Tirzah and I were at our fourth consecutive BBQ of the long weekend, of which we were so thankful to have full afternoons.
I couldn't find the time to write yesterday, and so I write to you today, this Tuesday, combining many different "themes", blog themes of ours I guess you might say.
Combining the sustenance and treasures from the garden with also the spiritual sustenance I have needed over these past days and weeks. For as I tell Tirzah each time we open the Bible after a meal, and as Jesus told his disciples: "Man does not live on bread alone, but by every word of God" Luke 4:4.
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| This is the sunflower that was cut off! GORGEOUS!! |
A thought that has been sustaining me, written by dear Marlene (I am simply going to cut and paste on this one. . . an email from her with thoughts on this sunflower. When I suggested the thought of something helpful during a season in your life becoming a death at another point of life. Marlene came to these thoughts):
That severed sunflower theme keeps calling for my attention & wouldn't let go!
And so, it led to the dictionary, and then meditating on this word:
graft
a shoot of a tree, inserted in another tree
as the stock which is to support & to nourish it.
these two unite and become one.
to insert into a body to which it did not originally belong.
Hallelujah! We are grafted into God's family tree!!
We are nourished & flourish! Bloom on!
You, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the other and now
share in the nourishing sap from the olive root. You do not support The Root, but
The Root supports you. Romans 11:17-18
Another truth, well several truths, that have been sustaining me come from the book Calm My Anxious Heart written by Linda Dillow. My dear friend Meredith read this book while we lived in Georgia last year. And now my sweet friend Hillary and I are reading though it together, a chapter a week and discussing it on Monday afternoons. In chapter one, the author writes a "prescription for contentment" that was found in one of her friend's mother's diary. Her prescription, (which I find a good one!) is as follows, taken from page 13 of her book:
*Never allow yourself to complain about anything- not even the weather
(What a challenge to not complain with my husband away! And what a challenge. . . not now with this gorgeous Pacific Northwest summer weather, but in the winter, what a challenge to not complain of the rain!!)
*Never picture yourself in any other circumstances or someplace else.
(That is a challenge too: every day I picture myself with my husband. . . )
*Never compare your lot with another's
(also hard as it seems a woman's curse is comparison; well at least mine is!)
* Never allow yourself to wish this or that had been otherwise.
(A challenge when I question my/our decisions)
*Never dwell on tomorrow- remember that (tomorrow) is God's, not ours.
(a challenge with my husband at war and the "what ifs" that sometimes creep into my mind)
A couple of pages later, the author writes this paragraph which has been at the forefront of my mind these past days:
"Proverbs 23:7 says, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he" (KJV). The writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: "Beware of what you dwell on for that you shall surely become." How convicting! We become what we think. Our thought life- not our circumstances- determines whether we are content. our thought life- not our friends, husband, children, job, or anything else- determines our contentment!" (pg. 32)
You know the saying: "you are what you eat". Perhaps we should extend it a little more and in other words say: "you are what you think". . . It is often that people say to me: "I don't know how you do it." Have my husband at war, that is. Have my husband on the front lines, in danger at every moment of his deployment. And when people tell me they are proud of me, that is my throat aches and my tears can not be stopped. For I don't feel like I am doing this well, but I do know that it is by His grace that I can choose to believe, and I can choose to take Him at his Word, and I can choose to live by faith and not by sight. Jesus tells his disciples in Mark 11:24: "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." And so I think and I pray and I ask in all humility, and I give thanks because I believe that it will happen and I live as if it has happened, that my husband and all of third platoon will come home alive from deployment, so that many will fear and trust and will put their hope in God.
Lastly, it was as I read from One Thousand Gifts again the other night:
"From all our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story. Satan, he wanted more. More power, more glory. Ultimately, in his essence, Satan is an ingrate. And he sinks his venom into the heart of Eden. Satan's sin becomes the first sin of al humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully, ungrateful for what God gave.
Isn't that the catalyst of all my sins?
Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren't satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other." (Voskamp, pg.15)
I realized that I had been harboring the sin of ingratitude in my heart towards Tirzah. I was ungrateful for her spirited and willful personality. I just simply wanted a simple child. I wanted her to be different; to be easier. And it took me reading those words of Ann Voskamp to realize that I held that sin against my own daughter. And how I needed to let go of that ingratitude and to give thanks even in the hard moments of her will against mine own. To give thanks in moments of her outright disobedience; of her outright selfishness; of her outright ugly sin.
We are sustained by thanksgiving. Because we are grafted into His family tree. Because we have His WORD to think and to dwell upon so we can become that word. Because He is good and so we can believe and live as though all He gives is good.
Sustained.
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