I don’t believe in coincidences

There are days when I feel like I am getting a clear message from God. Monday was one of those days.

My first devotional reading that morning was the daily devotional from In Touch Ministries and the below verse from Psalm 105 was part of the scripture reading.

I also read the daily Our Daily Bread devotional because my husband reads that one and I want to be on the same page with him for at least a part of each morning.🙂. In the reading Monday morning we were in I Chronicles and I read the SAME WORDS!

Two very different devotionals in two very different books of the Bible brought out the exact same message to me! I don’t believe in coincidences.

I believe there is a reason God wanted me to remember to look for Him and His strength in everything. It’s so easy to get distracted and to stop thinking about the Lord and all He does to sustain me.

Our lives are just so busy! October is an especially busy month for us with 2 birthdays in our immediate family and all the October performances and events our daughter is involved in with her Choir (fundraising performances, singing the National Anthem at the Homecoming football game, choir retreat) as well as Homecoming itself and a variety of other friend hangouts, etc. And I still have to get the grocery shopping and meal planning done, among other household duties.

But my priority must always be serving the Lord in any way He directs. And I can only know which direction to look if I am staying connected to Him through reading my Bible each day and through constant prayer. I don’t multi-task very well anymore. But God has still given me the ability to pray while I’m doing almost everything. I have a constant dialogue with the Lord going in my head.

I find that this habit protects me from negative thoughts, helps me stay patient in frustrating circumstances, keeps my feelings in check, keeps my tongue in check, gives me a calm assurance and strength I know only come from God. I feel a power and confidence when I have my mind occupied with prayer. Do you know what I mean? It feels to me like I can almost see the Shield of Faith out in front of me as I go into the grocery store, shoving danger out of my way. I can almost hear the swords of the Spirit wielded by His angels doing battle all around me so I can safely go about my day.

If that makes me weird, so be it!

I am not ashamed of my faith. I have gotten too far in this life, experienced God’s very obvious provision and protection too many times and witnessed the power of the name of Jesus too often to worry about what other people think about my faith.

Yesterday I wore a red hoodie as I did my grocery shopping. It was something that was suggested by the Turning Point USA people in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. It would have been his 32nd birthday and he was a very outspoken witness for Jesus Christ (among other things). My husband was concerned that in our liberal area I would be making myself a target by wearing it. I believe the verses the day before were planted by God to give me strength and to encourage me not to be afraid of my testimony as I did my shopping. And also to remind me where by strength and protection comes from!

Today is Wednesday and I obviously survived my shopping trip without becoming a victim of violence. And as long as God has a purpose for me on this earth, He will continue to protect me from physical danger.

There are no guarantees though. Plenty of Christians are physically harmed and killed for their faith every day in this world. I suppose I could be one of them some day. But I’m confident in the Lord’s strength regardless of my circumstances and am therefore unafraid of what lies ahead and unashamed of Jesus Christ whose Holy Spirit lives within me.

Have you found what you’re looking for?

I look for God everywhere I go. And I see Him everywhere I go!

I know people who dread going out in public because they expect to see rudeness and experience frustration everywhere people gather. And I have noticed that those people DO see a lot of rudeness and encounter a surprising number of frustrating experiences. My theory is that you generally find what you are looking for.

This morning I went to a coffee shop to meet a friend but I was early. I got my drink and scoped out a couple of comfy chairs for my friend and I to sit in and proceeded to just sit and wait - catching up on emails and texts as I waited.

Behind me was a man who had been sitting alone when I got there. He was drinking his coffee and just people watching. He wasn’t reading, on his phone, working on a laptop or iPad, just quietly sitting.

I am always looking for an opportunity to talk to someone God sends my way who might need some encouragement or a friendly smile. So, of course God made the man behind me turn his chair around and smile at me so I could meet him.

I found out that he is 77 years old. His wife was at home - she doesn’t get up until 9am and then she likes to be alone in the mornings so he hangs out at the coffee shop all morning. He recently started a hobby called “wire wrapping”. His work is beautiful! In talking with him I could tell he was searching for peace. He kept saying he had a lot of struggles and he finds wire wrapping peaceful and rewarding. And yet his eyes were sad and he lit up when I showed an interest in seeing pictures of his wire wrapping artwork.

The Holy Spirit kept prompting me to talk to him about Jesus - so after about 15 or 20 minutes I finally asked him if he ever thought about what might happen after he dies. He said “all the time.” I then asked him if he was a Christian or if he had ever heard about Jesus. He has friends who are Christians but he himself is not. He said he is “spiritual but not religious.” I told him that I wasn’t talking about religion but a relationship with Jesus. He said one of his friends had told him the same thing. I told him that I wanted to talk to him about Jesus because I really want to see him in heaven. He seemed to really be touched and said it was a very nice question. I told him that Jesus could give him peace and he said that was what he’s looking for. I told him that Jesus is the only way to experience true peace and that if he dies without Him, life after death will not be peaceful. I told him I would pray for him and asked what one struggle of his was that I could pray about. He said he has a growth (benign) in his lung that he is trying to find a less invasive surgical procedure to remove. He also has Valley Fever which is fungus in the lungs. He really needs Jesus! He teared up as he talked about his health struggles.

Before he left, he gave me a wire wrapped buffalo tooth on a leather necklace that he had been wearing. He told me that sometimes, when he is anxious at night, he just rubs the wire wrapped petrified wood he had around his neck and that was very calming. I told him that prayer does that for me so I would pray every time I looked at the buffalo tooth. I told him prayer is very powerful. He smiled and I gave him my phone number. I hope he will text me so I can encourage him to seek a relationship with Jesus. I pray he finds the peace he is looking for. And I am confident that he WILL find that peace because he is genuinely looking for it.

I never used to ask the Lord to send opportunities like this my way. I was afraid I wasn’t eloquent enough and wouldn’t be able to communicate the gospel clearly. I thought I would do more damage to the cause of Christ and would just invite conflict. But that is actually a really arrogant and untrusting way to live. God promises to be with us always and to give us the words necessary at the right time. He asks us to be available to serve Him in any situation He arranges for us. If I trust God not to send me into a situation I am not equipped to handle - and if I trust Him to equip me for every situation He places me in - and if I trust that He loves me and truly works all things for my good - then why should I be afraid? I shouldn’t!

I am seeking Jesus with all my heart and I finding Him in every detail of my life.

It’s energizing! I am home now but after my coffee date with my friend I enthusiastically went to volunteer at my son’s school where I was available to intervene and break up an altercation between two students and help the victim get to the office to report the incident. And at the end of the school day I picked my son and his friend (who we are trying to be a testimony to) up and brought them to our house where they are currently watching a movie upstairs. I was able to tell the boys about my buffalo tooth necklace and the man who gave it to me and how he needs Jesus and prayer.

And here I sit, my ears are ringing and the inside of my mouth is numb. And none of that matters because I am looking down at the buffalo tooth hanging from my neck and thinking about the appointment Jesus set up for me with a 77 year old man, anxious about his eternal future and looking for peace.

Strength for Today, Hope for Tomorrow

Sometimes the random nature of MS is confusing and upsetting to those I share this life with.

Yesterday was supposed to be a day when I had more energy because it was a day I took the medication that is SUPPOSED TO help improve my energy and focus. And the day started out great, actually.

There is no easy way to explain how my energy took a nose dive at around 9am. But I had to take a nap at 9:30am! Simple tasks like getting dressed are harder for me but on a day where I’ve taken my “pep pill” and had already downed a cup of coffee, I shouldn’t need a nap at 9:30am!

I took a shower after my nap. Showers for me are a glorious experience! I am always cold so a nice hot shower makes almost everything better. On some days a nice hot shower can give me an energy boost as well. But on other days the effort of taking a shower (and all the getting undressed and dressed again) take all the strength I can muster and then I’m too tired for much of anything else. Yesterday was one of those energy drain days.

These days cause my husband no end of grief. My doctor once had me taking extra caffeine pills to help boost my energy and at the time she told me that the reason I was able to drink a Coke or coffee at night and still sleep soundly was that my fatigue is stronger than caffeine. Apparently, my fatigue is also sometimes stronger than my prescription “pep pills” (as I call them).

There are multiple things going on inside me that can contribute to my fatigue. One is that I have MS which strips the coating on the “wires” in my brain that send signals throughout my body. This causes short circuits and slow signals and makes my brain work extra hard to do everything.

Another factor is that I am 53 years old and in the beginning stages of menopause which is a challenging stage in the life of a woman where hormones become unstable and so do we!😂 Multiple Sclerosis symptoms worsen during menopause and there just isn’t a whole lot that can be done about it.

In addition, the last few days I have been experiencing a new and bizarre sensation that starts in the neighborhood of my left armpit. It’s almost like an internal spasm but it doesn’t hurt. It shoots throughout the entire left side of my body and then I feel a cold sensation spreading through my body. It only happens once or twice in a day and it only lasts a few seconds. But I don’t like the feeling and I don’t know what it is so it scares me a little.

Thankfully, today was a much better day. I had the energy for grocery shopping and even had left over energy! Of course, my husband wasn’t home today to experience my energy. He often sees me on my lowest energy days. And it is really difficult for him not to feel a little hurt that I have energy on days when he isn’t home but often have no energy when he is home.

There is a hymn that I have had running through my brain the last couple of days. The specific verse and then the chorus go like this:

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth

Thine own great presence to cheer and to guide

Strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow

Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside

Great is Thy faithfulness

Great is Thy faithfulness

Morning by morning new mercies I see

All I have needed Thy hands hath provided

Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me

I love that hymn!

In any case, like I said, today was a good day for me and I didn’t experience the weird spasm thing today either!

My daughter is taking an anatomy class and today they were talking medical terminology. They learned about the meanings of some root words. She came home and told me that “Scler” means “tough” and “osis” means “disease” so “multiple sclerosis” is “multiple tough disease.” Then she said she is going to tell all her friends that her Mom has multiple tough disease! Then she asked me if I knew what GenZ means when they say “Tuff.” 🤣

I made this meme about it - my daughter thinks it’s “cringe” but I don’t care…🤣

I thank the Lord for the strength He gave me today and for the hope I have for tomorrow.

Unbalanced

MS is so weird! I experience some level of dizziness on a constant basis. Some days are worse than others but it’s always there. As a result, my brain is always working to keep me on balance and upright. It’s a daily struggle and it is fatiguing.

I went to bed early last night, slept well and didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at 6am. I got a solid 9 hours of sleep and I woke up feeling dizzy, nauseous and like my legs were made of rubber. But sometimes I will stay up past midnight, knowing my alarm is going to go off at 6am, and I will wake up feeling really good - less dizzy, more ready to take on the day.

The randomness of my symptoms is unsettling. I can never predict how I am going to feel on a given day.

Today was one of the days I took my medication that helps with focus and energy because today was my shopping day. But this medication does nothing to help my legs when they are feeling like 100lb bags full of rubber cement.

My left leg was particularly uncooperative today and I had more than just grocery shopping to do. My son is turning 14 in a couple of weeks and I needed to get his birthday gifts. This meant a trip to the Mall where the Lego store is located. So, after a trip to Fred Meyer and then to Costco, I drove to the Mall and parked where I thought I would be near the Lego store. Once inside the Mall I realized I had guessed wrong and I was even further from the store than I was when I went there at Christmas time last year. I had my cane with me but that didn’t prevent my left foot from tripping me up several times on my way to the Lego store.

Whenever my daughter is with me and there’s a lot of walking - and especially if I trip even once - she says “Don’t fall!” Her voice was running through my head both to and from the Lego store today. I kept thinking “Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall…”. Once I had my mind focused on walking safely, I stopped tripping and successfully accomplished my mission. Thankfully, tripping doesn’t always lead to falling. As embarrassing as tripping on a smooth surface in front of strangers can be, falling flat on my face would have been worse.

I pushed through all my errands and got home with just enough time to put the groceries away and hide the birthday gifts before I had to leave again to pick my son up from school.

My body and brain were done. My poor kids got home from school and had to do their chores while I sat in my chair and rested. They, of course, didn’t see all I had accomplished today. Thankfully, I have amazing children who believe me when I tell them I had a busy day and am tired and who don’t argue about doing their chores. I may have to remind them to stay on task but it’s not a battle to get them to do their chores.

I know that it is really difficult (especially for my husband) to understand why I am so tired some days when I haven’t been doing much. Some days I just lack energy from the moment I wake up and no amount of medication or caffeine can help me. But there is no rhyme or reason to it and it’s impossible to plan around my fatigue.

Truth be told, I rarely feel up to doing much of anything.

But I have an amazing God who carries me through each day and gives me just enough oomph to accomplish whatever I need to get done that day. And if I run out of steam before my list is done, that means God didn’t think those items were necessary that day. And He is always right.

I need to get myself off to bed now. Because MS is weird and I’m feeling tottery, off balance and oh so tired!

Good night friends!💤

Preserving More Memories

I am a “serial” picture taker. I got my first camera when I was in 5th grade. I took pictures of everything! The film canister only allowed me to take about 15 or 20 pictures to a roll and then it had to be taken to a photo development counter at the local drug store. They sent it off for developing and then called us a week or two later when the pictures were in and we could go pick them up. We didn’t have digital cameras back then so we had to wait until we picked up the hard copies of our photos to see how they turned out. Being very inexperienced, most of my early pictures were blurry - but I saved them anyway!

I recently went through old pictures I had saved and found a lot of blurry pictures of my stuffed animals. 😂I had very encouraging and gracious parents who were willing to pay for my film to be developed despite my careless picture taking habits. My Dad was the picture taker in our family and he would often have slides made of the negatives and bought a slide projector. One of our favorite things to do as a family was to project those slides of our family pictures onto our living room wall. We watched those slides dozens of times and it never got old. Memories are important and SHARED memories are even more important in a family.

I took a photography class in high school and joined the yearbook staff. I got a better camera and learned how to develop my own black and white film. I still have pictures that I took for the yearbook and one candid shot of my yearbook and photography teacher that I came across the other day.

I took a LOT of pictures in the years following- most of which my parents paid to develop and I still have.

Once digital photography became a thing, my husband and I bought a digital camera and I started taking even MORE pictures! It became possible to delete blurry pictures and pick and choose which pictures were worth the cost to print. Printing pictures could be done from a kiosk at the local drug store and I could watch them printing out while I waited. I tend to have a bit of an unsteady hand so I started taking multiple pictures of the same thing in the hopes that one would turn out well. Eventually my husband bought me a smaller, more portable digital camera for my birthday.

I have taken probably thousands of pictures and videos of our children and, now that the phones we carry with us everywhere have cameras as well, I can take pictures or videos in situations I would never have been able to before because I didn’t carry my camera with me unless I intended to use it for something specific- like on a vacation- but certainly not while grocery shopping, for instance.

One thing our kids love to do is watch old videos of themselves as babies and toddlers. They love going through pictures of themselves as they were growing up. It’s even more fun now that we can easily access those pictures and videos through our TV that is connected to our computer through a wireless internet connection.

After my father-in-law passed away in 2008, I realized we didn’t have a whole lot of recent pictures of our parents. So I started taking more pictures and even videos of my husband with his Mom, of me and my sister with our parents. I especially took lots of pictures and videos of our kids with their grandparents. In more recent years I have started to take more pictures of people in our church with our kids.

After I was diagnosed with MS it became even more important to me to take pictures of our lives, our activities, our neighbors, friends and families. I know that my days of mobility may be numbered. I can’t ride on fair rides now but I have pictures to remember the times I still could. It became important to me that my children have pictures to look back on to see how much they were loved and how excited I was to be there during all their favorite childhood moments.

And as I age and lose family and friends to the ravages of age or illness, it’s so special to me to be able to look back at pictures of their smiling faces and remember the times we spent together. I recognize that we have only so much time with our loved ones. And if I live to be as old as either of my grandmothers (one lived to be 90 and the other was 99 when she passed away), I may not be able to do much more to pass the time besides look back at pictures and remember.

As I look back at pictures now, I share them with friends and family. I find a blast from the past and want to share the memory with someone who was there.

At the end of each year I put together a calendar for the next year and fill each month with pictures from each month of the that previous year. These calendars are gifts I send to close family and to our children. It has become a tradition that my children wouldn’t let me discontinue even if I wanted to (which I don’t). It is as special to them as it is to me.

I also print pictures of the kids and our family and make ornaments that I send with a Christmas letter to family and friends each year. I used to take pictures of the kids with their teachers at the beginning of each year and make Christmas ornaments of them as gifts for their teachers but once they started having multiple teachers it got cumbersome and now I’m told it’s “cringe.”😉

Picture taking for me is much more than just documenting major events. It is a way of continuing connections with the people I love while they are still living. It’s also about preserving memories for myself but also for my children. And with a traveling husband it’s fun for him to get texts or emails with pictures of his family while he is on a trip and then he has them to look back on later or to show his coworkers as conversation starters sometimes.

And my picture taking isn’t restricted to just pictures of people. I take pictures of God’s beautiful creation. Beautiful sunsets, sunrises, rainbows, cloud formations, trees covered in leaves changing during the Fall, snow-covered trees, hummingbirds, deer, flowers, etc. And I use a lot of the pictures I take to pair with verses to send to people via text or paste into these blog posts.

My husband once told me I shouldn’t take so many pictures. He told me I would likely never look back on those pictures because I had so many that I wouldn’t have time to look at them all. But I have found that the pictures I take have value that can’t be measured. They have been used to bless others and to bless me as well.

So if you see me coming to take your picture, be sure to smile because the face you make will be the face I see when I’m 90 years old and remembering you. 😉