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You know how you can feel change coming spiritually, before it actually arrives? I wrote about this several weeks ago in my post Family and Career. Here is what I said “Like the cool breeze coming through my window — so different from the summer heat – I know my season is changing. May God direct my steps.” And then in my last post Whether to Weather I talked about how “like the wind, the Holy Spirit is a free agent. It can be a hurricane or a gentle breeze… I don’t know about you, but that’s a bit scary to me. A bit dangerous.”
Last week the gentle breeze in my life had a nip to it. Something was about to change. I had no idea what — and generally thought that it would be a positive thing. But let me tell you that right now, that in this week it does not feel positive and I’m doing everything I can do to remain pliable as dust in God’s wind as He molds me into His image.
Scary and dangerous — not in a fun adventurous way as I have experienced from God before, but in a deeply vulnerable and threatening way, rife with temptation and obstacles. I do not know where the Spirit is taking me right now, but I do know this: God is at work. He is everywhere on and in this, and like Larry Who said in a comment to last week’s post: “the Spirit just shows up and takes over.”
I found a new release at the library the other day, called The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women who went from Career to Family and Back Again, by Emma Gilbey Keller. After reading one line of the inside cover, I immediately wanted to read more – ”An inspiring book that argues that women can have it all — just not all at once.”
This echoes what I have long felt — that life happens in seasons.
For seven years I have been a mother of preschoolers. Their needs have been constant and basic — food, clothes, diapers, potty-training, bathing, and so on. Early motherhood is physically and emotionally demanding, and it doesn’t have a definite end moment, it kind of tapers off like the waves on a beach. But it does end.
And now I’m (suddenly!) the mother of elementary-aged children. If I find myself doting over them too much, putting on their clothes for them or reminding them to put their library book in the backpack, then they quickly call me on it. They need to do those things for themselves and this is a good and healthy part of growing up.
Realizing this has been difficult for me. I’ve been restless. I thought about cleaning more, taking up helicopter parenting, or shopping. But none of those sounded appealing.
So I picked up some contract writing work that has been keeping me busy, but yesterday I sent in the invoice and today I’m reflecting on family and career. As I write this, the house is abnormally quiet and through the open window I hear a truck in the distance and birds chirping outside. It’s peaceful, and didn’t I yearn for this during those rowdy summer days?
Like the cool breeze coming through my window — so different from the summer heat – I know my season is changing. May God direct my steps.
Nine years ago today Brad and I said our vows, a pair of two 21-year olds in love. As the sun set over the lake and in front of our friends and family (many of them likely crossing their fingers over our young age!) we committed ourselves to each other and set our relationship before God.
Here is what I’ve learned since then:
1) Love is a choice. Many times that lovin’ feeling will come easily, but sometimes it doesn’t. In those times we make the conscious choice to actively love each other.
2) Marriage is a gift, and only by the grace and mercy of God do we learn how to extend this same grace and mercy to each other.
3) And finally, no one else knows me like he does (besides God of course!) and that’s how it should be. The love that has grown between us since we first met is ours to hold. It is special and rare — almost like a precious secret. We prioritize, guard and nurture it.
I pray that God continues to provide His grace for us, and am so grateful that He’s brought us here together.
My sister Krista and I don’t have a typical relationship. We didn’t grow up together. That’s right – no fights about who gets to play with the cool Barbie first, no stealing each other’s clothes, none of that catty girl stuff. It wasn’t until my late teens (and her preteens) that we began spending time together. Now we’re both in our 20s, and we’re the best of friends.
But because we didn’t share common experiences during childhood, what happened last fall can’t be explained away by sisterly insight. There was something else happening.
In Part 1 of this series, I described a time when God called me to pray for a friend’s struggle, before I even knew anything about that struggle. That was my first experience with Spirit-led intercessory prayer. By October of last year, I had been in this gift for several years and had mostly stopped second-guessing the spiritual pull within me.
It was during this time that Krista encountered a rather significant, life-altering internal struggle. She came up to a crossroads, a place where she would choose what kind of person to become. And like so many of us have experienced, her emotional and spiritual life was in turmoil as she approached this figurative fork in the road.
Unlike before, I knew many of the details. Not all (in fact, the most significant details only she knew), but enough to put words to the prayer. I prayed for God to show her the clear path – for Krista to have total peace if the path was right. And if she had missed the right path, if she needed to change direction— for her to have increasing uneasiness, a clamor in her ears. These are the specific words that I prayed, peace or unease according to God’s plan for her life, and I began praying this during the middle of October. After two weeks I felt that I needed to tell her about my prayer.
So I sent her an email, and explained that I had been praying this way for two weeks.
Here is her condensed reply: “First of all, your email almost made me break into tears. I’m kind of in shock right now. I feel like when it comes to matters of the heart and just following intuition, God is at the center of it and keeps sending me these little messages. Sometimes, they are really big messages that are right in my face.
Anyway, seriously, your email almost knocked me out of my chair because I feel like over the past two weeks, my uneasiness has gotten worse when I thought it would get better, and I do have a “clamor in my ears.” I feel like you had such a strong desire to tell me about your prayer because you know that if I was feeling anything strongly, that it could be that God was working on me. And I guess we see now that He has been.”
Let me be clear about something: I don’t have magic, psychic powers; my words on their own didn’t “curse” her with uneasiness. I think what happened is that God needed a bridge to Krista, extending from heaven to earth. And in praying through the Holy Spirit, I allowed that bridge to happen.
This is my last post in this series. What spiritual, supernatural things can happen in your life? Have you asked God to open your eyes?
