Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 58

Today's Daily 5:

1. 1 year and 58 days of making these lists.  Because the last few days have been hard, and showing up here for a year and 58 days is a big deal tonight.
2. sourdough toast with butter and blackberry jam
3. a smooth job interview
4. praying friends
5. driving to do a few errands this morning without having too much panic
6. errands that went smoothly
7. drinking a big mug of rooibos tea while wrapped in blankets and pausing, before the day got hard
8. watching a couple of kids movies
9. making some necessary calls that I'd been procrastinating on
10. being reminded in a couple different ways that tomorrow is another new day
11. Shake the Dust - I know, I've linked to it over and over the last year, but I watched it again tonight and needed to hear that.  "this is for the people who are told to speak only when spoken to and then are never spoken to."  Shake the Dust.

Thinking About This Song Tonight...

My Reality

I've been thinking a lot lately about the realities of my life right now.  Some of them are humorous, some of them are just hard, but they're all things that are part of my reality, things that I have to navigate each day.

My reality includes (among other things):

• A bathroom door that doesn't reach to the ceiling
• My bathroom is also missing a ceiling and a normal floor.  It has a broken toilet paper holder (grandma broke it a month or so ago when she decided my bathroom needed to be cleaned.).  And it has spiders sometimes.
• No bedroom door, just a curtain (a fact that needs to change.  soon.)
• Feeling kind of displaced as I spend my days at one home, and my nights at another.
• A bathroom light that has wiring challenges, meaning you have to flick the light on and off several times to get it to stay on.
• A basement window that doesn't latch, so grandma has jammed it shut with a butter knife
• Figuring out how to really engage life in the moments where it feels more like exile than real life
• odd dreams
• a weird lighting/wiring set-up in the basement that means I use my iphone as a flashlight every single night to make the trek from the front door, down the stairs and through the basement to my living space
• Because my grandma has a thing about saving money (LONG story) and has actually timed showers, most days I shower in a different house than the one I sleep in
• walking through hard personal stuff, day by day
• navigating some pretty odd family dynamics that have cropped up around my living situation
• waiting - to find out about what kind of job to look for, to find out if I've been accepted into school, and on a number of more personal fronts.
• and, most recently, figuring out the arrival of my somewhat sketchy uncle, now also living in the same home as my grandma and I.

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 57

Today's Daily 5:

1. This joke made me chuckle when it arrived in my email inbox this morning: "After the death of a never married 94-year old spinster of his parish, the rector was given a note from her personal belongings. In the woman's handwriting were specific instructions for her funeral service. Along with the suggestions for Scripture readings and music were the following orders: "There will be no male pallbearers. Since they wouldn't take me out when I was alive, I don't want them to take me out when I'm dead.
2. Eating a fresh nectarine for breakfast 
3. arriving at mom and dad's just in time for an offer of dad making frittata for lunch with leftovers from yesterday's thanksgiving ham 
4. This facebook status from someone I know a little, which made me laugh out loud since I've been having a conversation with a friend about that very topic: "Some of my deep-thinking friends (and especially the Christian ones it seems) make me smile, and sometimes wince, because they just can't post a status update that is simply fun or happy. Everything's gotta be intense or profound it seems. Hope your lives are occasionally a bit lighter than your status updates my friends." 
5. an unexpected skype call with a dear friend in the midst of a day when I was struggling. the laughter and her gentle reminders of truth were oh so helpful this afternoon 
6. every historical village trip (like the one I made on Saturday) requires a visit to the old-fashioned working bakery. and purchases at said bakery. knowing that Thanksgiving was coming and that there would be leftover mean, Saturday's bakery purchase was a freshly baked loaf of sourdough bread. A loaf that smelled fantastic. A loaf that, when sliced, and made into a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with leftover ham from yesterday's Thanksgiving meal made for a divine sandwich. 
7. watching a few episodes of Grey's Anatomy on DVD 
8. catching up on blog reading 
9. laughing on skype this afternoon with my friend about last night's daily 5 (I miss having her be the peanut gallery across the room while I write those lists!) 
10. Being reminded over and over again lately that I am actually someone who is loved.

Not a Spirit of Fear

2 Timothy 1:7 (NLT)
For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

The passage above is perhaps one of my least favorites in all of scripture.  Not because I don't think that it's an absolutely incredible promise and statement, because I do.  I don't like it because it has been used as a weapon.

If I had a dollar for every time that someone has quoted that passage to me as a supposed "solution to all my problems", I'd be rich.  The gist of their thinking is almost always along the lines of "Well, don't be afraid, fear isn't from God, you know."


Really?  I hadn't caught that in all those years I spent growing up in church.


That's your big solution to the overwhelming and paralyzing fear I sometimes struggle with?  Just "don't be afraid, it's not from God."  Thanks for that.  No really, thanks for the helpful advice.


Obviously I've never said any of these things out loud to whoever the well-meaning person quoting my "favorite" scripture verse to me was.  I'm polite like that.  And well-trained.  And I might have permanent bite marks on my tongue, too.


When you're buried in overwhelming fear, "stop being afraid" just doesn't seem like an option.  When fear overwhelms whole arenas of your life, you're generally aware that that fear likely isn't a godly thing, and someone reminding you of that fact just feels like rubbing salt in an open wound.


And then, in God's usual way, he used my least favorite thing as an object lesson recently.


I'd woken from a brutal dream, terrified, and trying to pray.


It was one of those moments when God borrows his own words from scripture to speak.


"I didn't give you a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline."


There's something different about those words when they're being offered by the original author, and not being quoted as easy solutions to a problem that the person doing the quoting can't quite understand, and quite possibly fears themselves.


When God spoke them into the chaos of my heart that early morning, they carried an instant peace.  A knowledge that I was loved, and the One who loves me was intervening in the darkness that had encroached while I slept, and pushing it back.


That passage will probably never be one of my favorites.  There's an awful lot of cynicism built up in me about it.  But, when Jesus speaks it, I'm going to stop to listen.  Because when He speaks it, something special, something healing, is on it's way.