Well, I do have some news to report. Good news. I have struggled with feeling like I was in a kind of prison over the past weeks as I absorbed all the energy around me at work that was less than positive and forward-moving. I took my son’s advice and wrote out my views on a word document, so that if I decided I couldn’t handle it anymore, I would have my words in a well thought out format. I must admit that was stellar advice! After I got it all on paper, it ceased running through my brain at night, costing me the much needed sleep required to help me deal with the day ahead.

That being said and done, I began to see changes in my work environment, where I was actually able to make positive contributions and stay out of the things that brought me such angst. Once I began to be able to start helping people find homes again, I started to feel better about spending so much time in one place, something I have never been able to do successfully in the past. I have always thrived in jobs where I drove around or moved around a lot (Stewardess, Realtor, Faux Finisher).

I also saw that If I asked God to intervene and truly bless me in those circumstances that I couldn’t seem to change, that He actually did exceedingly beyond what I could have imagined. I have begun to include in my prayer list even more wildly extravagant requests for my life! We will see how that goes in the near future, but I saw this week one incredible example of His abundant answers (hard to explain here without a lot of detail, but trust me, it was huge!)! I will keep you posted on the incoming results. It will be nothing less than exciting….it always is!

I am pondering the situation in which I find myself  and wonder, am I practicing patience and long-suffering? Or am I just postponing the decision to go all out in what I believe God wants me to do. There are seasons in our journey, to be sure, but I am realizing how it will take some discernment to give up the safety of a paycheck to return to my certain faith that God will provide all that I need if I am doing what He wants me to do.

I think perhaps He knew I needed to see the value of that which He has put on my heart, but also to see the value of how He sees me. In a place where my strengths are really under utilized and almost become weaknesses, I am learning that there is a place where I am able to do much more than just live through the day.

I have always been available to be an advocate, an encourager to those who were getting weary. I now see Him sending the same kind of missionaries into my life to encourage me. There is a “job” that needs doing and sometimes when you feel you have no job you are doing perhaps the most important one of all.

I was speaking to a wife and mother today who also spends a great deal of time taking care of her aging parents and I told her, as I had told another friend just last week, that God has to have some missionaries that don’t have daily 9-5  jobs… so that they can be available to show up when everyone else is at work or so tired after work they can’t drag themselves out of the house. Most of us at work can’t even answer our phones  if we were to get a call, so our timetable means that others have to put their needs on hold.

This made me think that  I may be trying to operate on my own timetable and not on God’s. I believe when I am in sync with God’s plan for my life, it doesn’t feel sad when I wake up and go to work nor do I feel sad at the end of the day when I come home. While I often had bills I couldn’t pay on time and didn’t know where my next paycheck was coming from or when, I had joy in my life every day from the places God sent me and the people with whom  He connected me.

I miss that sense of doing daily what He instructed and being led by His spirit. I feel like when I check into work I check out of His plan for that length of time. At the end of the day I feel exhausted and sad. I have never felt that way in the past thirty years, even though I have been stressed by lots of circumstances, I have had such strong faith that God was in control. It is giving me strength to reexamine my circumstances, and come up with the courage to leave the safe for the uncertain, and once again be working with God.

I have, at the very least, more awareness of why it is so difficult for many to leave the certainty of a paycheck, no matter how much they may not like their job. I am grateful, however, that I learned to lean on God for provision a long time before I saw the temptation of leaning on a paycheck.

I have recently, thanks to the economy downturn and the real estate quandary in particular, taken a job in corporate America. I have to say….. I must have been living in a bubble for the last twenty five years!

Running my own businesses, and taking total responsibility for the outcome and the income (or lack of it!) I must say was a lot easier and more satisfying than trying to work ethically in an environment where so many no longer feel any personal responsibility for their day’s paycheck.

Maybe I have just been blessed by the employees I have been proud to work with,  delegate to and promote. Perhaps I am “just lucky”. Or  possibly the values I held myself to  also attracted the type of employee who felt the same.  All I know is I looked forward to every day of work I was privileged to have, and never went home with the sadness or started my day as close to tears as I have recently.

I am determined to do the best I can, even within the confines of having very little input into the solutions to the problems. I know that God provided this income and therefore has a purpose for me there. As with so many things, I may not realize it until long after, when the reasons are revealed. I do know that as always, I trust His map for my life, and will continue to try to stay on track. All I know is, sometimes I feel like my GPS has picked up a wrong signal and sent me way off course….like I am on a dirt road when I should be on a highway! The driving is a bit more precarious and I just have to slow down and proceed with caution, and prayer.

What would we be caught doing? I often wonder, since God sees everything and He knows our hearts, what do we really think we are hiding from Him? And how often does He delight in catching us doing something He didn’t have to prompt us to do?

Today I was sitting at my desk with my phone off because I was at work, awaiting the arrival of my youngest, who was coming to get something out of my car trunk. I knew approximately when he might arrive, but got involved in something I was doing and missed a text saying he was there. Meanwhile, a young mother I had noticed outside was on the phone, holding her baby, and standing outside of her car.

She was having car trouble, as my son obviously noted, and he had pulled his car alongside hers and was proceeding to hook up his jumper cables to her battery when I noticed him.

She drove off shortly after and he proceeded to get the item from my vehicle and go on his way. I thought afterward how effortlessly he had stepped in to help where help was needed. I was very moved by what I saw when it hadn’t been me who encouraged him to do so, frankly I was way more impressed because I didn’t even see the need.

When we catch our children doing the right thing or a nice thing when they don’t know we are looking is the very best time of all! I remember reading a parenting book one time that exhorted: “Catch your child doing something right!” I remember taking that to heart and trying to notice all the things they did correctly rather than the few I was trying to help them improve.

I will bet you God feels the same way about His children, when He sees them doing something He didn’t even have to nudge them to do.

Because it is no longer well enough. I was having a spirited conversation with a spirited friend and that is what came out of my mouth. We can’t leave well enough alone….at the voting booth, at the dinner table, at our job. Things are not well enough for us to do that. We have turned the other way, gone back to our TV show, put our head in a book of fiction so long that while we weren’t watching, things happened that we cannot reverse.

If we continue to let others speak for us, decide what’s best for us, we will lose the right to speak up at all. I read a very interesting email about the women who went to jail to insure our right to vote. Their story may come out in a movie soon. It is truly amazing the lengths to which they were willing to go to provide something  we often find an excuse not to exercise. How often I have heard ‘I had to make dinner’ or’ I had to pick up the kids at gymnastics’, as a reason someone didn’t vote.

It is curious that I  am more likely to hear “it’s to die for!” referring to a dress or pair of shoes than something like our right to vote, or our freedom to worship as we choose.

I truly believe the time is nearing where we will have to choose what we are willing to die for. Where what we believe in our heart of hearts will take precedence over all else. It may not be everyone who is forced to choose this way, but I do believe those who enlisted early on into God’s army will have to make hard choices, where there is no middle of the road.

I hope, if and when that time comes, to know my belief is substantially more important to the future of my childrens’ children than a pair of shoes, and I hope to be remembered as a woman in their lineage who was willing to stand up for something she believed, no matter what the cost.

In a recent phone conversation with a good friend, I realized that many of us are made with an interior radar system that defies the obvious. There is that innate gut feeling that tells you something is wrong, someone isn’t telling you the whole truth, things aren’t adding up.

I am amazed how many people will buy the stories, look the other way, fail to investigate or connect the dots. Just too time consuming, I guess.  The end result of this lack of time spent often results in a destruction of the very principles they believe they are promoting, the character traits they are proselytizing.

Isn’t this exactly what many people are teaching their children and their employees, by example? I question some of the small repetitive things that I am asked to do at my job, because the end result seems to be the opposite of  the ultimate stated goal. I prefer creative, specific, honest attempts to bring in the traffic that will actually fulfill that goal instead of create numbers that don’t necessarily compute. Each situation is very different, one size does not fit all.

We seem to have ceased looking for solutions that are case specific but rather give us vague generalities to solve our problems. I come from a lifetime background of finding specific solutions, and am continually noticing how  most people overlook the specific in favor of the general. Most of the people, most of the time, is their motto, I must assume. I see it as hardly any of the people, hardly any of the time,  feeling they have their best solution at heart.

I believe the time is coming, or has now come, where people will rise up in resistance to the one size fits all kind of marketing and thinking. I think it will be very interesting to see this happen, and watch the confusion of those who thought they had it all figured out!

When I had some emergency surgery recently, I was told to go home and fill my pain medication prescription, keep the Tylenol and Aleve handy, and most of all to “try and stay ahead of the pain.”

I wasn’t quite sure what the doctor meant by that, but I was grateful to see they had prescribed only about ten pills (I only took two the whole time, and cut even those in half) instead of the full bottle they used to charge you for. Mine mostly went down the toilet, so I usually vacillated between filling a prescription and just keeping it handy in case and until I was actually IN pain.

There was much to be said for this theory, however. Once you experience the pain, every nerve in your body seems to record it, so that it can play it back at the mere hint of it returning.  If, however, one stays ahead of the pain, taking the medication just prior to the previous dose wearing totally off, one never actually experiences the pain.

So this got me thinking. What if, when we saw pain approaching, and by this now I am referring to primarily emotional pain and heartache, we actually embraced it and went with it, instead of stoically trying to push it back? Like my young surfer previously, wouldn’t we be able to ride it out better if we tried to skirt out just ahead of it instead of being caught in the crash and foam and being thrown every which way?

I think there is a lesson in all that. If we truly trust God to bring us through every circumstance, no matter how potentially hazardous it may appear, isn’t He going to know how to ride the wave and stay ahead of the pain?

He is, and He will also probably be delighted we trusted Him enough to take that ride together!