Courage

Hey, how’re you doing out there?

Life on planet Earth is spinning wild right now.

I find my mind shifting rapidly from one anxious thought to another, trying to resolve compounding insanities in a world gone mad.

Honestly. It’s not all that bad where I am. But I read the news and catch up on the plethora of opinions on everything going on, until I can’t stand it anymore.

How do we slow the swirling and find our centre? How do we find stability in the midst of uncertainty and a constantly shifting foundation that isn’t a foundation in this world at all, anymore.

“Christ in me. The hope of glory.”

Breathe.

literally.

take some moments to inhale and hold

and exhale. slowly.

say the name of Jesus.

and breathe

Shalom

God is with us. Emmanuel.

Better? You can do this as many times a day as you need. And preferably in quiet, maybe even outdoors.

How does it feel to be living in a time when we get to watch things of Biblical proportions unfold?

Stressful? Or maybe, you’re realizing like I am, that all those things written are really true and that ONE DAY, Jesus will come back for His beloved people. He WILL ride in on His white horse while the trumpet sounds. We may get to see that in our day! Hallelujah. May we be ready and have our lamps filled.

Matthew 25:1-13 NKJV

“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Now five of them were wise, and five were foolish. Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. “And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut. “Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of the world and the difference between how God set up His creation and how things are unfolding now. Quite a contrast. And this has ebbed and flowed through all of history. The truth of God is being exchanged for a lie. Men (mankind of which I am a part as a woman) are listening to titillating stories and believing a delusion. Even within Christendom.

As world systems slide toward the fulfillment of major prophecies outlined in Revelation 13 and 14 of the Bible, I’m extremely concerned that people aren’t aware of how this could and will play out and the impact on them.

https://www.bible.com/bible/114/REV.13.NKJV

9Then a third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand, 10he himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation. He shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. 11And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.” Revelation 14:9-11

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/beast-revelation-13/

In a world that’s driven by digital everything and burgeoning AI, it’s very likely that a digital currency will become the norm soon with a subsequent morph to rfid chipping of the populations of the world.

Take heed to what the scripture says. And it’s okay to ask WHY God responds so severely to this. I’ve given a lot of thought and prayer to this topic.

The differences between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this World are stark. If God is the Creator of everything and justifiably the good provider of all we need and trustworthy, then this move to an allegiance with a completely Godless world system that denies His provision and sovereignty in every possible way, is an assault on His holiness and the integrity of His Name and identity which cannot be compromised. The system being set up will be inspired by and run by Satan. He is God’s enemy in every way. A created, rebellious, fallen anarchist who fights eternally in all ways to discredit and destroy the image of God stamped upon His creation and especially upon the human race – the Imageo Deo. God must respond according to His character, as any of us would if a rapist or sociopathic murderer came against our children. We would fight to the death for them. God did this in Jesus Christ. But if our child turned against us and allied themself with this vile enemy, defining himself and his identity with them, uniting with them completely and standing against us, we would have no recourse but to consider them now to be our enemy.

In our digital and AI driven world, the prophecies become alarmingly real and clear. Yet many will be deceived, for the sake of self preservation to sign up for this new mode of identity. The alternative will be loss of job, of bank account, of groceries. Scary! We could starve and die. The Bible makes it clear that the enemy will be allowed to persecute the believers in Christ. But we must hold fast and endure to the end and we will be saved.

The comparison then is heavily weighted on the scales of eternity. Yes we are persecuted, we may die. Yet in this Christ approves us and we spend all of forever with Him, provided for in every unimaginable way.

William Wallace said it so well in Braveheart:

“Aye. Fight, and you may die. Run, and you’ll live, at least a while. Dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?”

Similarly, would we be willing to enslave ourselves to a system of tyranny in order to have a semblance of life and not die, but forfeit eternity with the true King of Kings. The result is judgement and hell.

Courage my friends.

Every time I’m tempted to be distracted by even the good entertainments of this world, I hear the Holy Spirit calling me to His Word. It’s time to press in, to read, understand and memorize what the scriptures say so that I’m prepared and filled with understanding as the day approaches.

Terrifying. Exciting! If God is who He says He is. And we are who He says we are. If we trust Him as little children and do what He says, we will endure and be saved to the uttermost. There is a glorious freedom in this.

Now to Him who is able to do

exceedingly abundantly above

all that we ask or think,

according to the power that works in us, 

to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus

to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Ephesians 3:20-21

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If Microbiome is Life

If life really is like sourdough

If the rain gathers in silver streaks on the hosta leaves

If this granite patio holds steady like rock under my feet

Then why is there strife?

If yeast permeates the air and flour grows on a stalk

If water bubbles up from the ground

And mixing them together brings me bread

Why can’t I get it right?

If words are flung and cortisol floods

If thunder cracks and foundations rock

If my shoulders rise and leak out my eyes

Where on earth is the Light?

It’s all around you

In all I made

No excuses, no need to be afraid

I am for you

I am with you

Remember the tomb is where I laid.

Lay it down

Wait on Me

I will lead you

To your death.

Die in me and you’ll find life

You’ll have new eyes

My Spirit in you

Come with me

There’s never life without sacrifice

Death in life

Hope in torment

Spring births after winter

Come and rest.

Just like dough, right?

Measure flour, mix the water

Let it rest

Then fold and pound it

Sometimes I’m confounded by what grows, how you did this

How tomatoes green to red in this sun and so often I’m

Impatient

Want it now

But fermenting takes a long time

Through a dark night then the rising

And the oven of affliction

The development of crust around the tender, flexing gluten.

You’re not hurried,

Let the process do the rending

Tear the dough, the kneading’s mending

All around me you’re creating

Things expanding, stars are singing

Help me yield and trust Your tending

You are good, forgive my doubting.

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Sourdough Is Life

Mix flour and water. Stir. Wait. Discard. Repeat.

I’m new at this doughy venture but today I woke up to this bubbling, growing culture in my glass bowl and I knew I was on the way. I’d captured a wild yeast so they said. I felt like Mother Earth and hadn’t baked a thing yet.

Yeast. Beast. Capture/harness/tame. It sounds so farmy. I’m a little obsessed with this right now in case you hadn’t noticed.

Everything we need is floating around us, waiting to be invited into community, to begin and make something out of nothing, to expand and grow more out of little.

God has given us everything for life and godliness by His divine power (2 Peter 1:3). Everything! From a bit of reading this seems to refer to His word, but His word reveals from Genesis all the way through, His creation, how we are to steward it and the outcomes of when we love Him and each other according to His wonderful, good plan.

He promised us Life and that more abundantly.

The whole process of sourdough metaphors life. Follow the plan of creation and the maker (baker), and you’ll end up with a bubbling concoction of goodness, ready to draw from, to eat from, to be replenished by, to have as an ongoing source of nourishment.

Add too much flour or the wrong kind, or too much or too little water and you’ll end up with an uncooperative glob or a watery, starving bowl of hooch.

Done incorrectly, it won’t produce life.

Hence the allegory.

It’s not just written in a book, it’s in the air around us. Everything pulses with the truth. A Horton like chorus “We are here, we are here…”.

He is here!

I don’t mean that God is yeast. I’m not a panthiest. I just mean He has left His fingerprints all over everything and one of those things is the very air we breathe. I think I wonder if His hands have flour on them.

Work with me here. God storifies everything into meaningful messages we can understand.

It’s like a blueprint. Do this and you get that. Follow these directions and you’ll have life and blessings. Don’t, and you’ll get death and curses (Deuteronomy 30:19-20 https://biblehub.com/nkjv/deuteronomy/30.htm ).

So to be truthful I’ve baked sourdough discard tea biscuits. They were yummy but flat so I will try again. My starter is bubbling but not there yet according to what I’ve read so I’m going to keep feeding and nurturing it and hopefully will one day post here a picture of a pretty loaf of bread.

For now I’m going to enjoy the story of redemption and all the goodness God has given and especially the gift of His Son, the Bread of Life.

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We Don’t Deserve Anything

If it’s all true that Christ died wretched on a tree,

why do I ask for anything for me

A house, a spouse, all the things pale beside this misery

He endured.

The song sings “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.”

So why do I want what I want?

Not even wrong things.

Sometimes the right ones are the hardest to repent of.

Because I put them up there on a pedestal as a way to find peace, as a way to be free.

This iron will sits hard in my centre, tries to justify it’s expectation, calling it hope.

I want what I want.

It’s layered, there are many justifiable reasons I yearn for the things I do (insert yours here …)

My reasons are empty balloons in the face of the cross.

Even full, they are still all just air.

We are lured, age after age, generations over and over into making our camp here,

adopting traditions of the tribes and forgetting that we are Leah* like holograms

meant to bring a Word to the world, good news peddlers, pilgrims, wanderers.

Bonhoeffer said “Christ bids us come and die.” (The Cost of Discipleship).

Larry Norman said, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through…”.

Yet we are a people of roots.

We want to be sunk deep in the soil, be fastened to a location and call it HOME.

Wrong?

No. God promised His people that if they obeyed Him, He would bless them,

their wombs, crops, flocks and so forth.

I think this meant that they planted vineyards and had pastures,

built houses and stayed in a place.

So why do I feel this way?

Perhaps because it’s when, (even as the Isrealites fell into) prosperity comes, we (I) get lazy

and distracted.

We slide into what He warned about, the slippage into selfishness,

absorption with wants and culture,

rather than a continuous, grateful attachment to He who made it all

and in Whom we live and move and have our being.

Why do I think I should have, when most of the world has not.

Can the tide change and suddenly or gradually even,

I’m on the other side, picking through a garbage dump for my daily bread?

And if that is so, will I give thanks for the morsel I find?

I go through the motions;

prayer, self care, eat and clean this space, work, relate,

write words and garden, trying to produce some fruit.

Speaking of gardens there was a sower* who encountered various soil

as he toiled and I think I’ve found that mine might be thorny;

worries and wealth, creep stealthily until they choke the fruitful growth.

Open my eyes Lord, unwind the creeping vine that smothers the free and lovely

plans You have.

I confess, as I sit here, gazebo shading me from the heat, that some of the reason

for the gardens filling our yard is vanity and pride.

‘I can build that myself,’ as I gaze at a neighbors professional landscaping.

Some of it was just sheer lack of funds to do what they did.

And some of it was the arrogance to think I could achieve such a spectacular space

without the education, skills or funding.

Only God knows the deepest marrow of our motives.

Sometimes we build something though for the wrong ones and end up with a mess to maintain.

We become a slave rather than a joyful custodian of a blessing.

Lord have your way with my prone to wandering heart.

Rich Mullins sang “I’d rather fight you for something I don’t really want than take what you give that I need, and I beat my head against so many walls so I’m falling down, I’m falling on my knees …”.

I also know in my marrow that God is good and like a wonderful Father does,

He probes and prunes, too concerned with our eternity to leave us content in the now.

For this I’m so very grateful.

*Leah – Star Wars Princess Leah appeared as a hologram to bring a warning to the Rebels.

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Is It Possible?

Can it be,

that when circumstances change

so does your body?

From the synapses of thought connections

to fibrousy muscle tissue,

there’s a settling.

A re-aligning of Jenga like sections,

shifting into place.

A releasing of breath

that you didn’t know had been held,

for a decade and a half.

Can you hold your breath that long?

Was it a lack of trust that caused the binding

or did the intensity of the grip prove the trust.

Or both.

Can you look back

and realize that His promises are true

and that He’s had this all along.

Is there wonder stirring

under the weightedness

that you didn’t know bogged you down.

Was the weight that you knew was there

so connected to the deep, yearning desire for this,

yet you didn’t realize the depths of the burden you carried,

until it started to lift.

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Flurries

Back door, porch light on,

close to midnight in a blizzard,

snowflakes zoom.

Not fluttering but meteor-like they cascade from the sky,

leaving streaks, burning stars of delicate ice crystals

flailing through the air

sideways,

straight down,

and buffeted they change direction and swirl,

little darting points of white, cold light.

I reach out my hand but they evade me in their silver dance.

I try to capture them with my camera, and think they don’t look like that in real life;

But they do.

Bright lines,

zooming flakes,

a reflection of something they’re not,

but having come from the same brilliant Mind,

they mimic the meteoric flight of stardust.

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Christmas Post

It’s post Christmas.

Food baby firmly tucked around my middle

Mild headache and they said at work today I looked defeated.

No defeat, just plain old fashioned exhaustion.

I know I’m not alone.

This year felt like a marathon, without training.

But right down the middle of all the crazy …

(rushing, cooking, cleaning, stupid late nights watching Christmas movies, navigating relationships in a crammed full house, checking work emails, shopping, wrapping – the same as all of you – but I’m a year older and for some reason just didn’t weather all this the same)

… there was this family … these long and lanky men and spunky young woman.

My heart beats outside my body in four places. When they’re here my eyes fill with the sight of them and my ears with the sound of their voices, various deeps and one light and bright, and the tread of their footfalls. I can’t get my arms around them enough, and then they’re gone, three of them anyway and I feel this bereft joy, that they were here, and now not. And I know #4 feels the gain and loss so deeply too.

Such help on the busy day, team Catfamily and we did it people, we got it all done together. Yay!!! My best happiness in all of it, the cooperation.

Family.

Deep conversations, music and lots of it, laughter and the odd spark but yet never a fire lit to an angry blaze.

And your Dad laid low with an infection, struggled through and managed to be well on the big day. Thank you Jesus for this mercy as he wanted to be in the midst of it all and in the end was, revelling in his own way at all the love.

Beat, my bursting heart, with the fulness and then the abrupt quietness at Christmas’ end.

Calm and slow the wild and whelming waves into rest and acceptance.

Keep my loves as they depart in all the ways and directions.

Bind us all together in You, Lord of this birth-day we celebrate.

Carry us by your grace into fresh vision and next things until,

We meet again.

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War (Part 1)

What if all is war.

And we’re only becoming more aware of it now

As the darkness simmers and threats threaten

the ether of our simplicity on the edge of being dismantled.

Now, as the stripping away peels closer and judgement looms.

As what we have fractures fragile and the ethos crumbles

It becomes cracklingly clear.

This is war.

When our little lives are not managed

with utmost concern to the poor and marginalized

then the slip into darkness will awaken us if we’re paying attention.

How do you perceive the threats looming?

Is it gloom and fear?

Or the release by a mighty Hand, of

Assyria, upon idolatrous Israel?

Is it an arresting of our rights?

Or an assault on selfishness,

An invitation to repentance

A turning towards Love.

This is war.

The enemy is in the citadel*

And the citadel is me.

*Quote taken from “The Valley of Vision, Puritan Prayers”, by Arthur G. Bennet

1

You will keep in perfect peace, her whose mind is stayed on You
Stayed on You
Stayed on You
Perfect peace
In the midst of worry and doubt,
Niggling, nibbling frettings
Perfect peace
Stayed on you
Drama and pain,
Stayed on you,
Death and destruction
His Kingdom in us
Pain and suffering
His Kingdom in us.

Will he stop what’s coming
Will he prevent the difficult
Not if you follow history
I see Him cupping my face
In the centre of the storm
whirling, swirling worry
You okay? You’re okay.
Eyes on me
Let my Kingdom come and
My will be done in your heart,
In your life now
In all the mess
Me in you
You in Me

Will you enter into this trust?
Into this dance of knowing
That nothing can hurt you
Will you let the stripping away happen
Down to the bare
To the cracking off of the shell
Till you learn that no matter the hurt,
No matter the fracture or attack
Nothing shall by any means harm you.

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Leaving Part 1

There’s no right time to say that raw and weeping goodbye.

But you’ve been leaving for a while now.

Little by little, your steps faltered until you couldn’t manage anymore.

Your voice told me over and over yesterday that this was too hard.

So today you rode in the car, nestled into my arms to the place of farewell.

Did you know we were taking you to the place where pain would cease?

You quietly acquiesced into oblivion as we wept and stroked your

silky waves of doodle coat, as your heart stilled and suffering stopped.

#

I miss your cheerful wag and pokey nose nudging my leg

as you pass me by, or pause to lift your white face to my hand.

You won’t eat dirt anymore or chase those taunting squirrels along the fence

legs rigid and tail aloft in all your yammering glory.

I miss my travelling buddy, happy in the backseat,

our hikes at Gibson or you exploring with Hope at our adventuring places.

I miss you laying by the piano bench while I play

And really just you being anywhere I was my dear friend.

I miss you greeting everyone who came through our door,

standing, with your soft front paws on their legs,

smiling as they fell in love with you all over again.

And I especially miss you lying at the door when I walk in,

happy to see me, head lifted for a smooch.

I miss you finding me and telling me you want to go out

with your “owrrrr, owrrrr” gentle, growly voice.

I miss you so much, my sweet, gentle, beautiful, dear friend Dani

and am so thankful for the time we had together.

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