Real Life is Good and Hard

I follow someone on Instagram who I don't know. I know that she is a first cousin once removed of a friend of mine...whatever that means. That isn't important. I follow her because of her charming upbeat personality. Also she travels and takes beautiful pictures of ordinary things. Mostly, it's because she sees the good and funny in the everyday. She's jokey and fun. She's young and beautiful and original and she doesn't try at all. She just is all that. She inspires me.

She inspires me because of what she chooses to focus on. Which is a lot of what I've been thinking about the last weeks. Do you know how life changing it is to think through the eyes of the redeemed? And how about the ability to remember that you are a 'new creature' after being redeemed? I don't know if others experience redemption in one fell swoop, but for me it is a continuation and a constant effort; one step forward or two steps back.

Because once you have been to the brink of despair about anything, all the habits you have formed to get you to that point are still there as first reflex to get you to go back. This can be thoughts you have formed about yourself and others. Or it can be how you feel about marriage, church, and politics. Anything really, after forty years of living, becomes habit.

However, thank God for redemption even after forty years of building bad habits. Because guess what? While you were struggling through those years of growth and forming less than desirable habits or thought patterns, you were also making some good, solid, wise decisions. And while it's difficult to stop nagging, yelling, and bickering with your favorite people, if that has been your pattern, it is possible to change.

I don't win any brownie points on this subject, I make a mess daily. And I long for my struggle to think right, to become easier. After we got home from our time at Heart Care Ministries the end of January, I did enter my home with trepidation, first of all, I was beating myself up for my lack of knowledge in building a home that show cases, Jesus... secondly, because of all the years of wrong thinking and unresolved pain that got me to this point of a gajillion bad habits and negative thought patterns, and thirdly, because it felt like Mount Everest with my word of the year 'Steadfast' staring me in the face.

God gave me the word 'steadfast' at the beginning of the year when Bruce and I took our girls up to Ainsworth Hotsprings for a night. I realized over a very expensive dinner the three of us shared in the restaurant, while Shaunti lay sick in our hotel room, having lost her lunch in a paper sack as we pulled up to the resort to check in, that I was in dire need of a sense of stability. My emotions had run amuck before we even left for our mini vacation when our son... the eldest... already twenty...had informed me he had to work the days we had planned for our trip. Loss was staring me in the face on all sides, the first being my firstborn no longer wanted to vacation with us. I wont't go into all the losses I was experiencing at this time in my life, but let me tell you, the word 'steadfast' felt like a life raft in an ocean sent to save this poor old sinking ship.

So anyway, I'm inspired after five months of learning about being steadfast...with focus. I am not getting it perfect. I slay my dragons of self pity and self righteousness every day. Those two in tandem are dragons to relationships. God knows the depths of my humanity. But to focus on the good that has been there all along, to focus on the good in my everyday, and to focus on the good that God has in my future, gives me the best kind of steadfast I know.

Focusing on Jesus as my helper and healer, my friend and my field guide(He helps me identify what's what) changes everything. Jesus reminds me of the fact that I am redeemed, bought with a price and made a new creature when someone in this household of humans, is unkind. It changes my reaction of biting back, to a response of healing. Not perfectly and completely do I slay my dragons but eventually I see that life is good and hard to the steadfast. Amen.😁