Today

In my June blog, I wrote a little about my sweet dad. But I didn’t tell you everything. I didn’t confess just how annoying he was.

My dad was a morning person.

Some of my “worst” childhood memories are of Daddy waking me up.

A World War Two Veteran, Daddy loved blaring Reveille on his shiny trumpet at the foot of my warm and cozy bed. Really?

Or, as he shaved each morning before heading off to work, he belted out his favorite hymns loudly enough for all of Elmer to be evangelized and for me to cover my head with a groan. No one should be so pleasant at 6:30 AM.

But I think Daddy’s favorite strategy was to cheerily call from the doorway, “Rise and shine! This is a day that the LORD has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.”  Ah, the Bible dart! Straight from the Psalms to pierce and shame me. What’s a kid to do with that?

Daddy wanted us to “seize the day.” He taught us—and lived—that each day was a gift from our Father to treasure and use for His purposes. And we should be thankful for each one, no matter how rudely or how early we were awakened to it. It was almost like he knew he didn’t have a lot of time.

I’ve been thinking about that lately.  I officially joined the ranks of the proud, Medicare-Card-Carriers this month.  A few days later, I attended an unexpected, bittersweet funeral of a dear family member. There’s nothing like a few out-of-the-ordinary life events like these to get one’s attention. So I hit the pause button of my busy life. Speak, Lord. Let me hear from You. Let me get it.

 Words spoken at the funeral service to the grieving family are still echoing through my brain. The pastor reminded those gathered of Psalm 90:12. “Teach us to number our days…” Hmmmm. How am I doing with that? I’ve known to do this since childhood. Days are a gift to be stewarded, to be grateful for, to be lived for Jesus. Have I gotten off track? And, seriously, just how many days do I have left?

Moses, the author of this oldest of Psalms, seems to indicate that this awareness of our allotted time isn’t a natural exercise, that we thick-headed humans need a Teacher, a divine instructor to train us, to remind us that we are like grass that springs up in the morning, blooms and flourishes, but by evening, is dry and withered. He says that we then “fly away.”  Not something too many of us care to think about, is it? But we should. And when we do, we need to cry out for the Teacher who will “teach us to realize the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom.”

I want to be wise in the use of my limited number of days, don’t you? If I am carelessly breezing through them with no real purpose or intentional goals, living only for my own selfish pleasures and desires with no thought for tomorrow or for what God has for me to accomplish on my journey here, I am squandering a very precious, priceless gift, one I will never be able to recover. It only takes a few moments to glance at my ink-covered calendar or to open my checkbook or scroll through my iPhone to get a fairly accurate assessment of what I am doing with the days—the minutes and hours—of my brief life.

I don’t want to waste them. And I don’t want to be too busy to be able to meet a hurting friend to talk and pray—or to cuddle my grandchildren or take a walk on the beach or to feed my birds. It’s not about busyness at all...or accomplishing great things. It’s simply about making conscious, deliberate, and informed choices about the best use of each day I have…for my Father.

I think I need planned flexibility. I need to thoughtfully schedule all the important events of each day along with all of my ordinary tasks--while recognizing the Father’s ultimate authority and right to revamp and reorganize my day any way He sees fit. I release my day to Him, discerning He knows what’s best for me, how I need to be spending the moments I have been given. I need to pay attention to His promptings, to the divine interruptions He orchestrates for me. Then, at the end of each day, with a gratifying sense of accomplishing my Father’s will, my heart will rejoice and I will rest in His good pleasure.

Often, early in the morning, I pull my quilt up around my neck and smile. I find I’m waiting for Daddy’s voice (or his horn!) to rouse me from my sleepiness and get me up to “attack the day.” What a precious memory that is now…what a blessing to have been given such an “annoying,” wise dad like him.

So today, I listen for my Heavenly Father’s voice. He, too, wants me to embrace today. I don’t know how many todays I may have left before His trumpet sounds. Now that’s a blast I can’t wait to hear…early morning or not.

How about you? 

Special Alert

B-Being

U-Under

  S-Satan’s

Y-Yoke

Each year I hear parents reporting on how they are preparing for the new school year. Filling up the calendar with important things like school of course, than the other possibilities: whether it’s sports, the arts, or any other variety of things that are offered to your children.

The temptation will be to fill up the calendar with activities for each child or else, in our culture’s mind, you will be labeled as a bad parent.

The sad truth is, I not only hear all of the activities that will be starting in the new school year, I hear these things as well:

• “We only have a chance to connect as a family when we come to counseling for the week because we’re so BUSY”
• “I haven’t seen my kids all week to be able to talk with them about our value system because we are so BUSY”
• “We were too BUSY to do our assignment for the week”
• “I haven’t gotten around to leading the family devotion because we were so BUSY this week”

The list could go on and on.

The belief that children will learn important life skills through having to participate on a team, dealing with conflict and how to be disciplined in a sport or the arts is very true. All of these values are present as I used to participate in team sports growing up. The art of discipline, hard work, dedication. But...when our value system is the Word of God, our culture cannot be the measuring stick that we look to in order to inform our decisions.

Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

In order to train a child it takes time. So I looked up the definition.

Time-

noun \'tim\ 

Simple Definition of time

: the thing that is measured as seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, etc.

: a particular minute or hour shown by a clock

: the time in a particular area or part of the world

Hmm....you can ask yourself, how much time am I investing into my children? Or am I unloading my responsibility of training them onto the school, sports or dance?

So what does this training word mean?

Train

noun

Simple Definition of training

: a process by which someone is taught the skills that are needed for an art, profession, or job

: the process by which an athlete prepares for competition by exercising, practicing.

The whole point of this blog is to help you take the time to prioritize your upcoming schedule, keeping at the forefront of your mind how you use this precious gift of time and training up your children. God gave them to you as a gift to train. They are really His and He has entrusted them to you in order to raise up Godly men and women to walk out their purpose on planet earth.

Once again, the Bible says:

Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, friends,

Lois Robinso

Profile Of A Workaholic

This week I would like to feature a blog present by Ray Pritchard in the CareLeader website. I encourage you to approach the blog from two angles: seek to understand this life-draining dynamic and seek to examine your own life in light of it.

I can think of times in my life when I turned to "work" to avoid some painful reality or perhaps conversation I wanted to protect myself from. I used work for a purpose God not design it for in my life. This is what I mean by life-draining. 

I hope this blog resources you in some edifying way. Click here to access the blog!

Sincerely,

Diego Cuartas

Tattoos

Tattoos. What’s your take on them?  Do you like them? Do you have one? Do you like the multi-colored ones, or just black?  Flowers? Hearts? Flags? Or don’t you like them at all?

I have to confess; I have two of them. They were done fourteen years ago, when I was 71. But they are really, really small.

They are just two tiny dots to show the radiologists where to aim, because I had breast cancer. I suppose that I should have been more involved with my diagnosis and treatment, but I wasn’t. I was too busy. I did what they said and showed up when I was supposed to, but I just wasn’t really with it. I didn’t have the time or the energy. Because my husband was in and out of the hospital with esophageal cancer, and he really needed me to be there to help make important treatment decisions.  And I was exhausted.

We lived in Manahawkin, and my radiation was being done in the hospital there; he was in Jefferson in Philadelphia, 60 miles away. So I would get up in the morning, do what I absolutely had to do at home, run in to Radiology, and then drive to Jefferson to spend time with him; then drive home in the dark and wake up the next day and do it all over again, 5 days a week. On weekends, blessedly, there was no radiation, and I could spend all day at Jefferson. At the end, though, he came home in Hospice, and the day he died was the next to last day of my radiation. I kept my appointments.

This little short story is just a snapshot of the many times when we face situations we cannot change and don’t see how we can handle. How can we do it? Where can we turn?  I wasn’t   especially strong or especially anything. But I had the greatest thing in the world going for me. I had Jesus.

I know that ‘I can do all thing through Christ who strengthens me’, but that didn’t change needing to be in two places at once. But Paul also said, In Acts 22:33:  Pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

And It’s true. God CAN and DOES step into these situations and make all things possible. You can be frightened, you can be grieving, you can be angry, you can be totally overwhelmed. I’ve been in all of those miserable places and more, but when I prayed, and especially when I remembered all the times that God had already brought me through, I could feel God’s peace running beneath all the pain and confusion, strong and steady. His doctors became available when I could be there. I could do it.

God is so good. I am stubborn. But after enough times when I first tried to battle it out on my own, I finally got smart and gave up on THAT scene, and started to remember to trust God FIRST. And then it became almost automatic, and that was God ‘guarding my heart and mind’. Without this process, it is so easy for us to slip into resentment and bitterness, which is certainly not what God desires for us. His peace really is beyond our understanding, not only because he is eager to offer it to us, but also in its depth and power. And it is ours for the asking.

What a wonderful God we have!