Playing Church

When my girls were growing up, it was a common thing for them to "play church".  They had several cousins their age and when they got together they pretended to be the preacher, the worship leader and the piano player.  I remember a particular time when my daughter, Melinda, found some notes from a sermon my husband preached and she preached it to her 'congregation' just as she heard her dad preach it.  She is now a youth leader and my oldest daughter, Mickie, plays the piano at her church.

My grandchildren are now the age my children were then and I have not seen them play church like they did. So I talked to God about it.  I wondered if it was because of the lack of worship they are seeing from us.  Our children and their friends could immitate every shouter and aisle runner in our church but I had not seen my grandchildren imitate anyone worshipping.

Yesterday, God answered my prayer. 

My grandaughter, Summer came over with her cousin, Shelby, and I could tell they had been crying.  She said, "Grandma, we were reading the book of Revelation and how God was not pleased with the churches and we just started praying and walking around the add-on (a big family room they built on to their house) and we were speaking in tongues!" They were not just playing church, they were having church.

When I pray at our prayer meetings at church, I walk and pray.  Imitating?  I could only hope that I could have that kind of influence. 

Lord, help us be an example to our children of this next generation. Don't let us be the generation that drops the ball in passing on these truths with prayer, worship and Godly living.

Family Day

We had our annual Family Day with Noble's family in Calvert, Texas this past weekend at the Country Club.  Mickie and Jake finally sat down with us to learn to play 42. Tera and Shannon were gracious enough to help teach them.  I played golf for the very first time and loved it. Our nephews said Noble and I were naturals. I look forward to hopefully playing again soon.

We then went to Wayne and Elaine's house and heard some great old fashioned singing.

This is our beautiful and talented niece, Dana with her mom on the piano singing "I know My Redeemer Lives"

My brother and sister-law, E.W. and Elaine Whitmire, singing their, trade-mark song, "House of Gold" :

My sister-in-law, Sheila, joined in on this song, "Address Change Notification": 

I think next year I will take our keyboard to the Country Club so that everyone can join in the singing.  So stay tuned for more vidoes next time.

CHANGE

There have been some changes in our church. 

I had finally began to accept the changes and started working with the change instead of against it, when I purchased a book at a resale shop, "Who Moved My Cheese" by Spencer Johnson. I had heard the book was a best seller but had never read it. I was looking for something to take to the beach with me to read so I thought it would be a good time to finally read it.

Oh, how I wish I had read it sooner.  It would have helped me to better adapt to the changes and perhaps embrace them instead of opposing them. The story's unique insights about change brought peace of mind for the changes I am facing how I can better handle change in the future.

It is a simple parable with profound truths about change. There are four characters, two mice and two little people. They are searching for Cheese (a metaphor for what you are looking for in life, a good job, a good relationship, a better position, even peace of mind), in a maze (where you look, the company you work for, your family, your community). Upon finding their cheese, the characters are then faced with unexpected change. They each must decide how they are going to handle the change. One of the characters tells us what he has learned through Handwritings on the Wall of the maze to help us on our on journey toward change. (I guess a bit like blogs).

The successful one reflected on his mistakes he had made in the past and used them to plan his future on how to deal with change. Some of the points I highlighted in the book for myself are:

1. The More Important Your Cheese Is To You, The More You Want to Hold On To It.

2. Things Are Changing Around Here, Maybe We Should Change and Do Things Differently.

3. Sometimes Things Change and They Are Never The Same.

4. Fear of Change, Sometimes Turns Into Anger and We Won’t Listen.

5. Why Didn’t I Get Up and Move With the Cheese Sooner?

6. If I Had Wanted To, I Probably Could Have Seen What Was Coming.

7. He Wondered Why He Always Thought That a Change Would Lead to Something Worse.

8. He Realized That When He Had Been Afraid to Change, He Had Been Holding On to the Illusion of Something That Was No Longer There.

9. He Realized the Fastest Way to Change Is to Laugh at Your Own Folly - Then You Can Let Go and Move On.

10. Admit the Biggest Inhibitor to Change Lies Within Yourself, and Nothing Gets Better Until YOU Change.



I saw myself and why I have handled the changes in our church the way that I have, in that when we have been doing something successfully for a long time, we think it will go on that way forever. We become arrogant in our success. It becomes "our" Cheese.

The book also mentioned the role of the leaders in an organization during change, in that people are understandably more afraid of what the change imposed (forced) from above might do to them. So they resist change. In other words, A change imposed is a change opposed. Leaders, let’s be more sensitive to those working with us and discuss these changes in advance to take away the uncertainty of where we are headed. I see where I have been managing because of my fear of change, instead of leading during the change.

The book also helped me better understand changes in life, in our jobs and our finances. There will always be change.

After we get past our fear, the best thing is realizing there is New Cheese out there just waiting to be found.

Transparent Regrets

This year has been a year of soul searching for me. I have looked back on my life and must say with a lot of regret for some decisions I have made. I asked my mother-in-law on of one of our morning walks, if she ever has regrets that consume her at times like I do. She immediately responded, "Oh yes, sometimes I break out in cold sweats when I think about some of them." Because I believe her to be one of the most Godly, sincere women I know, I found comfort in her words, that we all have regrets of some degree.

I never looked forward to being called an old woman. Now that I am officially old in the eyes of children, and sometimes in my own eyes, I understand why in the 2nd chapter of Titus we are told to teach the younger women. There are some paths that we have taken, some mistakes we have made that we can help the next person be aware of and perhaps help them make better choices.

In doing so, we must become transparent. We have to be willing to say, this is what I did right, if I had it to do over again, this is what I would have done. I would not have made that decision, I should not have trusted that person. Hold your peace, keep some things to yourself, be careful who you allow to get close to you.

We must tell them. No one would have known about Peter's denial that he was one of those who walked with Christ, if he had not told them. It was only him and the young girl who knew. And he denied it to her. But he wanted us to learn from his failure.

We needed to see how far he failed so we could do like him and get back up. We have to pass this on to the next generation.

Missing Pieces

Last night my granddaughter and I were putting a puzzle together. My daughter came in and asked, "Did you put puzzles together when you were growing up?"  She said she asked that with some hesitancy knowing she may not like the answer because my childhood stories are not always happy ones to her. 

I told her we did.  We would buy them at garage sales. Sometimes there would be a piece missing, so we would cut a piece of cardboard from a cereal box and color in the missing piece as best as we could to match the other pieces.  She laughed and said, "I knew I should not have asked."

But the fun part about putting together a jigsaw puzzle is not all about the finished product, although that is a big part of the reward.  When putting together a jigsaw puzzle you talk and share thoughts and memories, or even if you are alone, you feel like you are working toward a goal and accomplishing something.

If you work really hard to achieve your goals but don’t enjoy the journey, you are not enjoying life.  Sometimes our goals or dreams do not turn out exactly like we had pictured on our box, but we just make the best of it, because we can't change it now.  Move forward.  Make a new goal.  Enjoy the puzzle of life. In the end, your greatest joy will be the memories you made along the journey.

Keeping up with the Chaos

The weeds are overtaking my garden.... again.

It is called Enthropy. Entropy is the universal tendency toward disorder, disorganization, disintegration and chaos.

A new car left out in a field for years will erode, a house left without any maintenance will deteriorate. When chaos happens, it is not something gone wrong it is what is naturally gone right. The weeds grow, the paint peels, budgets expand, your business slows down, this is all natural.

It all started... In the Beginning. And the earth was chaotic and disordered… (Genesis 1:2) God’s first act of creation was to convert chaos into structure.  He showed us the importance of our human role, bringing order into the world when he put Adam to work in the Garden of Eden.

Wouldn’t it be nice if when we put a seed in the ground it grew into this immaculately groomed garden, all of our children would become prominent and productive individuals, and that when we have a job there would be no more bills.

It takes a constant, continued positive effort to keep all your life organized, maintained and growing. Just like my garden, left alone, it goes back toward natural chaos.

Positive actions - mowing the grass, tidying up your desk, a phone call to a prospective client, a kind or encouraging word to a friend or a child - will create positive results.

Making the Turn

When we go through trials or struggles in our life, there comes a time when you see a light at the end of the tunnel and feel things are about to get better. My pastor calls this "making the turn".

I realized we were finally making the turn while I was clearing out the messages on my home phone answering machine. Message after message were debt collectors that had called over the past few weeks. Some calls I answered, some I intentionally let the answering machine pick up because I had no response for them of when I would be able to pay them.  Thankfully we are making progress on catching up them, but hearing the messages again reminded me how hard it was during the moment.


We received an unexpected blessing when on the phone about my car note, we found out we only owed two more payments. Even during this crisis, God provided a rainbow.

The first time I recognized the power of realizing you are making a turn was after I had been hurt very badly by a friend. I thought about what she had done on a daily and almost hourly basis. On the way home from work one day, I looked at the clock and it was after 5:00 p.m. I had gone all day without thinking about the incident. I knew if I made it through a whole day, then I was making a turn in the road and it was the beginning of a new and better direction in my life. It was an enlightening revelation.

In life we will travel down many roads where we encounter hurt, pain, disappointment. We must remember every road at some point has a turn or bend, where we can once again get past the roadblocks and continue on our journey.

Isaiah 42:16 says I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.