’m good at what I do.
There. I said it.
Have you ever looked at the over-all picture of your work and said that? I think there’s a lot more people who could than do.
Recently I switched from my OB/GYN doctor back to the midwife/birth clinic where both my girls were born (another story).
The midwife meeting with me asked why we were having this third. Laughing, because I didn’t have a concrete answer for her (“noyb”), I said, “I’m such a good mom I knew I needed another one.”
I immediately felt the blush from my neck to my forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Well of course you are!” she replied sincerely. And I instantly remembered two other people who used the phrase to describe me (and, I think, to encourage me), when I told them I was pregnant with my third.
Now I have to be the first to say I’m not perfect (otherwise someone else will doubtless point that out), but who ever said that good has to be perfect?
This was the concept I shared with my husband that night. No one (least of all my mother) is holding the illusion that he is perfect. There is not going to be some sudden crash of scenery that reveals him as *gasp* human to an unsuspecting public.
And there won’t be for me either…
Unnecessary redundancies
Have you ever noticed how many words or phrases we are stuck with because they are expected, and not because they’re very precise?
The most basic example of this is the ritual exchange of “how-are-you?” “I’m-fine, and-you?” That many before me have pegged. Continue reading
The right place…
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Currently Reading The Mommy Manual: Planting Roots That Give Your Children Wings By Barbara Curtis see related |
I just finished my first full day of “A Woman’s Affair,” a trade-show showcasing anything interested parties (sellers) think a woman might buy.
I went this morning to sit behind a table as Gordian Knot Productions, and offer books and my workshop. I was feeling self-conscious again about being pregnant and “preaching” on this, so on my further explanation that I taped under my name-sign I put “Natural Pregnancy Achievement and Avoidance.” Putting the “achievement” part first, so I didn’t feel so weird.
I’ll be changing that for tomorrow. Back to the normal line on my business card: “Natural birth control and pregnancy achievement.” Not all that different, I know, but I noticed a number of people seemed to stop reading after the second word– or at least their comments indicated that. (”Don’t need another one of those!”)
Since I’ve always had more people interested in avoiding than achieving, I guess should just keep giving that side priority anyway…
Sold 2 books, signed-up two woman for the June workshop and told two military wives that if they could get five-friends together I’d set-up a special session for them (at 20%-off too) so they could have a bit more practice/experience by the time hubbies came back for R&R in July.
I’ve felt for a while that this deployment time is the perfect time for wives to learn FAM, and I’m very curious if the one lady will pull it off. Getting people together, I mean. She seemed pretty motivated.
Ordinarily (in theory at least) I’d only give the discount at a regularly scheduled class, but I liked the idea of motivating the gals to do some leg-work. And I felt a little guilty about how far away the next workshop is anyway. I’m hoping good comes of it. I guess by “good” I mean “results” or “income.” 
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Being at the show has been interesting. Most people walk right by. Some smile, if I catch tem looking at me, and three have enthusiastically bubbled their version of “You’re exacting what I’m looking for! Are you in-town?”
If I get one more sign-up for June (and they all follow-through, and actually pay and come), I’ll make back my table cost. I am hoping, too, that ‘the word’ will somehow be “out” more, about my work and me too.
How busy do we have to be as Christians?
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Currently Reading The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits By Richard A. Swenson, Richard A. Swenson M.D. see related |
I found a good reminder today in a book called The Overload Syndrome. It’s a book that asks readers first to recognize they have limits then encourages them to live inside those limits, despite all they could be doing, in order to remain healthy and (even) best available to God.
“God does not have to depend on human exhaustion to get His work done. God is not so desperate for resources to accomplish His purposes that we have to abandon the raising of our children in order to accommodate Him. God is not so despairing of where to turn next that He has to ask us to go without sleep for five nights in a row. Chronic overloading is not a prerequisite for authentic Christianity. Quite the contrary, overloading is often what we do when we forget who God is.
“Someone has said, ‘God can do in twenty minutes what it takes us twenty years to do.’ Let’s trust more and do less. Is it busyness that moves mountains…or faith?” (pp. 36, 72).
I have a remarkably empty calendar right now. Perhaps the emptiest it’s been since I could set my own schedule: all I have in stone is church/Sunday school on Sunday and ToastMasters for an hour on Mondays.
And I have rarely felt this tired. Granted, that has everything to do with being pregnant, sick, and corralling a house with 2 toddlers.
But, the best thing about being tired (and I like this) is that it makes me ruthlessly evaluate every new (or old) opportunity that comes my way.
It makes me look at what need is being met in this activity– either by me or for me– and if it’s not important (enough), it is very easy to let it go. This awareness also makes it relatively easy to occasionally pick-up new things w/o feeling guilty. The cost/benefits ratio is the easiest to see it’s been in years.
Muscle-memory
Do we consider (I wonder) the way we’re training our mind/will/emotions in our daily responses to things?
Earlier this week a friend my mom’s age was mentioning to me how her mother’s dementia was worsening. This friend described how hard it was getting to shift her mother’s focus off the negative (real and imagined) of her own world.
I said that, since we all have to choose to be positive anyway (negative seems to come so naturally), perhaps her mother was just past that place of being able to make that choice. The daughter looked me in the eye and said, “It’s a muscle-memory thing.”
I’ve been thinking about that since Tuesday– Apparently this woman used to find the negative, even when she had the choice, and now that she has less and less capacity to choose, she’s paying for it.
That phrase my friend used seems so spot-on: “Muscle memory.”
It makes me think of my guitar practice, and how exciting it is when my fingers just go where they need to be, without my having to think about it. They’re beginning to be trained, but only because I made it happen at first, by doing and thinking about it, over and over.