Friday's Musings

Here it is 14:12 hours and I'm still playing around on my computer. I think I'm going to have to be careful to not carry this blogging thing too far. It's scary how easy it is to get totally lost inside the blogging world and suddenly coming up for air to find the clock hands have spun around a few times on you. I wanted to do a devotional and have wanted to do that for the past month but I haven't had the time. And now that I have the time I find my mind blank! I finished my in-depth Bible study yesterday afternoon. (A day early because our cable service was out all yesterday afternoon and the house was nice and quiet and I just decided to go ahead and finish the study.) I have had a look at every book of the Bible, at the authors, and the extent of the message. Some books were just cursory glances, other were more detailed. But over all it has been a very profitable study and one that I will probably do again in a few years down the line. The cursory look at the Prophets has made me hungry for a more in-depth study of just them so that's my next endeavor, I think. I fell so much in love with them in this past study that I desire to go through them, looking a little closer and spending a little more time. What I got out of them this time is the fact that God lays bare His great big heart to us. He is so beseeching in the Prophets, wooing us to Himself. You can't read the Prophets and come away thinking that God just might not love you. He says, "See how much I love you and how much I long for you to love me?" He speaks over and over again of how much He desires us to come to Him in love and obedience and if we would just do that, we would see how truly good He desires our lives to be. You may already know that but I didn't before this study. I always thought of the Prophets as the place to see God's condemnation and words of judgment and while that does come into play, it was His incredible love for mankind that He revealed to me in this last study. Joel, Micah, Zephaniah, and some of the other small books are just ripe with God's pleadings for us to turn to Him. He has all this love and blessing that He desires to impart to us, if we would but come to Him. You can often hear the pain and desire in His voice. Over and over again He tells us of the blessings He has for His people. I'm spending a little time today playing those things around in my head trying to solidify the way I want to study them. I go in search of the Father's love so I don't know that commentaries are the way to approach this study. Has any of you found a rewarding way of studying the Bible on your own? If so, would you share?

Well, ladies, I blew it! I'm so put out with myself. This is Friday and my second Fasting Friday and an hour or so ago I reached into the fridge and pulled out a piece of turkey bologna and ate it, and THEN remembered that I'm not supposed to eat on Fridays. Rats! And then, when I ran out to the Post Office and the Bank, I stopped at my favorite mini-mart and bought myself some candy. BUT immediately after buying them I remembered, so I still have those. I didn't eat them. Why was it so hard for me to not eat today?! Habit!! It all falls back on habit. So I wondered if I should just called the day a total loss and go ahead and eat anything I wanted to but then thought, no, a partial fast is better than no fast at all when I've already told the Lord that I will be fasting for the day. The thing is that I knew it was a day of fasting, I'd already remembered that. I just without thinking put food in my mouth. (Maybe that has to do something with the weight gain I'm struggling with.) Well, like I said, a partial fast is better than no fast at all. Now this is for me ladies. I'm not saying that we must all fast or are in any way more special because we do fast or do anything else for that matter. This is just a personal thing I'm doing with the Lord. I felt led to fast but I have no idea why. This is all part of the new relationship that the Lord and I are building. He has become so active in my life and He has me doing incredible things. Things I would never have done on my own. In fact, some are things I was almost against. Things like fasting, journaling, and tithing. Oh and my manner of dress. There's this whole new sense of self I have with God now. Why would these things be important in any way? To me or to anyone else? And yet, I feel His nudges and checks with all of them. It's really sort of weird. Weird but wonderful. I really think what the Lord is showing me is just the incredible amount of freedom we have in Christ. I've always thought of not doing things as my freedom from the Law, from all the rules and regulations. And now it's almost like God is saying, "Yes, child, but you have the freedom to DO these things as well as to not do them. I'm ashamed to admit it but I think there was a bit of pride in my choices to NOT to do certain things. And now God is showing me that I have just as much freedom with or without choices I make (and others too by extension). I don't know if I'm making myself clear here and really I guess it is such a small matter that I probably shouldn't be looking into it at all. Sort of a NON-ISSUE. But it's fun to know the Lord is doing things in your life that only a matter of months or years ago were so totally unimportant to me. God is just showing me that people who love and worship Him are just as free to keep the rules as they are to NOT keep the rules. Anyway, for whatever reason and forever how long, I am finding myself doing things I used to pride myself in NOT doing. I know. It doesn't make sense to me either. Ha! It is just incredible to feel the Lord working in our lives, isn't it? I just love it! And it's amazing how we can work pride into all the things we do (or don't do) without even noticing.

My beloved is out working on his latest play thing ... the bus. I was starting to feel guilty because the only thing I've accomplished today were my morning chores and errands. But I guess if he can play all day, so can I. We're just going to have hot dogs for dinner [we grilled a bunch the other night just to have on hand, ready to eat (all we have to do is nuke them); they taste entirely different after they've been grilled] so, that being said, I don't have to be planning or preparing for dinner. I love it that he is as casual about food as I am. No, I don't think casual is the right word for me. Rebellious is more like it, ha! The fact that we are required to spend so much of our time and energy around this silly habit we all have of eating several times a day! And the fact that I spent the last 35 years coming up with menu ideas and dinner plans and have suddenly decided to rebel. We still have to cook but both of us are interested in just doing the basics and go back to formal dining when we get around to it. I went through a phase almost 10 years ago when I was really into cooking. I watched all the TV shows about cooking (now they an entire network dedicated to cooking!) and subscribed to a couple food magazines. I really had fun but I didn't have much of anything else. I was so busy planning and preparing our next meal that nothing else got done. As you can tell I'm a real phase-er. I go all out for one thing and then after a little while it's something else that has my interest. [The thought of that candy in the kitchen just waiting until 6:00PM has my mouth watering and all this talking about food isn't helping so I think I'll go on to something else.]

Pastor just called and we're going to do communion a little differently this Sunday so I won't have to get up early and get to church at the crack of dawn (what feels like it anyway) just to get everything ready beforehand. And that means there won't be a lot of clean up afterward so I'm going to get off lightly. I'm glad he thought to call me and let me know. Last time he forgot to call and we had to do it a little differently than he had wanted. But it taught him to remember to call me ahead of time when he wants to do this.

Today is another beautiful day up here in the Sierra foothills. A good stiff breeze is blowing and the sun is bright and the skies are clear. We've had more wind in the past couple weeks than we've ever had before though. There were con trails marking the sky when I went out to run errands and for some reason I thought of those old westerns I used to watch that had con trails in the sky above the horses and stagecoaches. Guess when you're making a movie you can spend time worrying about little things like that. It's like watching an old Rockford Files where the car screeches to a stop or slides around the corner in the chase scene and you see all the rubber on the road from all the practice runs they've made before filming. It's always funny to see things like that. I saw an Alien movie once that was supposed to be our first landing on mars and there were tire tracks all over the place on this never-before visited planet.

Well, this has been a real nothing post! Sorry! And with that I think I'll put this poor thing out of its misery and publish it. I will try really hard to come up with a devotional for my next blog. Something other than ramblings. But if you've been feeling the Lord really working in your life, would you share that with me on this blog. He does things so differently with everyone that it's really fun to read. What is He doing for you in your life?