I am amazed at how many situations are made easier with instant cell phone calls, texting and emails. Plans can be changed in a split second, people can find each other in malls, one can know immediately of one anothers needs or successes.

Again, the boxes of pictures and letters, and the endless processing. Today I grabbed one more big green plastic container that had long ago lost its lid. It has a small fuzzy stuffed bear and a string of Christmas lights and what seemed to be as stash of  very old crayon drawings from kindergarten times. I wasn’t even sure which child may have drawn them, but I determined to wade through them, just in case.

There were several stacks of things that weren’t keepers, but I put them aside for review by the child whose early efforts at artistic expression were recorded, just in case there were clues to his life that might be of interest to him. The other son had already looked through this particular box this weekend, dismissing most of it with a cursory once over.

Somewhere toward the middle I began to find remnants of a retreat called Chriseo, that I had been part of on Mother’s Day weekend in 1991. It is a Christian ceremonial tradition of a three day walk with God, the “fourth day” being the beginning of the rest of your life with Christ. One of the wonderful things they do, while the pilgrims are preparing to go on their walk, is ask their friends and family to write letters that will be given to them the third day.

Often we don’t sit down and tell people how greatly we admire them or treasure who they are in our lives. Sometimes we make reference to those feelings in a card at birthdays or other occasions, or when they are honored at a function for business or community service. For the vast numbers of people, however, those thoughts may never be put to paper until we are addressing their relatives in a sympathy card after they die. I know that it is those cards and letters, mixed in with all the other bits and pieces of my past, that have been the things I moved to a separate spot, my new box of treasures.

Here amongst the others was a hand written letter from my Dad. He began by saying he realized he had mostly put pen to paper to tell me the things that he was concerned about as I made choices about my life. They had often been harsh and full of the potential negatives that he felt I might run into, should I choose a certain path. Unfortunately those letters had left scars that, while I was certain were unintentional, were never completely healed.

This letter made quick reference to those  other letters, but went on to address all the ways in which he admired the choices I had made. He confirmed the excellent job he felt I was doing as a parent to my boys and how I provided them not only the necessities for living but an abundance of love and support for them as well as a firm grounding in the love of God and knowledge of Jesus. He told me how compassionately and unselfishly he saw me live my life and attend to the needs of others. His pride was evident in his choice of words and especially in the ones he underlined for emphasis. That letter gave me the opportunity to let go of all the harsh-sounding words that had rung in my ears over my lifetime, condemning me to try to resist them as the truth about myself. Here, in his own words, were all the things I had ever hoped he had felt about me; here was an opportunity to erase the familiar voice of the liar who had held space in my head most of my life.

As the mailman goes the way of the Pony Express, and email cards take the place of handwritten ones, I wonder if we will ever again hold those saved missives, bearers of both good and bad tidings. Is it our loss or will the gains be worth it? Will we tell each other more often how much we love and appreciate one another, so that summing up our feelings will never be as necessary? Only time will tell I suppose. With the fast sharing of news, in less than a week we have had to process the death and devastation of horrible tornadoes, the happiness and splendor of a Royal wedding, as well as the capture and demise of the man who caused the most incredible hurt ever to happen within our borders since the Civil War. In six days that requires a lot of emotional endurance, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the rapid delivery of news, and quick sharing between friends and family of our emotions that can be facilitated today.

My prayer is that good news and loving thoughts are hitting the airwaves and bandwidth just as quickly. That an email that conveying an unmeant but hurtful message will be quickly responded to with a phone call that heals what might have become a serious wound. It is possible, if we keep our hearts alert to what is/ or is not hidden between the lines of type. I know for me those important things were often written at the very end and up around the right side of the last page of the letter. The last P.S….and then the P.P.S. If we commit to keeping our emotional databases as up-to-date as our news, we will have a wonderful, healthy world (and family) indeed!

We never realize how long it actually takes to go through those boxes containing our past. All those seemingly random pictures, cards and letters saved, thrown into boxes, mementos of a life lived.

I think if we never allow ourselves that time to process them, we are missing out on some very important substance to our lives. It is a review of what we considered important, and a way to see if it still holds meaning for us. In many ways this can be confirming, or it can assist us in making future decisions or commitments.

I have found letters I thought I had thrown away, as well as some I never remember receiving. Like the one from my brother-in-law, mentioning that nothing was more important than my choosing Jesus in my life, and that everything else would fall into place after that. He was praying for me that day as he wrote. The date on his letter was Dec 9th, 1983. I ran from the garage to the house to check the bookmark in my Bible. It commemorated the day I had asked Jesus into my life. A single mom from the church I was attending had come to my home that day and cleaned for me while I was taking care of a newborn son. She asked me at the end of the day if I would like to ask Jesus into my life and when I said yes she prayed with me. She gave me that bookmark to remember the date. When I pulled it from my Bible, it confirmed exactly what I had thought, Dec 9th, 1983.

My brother in law mailed that letter that day and I received it three days later. But God didn’t wait on the mailman, He responded immediately to his fervent prayer and sent an angel immediately to my home. I found that to be an amazing testimony to His loving attention to our requests. I will now keep both together in my Bible.

We need to take time, and spend time assisting our older relatives, to process those memories. They hold a lot of good information and clues to a persons life. It is too difficult to do at the same time as we are trying to move someone out of their home, or after they have died. How much better if we make time to sit with them once a month or even once a year helping them preserve those treasures by scanning photos and letters, taking pictures of furniture that might be willed to family and making notes about its history while the person can still tell the story about it.

A gift of time is indeed a gift of love, and as in the instance of the mom who came to clean my house almost thirty years ago, or my brother in law taking time to write and pray, it may be the most important gift a person ever receives!

I am sorting through the past forty-five years of my lifetime in bankers boxes of paperwork, along with the furniture I have purchased and accumulated through ten homes, plus that for which I have assumed responsibility from my Mom, and it is a most interesting process.

Initially I had trouble deciding whether to sell the furniture (to help pay for my move) and be able to get what I will need on the other coast, or to store it here for a year until I see where I land and what I need and/or might want to have at some point. Hating to be an Indian giver, I resisted asking my family if they wanted anything, not knowing if I might want it back.

The idea of garage sales brings me nothing but headaches, and I find them to be largely a waste of time for me. I have found that donations are a better solution for most things I would consider garage sale items. I also realized I would rather someone in my family was enjoying  a favorite item, rather than realizing I had sold it for about one eighth of its cost to me, and missing the value that just seeing it once it enjoyed and used provided. It also seemed like such a final decision when I really can’t possibly know what my life may look like a year from now.

The most interesting thing that I have noticed was the fact that what I really wanted was more what the furniture represented than the item itself. I had asked for the dining table and eight chairs that represented all the holiday meals we shared when our family gathered at holidays. Having the table didn’t give me the gathering nor the large family it could seat. The memories were already in my mind. Truly the table was more a sad reminder that I mostly ate alone, so passing the table on to a family member who might actually have those gatherings was a much better solution than keeping the table.

In the same manner, I realized I have bought over fifty cookbooks and carried them around for years. While I often take them out and look at the pictures, envisioning meals and lingering conversations with others, I almost never cook for more than myself and rarely get together with friends, except at restaurants for lunch when our schedules and wallets permit. The cookbooks merely represent the desire of my heart to eat with others more frequently, not the desire to cook or to eat the foods I pick out in the pictures.

After several weeks of indecision, I have decided to take digital pictures of my furniture and ‘valuables’ and send them online to my children, siblings, nieces and nephews, and after that perhaps to my close friends. I will seek foster care for these items for the next year or two. I am really looking for someone who would really enjoy my things and would care for them as though they are their own (as they may well be in the future). It is preferable to putting them in storage for a year or more. I may ask for a small deposit(or donation) which I will refund should I later request the return of the items.  That would give me a start on helping me purchase the basic necessities when I get to my new home.

At least for now, that is my favorite plan. What I take with me is the courage to find new friends to eat with, a sense of community that embraces me, and more opportunities to linger over coffee with friends and family. A tiny studio with basic necessities will be more than enough room to house the things I really need to sustain me.

As I ready myself for Life Change # ?, I am once again revisiting my past, as I sort through what seems like more photos than I ever remember taking or being caught in and many more notebooks, yearbooks, documents and letters than I can keep (or need to!)

I have written less in my blog, but  I do seem to be processing more in my head. More thoughts, more inward thinking, more moments of just trying to make sense of where I have been so I can more easily chart where I am going. I had started trying to connect my own dots, see what were the common denominators of the former parts of my life. One of the joys of doing this is that it resembles writing one’s own memoir or eulogy, someone else isn’t doing it for me.

That is even one of my common threads, trying to put a name on my journey through life. I am getting closer. In the course of excavating hundreds of well-worn self-help books, I came across one that slipped by unopened. It turned out to be providential that I had overlooked it because it is the perfect guide for this part of my travels!

I have been trying to pull together ideas for a new job when I arrive at my new base in California. In reviewing past forms of both vocations and avocations, I began to notice similarities of intent, if not of description. This book is called Is Your Genius At Work? by Dick Richards, and it has really helped me. I don’t know whether it will lead to a new job or not, but it is helping me find the truth in my resume. It leads you through exercises to name what you do that no one else does in the same way, putting a two word name to your particular gift and seeing how your life and work line up with it. Its really more like extracting it from your life, because it was always there, and you have always been doing it (or trying to).  It would consist of a gerund (a verbal noun ending in ‘ing’) and another noun which together form an active representation of what ‘you bring to the party’ and would do easily and for nothing. Because that is true, it would also be your happiest form of employment or volunteer work.

I think what I would most like to do would require a counseling degree and Masters to do it for pay, but I am drawn to it nonetheless. We will see where God goes from here. Sorry to be so absent from blogging lately. I have been sorting through my life and it seems one can only handle so much downsizing at any one time and, interestingly, there have been fewer things to write about than when I am interacting with others ….which is also, it appears, a major indicator of my life’s work and perhaps my ‘genius’ as it turns out!

I am sitting here trying to figure out how to comfort my dog, Gypsy, through what seems like an endless storm this morning. I am grateful that I do not have to be anywhere else, but I really can do little to alter the fear that he is dealing with. My presence probably helps, as he does seem to want to find a place in whatever room I move to, but he faces away from me, almost as if he is trying to keep an eye out so he sees the approaching danger before it gets me. It is only because this is the opposite of normal for him that I even notice.

Heavy panting seems to be the way to calm oneself at the worst moments(if you are Gypsy), as when huge thunderclaps come. Right now it is actually almost quiet and he is slithering under the bed, a very tight squeeze. His body is all under but his legs are sticking right out. As I grabbed my camera he was able to pull them under as well, so I missed a cute shot. I guess he is recuperating from the last few hours and hoping it will be the end of it. Might stay in bed and pull the covers over your head be the human equivalent of his denial, or is he hiding so the storm can’t find him when it returns?

I was thinking of the panting exercises you learn in childbirth classes, to get you ready for contractions that you may not know will be so bad. I guess panting and breathing are the critical ways to live through unidentified fears. I know Gypsy takes a very different stance when facing a known fear, like an animal that doesn’t seem to particularly like him. Storms are a seemingly unknown fear, as I guess  the world could come to an end in any one of them, from a canine perspective. No amount of my telling him he has lived through this before seems to be of any help.

When someone tells you ” just breathe” it seems so simple and yet we often forget we are holding our breath. That’s good if you are going under water, but if drowning is not the fear, opt for breathing. When you hear a dog in a thunderstorm, his breathing is almost as loud as the beating of his heart. I guess that’s a good sign, when you feel your heart beating as though it would leave your chest….start breathing! Oh, and be sure to remember God’s presence is always in the room with you.

Not to take anything away from Forest Gump, but lately I am more inclined to compare life to dentistry! That could have a great deal to do with my age and/or the condition of my teeth and gums, or it might just be a good analogy to which only a lucky few dental victims can relate!

It is interesting as I continue this journey, looking back at the pictures and memories of my past as I make way for my future, that I come face to face with many emotions I have thus far refused to acknowledge. I guess I have made it this far by having a Pollyanna attitude about most things, choosing to put a smiley face on those things that caused the most pain, but about which I really had little choice but to accept them.

As I make ready my heart for the joy of grandparenting and everything leading up to it, God has taken me by the hand to revisit the months leading up to the birth of my first son. As it also held clues of a marriage that was not going to make it past the baby’s first birthday, there was a lot of pain mixed in with my best thoughts. That’s where the root canal comes in.

God is so tender and loving and always waits until we give Him permission to take us back and clean up our memories. Going to the dentist for surgery is similar. First you have to recognize there is pain. Then you have to decide how you are going to deal with it. You may try to ignore it for awhile, taking some kind of pain killers and hoping it just goes away. You may get so angry you just have it pulled, leaving forever an empty place where a tooth was, but at least the pain is gone as well. Most of all you have to count the cost. A root canal can be expensive. Saving a tooth with a cap can be expensive. You have to be willing and able to make the payment.

That is where I find myself with God. Once I realize there is a painful memory and I decide it is worth it to fix, we find a time and a safe place to go back into that situation and remember what really happened. God’s mercy and grace are the Novocaine and fillers for the job of excavating the debris that is causing the pain. An old decayed root that is preventing me from feeling complete joy. Once we go back and finish the job, there is instead a healed place from which I can experience total happiness! Instead of losing the use of that piece of my heart, I have repaired it and changed the memories forever. Now if something touches that memory, there will no longer be a sharp pain that pierces the moment for me, but instead a strong new surface, ready to experience everything that current moment holds.

There are friends who caution me sometimes “We can’t go back there, it’s too painful” but I say make the appointment and get it done! When something happens that triggers a painful memory, ask God to go back with you and clean out the dying root. You will never know how wonderful it feels to have your  heart healed if you aren’t willing to schedule the appointment with Him.

Sometimes it occurs to me that I process ideas and new behaviors in a hit and run method. Right now I am really trying to add some new habits to my daily routine. I am trying to begin a certain regime of vitamins, to see if my energy and arthritis symptoms improve significantly.

I have also started to breathe more deeply, having noticed that I probably use only half my available lung capacity with my shallow breathing, and that being the case, I am probably robbing my cells of the oxygen they need to stay really healthy. It is not easy to change the way you breathe. It is something on which I have to concentrate, and I can feel the place halfway there where I am tempted to stop and the block I have to press through every time to do it differently than what comes naturally. Let’s face it, I have been breathing poorly for most of my life!

What I mean by hit and run is that I have definitely had these urges to change behaviors in the past. I think of them, ponder them for a day or to, perhaps start a plan to incorporate them, but then I move to something else that distracts me from my purpose and I basically give up trying to notice if there was any difference or a way to measure it. I call that a lack of discipline on my part, but in order to change it I am finding it necessary to come at the problem from another direction.

Having 90 days to bring about a move across the country and finish up my business on this coast has given me an opportunity to put some new behaviors into place as I try to structure my departure. I am finding  mental clarity is really necessary to keep me on track, defining priorities for each day, week and month. Finding a way to discipline myself is a continual challenge, and while I have not found a total solution, I am trying to adapt what I already know about myself and work with that. I will keep you posted as I try not to run but rather to stick around until I find a way to get better performance out of my mind and body!

And what does this have to do with my day? I was watching an interview this morning with a man who studies them in the wild, and who is doing a documentary about them over the past seven years . At the moment there is only speculation as to why Knute died in the Berlin Zoo yesterday, at the young age of just four.

This man said that while he was not a vet and did not know for sure, that perhaps the animal had a seizure of some sort, but the habits and challenges of a polar bear in the wild can not be replicated in a zoo. Polar bears are by far one of the most intelligent predators he has ever studied. Mainly because they have to live in a constantly changing landscape of ice flows, they train themselves to catch their prey in three dimensions. They stalk under water, above water, and by jumping from one chunk of ice to another. They are extremely good at challenging the elements in their way, and of figuring out ways to get to their food. It is never simple, nor is it ever the same.

This made me think of what I was trying to say in yesterday’s blog.  I never think of myself as extremely intelligent, though I recognize that I have a way of thinking about problems that some of my more degreed family members never seem to grasp. It has continually amazed me at how one dimensionally a person trained in absorbing only what has been written seems to think and process what is happening in the present.

I, on the other hand, seem to process what happens as it is happening, without all prior knowledge to get in my way. I notice how people actually behave and operate in situations and how their emotions affect their circumstances, as well as how their circumstances affect their emotions, and then how that leads them to be able to change those circumstances or not. For someone who thinks life is already figured out and there is a right and wrong way to go about it, this is way off the mark and easily discounted.

For years I let that view of (my)life make me feel inferior. The longer I live, however, the more I notice that these skills of observation actually give me a feeling of confidence and lack of worry that the thinkers don’t have. My faith overrides their worry. It can’t be explained by mere principles, it just is. There will be no degree conferred from this knowledge, but it seems worthy of one, none the less.

The polar bear may have died from lack of both stimulation and lack of challenges for his intelligence. He needed to keep figuring things out with his mind, and in his caged environment the days were pretty much the same, one after another. This affected his mental state, which could very much have affected his physical state. When I said yesterday that I seemed to need challenges to prevent a slow death, I was grasping for that same piece of information. Some people, and some animals, will never be content with the status quo. They will continually see things that could be improved and try to make a difference. They need the juxtaposition of ideas and circumstances to give them an ever different perspective.

They need a continually changing landscape to their life. That certainly makes the twenty-some moves of my adult life make a bit more sense now, doesn’t it? Or perhaps they need people around them who constantly challenge their way of thinking and doing things, not ones who choose the comfort of doing them a certain way once and for all. That is why I feel like a rebel in some situations, though I know I am a peace maker at heart. The status quo,  in and of itself, will always challenge me to improve upon it, and I may always butt heads with those who are comfortable with it just the way it is.

I had been speaking with a friend on the phone and she was remarking about my story and how I continually made lemonade out of lemons, so to speak.

In response I told her it was actually not the challenges, but the lack of challenges that sometimes made me ready to give up in life. I seemed to do better with the crises than I did without them. They drew something out of me, an energy, a hope and faith that propelled me to figure out a solution.

My life may at times have looked like a disaster to others, but the challenges that have presented themselves have definitely given me the courage to take on new ones. I look back and see how God has used them all for my good, even when that seemed incredible and impossible. There are a couple challenges right now that I will be interested in looking back at to see how that happens yet again. As it is now, the losses of the past two years have put me in the enviable position of having as little baggage as at any point in my life to make a significant move, so it’s all good.

Only when we look back can we ever see God’s hand in our lives in the things that confuse us. Many of my entries over the past two years have been filled with uncertainty about where I was going and why so much seemed to be changing for me. All the things that previously seemed like losses become freedom in the circumstances I am in beginning to create today.

As I look at making a major move across the country, I am thrilled that I don’t have a home to sell, thanks to last year’s bankruptcy. I do not have a thriving real estate business to leave, courtesy of our present economy. I have become used to living without my furniture, thanks to a friend with whom I moved in temporarily. All the things that seemed so difficult to understand now have an entirely new framework within which to observe them and make new decisions. How light and free I am, now that everything is down to the basics!

What I learned in all of the paring down of the past few years is that I am a relational person. My relationship with God is foremost, then my relationships with family and friends and all the other wonderful connections that have crossed my path. Knowing this has made it really easy to make a choice to move. Not having a husband, particularly one with a job, meant I did not have to get permission or agreement, or impose my needs on anyone else. The things that made me feel lonely and single became the gifts that allowed me to follow my heart. How could I have known this when I was in the midst of despair or depression? Only by faith.

Hopefully when I read backwards in this blog, or better yet start from the beginning and read forward, I will see evidence of that faith as I went from one crisis to another, putting the pieces together as best I could, knowing God’s grace was always with me. I know I was often in a downward spiral, but I also know that He helped me to keep my head above water when I kept my eyes fixed on Him and His promises to me. I have never been disappointed with the journey we have been on together, and now it is time to move on to the next place and see what He has for me to do there. Having been taken to Berlin in 1987, seemingly to learn to pray deeply with a huge group of women brought there for the same reason, I am excited. We prayed for the wall to come down, believing in what seemed at the time impossible. Two years later, it did. With the idea of earthquakes and fault lines and radiation fears all over our West Coast, I can imagine that He needs more people of faith out there praying. If so, that is OK with me. There are many kinds of missionaries in this world. Perhaps someone’s fears will open an affordable home opportunity for me!

I am one who never seems to be under the covering of any particular church or ministry, yet I know I am under the cover of the Holy Spirit continually, and so I will go where  I am called and see what is needed there. It is always exciting when God changes our course and direction. His plan is always better than the one I might have made without Him. I hope to keep posting as I take one step at a time following the map as it is laid before me. I have to admit, a part of me thinks I should start a blog called “How to downsize your life to what fits in a car and move across the country in 90 days!” I had better google that, as undoubtedly someone has already written one that I can follow!

The biggest part, as in all things, is keeping my faith way ahead of my fear, knowing the enemy will try to keep me from going where God is leading. Having a prior track record of similar journeys is a big help when it comes to that. We have done this together before, and God is in my driver’s seat!