Monthly Archives: February 2019

Taking a day off

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in faceliftbook journey, Recovery journey

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It’s been one of those weeks.  I have a couple of pieces in the works, but none of them are crying out, “Finish me!”  Maybe because things keep somersaulting and jumping up in totally different places all over my life lately.  My days are just not playing out like I expected.

If you are a mom, or have one, maybe you can relate.  You map out a day in a way that would fulfill some of your needs, and find a dozen detours where you end up taking care of other people and their obviously more urgent issues.  And as the next day starts, your own list is still as long as the day before.

A little over a year ago I decided to stop putting myself last.  Okay, don’t pitch a fit. That is not the same thing as putting myself first!  Because that’s not my intention.

I was deep into an intensive Bible study, and while facing some hurts from my past, I realized I’d let those situations affect me my whole life.  I had learned a lot of ways to handle relationships that weren’t healthy, and that left me wondering why no one was taking care of my needs the way I tried to look out for others’.  So as part of my recovery journey, I decided a couple of changes were necessary.  I needed to quit trying to fix those around me by doing things for them that they could do for themselves.  And I needed to start doing things for myself that would help me become the person God created me to be.

So over the last year I’ve done a number of new things, and returned to some others that excite me and spur me on to deeper personal growth.  And as fun as some of those activities were, the hardest part was walking away from home, leaving my family to fend for themselves for a few hours or days.

Spoiler alert.  They all survived.  But there were times I drove off leaving frustrated teens behind, wondering who was going to take care of whatever they wanted me to do before I left, hoping they would figure it out.

And I also survived.  Cranking up my YES-FM, looking away from the rear view mirror, heading out to a time or place where I could start looking to God for direction with no interference.  Is this where you want me to go next?  Is this dream you’ve put in my heart your desire for me, God?

Because sometimes I can’t hear him in all the noise of life.

And it doesn’t help that I’m not a good finisher.  I excel at starting things, especially lists of things I’d like to do, or have someone else do, but not so successful at wrapping things up.

Someday I’ll connect all the dots from my past that will make me say, “Aha!  This is why I’m like this!”, and when I do I’ll share some of that epiphany.  But while I’m working on that, I’m finding it is possible to change.  Just because I have a history of not doing this or that, it doesn’t mean I can’t learn how.  And just because I have dozens of unfinished projects in process, I can choose to follow one through to completion.

“One day at a time” is a familiar phrase to me, one I’ve repeated hundreds of times over the last almost four years, and it gives me hope for each new day.  Because when I have those days where nothing new is accomplished, I know another day is going to follow.  The same when everything falls apart or even when everything runs smoothly, I’m still living it one day at a time.

As I look back over the last year of taking some time out for me, I have a clear knowledge that God was leading me through these experiences.  I could list all the things I did, but I’d rather tell you how they’ve changed my life.

I made connections with a new writing group, not knowing that my local one was going to fold by year’s end.  I have been forced to face my own physical limitations and it’s shown me it’s ok to say no.  I’ve found I’m more artistically creative than I knew.  I’m able to appreciate my family’s unique gifts better than before.  God gave me a new friend, one I love deeply and can’t wait to spend time with soon.

I want to share with you a little piece of writing that I grew up seeing all over my Mamaw’s house, both the more well-known short version and the full version.  I believe God put that in front of my eyes as a girl to prepare me for the day almost four years ago when I walked into Celebrate Recovery for the first time and God began a total overhaul of me that isn’t anywhere near done, and has brought the most abundant living I’ve known so far.

If you’ve never read this before, let it sink in.  Break it down, phrase by phrase, and you might want to make a change, too.  Because it’s never too late to start living the life God wants you to discover.  One day at a time.

Prayer for Serenity

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it;
trusting that You will make all things right
if I surrender to Your will;
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

Reinhold Niebuhr

A New Normal

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Grandfostering

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February is often a frigid month in Northwest Ohio, but regardless of the weather that late winter of 2017, a cold numbness settled in.  Baby A had moved on to a new family.

Life paused for a while.  That day, after my daughter handed her over to the case worker, we didn’t have our routine to keep us busy.  Our focus was suddenly gone.  We hung out at her house, ate lunch, watched a movie, but then what?  It had only been a couple of weeks of the baby going to daycare, and I was still tuned to her schedule.

My teens were struggling to understand and accept the uncertainties of fostering.  I had time now to try to help them process, but I’m sure my words sounded hollow.  I didn’t know how I felt from one moment to the next.

There were lots of tears over the next few weeks.

And hard lessons about love.

I Corinthians 13:4 says in the middle of the verse “love is kind and thoughtful, and is not jealous or envious”.  In the version I quoted a couple weeks ago it was worded, “Love cares more for others than for self.  Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.”

That was really hard to feel right after this little one left our circle of influence.  Altruistically I might have said that I wasn’t jealous of Big Brother and their new foster family.  But in my heart I was angry at the inability to control any of the circumstances.  I really had to focus on the good that was happening for our girl, the bonds that were being created with her newfound brother, the care she was enjoying from a family with kids to love on her.

I was reading in My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers  the February 11 devotion about imagination.  How if we neglect it we easily can feel exhausted and weak in our faith.  It goes on to say that when instead we choose to use our thoughts to focus on Jesus, it will be our biggest asset when times of trial come.  I felt a big “Yes!” in my heart.  I had been thinking about Baby A, how the only way I got through that time was to imagine the good things she was hopefully experiencing apart from us.

A new grandma would be caring for her some of the time, and I pictured her as being about my age.  Someone to feel the warmth of her snuggles, learning the ways she liked to be held.  Unlike our family, her new one had young kids.  When my daughter had met them before she had to turn the baby over they had seemed friendly and interested in Baby A, so I could imagine her being entertained by their activity and the attention she was receiving.

Her new foster mom had wanted to meet her, to introduce her other children to Baby A, to reassure my daughter that she was eager to take in these siblings and immerse them in her family, before she took them into her home.  So I would imagine another young woman experiencing all the firsts involved with getting to know our girl.

And of course, Baby A and Big Brother were discovering in whatever way they were able the wonder of a flesh and blood sibling.

And I found hope.  God taking these hard things in life and working through them and in them, working them for my good.  Even this.

It was a time of swimming through feelings for all of us, holding our breath to see how long my daughter would be willing to let herself adjust before diving into her next placement.

I watched her pack away the baby things, ready for the next one, much sooner than I was ready to have them out of sight.  Two months of a baby in her house had shown her  things to take care of while there wasn’t a little one around, and we inherited her much used and much passed down couch and loveseat in the process.

My stuff went in baskets where I could see them still, the little things kept at our house for when Baby A was with us.  There was a hedgehog one of my sons had gotten for her at Christmas, and it was just too hard to part with it, so he kept it to remember her by.

And in the busyness of the short two months she was with my daughter, we didn’t have many tangible mementos.  I have some scattered notes, the remnants of all that record-keeping my daughter asked me to do.  Schedules of what days I’d have her.  Pictures on my phone I had never developed.  A handprint that I still haven’t transferred to our family Christmas quilt.

So many memories with no physical proof.  No pictures of my heart to put in a scrapbook.  But I believe that the most important things in life are the things we can’t see, that we have to know without being able to prove.

Because those are the only things we take with us.

The end of the love chapter, I Corinthians 13, says that one day we will know as we are known, but until that day comes there are three things that remain.

Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly.

And the best of the three is love.

Yes!  Yes, it is.

Even when it hurts.

 

Learning to Flow

14 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Recovery journey

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I have to confess that as I’m sitting down to write this, I’m tired.  Falling asleep at stop lights in the middle of the afternoon tired.  And contrary to my big plan at the beginning of this blogging adventure, I don’t have at least two or three finished pieces ready to post at any time.   At least not tonight.

My reasons are the same kinds of things we all have: the perfect storm of actual bad winter weather, work, extra visits from the grandbaby, my second ever asthma attack, along with the regular stresses of life.

What I really want to tell you about is a few minutes of a radio show I caught coming home from  Celebrate Recovery last week.  And oh yes, love.  Because this is posting on Valentine’s Day.  And they really are related.

Ok.  I can see I need to get this a little more organized, so you can at least attempt to jump on this train with me.   Last week my regular Celebrate Recovery group was displaced by a special event at the church where it is held.  So I decided to go to a different campus for CR, one where I had gone through an eight month Step Study with a terrific group of women who are now my step-sisters for life, who I love deeply and was ecstatic to see again.

A Step Study, as the name implies, is a journey through the twelve steps and eight principles of Celebrate Recovery, all based on the Bible and the words of Jesus.  It’s an intense study, a deep look at yourself, done in the company of and with the support and encouragement of others who are also looking deeply at themselves.

It is the most intense experience I have ever had.  And I’ve done a lot of Bible studies.

I must confess that I’m kind of spoiled now.  I have learned so much about my own character flaws, faults, sins, grudges, unforgiveness, defensiveness, as well as strengths and victories, that I find it necessary to dig deeply into anything I decide to study.  But in the world of women’s Bible studies, they are generally not as cathartic as a Step Study.

So I eagerly headed to their CR last Friday.  I’d been savoring that night all week.  I was pleasantly surprised at the difference in feel between our larger, more formal group (I’d guess at least double the size) and the intimacy of this smaller group.  They did the same basic things as every CR program, but more up close and personal, which felt so good to me. There was only one men’s and one women’s open share group, and all my step-sisters that were there were in group with me.

Last week I listed several topics I wanted to write about, Celebrate Recovery being one of them, specifically my own personal recovery journey.  And in my mind I was going to start at the beginning.  I planned to map it out, have it go in chronological order.  Because I knew I wanted to start talking about it, and it seemed like the logical way to go about it.  And yet I hadn’t figured out a good way to start.

Which is where the radio show came in.  Chuck Swindoll was playing on my drive home Friday night.  It seemed to be an address to a group of graduate students, and I tuned in as he was giving a list of about twenty principles to remember as they headed into their lives.  This is the one I’ve been thinking about all week.

Does it flow, or is it forced?

So far everything I’ve written has flowed.  It hasn’t all been in the most logical order, the topics have changed in the middle of the stream sometimes, but it has felt effortless and purposeful.

Until this week, when I tried to write my recovery story from the beginning, or searched my mind for a different topic.  I’ve sat down several nights and gotten a total of twenty-six words down before hitting a wall.

That would be an example of forced.

There was a little more to his principle.  Am I asking God to lead and waiting for his direction, or am I pushing ahead with my own agenda based on what I’d like to see happen?  Pastor Swindoll urged his audience to wait for God’s leading instead of jumping ahead of him, because when we do things with God’s timing, it will flow.  And when we do it in our own timing, it will feel forced.

So as I sat down tonight, tired, my thoughts refusing to come together in the way I thought they should, I did what I should have done in the beginning.  I asked God what I should write about and what I should say.  The faces of my step-sisters and brothers from this other group popped into my head.  The love and acceptance I felt from them Friday night, that I had felt in the years I’ve known some of them.  The hope that was kindled in my heart when I clearly saw what starting a CR at my own church could look like if I had the courage to ask God to show me if and when to launch a new group.

And it quit feeling forced and started to flow.

It really does all circle back to love.

I’ll tell you another time how it all started, but recovery is all infused with love: the people, the program itself, the words of Jesus we speak to each other week after week.

The way God cracks my defenses and lets me pour out my pain and struggles, as well as welcome in healing and restoration.  The way listening to other women talk about their journeys, their own struggles, helps me get clarity for myself.  The gift of being able to pray over and for these women that are part of my forever family, along with the men who are also my brothers in this journey.

God loves me so much that he isn’t satisfied to let me force my way through life, never dealing with my issues.  He offers me help that is real and life-changing, but he doesn’t force it on me.  He waits for me to get to the end of my own plans, my own brilliant ideas that only make things harder.

He waits for me to ask.  And then the help flows, in ways I didn’t imagine, gently, filled with grace, mercifully exposing me for who I am.  And giving me a glimpse of who I can be.

 

 

 

Trains of Thought

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in faceliftbook journey

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alone on trainI tend to go where my thoughts take me.  I have always been this way, jumping from one train of thought to another.  For instance in this picture on the way to Chicago last summer, I was copying sermon notes, studying “one thousand gifts” and journaling about it, writing in a prayer journal, and conversing with my family.  Like the train we were on, my thoughts had many destinations.

Unlike the route, I often switch easily from one to another of the many tracks in my mind.   I  see obvious connections even though others don’t always follow my trains of thought.  I’m telling you this because as I pursue this need to write and share with other people, I want you to see how my mind works.  And maybe you’ll be one of the few who try to follow what I’m saying.

So for instance, in a recent post I talked about why I have no choice but to pour love lavishly on my daughter’s foster babies.  And in my mind that connects to my Grandpa C.  And that connects to my dad, and his dad, and poverty, and my Papaw’s alcoholism, and lost opportunities, and back to my dad, and how he never learned good boundaries, and on and on.

I could keep writing my story and never come to the end of it.  Which is good if you like reading these posts!  So don’t be surprised if I go places you never saw coming.

There aren’t  many people in my life that have stuck with me throughout this journey.  There’s my family, siblings, extended family who I love dearly but have never gotten to know as closely as I’d like.  Friends that are almost all in my church family, who have the gift of extending grace to this passionate, bullheaded person.  And my forever family at Celebrate Recovery.

I’ve reached a point where I know I’m a loner, but I also know God created us to be in relationship with each other, and in recent years I’ve been digging deeply into why I’ve struggled to let anyone see the inner me.  So as I am opening up, I am feeling vulnerable but also expectant that God will take my words and help other people see that it’s okay to be real with others.

I think it’s funny that I have no problem connecting ideas in my mind, but in real life I stink at cultivating relationships with real people.

In addition to chronicling my experience with my daughter’s fostering adventure, I’ll continue into adoption, my personal recovery journey, and along with that all the ways that God has challenged me to give up my “rights”, and willingly give everything back to him.  As my mind is thinking over just those things, connections from my childhood pop up, mapping out how I got from there to here.

And why I’m not anywhere near ready to stay where I am now.

Just over six years ago I was at a writer’s conference I’ve attended for years.  The speaker talked about blogging and ways to get your name out there, about building your platform,  your specialty, or what you are known for writing.  Like if you say horror stories, Stephen King comes to mind.  Or pioneer family life you’d think Laura Ingalls Wilder.

He challenged us to tweak what already existed to make it our own.  So he threw out the question, “What would you call Facebook if it were aimed at women fifty and over?”  My hand shot into the air and I immediately said, “Faceliftbook!”

He loved the idea, and I ran with it.  As far as naming my blogsite, that is.  It has been six years since, and the name has grown on me, even though I never did much with my blog back then.  I set the impossible task of posting every day, and it only lasted a few days.  Lesson learned.

This time around I decided to shoot for a weekly post, which I’ve successfully done for 12 weeks now – hey that’s almost 3 months!  And though I’m not consciously trying to work in a direct reference in every post, I’ve decided my blog is about helping us all lift our faces to God.

Acts 17:26-28
  Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living  so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. He’s not remote; he’s near.  We live and move in him, can’t get away from him! One of your poets said it well: ‘We’re the God-created.’
My biggest struggle in life has been facing God.  And my biggest problem is that I want to look everywhere else for him but where I need to be looking.  I turn to my circumstances or my problems, to how different my life would be if everyone around me would just shape up and take responsibility.
So as the blurb on the top says,  this is one woman’s attempt to lift my face and see beyond my circumstances.  Because they truly don’t define me.  They don’t really say that much about me.  They are pictures taken from a train on paths that can change as quickly as my mind switches from one thought to another.  What matters is who I choose to look to in the middle of wherever I find myself.
And since I can’t get away from him, and he is near, and he wants me to seek after him, I choose to look at the one who created me, trains of thought and all.