The Sylvr Pen

Not so random, this excerpting from my journal, because I wanted to share with all you fellow (and potential?) journal-ers the great value journaling has been to me this past month.

The word I chose for this year’s focus was “Aware,” and the most important thing I wanted to be aware of: God’s presence and working in my daily life.  So that specific awareness was my January micro-focus.

What I did daily from early on was to take a moment or two each evening, sometime before bed, to review the day and note in my journal the evidences of God’s presence in it.

I soon found that often, though I’d recognized such evidence somewhere in the day, by that late time of tiredness I’d forgotten! So I then took to noting things down as soon as possible after I’d noticed them—in my journal, or in a little carry-around notebook, to add later to the journal.

This worked. And what a month ensued! As January 31’s entry testifies:

Review of January

January 31, 2014

What a fat lot of pages hold my notes and thoughts of this single month’s pilgrimage! To read through them all as I want to do I’ll need to allot some time. Well, tomorrow’s “Still Saturday,” and [husband] hasn’t done breakfast with the guys for three weeks, so I may get a chunk of Saturday stillness, and then comes a sabbath where the busy stops. Today I’d best clear up the clutter of the week’s scattered ambitions and make for an undistracted weekend. But I do want to do some of this journal review reading today to step wisely and happily into February’s pilgrimage.

I have already read the first two pages’ “Plan for 2014” [written December 29, 2013], … and I am just delighted with surprise at how much this “plan” actually happened, followed through in routines that now seem natural. This is the LORD. I’m sure of it—because I have not checked back to those two planning pages in recent days at all; my focus was, rather, on You, Lord, Yourself. (See how my words sweitch spontaneously to second person? This is what’s happening, praise God!)

-So thankful for that! Thank You, God!

-Thank You for this [additional] awareness: [that] what my body, even my mouth and palate really wanted was [healthier food than what I was about to eat]

-Three items [recorded] showed a “natural” movement in my awareness is already happening: to greater awareness [also] of what is good and prospering to the “temple maintenance” [care of bodily health] I’ve neglected far too much (a 2014 desired purpose not yet followed through on). Thank You also for that!

[Through January I also noticed this: As my consciousness of God’s presence in my days increased, an awakened awareness of my conscience, soon began automatically to follow. Being sensibly in the presence of holy, mighty, omniscient God will spontaneously bring the conscience to life, won’t it? And along with that, consciousness of His grace and forgiveness.]

How could one not be “happy in the Lord”* with these awarenesses flowing?

*[a George Muller phrase I’d quoted shortly before]

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Random Journal Day

Sometimes—such as now—I feel like I’m stuck in Narnia.  Winter just keeps going on and on, and I don’t mean only literally. “Normal activity,” as I see it, has not yet resumed. Seems like it never will. Maybe it won’t.

Today a repost, because I need it, and maybe someone else does. Even when the winter of our discontent runs overtime and hard, we’d best settle and look up, rather than try to scheme our way out of it, all wily.

Whiteout!

The sky is falling! —in tiny pieces, white crystalline fragments, swirling down so densely they block my view of everything else. I can’t see either heaven or earth—even a few yards down the road. It’s a blizzard!

Sometimes it seems my life’s sky is falling.  My spiritual eyes can’t see a bit of heaven—or even my next steps down the road.  I’m having a spiritual whiteout.

I love the snow—if I have nowhere to go.  I don’t need to see ahead then. I can calmly watch while flakes swirl down in solo dances or tight little groups, swiftly coating the ground in gossamer, then gauze, then deep fuzzy blanket.  The sooty road becomes pristine.  The trees get dressed in lace.  The mud and the clutter of wind-delivered twigs and leaves disappear beneath a spotless veil.  Stillness reigns, traffic ceases, people snuggle down in houses, while Heaven’s white pours earthward.

But when I “need” to keep appointments, go places, do things, how different my reaction:  tension and restlessness, anxious pleading for the storm to stop!   In such a state, I miss the beauty of the moment.

I must realize: Normal activity will resume…later.  But now the falling of the sky, slowing life to standstill, is probably just what I really need.

How often in the midst of swirling life our deepest need is to “stand still, and see the deliverance of the LORD,” to “be still, and know that [He is] God” (Exodus 14:13; Psalm 46:10).  How often (though we may hate to admit it) having our “sky fall” is the only thing that will bring our noisy hustle-bustle to a halt, our hearts, minds, and souls to stillness.  How often only the fallout of a blizzard can cover with white the mud and debris our scurry has churned up, so that we can afterward view the outlines of life in clear simplicity.

~

Rest in the LORD and wait patiently for Him. Fret not thyself… -Psalm 37:7 KJV

[Repost, edited]

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How is God with me today? In what He’s made.

With my heart acknowledging Him as Creator, today I feel His presence through the sweet delight He’s hidden in these things set before me: things I’d never notice but for their signature scents.

Dust and broken foliage, that’s all they are, one would suppose, just to look at them. But as I pour herb after herb, spice after spice into their separate confinements, unique fragrances break free to bless the air wafting to my nose, and I marvel at each uniqueness, built in since its creation. Cinnamon, cardamom, cumin… Sage, rosemary, thyme…

Why so many differences in the subtle scent nuances? And why the amazing ability of my olfactory apparatus, that I can easily differentiate one from another? And why the inner programming of delight He’s written on my heart, that these scents should make me smile so without my trying?

Is He not with me, enjoying my enjoyment, the way I enjoy the delight of a son or grandchild of my own? Is it just my imagination that I think I feel His delight at my delight?

What an insult to the Creator not to appreciate and savor all these wonders He’s put before us, and to enjoy the ability He’s given to sense all their great and delicate differences!

Oh, Lord, thank You for this joy: the sense of Your love poured out in these enjoyments. And may my delight at them and thankful acknowledgement of You as their highly skilled Designer bless You with its own unique incense of gratitude and love.

I am small dust and miniscule crumbled foliage, too. But did God not put in my love for Him my own signature fragrance? Is it not “sweet savor” to the Savior of my soul?

~

Thanking Him this morning…

for parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

for cinnamon, cardamom, cumin and cloves

for  caraway and celery and fennel and dill seeds

for ginger, nutmeg, allspice, and star anise,

for my olfactory apparatus

and all this uniqueness

and for the grace that makes it all rise like incense of joy—

to human noses and souls and hearts,

and then in turn, in return, back to the glorious  Giver of it all.

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………………………….Blank Slate — Nothing Written Thereon………………………….

In the stillness I chose for this morning, I think of her: that excellent teacher who could enter a classroom and within one or two minutes gain the silent, undivided attention of every pupil there. Time after time.

Watching her taught me much: for my own teaching then, for motherhood later—and even today for experiencing and learning from God…

What a wondrous phenomenon: that roomful of fidgety sixth-graders settling into silent, complete, rapt attention—and not just suppression of outward behavior with minds yet jumpy inside. No, order reigned not only in the classroom but also within each child.

What she did was wisely simple. And it occurs to me this morning that God does the same wise, simple thing.

In silence she’d take her place before the class, then stand in silence and look out over them. She spoke not a word.

One by one they subdued their chatter, quit their whispers, quieted their restless movements.

She remained silent, looking on. With deliberate eyes she noted the fingers fiddling with a pencil, the hands probing a desk’s interior, the restless head turning, distracted by every bulletin board, the hand lifted toward a mouth to bite a fingernail.

Giving only a calm, knowing look—still she uttered not a word—till all the nervous motion ceased, all bodies stilled, all eyes focused expectantly on her, all ears obviously tuned in.

Excellent learning followed—partly, of course, because of her lessons’ excellent content. But that settling into such receptive state was integral to how such good learning happened.

God is like that, is He not? Most excellent of teachers, He tells us to look to, call on, wait for Him, for His Holy Spirit, Who “will lead us into all truth” and “teach us all things.” Trying to learn by mere human effort, we are but fidgety children, gaining only what rude, unregenerate minds could figure out from the text or sermon or circumstance through which the great Teacher waits to teach.

He is ever ready to instruct us. Yet to learn what only His Spirit within us can discern (1 Cr 2:6-16;2 Cr 1:21-22),  we must, I must, be settled, fully attuned. The fidgety flesh, the too-human mind, must come to stillness. Then, when He has our full attention, He will teach something wonderful, mighty, life-changing and  -enhancing.

“Be still, and know…” He says (Ps 46:10). “Cease striving…” (Ps 46:10 NASB). Come to a standstill, without and within.

God waits to be heard.

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Somehow you get the impression it all happens at once.

But mostly it’s only catastrophes that happen that way.

Usually…

fffwump!fffwump!

fffwump!

What is it you hoped to change, to improve, this new year?

Was it your messy house?

The shedding of pounds?

The removal of a bad habit? 

Or the uncovering of truth?

Flylady can tell you this about your cleaning up your mess: “It won’t happen overnight.”

Weight Watchers can tell  you, you won’t lose those thirty or forty pounds in two weeks!

The experts can tell you, it takes 21-28 consecutive days to form one small routine into more or less of a habit—and that the best way to remove a bad habit is to displace it by a good one.

And I can tell you, awareness of truth comes like the uncovering of that barn roof, as segment by segment, area by area of what lay obscured warms in the light of His word and the movement of His Spirit, and the masking slides away, revealing more and more of the whole and nothing but.

Anything worth the gain is worth the stick-to-it—and the pain.

One small step at a time.

~

“And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment” (Phl 1:9).

“…We urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more, just as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God” (1Th 4:1).

“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen” (2Pe 3:18).

 *****

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