Musings of a Muddled Mess

Honesty is hard. Mostly it's hard because not everyone is trust worthy. Not everyone we open ourselves up to will be understanding, non-judgemental, helpful, kind, or loving. What's the most difficult part of your life, right now? How many people really know the depth of that situation? The struggles? The fear? The anxiety? One of the hardest things I have ever dealt with only about 7 people in my life know the full depth of. I really struggled with it for a while, it broke me. Which in turn wasn't making the situation any better. The more it hurt, the harder I struggled with it. Till one day I opened up and told someone. Now I will admit, my choice while trustworthy wasn't my best choice for my emotional state at the time. I quickly realized that and within days let someone else in on the situation. Someone I knew would keep me grounded. With each person I chose to open up to I found something really important, support. Sometimes the things that are the hardest in our ...

On several instances lately I sat listening to someone talking about stories in the bible and belittle the people for the way they acted. For instance, the Israelites, straight out of Egypt, just crossed the red sea and now they have been traveling for days, putting distance between themselves and the Egyptians, no water for 3 days and they are concerned(Exodus 15:22-). They find bitter water but not suitable to drink. So they run to Moses. In listening to a discussion on this the conclusion was almost overwhelmingly that they were complaining. I sat there wondering though, is it complaining or simply voicing that human concern. I mean, think about it. God built in us the ability to thrive under various circumstances by using our ability to think, reason and problem solve. Part of that is to see problems as they arise. Now some of us are much more adept at seeing problems coming than others. Something about mothers, they know what trouble you're going to cause long before you do it...

Too many thoughts today. I was going back looking at past conversations where I had really started to think about Gideon. What I saw in the conversations was interesting. 3 months ago, I had zero confidence that God could ever use me in a big way. 3 months! granted at this point God's been working on me in this particular area for almost a year, but the last 3 months there has been some serious progress. I have reached a point where I am trusting God. Now, don't misunderstand, that doesn't mean life has gotten magically easier or that I am not struggling my way through this, but I have made a choice to trust God. We always talk about how love is a choice, we have to choose to love people even when we don't like them very much, especially your spouse. Trust can be very similar. There are many instances of broken trust in my life, and they can either lead to me not trusting(that person, situation, or anyone in general) or I can learn from it, but still choose to trust. I ...

Today as I was folding a mountain of laundry(reality check, it was probably a mole hill) I was thinking about someone I hadn't seen in 3 or 4 years that I may see in the near future. I am one that tends to run "what if" scenarios. I started thinking about catching up, what life is happening now that is different from the last time I saw them. All normal catching up stuff, family, jobs, etc. Then I realized that not only is it likely that the church we are involved in is different but my involvement within the church has changed. All of a sudden I found myself mentally telling them "I'm loving most minutes of it." After coming back from my musical interlude that thought triggered, I realized that as a parent and christian it seems that the general expectation of life is to be in a good place constantly. A few years ago I realized my kids were learning the old church song "happy all the time" in our kids program. This bugged me... a lot! If you...