Time Out For Digging Out Newsletter

Fast-Forwarding through the Hard Times

 March 2009

I love watching prerecorded television programs because I can skip the commercials and get right to the good stuff. Sometimes, I wish that life came with a digital recorder so we could fast forward through the times that seem too difficult to get through at normal speed—like the week before my daughter’s eleventh birthday party. She’d invited ten girls and almost all of them were planning to stay over.                                                         

“Where will we sleep?” Katie asked.

“I was thinking about setting you up in the basement.”

“But my new bed is coming that day,” she protested.

I wanted to honor Katie’s request to sleep on her newly-restored antique bed—especially since it was the one that I used as a child whenever I stayed with my Dad on his farm. I also wanted to give her options instead of an ultimatum.

“You can stay upstairs if half the girls sleep in the guest room and half in your room.”

Katie considered my offer for a few seconds before respectfully declining it. With that, the race was on to get our unfinished basement ready for the party. It would be the first time that anyone slept in it; and I wanted to make the space as inviting as possible.

“We should put carpet in the area where the girls will be sleeping,” I told Bill after Katie and I returned from delivering party invitations.

“And paint the cement walls,” he suggested.

Painting was the last thing I wanted to do . . . and I fought Bill's suggestion all the way to Home Depot (three times) on the Sunday before the party to buy supplies. That same day, Bill and I put carpet in the space where the girls would be sleeping. The next morning, Katie and I painted the grey walls a lighter color. On Tuesday I shopped for fabric and party supplies while Wednesday was all about sewing curtains for each of the egress windows. By Thursday, I was both exhausted and excited as I hung balloons and streamers from the rafters. Once the decorations were in place, our basement was finally ready for the big event.

As I stepped back to survey the finished space, I realized that I wouldn’t have felt the same sense of satisfaction if I had not done the work myself. Proverbs 14:23 promises that all “hard work brings a profit” while “mere talk leads only to poverty.” In all my years since first reading this verse, it never occurred to me that the profit and poverty King Solomon wrote about applied—not just to dollars and cents—but to the sense of accomplishment that comes from a job well done.

This thought led to another one as I wondered: What if everyone who tried to skip the work and reap the rewards of someone else’s labor reached this same conclusion? Would they see that the people they were really cheating were themselves?

Children are particularly known for taking the easy route. I was no exception. From third grade until my high school graduation, I wanted to fast forward through every other weekend and the month of July because I didn’t like spending them on my father’s farm.

I loved my Dad. I just didn’t like being sucked into his rural universe where life revolved around feeding cattle, fixing machinery and farming. Unlike my older brother who was driving tractors before he was a teenager, I preferred to sit in the car with my homework or a good book until Dad was done in the field.

Worse than being out of my element, was being outnumbered. As the only girl in a house with three brothers and my father, Westerns were the genre of choice when watching television. If I never see another episode of The Lone Ranger or Gunsmoke again, it will be too soon. Although we did get to watch the The Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, even those were hard to sit through because I never knew when an advertisement for feminine hygiene products would embarrass me in front of my siblings.

One of my loneliest moments came, not during a commercial break, but after the television was turned off and everyone had turned in for the night. I was sleeping in my grandparents’ antique bed—the one we were having restored for Katie—when I dreamt that I was being attacked by a large number of bats.

The room was so dark when I awoke and the nightmare seemed so real that I could still picture them hovering over my bed. Too afraid to call out to my dad and brothers (who were sleeping in the next room), I inched my right hand under the covers in search of the pink stuffed puppy I’d brought with me from town. More than the dog, I wanted my mom . . . and she was an urban universe away.

“Please God, let me wake up in town,” I prayed as I struggled not to cry.

I repeated those words so many times before falling back to sleep that I actually thought they would come true . . . until I woke up the next morning to find that I was still in my bed on the farm.

It's been said that every crisis has a turning point. On page 79 of Praying for Purpose, Katie Brazelton had this to say about these defining moments: “turning points occur when our plans and reality collide. Disappointments, failures, tragedies, and dead ends all provide an opportunity to ask ‘Why?’ and become a victim or to ask ‘What’s next?’ and cooperate with God about the next phase of our life”.

Sometimes the next step is to accept that God wants us to stay right where we are. As hard as this was for me to understand at the time, God was not going to save me from my circumstances because they were shaping me into the type of person He needed me to become.

Photos Of Old And New

Click on the link below to view before and after photos of the antique bed mentioned in this newsletter.

Before and After Photos

Lyrics For You

The lyrics to You Found Me by The Fray serve as a reminder of how desperate we can feel in trying times. While God doesn't always remove us from difficult circumstances, He can be trusted to help us rise above them.

You Found Me Video

You Found Me Lyrics

An Organizing Tip Or Two

Making Your Unfinished Basement More Livable

Added To The Archives

Something Easy

Verses To Heed

“those who seek me find me.”

(Proverbs 8:17b)

“if you accept my words and store up my commands within you,

turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding,

and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding,

and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure,

then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.”

(Proverbs 2:1a-5)

Books To Read

Hearing God by Dallas Willard

 

During the first week of February, I found the hard cover version of Praying for Purpose at Dollar Tree. The book is also on sale at Amazon.com for $4.99.

 

Praying for Purpose by Katie Brazelton


Click on the images above to view a description of this book.
 

“God will use our heartache, whatever its cause, to build our character, draw us closer to him, and make us pliable tools for his purposes.”[i] As true as these words from Katie Brazelton were, they offered little comfort to a little girl who never felt so alone.

For the rest of my childhood I saw God as a casual observer, unwilling to get involved in my insignificant life. Although I still pleaded with Him from time to time when I really wanted something—like our lost cat to be found or the boy I liked to call—I never expected Him to come to my rescue.

If I’d set aside my Judy Blume books for long enough to check out a non-fiction title, I might have discovered Hearing God by Dallas Willard where, on page 28, the author had this to say about the divine silence: “I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for securing their own safety, comfort, and righteousness . . . Nothing will go right in our effort to hear God if this false motivation is its foundation. God will not cooperate. We must discover a different motivation for knowing God’s will and listening to his voice.”

As a young teen, I received a glimpse of what this different motivation might be when two poems found their way into my hands. The first was printed on the front of a greeting card. From what I can remember, it went like this:

Bless me heavenly father, lead me in your ways

Grant me strength to serve you, put purpose in my days

 

Give me understanding, enough to make me kind

So I may judge all others with my heart and not my mind

 

Teach me to be patient, in everything I do

Content to trust your wisdom and to follow after you

 

Help me when I falter, hear me when I pray

And receive me in your kingdom, to dwell with you one day.

The second appeared in a magazine that my mom subscribed to:

Dear Lord, clear my mind as I go before you

Help me to seek you in all that I do

Help me to know where you’re leading today

Allow me to follow each step of the way

 

I pray not for riches or worldly fame

I just ask for strength Lord to lift up your name

If a friend has a need or a burden to bear

Help me to be there to show that I care

 

Help me to be all you want me to be

Let others see Christ Jesus living in me

And when day is ended and sleep takes control

Lord help me say, all is well with my soul.[ii]

I remember sitting on my bedroom floor as I compared these two poems to see which one I liked best. Each offered a more mature way to talk to God than the classic bedtime prayer I’d been reciting for as long as I could remember. Unable to pick a favorite, I committed both to memory and began to recite them on a regular basis. Although God still seemed more like an absent parent than a loving father, reaching out to Him gave me comfort as I held out hope that one day, He would play a more active role in my life.

Without knowing it, I was demonstrating the blind faith that Willard talked about on page 46 of Hearing God when he said: “God calls us to a direct and fully self-conscious personal relationship with him (as priests) in which we share responsibility with him (as kings) in the exercise of his authority. Exactly what does this involve, and how do we experience it?”

“There are a number of phases involved . . . ” Willard continued. “First of all, what we may call “blind” faith is a valid, though very minimal way of God’s being with us. Here we find ourselves really believing in God and believing that he is with us. Perhaps we believe because of past experiences or because we have faith in the faith of others or even because of abstract reasons that tell us he simply must be here. But our conviction—almost a mere will that it shall be so—is the only way that he is present in our lives.”

As minimal as my faith seemed, it was all I had to cling to as I put in my time on the farm and paid my way through college. Eventually, I learned the importance of reading the bible and seeing its contents as “God’s speaking preserved in written form.”[iii] This led to the discovery of other aspects of God’s presence as I immersed myself in His work and learned to listen for the moments when His thoughts were directing my own.

Still, I never forgot the poetic prayers that started me on the path toward a personal relationship with God. For fourteen years, I recited them almost every morning as I walked from my car to work. And when we were moving to Illinois, they came to mind during a house-hunting trip to the western suburbs of Chicago. I was in the back seat of our realtor’s vehicle when the words took on new meaning as I saw them, not as a way to reach out to God, but as evidence that He was reaching back to me.

Once in a while, we get a glimpse of how far we’ve come as “God uses our self-knowledge or self-awareness, heightened and given a special quality by his presence and direction, to search us out and reveal to us the truth about ourselves and our world.”[iv] The truth that God revealed on that house-hunting trip was that He wasn’t an absent father, but an active participant in my everyday life as He made a lot of what I had been praying for come true.

The God who refused to remove me from my circumstances, had helped me to rise above them; and although I still have a lot of work to do to become the type of person described in those poems, I know I'm on the right path. What I find most surprising about my journey is that, when I prayed for God to improve my character, my circumstances followed.

I now wake up every morning in a town with no tractors and feeding troughs in sight—just an antique bed to remind me: we can't fast forward through the hard times,  but we can rewind them to see that when we search for God and never give up, one day we’ll realize . . . He’s been there all along.

“All hard work brings a profit”

(Proverbs 14:23a)

Quotes to Grow On”

“Recall one of the worst times in your life and the circumstances that surrounded it. . . . Now go ahead and ask today’s important question about the good that God was able to bring out of it. God will use all your troubles in his plan for your life—if you let him.”

Katie Brazelton, Praying for Purpose, p. 45

“We must never forget that God’s speaking to us, however we experience it in our initial encounter, is intended to develop into an intelligent, freely cooperative relationship between mature people who love each other with the richness of genuine agape love. We must therefore make it our primary goal not just to hear the voice of God but to be mature people in a loving relationship with him.”

Dallas Willard, Hearing God, p. 31

“If you truly desire God's greatest plans for your present and future, the most powerful things you can do are to pray, reflect on Scripture, read about biblical and modern-day role models, take time to listen to God as he mentors you about his wishes, and record your insights.”

Katie Brazelton, Praying for Purpose, p. 23

“God is always trying in many ways to teach us about himself. He will certainly meet us with inward illumination as we study and strive to understand”

Dallas Willard, Hearing God, p. 66

 

[i] Katie Brazelton, Praying for Purpose, p. 47.

[ii] Because these poems were committed to memory more than two decades ago, their source is unknown. My prayer is that, by sharing them with you, the poems’ authors will make as much of a difference in your life as they have in mine.

[iii] Dallas Willard, Hearing God, p. 53.

[iv] Dallas Willard, Hearing God, p. 100.
   
 

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