Grandkids!

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.........drum roll please......... Everybody listening?.............

Daughter #2 and her hubby are expecting again! Their first child is a mere three months old, so they are still in shock mode, but they're adjusting. So that means that Grandchild #4 is on the way! Woo Hoo!!

In honor of that announcement, I thought I would regale you all with a couple of cute grandchildren stories.

My grandson, Aiden, is 5 years old. In addition to being an absolutely beautiful child (shhhh! he would correct me if he heard that - "Mimi, boys are handsome, not beautiful"), he is extremely bright. Recently, as I was leaving his house, he walked with me out to my truck, asking if I knew what he wanted to be when he grows up. "No," I said, "what do you want to be? I was expecting the typical boy answer of a fireman, a policeman, a super-hero, something along those lines.

"I want to be an entomologist," he said, pronouncing entomologist very precisely and precisely right. That one stopped me in my tracks. I dropped down on one knee to eye-level with him and asked him if he knew what an entomologist does. He looked at me like I had just asked the dumbest question and told me, "It's a person who studies bugs, Mimi." Oh. Well, now I knew because I sure didn't know before he told me. (Seriously, I had to look up how to spell it! Probably could have just asked Aiden!) Meanwhile, his three-year-old sister, Olivia, was running circles around us in the front yard wearing her fairy costume with wings attached, screaming at the top of her lungs, "When I grow up, I want to be a pink Power Ranger!"

Last Sunday after church, Hubby and I went to lunch with Aiden and Olivia and their parents. We were all discussing a house that my two sons and Hubby have been remodeling to "flip." When the house gets to a certain livable condition, my two sons will move in and live there while finishing the work. Apparently, Aiden had been present when my sons were discussing this possibility earlier in the week. He asked if we were talking about the house that Caleb and Eli were going to move in to. His daddy told him that was right, it was that house.

"But, who's the other one who is moving in with them? There's three of them," Aiden wanted to know. We were stumped. His daddy suggested to him maybe he meant Maverick (Eli's Chocolate Lab.) "No," he insisted, "it's another human."

We still don't know who he was talking about, but what a kid! Another human! I love talking to Aiden.

Olivia has her moments too. She and Aiden were in the den one day recently, playing with their toys while Hubby was trying to get some work done (he works at home, remember?) Aiden was running up and down the stairs, Hubby had already spoken to him about it twice, so on the third time, he spoke more sternly and threatened him with serious bodily harm if he didn't stop it. Olivia sidled up to her granddad, and slipping her arm through his, she laid her precious little head on his shoulder. Looking up at him with her big brown eyes, she told him, "Granddad, I love you."

"I love you too, Baby Doll," he said.

"Granddad, you're so handsome," Olivia cooed with her head still resting on his shoulder.

"Well, thank you, Baby Doll. I think you're very beautiful." By this time, Hubby should have known something was up. But he was clueless.

"Granddad?" Lots of batting of the eyes at this point.

"Yes, Baby Doll, what is it?" says clueless Hubby.

"Don't ever talk to Brother like that again." Serious as cancer now, but still with that sweet little munchkin voice.

Hubby thinks he must have misunderstood her, so he asks her to repeat what she just said. She repeats it, doesn't miss a beat. Still thinking he can't be hearing what he is hearing, he has her repeat it a third time. And again she repeats it, with the same sweet conviction as the first two times.

Hubby came wandering into the kitchen shaking his head, still trying not to laugh out loud as he related to me the orders Olivia had just given him.

The girl is a force to be reckoned with, I tell you.

Mercy Came Running

I've been a Christian for a very long time now. I first got saved when I was only 10 years old. I didn't really know what being a Christian meant back then except that I wouldn't go to hell, which I thought was a pretty good deal at the time. I remember leaving church that day and just feeling like I was walking on air. I thought everyone must be able to see how different I was - I was changed! When I went into the church earlier that morning, I was just a plain old sinner and when I came out later, I was a sinner saved by grace. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. But as I walked along behind my mom and dad and little brother to our car and tried to strike up a conversation about this wonderful thing that had happened to me, no one seemed too excited. I was confused, but I didn't ask any questions. I just figured this was one of those things that we didn't talk about - we had a lot of those.

So I tamped down my joy and acted like it was just a regular day, but inside I knew it wasn't. It was a special day. I don't know why my mom and/or dad weren't comfortable talking to me about this great and wondrous thing that had happened to me, but they weren't. My mom downplayed it and my dad just said, "Well, that's good." So I wondered if I made a mistake and was making too big a deal out of it.

Over the years, my parents took us to church sporadically and that flame inside my heart didn't get fed very often. But it never went out. Eventually I grew up and began to find my own way to God. I got married and we picked out a church to call our own. I studied and prayed and found my place in the church. Every time the doors were open, we were there. We were faithful. For years, we were faithful. I thought I understood mercy and grace. I sang about it and taught it and wrote plays about it.

I could never imagine my life outside of God's will and I wondered at people who wandered away from Him. I decided they must have not really known Him if they could leave Him. It made me feel better to think that because if that was the case, then it would never happen to me.

Then one day, I got my heart stepped on one too many times and I walked away. I told God I could get treated like that in the world and that I thought I would just go out in the world where at least I wouldn't be expecting to be treated better. I said, "See ya later, God. I'm going to live in the world." I was the Prodigal Child, walking away from the Loving Father, thinking I knew more than He did. I was angry and hurt and I was through with God. But He wasn't through with me.

For seven long years I kept my back turned to Him. I lived like Hell and every line I crossed made it easier for me to cross the next one. I kept getting further and further away from Him with every step. At times, the thought would cross my mind that I should turn back around and go home to Him. But I would quickly dismiss that thought - I was still too angry and bitter. I ran faster and looked harder for something in the world to make the hurt go away. It never did, it just got worse. I refused to even consider that I was headed in the wrong direction. I came to despise the things I once held so dear. I belittled the faith of others and told myself I had been a fool to believe the things I had once believed. I tried to convince myself that God didn't really care about me or my problems. I rebelled and rebelled again. Still, God wasn't through with me.

My heart grew cold and hard. I believed my anger was justified. I became bolder and bolder in my rebellion. My life was in shambles and I no longer recognized myself. I had become someone completely different. I was a stranger to myself. Still, I wouldn't consider that the reason I was so miserable was because I had wandered into the wilderness and was lost. I wouldn't let myself think that I needed to go home.

All the while, God was holding on to me. He never let go of me. He loved me still, even when I didn't love Him. Gently, gradually, carefully, in His infinite wisdom and patience, in a way that only God can do, He chipped away at my hardened heart and drew me back to Him. I never even knew I wanted to come home until I heard myself saying those words to Him in a church, of all places, somewhere I had said I would never go again. You see, God wasn't through with me.

And now, I am finally beginning to understand mercy and grace. After all these years, after seven years wandering around in the desert, after wallowing in a cesspool of my own sin to the point that I believed I couldn't come back even if I wanted to, I find myself enveloped in God's mercy and grace. I finally see that there is nothing I could do to earn it, nothing I could do to lose it. His mercy and grace do not now, nor have they ever, depended on me. God's mercy and grace are gifts I don't deserve and treasures I could never earn. Even when I was in the cesspool, His mercy and grace covered me.

"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there." Psalm 139:7-8

There's a song that says it so beautifully. The words are:

Mercy came running, like a prisoner set free
Past all my failures, to the point of my need
When the sin that I carried was all I could see
When I could not reach mercy,
Mercy came running to me.

God on a Stick

I wonder why it is that we always think we know better than God? Maybe you're not that way, but I know I am. There's an old (and odd) saying about "thinking we have God on a stick." I always thought of it as meaning we think we have God stuck on to the end of a stick and we wave Him around like some magic wand. Like we sprinkle a little "God dust" here and a lot of it over there. I never thought of myself as being guilty of that, always someone else. Isn't that always the case, we can so clearly see the faults in others and we are blind to our own? I had a friend who used to say that we treat God like a slot-machine. We expect to put our money (our time, our prayer, our talents, you fill in the blank with whatever fits) in the slot and pull the God handle and we get our prize - sometimes we hit the jackpot and sometimes we don't get anything. I certainly never saw myself as having that attitude. A slot-machine God, please, I would never think that way. Not me!Then there was the teaching that made the rounds for quite some time that we should pray "directed" prayers. We were taught that we needed to pray specifically - in effect, telling God exactly what we needed or what should happen. I have to confess that, being the control freak I am, I bought right into that one. My prayers became more like a grocery list or a honey-do list than anything else. I put a lot of thought into how to pray and what to ask for, never realizing that I was reasoning with my finite mind and leaving absolutely no room for God's sovereignty.You can get by with those distorted views of prayer when life is not giving you anything too tough. However, when the bottom falls out and your life is turned completely upside down, you can wave your God-wand around, put your money in and pull the handle on the God slot-machine and pray all the directed prayers you want, but none of those things are going to get you anywhere except discouraged. Having been through an absolutely hellish time in my life for the last several years, I tried all those things. None of them made even the slightest bit of difference in the cataclysmic events that swirled around without mercy. Not that I could tell, anyway. So I decided that it was all a crock. God must not really care about us. I still believed in His existence and that He could, indeed, perform miracles; you know, heal the sick, set the captives free, make blind eyes see. But I didn't believe anymore that he cared about me personally and I was mad about that. I was mad at Him. I thought I had been sold a bill of goods and I was not happy about that. My vision of God got smaller and smaller until He was ultimately just a tiny dot on the horizon of my life. I was pouting. If He wasn't going to play the game my way - the way I had Him figured out - then I wasn't going to play at all. I pouted for a long time, too. I can be very determined at times. Seven years, but who's counting, right?There were times during that seven years when I would throw out a test line to see how God was going to behave - times when I was either desperate or just thought "well, maybe..." In His mercy and grace, God never gave me what I deserved, which would have been a swift pop in the back of the head. He just kept being God and I just kept being mad at Him. Somehow, I came to believe that if He had just done things my way, the way I prayed, then my family wouldn’t be going through everything that happened. I wanted Him to come around to my way of thinking. We’re talking the height of arrogance here, folks! Still, He didn’t slap me in the back of the head and tell me, “Hey, is your name God?”
That’s the thing about God. He doesn’t react the way we do. He doesn’t think the way we do. He doesn’t see things the way we do. He is God, after all. Somehow, my view of Him had become very pedestrian and ironically, I was mad at Him for being who I THOUGHT He was. Very twisted thinking, I know, but that’s where I was at the time.
Have I mentioned that I can be extremely stubborn? Oh yeah, the seven years thing. That was definitely me being stubborn. All the while that I was being so arrogant and so stubborn, God was quietly working, doing things His way (without any help from me, can you even imagine?) and bringing me and my family through the raging storms intact. Not only intact, but better and stronger. He didn’t do it the way I would have done it, or the way I prayed it would happen, but He did it the way that worked. The God way.
I still don’t understand a lot of the things that happened or why they happened they way they did. It certainly wasn’t the way I would have worked things. But I am trying to remember these things – my name’s not God, His thoughts are higher than my thoughts and His ways aren’t my ways. I’m trying to keep it simple.

Turning Fifty

I turned fifty this year and it hasn’t been as traumatic as I once imagined it would be. I think it’s more the number that I mind than the age itself. It may have something to do with a distinct memory I have of a conversation between my brother and my grandmother. My brother, Mike, was probably about five years old at the time. He and I were in the back seat of my mother’s car, my mother and grandmother were in the front. We were riding along in relative quiet when suddenly Mike leaned forward over the seat and asked my grandmother how old she was. My grandmother (we called her Gommy) was the sweetest woman who ever lived—really, you would have loved her. Gommy turned around to Mike and patted his little hand and said, “Well, I’m fifty, Honey.”
Mike looked at her with a big, wide-eyed expression and said, with complete seriousness and concern in his voice, “Woooooo, Gommy! You won’t be around much longer, will you?”
Gommy proved him wrong, living to the ripe old age of 92, but that little snippet of conversation stuck with me all these years. I told that story to countless people over the years and giggled right along with them, but the closer I got to 50, the less often I told the story.
Now, here I am at fifty myself and I am discovering, just as I’m sure Gommy did, that grandchildren have a way of keeping you humble. At my fiftieth birthday party, when my grandson Aiden, who is five, asked how old I was and was told that I was fifty, he responded with a wide-eyed look. That was nothing compared to his reaction when his mother told him that being fifty meant that I was half of one hundred. He said, in all his five-year-old-innocence, “Wow, Mimi that’s OLD! Are you sure you’re really 50?”
A few weeks prior to the party, my three-year-old granddaughter, Olivia, was sitting in my lap, looking up at my face. Suddenly, she reached up and started to stick her finger in my nose. I stopped her, “Oh Olivia, don’t put your finger in Mimi’s nose.” To which she replied, “I just wanted to get those spider webs out of your nose.” Oh my gosh—spider webs?
I’m also discovering, just as I know my grandmother did, that there is nothing quite like the wonder of grandchildren to take the sting out of getting older. Who cares that I’m not as young as I once was? I have three grandchildren whose eyes light up when they see me; three precious grandchildren who melt my heart daily and make me feel like the most important person in the world.
I always wondered why Gommy just laughed when Mike insinuated that she was near death when she told him she was 50. Now I know that she understood the kind of joy only grandchildren can bring and age wasn’t a concern to her. She knew what was important and I believe my grandchildren have taught me that as well.

In My Own Shoes

Here we are in a brand new year filled with opportunities and adventures, happiness and sadness that we have yet to experience. I’m excited to discover what this year will bring. I’m learning (yet again) to count my blessings rather than dwell on the things that are “less than” what I would have wanted. Seems I have had to learn that lesson over and over again. Each year brings challenges and opportunities for growth that we can choose to embrace or push away. I had a friend one time who said that it seems that when God is ready for you to grow He puts you in a vise and starts tightening it down while He is saying, “Okay, time to grow some more.” I have to agree that sometimes that is exactly what it feels like. And more than once I’ve tried to wriggle out of that vise and stay right where I was because it felt just too uncomfortable to grow.
A very wise man once told me that we only grow through adversity. I admit that when I heard that, it rang very true in my heart, but I didn’t like hearing it. None of us cherishes the thought of marching headlong into adversity. I like the feeling of sailing along on smooth, open waters with not a cloud in sight. Or those mountain top experiences when I feel as if I’m on top of the world and nothing can touch me. But when I’m honest with myself, I know that I don’t want to stay always the same. I do want to grow and mature – like a fine wine, as they say.
I’m beginning to wonder if so many of those “vise times” – otherwise known as opportunities for growth – weren’t made even more difficult than they had to be because of my penchant for trying to wriggle out of the vise and find an easier way to do things. I heard someone say yesterday that when we’re in control, God isn’t. Not because He can’t be, but because we won’t allow him to be. We keep stepping in His way. I know I stepped all over his toes the last few years trying to do things my way and I know those last few years were tough ones, to say the least. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that I made them a lot tougher than they had to be because of my determination to make things happen MY WAY.
Now, in this new year filled with hope and promise, I have decided that I want to stop trying to wear God’s shoes. Instead, I think I will fall in step behind Him and see where He takes me. Wherever it is, it has to be better than the paths I’ve chosen myself for the last few years. I’m ready for the adventure – but in my own shoes this time.