The things we do

I'm getting bad at writing on the blog.  I attribute it to a different habit; keeping a journal.  The blog used to kind of be my online journal.  Lately though, my life has been pretty much uneventful so there hasn't been much point in writing it on the blog.

I hope that 2020 will change that.

Anyway...

I was thinking over the new year about how God has so changed my life.  It was 10 years ago that the avalanche of me leaving the Air Guard and a pretty great job for the unknown disaster I was walking into.  It's hard to believe that was ten years ago because the time has flown by.  It was about ten years ago, I started fooling around with writing the blog, and in the fall of 2010 I got serious about changing the what I was writing about.  I think this is like the third iteration of the blog itself, and I'm toying with changing the name of it once again.  You never know.

A lot has happened over the last ten years.  And now that I'm on the other side of most of it, I look across and see the multitude of stuff that God made me go through.  It's one of the things I was thinking about the other day.  For a time, it seemed like every answer to a prayer from me was NO.  And the Holy Spirit helped me understand that for the most part, those prayers were asking God to deliver me from a corner I'd painted myself into or to avoid the consequences of the decisions I'd made.  Instead of doing that or letting me run to the next problem, which I'd done my whole life, He made me walk through the deep valley.

But He didn't make me go alone.

And in that deep valley, it's where I learned the importance of the things God was teaching me.  That's not lost on me either.  It's not lost on me the things He lets me do for Him nowadays that I would have never dreamed about ten years ago, and it's amazing to me that standing on the other side of that ten years, how blessed I am to be where I'm at.

I was sharing that the other day with a friend who was struggling.  I told him about some of the circumstances God used in my life while I was serving Him to teach me to forgive.  I've seen God provide for me in the lean times, where I always had enough and help when I needed it.  A lot of times, that help looked like opportunities to earn extra money and it was up to me to do my part.  Sometimes that's how God provides.  Other times, it's a blessing of an unexpected check in the mail.  I can't recall how many times a check came for a settlement of this or that class action thing.  They were checks that weren't large, but they always came at the most interesting times.

I think too about the relationships God gave me.  I know that's been a messy part of my life, but I'm amazed at how God refuses to let my mistakes deviate from His plan for my life.  In that, there have been countless times I've asked Him for a new plan only to be told no.  Thee was a detour that bore fruit for the Kingdom but led me right back to where I was supposed to be.  There were the countless times I wanted to go on my own.  There were a couple of times I was going to try, where God moved to keep me from doing that.

I got asked to a Great Gatsby New Year's Eve party in July by a woman I would have really liked to date, but I know that it's not what God wanted for me. I said no. It was funny to me that a couple of days ago, I saw a movie about this woman who had killed her husband.  She ran to a friend and told him what happened and he wished he'd been the killer instead of her.   At the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve she was wishing for a do-over and suddenly found herself back one year.   I didn't see the whole movie because I thought the storyline was not something I was interested in.  I did see the last five minutes of the movie, where the man she was with wound up killing her husband before he could kill her.  The idea was that the result was the same, so it didn't matter who actually did the killing.

Again, this would hardly be worth mentioning if the name of the character in the movie hadn't been the name of the woman who asked me out to the party.  This was an old movie, and I couldn't help but wonder if maybe there was a little message in there.  For good measure, I would spend my New Year's eve and day suffering from a bout of gout brought on by some medication that's supposed to prevent it.  That incident reminds me of another New Year's Eve date that didn't work out.  It's the one I spent at the Vet ER when the kitten got squooshed by the recliner.  The lady I was going to ask out worked in our building.  She got moved out of our building the next day and I didn't see her again for almost a year.

Sometimes you have to take a hint.

2020 starts off with things in turmoil.  That's not unusual for me.  This time, the turmoil is at work, and it's just changes brought on by circumstances out of anybody's control.  I'm curious to see what the effects the changes the new year has brought will be.  Only time will tell.

I know that God has been so faithful to me and I've seen so many good things happen.  I witnessed a miracle of healing  in Miss June's recovery.  So many people never recover to the point she has.  A famous person died from the same thing Miss June had.  God healed her for His reasons and I'm happy she's being reacquainted with other family members.  She's doing well, by the way.

And I think about how God has removed enmity from myself and my ex.  My pastor friend put it to me this way:  "...you've graduated from anti-Christ to friend".  I had three people suggest that possibly we would wind up back together, but as i pointed out to each of them, I don't think God would be building a life for her without me if that were the case. 

And then there's the path I'm on.  I still think its the right one and that doesn't seem to include that type of reconciliation.  God does fix relationships.  Sometimes exes reconcile and work things out.  Sometimes God just puts enough of the pieces back together to make the thing what He wants it to be.  That's kinda where I'm going with things.  He's in charge.

I'm following. 

That's about all I have for today.  BTW, if you're not praying for our country, you really should be.




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