Just Keep Walking....

 My Prayer From November 17, 2018

I sit here this Saturday morning....the sun is blazing through the windows, the leaves on the trees hanging on for dear life and the house is quiet....no wheelchair running into the doors...no squeaky rubber wheels turning on the wood floors... 

I see a tiny hand print on the back french door...must be Roy or Sam or Ruthie's....and I'm tempted to get up from this perch I'm sitting on and go take a picture of it. 

We are one week past the Memorial Service for Chuck.  I was dreading this day last Saturday....but God turned it into something beautiful and right.  I've lost count of the many people who said it was the best service they have ever been to.  Who laughed at the many shenanigans of Chuck and learned about a man they most likely never knew.  

 

But now they do. 

 

We honored him the way he would have wanted to be honored.  This I'm sure of.  God blessed me with 24 years of walking together, laughing and playing tricks on people.  He tried to teach me not to take life too seriously....to take this road with a little lighter step and, by-golly, just keep walking.  

 

Even...no especially...when life throws crap at you.  

 

God is helping me do just that.  To finally learn what he was trying to teach me all along.  That no house....no circumstance....no disease can take me down unless I "allow" it to.  We are here only for such a short time....a very short time in relational to eternity...so LIVE...and LIVE it right.  

 

Smile.  Love.  Help.  Teach.....

 

...and be a mirror to others of what is located deep inside of us...and that is God.  May I open myself up fully for others to see Him in me and say, "I want what she has" just as I did years ago when I witnessed the life my brother James lived.

So I thank God today.  Thank Him for getting me through these past few weeks.  The final weeks of Chuck's life were brutal.  And yet, they were just weeks.  They weren't months or years...they were weeks.  And I thank Him for taking him before they turned into months and years.  

 

That's called Amazing Grace.

And so here I sit...alone...but not...in this beautiful house so much has happened in.  Flood Waters, Death, Joy, Marriages, Births, Friendships.....I think back on all the things that have happened here and I'm blown away at how much life this house actually held.  Not just the words scratched with a Markie on the beams and floors of this beautiful home after the Flood; promises God made to us so long ago covering and surrounding this blessed and, in some ways, HOLY place... but the Love from the hands of friends and family that wrote His words throughout this home. 

I thank Him for discouraging home buyers to keep looking elsewhere.  They weren't meant to live here....and in some small corner of my soul, I think I always knew that.  I never know His reasons or ways, but I felt them in this situation.  So I'm relieved I'm not moving......and I know I will feel the attempt at Fear to discourage, scare and cause me to cry again some day because in many ways, I long to move.  This is a guarantee.  But may I always remember ....God is the Man of this House...He is the Leader of this home and this life I live in.  I thank Him for being the Leader of Liz.

Today I take in a deep breath of this new day I have been allowed to be a part of.  For none of us know the number of our days...we are simply striving for the last page of the earthly travel book with our name on it.  He "owns" my heart...because part of it is actually His.

GROWING SEEDS: "God's Timing Is Right On Time"

"When Mary came where Jesus was and saw Him, she knelt at His feet and said to Him,

"Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."

John 11:32-44 (NRSV)

The story of Lazarus is so much deeper than just a dear friend of Jesus' dying.  It's much more than two sisters desperately loving their brother and wanting to do anything to save him.  It's more than sending a messenger on a two-day walk to find Jesus, only to have Jesus say He was going to wait a while before heading to His dear friend Lazarus' bedside.  It's so much more, friends.  

It's important to understand the Hebrew view of death...which believed that during the first three days after the death of someone, their "soul" hovered over their body.  On the fourth day, they believed the soul would flee and you would be truly and totally dead-dead.  

The rabbis had been teaching the people they would know the Messiah had truly arrived because He would be able to do such amazing things, like bringing the dead back to life, and then they'd easily know He was the Messiah.  Now by the time we get to the story of Lazarus, Jesus had already raised two other people from the dead, Jairus' daughter and the only son of the widow of Nain.  But they were both within the first three days of death.  That didn't count according to the rabbis.  They'd claim that bringing a person back from the dead during the first three days didn't count because their soul would still be lingering around the body and, therefore, the supposedly dead person was just in a coma.  

The Jewish religious leaders used this three-day hovering of the soul teaching to discredit Jesus' prior two miracles.  For Jesus to truly be the Messiah, in the people's eyes, He’d need to raise the dead after the third day.  Awww...and then there was Lazarus...

So, Jesus delayed.  By the time He left for Lazarus' bedside, He wouldn't arrive until the fourth day after Lazarus had died.  If He had left at once, it would have only been the second day of Lazarus' death and still within the three-day-soul-hovering-time-limit.  And this is the significance of the fourth day.  Jesus' delay was intentional.  A fourth-day resurrection would tell the people that there was no question that Jesus was the Messiah. 

Lazarus learned this truth the hard way. He had to make the ultimate sacrifice to prove Jesus was, indeed, the Messiah to the people.

And friends, that is the REAL gold nugget in the raising of Lazarus from the dead.  God's timing ALWAYS has a purpose.  It's never too late or too early....it's always just right on time.