All in Inspiration
Something has been stirring in my heart lately. I keep trying to put my finger on what it is exactly, and it's been difficult. It's like all of these pieces and parts in a large cauldron going round and round but not really making anything specific--just bits and pieces.
David opened yesterday's staff meeting with this verse, "Seek God's will in all you do, and He will show you the path to take." Proverbs 3:6
He explained, as business owners, we are always seeking God for wisdom. The decisions we make are an attempt to make our business better for our employees and our customers. The decisions are never meant to make life harder for anyone. Much thought and meaning are behind them--and sometimes a few tears. We're the first to admit when a decision needs to be changed if we recognize it's not working well. It's not fun to fail, but it's necessary in learning what works and what doesn't.
While in the car scanning the stations, a radio announcer caught my attention with an interview he was conducting with an up and coming country musician. The musician sounded charming, so I stopped the scan and listened to what was being said. It was amusing and fun.
After the brief interview, the station returned to its regularly scheduled programming which involved an upbeat song. Whoa! Thirty seconds in, and I was glad my kids weren't in the car with me. I immediately changed the channel.
My seven year old said he had something to show me. He was sitting at the table with a smooth, blank sheet of paper. He said, "See this paper. When someone says something hurtful to you," he bends the corner of the paper, "it looks like this. Crinkled." He went on, his demeanor serious, instructional, "And then the next person hurts you," he begins to wad up the paper, "and it does this to you." He repeated this several times until the paper was a legitimate ball of crinkled mess.
A nasty cold as my temporary companion, I find myself sitting for a little longer than normal leading to much needed contemplation and reflection. There's laundry to do, and I noticed today that my bathroom floor is overdue for a good get on my hands and knees scrubbing. But it can wait.
Some of you know our business fell victim to a scam by a fake customer, "Sam Statler." We lost close to $14,000. Basically, a potential customer placed an order, and gave us a credit card which we processed. When the money from the credit card cleared our bank, we processed a wire transfer to a "freight forwarder" for the freight costs which is common place in our line of business as an importer. This practice is something we have done many times before without even a blink.
If we overcome the obstacles in this world, we get to sit down with God on His throne in the next. Isn't that powerful? To know our reward for fighting until the final round is to sit down, to finally rest, with our Heavenly Father. I don't know about you, but that promise makes me ready for another round.
This week has been one of those weeks you don’t want to repeat. It seemed as though one problem stacked against another problem forming an impermeable wall of stress and despair.
As I type these words, I think to myself, "What a cliché topic." I get tired of it, quite frankly, but my feelings about it doesn’t make it go away.
Have you ever had a time in your life when you've asked, "God, if you want me to be successful, why is it so hard?
This week, David and I have gotten one piece of bad news after another creating a string of frustration and disheartened demeanors.
It was happening. I could feel all of the physical symptoms surge through my body. It had been quite some time since the last time this had happened. Probably six months or so ago. But it was definitely happening.
"Well, here I go again," I thought to myself as I boarded a tiny eight passenger plane heading home. "I can do this. I'm going to be fine."
"I had lunch with a homeless man," my husband said when he called me earlier this week from Atlanta. "I'm walking back to the market right now, but I thought I would call and let you know."
I was walking down the sidewalk with my two boys on a normal summer day when I heard music playing in a nearby park. It was a song you used to sing with your band. Each lyric I heard stirred up an emotion deep inside and turning it into tears filling my eyes. Tears hidden by my sunglasses. Tears I didn't allow to escape, because I was in public. Tears I didn’t want to release, because I didn’t want my boys to be upset.
Have you ever had someone hurt you deeply? I have. Have you ever had a hard time forgiving someone even though you knew you had to do so? I have.
When someone hurts us, it can be hard to forgive and even harder to forget. What if the person who hurt us made a mistake and has legitimately changed? Do you still hold the wrong they did to you over their heads?
My oldest is very creative, but he wasn't feeling it lately. For three days, he would say to me, "I don't feel creative." It was making him sad.
We had a talk about our identity not coming from what we could do, and we talked about not letting our emotions control us. Feelings can't always be trusted. A hard lesson to learn for some.
A little over a year ago, my marriage was attacked when we were least expecting it. Before I knew it, I felt like I was drowning in a sea of confusion. Every day was a gasp for air as I tried to sift through and separate the truth of God from the lies of the enemy. When we are weak and broken, it can be hard to decide what is true. It can feel impossible.
Work has been a wild race the past couple of weeks. It's like Christmas, but it's Mother's Day gifts and cards and Cemetery Arrangements instead of Christmas trees, glitz, and glitter. Life, in general, seems to be crazy in May. No one seems immune to all the hustle and bustle the end of the school year brings.
Recently, I was talking to a well respected lady in my community. We were both laminating over how we had both, in different ways, been attacked by people. We both said, "Me, too," a lot as we shared our hearts about how it feels to be hunkered down behind a shield while arrows of lies were flung toward us full throttle.
It can be a paralyzing, anxiety ridden day, month or season of life.
Spencer got a Nintendo DS and game for Christmas. He lost the game and couldn't find it anywhere. I spent a big part of the day yesterday helping him clean up his room and Isaiah's room to see if we could find it.
We looked in the couch, under the couch, behind the freezer, in drawers, in the car. Every. where.
Isaiah looked. David looked. We had all looked.
