Waiting for The Other Shoe...

Some of you are experiencing for the first time what I have always called “Waiting for the other shoe to drop”.  It’s a place where your fears and your faith have not quite connected yet.  It’s a hard place to be, but for the believer, it should be a path to getting your feelings and emotions lined up with what you know to be true....God is in control.  God has always been in control.  God will never cease to be in control.

Cancer patients and caregivers live this way. People with chronic illness live this way.  I’m sure there are many others who live this way, but that’s the world I know best. I realized this afternoon that those are the familiar feelings I’ve been dealing with this week.  I am struggling to take my thoughts captive, to align them with Scriptural thinking, and preach truth to my heart.  

In the space between fear and faith, we do things.  We try to control our world.  Our circumstances.  We try, by human means, to “prepare” for the unknown.  We read every detail available.  We take sides. We look for the right question to ask, find the right answer. We buy toilet paper.  :-). We search for what gives us peace in the midst of the unknowns of an illness that doesn't have well defined borders or order yet.  

Peace is only found when we trust in the Lord. Trust His Sovereignty and His Goodness.  When we acknowledge that no matter what happens, it is for our ultimate good and God’s Glory.  

Search the Scriptures for those passages that preach truth to your soul.  One of those for me is Matthew 6:25-33.  Jesus is speaking to us about not being anxious for what we will eat, drink wear, or how long we will live.    Psalm 91 speaks of how we abide in the shadow of the almighty, and the call to make Him my dwelling place. That it is a place of safety.  Not from troubles, but from fears.  

I’m getting there.....

Said the robin to the sparrow,
“I would really like to know
Why those anxious human beings
rush around and worry so.”

Said the sparrow to the robin,
“Friend, I think that it must be
That they have no Heavenly Father
such as cares for you and me.”

                                   ~Elizabeth Chaney

Cleaning...

I got a good start on cleaning my garage last weekend.  After a reasonable amount of time after Daryl passed, a dear neighbor (who has had to look at our garage for 30 years) said they would be glad to help me clean out the garage this summer.  I have to chuckle because it was probably a statement of  both kindness and desperation to look at something besides my wreck of a garage.  Our houses have no storage, so garages are on-site storage units.  They love me dearly, but probably hated my garage.  :-)

I could actually park a car in there now if I wanted to.  If the driveway were straight...but that's another story.

The interesting thing is what doesn't mean anything to me anymore.  As I look around the house/garage and decide how to streamline my current life, I'm amazed at what things that held such special memories before simply don't have the same meaning to me now.  I am realizing that shared memories make items special.  If the memory has no one to share it with, if nobody was "there" when it became special, it becomes just a thing.

It's a little like losing a piece of my history. 43 years of shared memories, inside jokes, things that were symbols of shared times and events....some things have no one who was there for them except me.  And I find that it was the sharing of life that made stuff fun.  Not the stuff. 

So I am passing some things on to the kids now.  Things that still hold that "essence of Dad" for them.  Because now will be the time that they mean something to them.  And, I find that I can now have shared memories with them.  The stuff is fun again. 

I'm making new memories.  With kids.  With Grandkids.  With friends.   And there are new mementos of these fun times. 

And I have a delightfully cleaner garage!