As I go about my days, driving to my kids’ schools to volunteer, heading to the grocery store, cleaning, relaxing, going about my day-to-day life, I can see the face of God smiling at me, patiently waiting for me to remember Him.  He’s not angry.  He knows me, and He knows I’ll return to Him.  The problem is, because I know this, I can keep Him pushed away for a while longer.  Because I know He’s there, patiently waiting for me to return, to fall to my knees and pray, to pray like I’ve never prayed before, to sing songs to Him, to talk to Him, to read His Word, to read what others write about Him, I know that I’m okay and will eventually get it without inciting His wrath and fury.

But how does that help me?  It doesn’t.  What am I doing?  I’m pushing away the One who gave me life, who created me in His image, who sent His Son to die for me.  The One who loves me and will never stop loving me.  Why am I doing this?  Selfishness.  I have other things to do.  I’m busy.  I’m too tried.  I want to do something else right now.  Fear.  I don’t want to hear what He has to tell me.  What will He make me do?  What will He make me give up this time?  Will He make me leave my comfort zone again?  I really hate that.  Doubt.  Am I really hearing from Him?  IS this Him, or is it just me?  Am I making this whole thing up?  Is this really what God wants me to do?  Am I really hearing from Him, or am I just so impatient that I come up with my own answers?

So why bother?  But yet He’s there for me.  I still see His face, kind, loving, smiling. Looking at me; waiting for me to return.  God is a God of action, yet while He’s making blind men see and lame men walk, He’s sitting back, patiently waiting for me.

It’s my time to return.  Again.  And again. And again.  A constant cycle, one that tends to repeat in my life.  Yet, I know he’s not angry.  He’s not mad.  He’s just smiling at me, waiting for me to return again.

Dear Lord Jesus, I’m sorry for making you wait for me.  Again.  I’m sorry for continuing this cycle.  I know that you love me, and that you will never leave me, and I am so very thankful for that.  Your patience is unending, you love never fails. Grant me the mercy that you so graciously bestow, and allow me to walk by your side again.  I love you.

Amen.

My daughter is not a big fan of quiche.  Okay, to be honest, she hates it.  At least she says she does.  Each week my kids get to pick a meal that they’ll help me cook (they look through my cookbooks and cooking magazines), and one night last week my youngest son chose the “ever popular” quiche.   Oh so good; it’s one of my favorites.  My daughter protested before the day even came.  That night we were in a bit of a hurry because she had to get to her swimming class, and she claimed that her stomach was bothering her so she stayed away from the table for a little bit.  No time to eat.  Hmm….  Before we left for swimming she promised she would eat it for breakfast the next morning (after all, it is a breakfast dish!)

The next morning I warmed up the quiche and placed it down in front of her.  She looked at it.  She did not want to touch it.  There were pancakes left over from my husband’s breakfast, and she eyed those.  We told her she could have them after she ate this one small pie shaped piece of quiche.  She threw a fit, and continued to tell us, “Quiche makes me sick” – which it doesn’t.  Finally, after yelling and tears, she took a tiny bite, if you could call it that.  She began to gag.  And I began to get even more angry.  Needless to say, she finished the quiche, did not have the pancakes, and missed her bus in the process because she didn’t get moving.  It was not the best morning.

This isn’t the first fight we’ve had over food.  One stuffed mushroom which she really didn’t like has been the bane of the dinner table before, and she really did not like that.  Another dish has also played a part in this that, after all the fights, the grounding, and the serving it to her for dinner and breakfast until it was gone, she realized she actually liked.  Of course, because she had convinced herself that she wasn’t going to like it, it took a while to break through her pride and get her to admit that she really did.

There’s a story about my husband when he was a child.  He hated salmon, and he had told me that it used to make him throw up.  I enlightened him by telling him that it wasn’t the salmon that made him throw up, it was his temper tantrum and the fact that he convinced himself it would do so.  He sees that now, and though he still doesn’t like fish of any type save for shrimp, he eats it without incident.

This is what happens when we tell ourselves what the outcome will be before it actually happens.  “I’m not going to like this.”  “This will make me sick.”  “It won’t turn out well, so there’s no point in trying.”  There are hundreds of thousands of excuses out there that we cling to so that we can get out of the things that are not pleasing to us.

I don’t like phones.  I admit, I hate talking on the phone.  In my life there have been only a select few people who I’ve actually enjoyed talking to on the phone, and with them I could talk forever about nothing and I loved it.  But otherwise, I hate phones.  Calling to make appointments makes me anxious.  It takes me forever to get to it (when my husband refuses to do it for me), and I have to prepare.  I write down who I’m calling, the phone number, who I’m making the appointment for, and any other information I may need at the time.  I rehearse in my head what I’m going to say when someone at the other end answers.  Yes, I suffer from this.  It’s something I need to work on.  When I worked at Babies R Us I was the one who would place calls in the morning letting people know the furniture they had ordered was in and ready to be picked up.  I would double check who I was calling, dial, and while I listened to the ringing of their phone I would pray that that it was their answering machine so I could just leave a quick message.  That didn’t always work.

So it’s really no surprise that when I was asked to play a bigger role for a traveling with kids website- I’ve been a member for a few years and love writing reviews- recently that I freaked out.  It sounds like it would be fun; I’d have to find businesses where someone from the site could go (free of charge) and write a review about their time there.  That place would take care of all or most of the expenses.  Both the establishment and the one chosen to go would have to go through me.  When I told my husband about it he said, “You’ll probably have to have use the phone and you know how you are with phones.”  Big blow.  I do know how bad I am, how anxious I get around them (can I just say I love caller ID and my answering machine?).  My husband was giving up on me before I had a chance.  I was sick with worry from that point on, and I was going to tell them that I wasn’t interested.  But I wasn’t ready to say no just yet.  I don’t know why.  Instead I told the woman I was in contact with that I would like to hear more about it, and we agreed that she would call me this week (yes, the phone.  Joy).  I’ll make my decision after that.  Who knows.  Maybe this will be a good opportunity for me.  Maybe this is God’s way of getting me out of my comfort zone.  The day this all happened I wrote on as my Facebook status: “I like my comfort zone, thank you very much.”  And it’s true.  I don’t want to do anything that goes beyond that.

But God tries to get us out of our comfort zones to do His will.  As it is, it’s not easy being a Christian in a fallen world.  We’re called to go against the grain, and that’s not an easy feat.  But we can’t make excuses for not doing something whether it’s eating, working, volunteering, or just helping someone out.  If it exceeds our area of comfort, we need to seek Him to help us out.  More than likely He’s the one telling us that we need to do this.  I have heard so many excuses, “I can’t do it,” “That’s just not me,” “I’m too old,”  “I’m too young,” “It’s not my forte,” and so on.  Fear, pride, age, time, money, they all tend to weasel their way into our lives, giving us an “out.”  We can excuse ourselves to death if we try hard enough.

What would this world look like if Mary had said, “Yeah, great.  I don’t think I can do that.  I’m too afraid of what my parents and Joseph’s parents would say, not to mention Joseph himself.  Besides, I’m too young.  Why don’t you find someone a little older than me?”  Savior of the world?  Where would He be?

Or what if Jesus had given up on Peter when he got out of the boat and tried to walk to Jesus on the water?  “Well boy, you blew that one.  Maybe you shouldn’t have come out here since your faith is so weak.”  I don’t see Jesus saying that.

We can even look at King David’s life.  He was called up a couple of times.  “Hey David, slay this giant for us, okay?”  “Yeah, thanks, but I think I’ll pass.  I’m just a shepherd, the youngest of my brothers, and by no means the largest.  I’ll just stay here in the field.  Thanks anyway.”  Or, “You will be the next king.”  “Wow, that sounds so great, but I’m happy where I am. No one will want to listen to me, and I know I’m not cut out to be a king.  If I were I would not have been born the way I was.  Let someone else take it from here.”

“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”  This is the message Jesus taught us in Matthew 19:26.  So if we set our fears, our worries, on Him and learn to trust Him, He will lead us through.  Maybe we’ll find that we weren’t meant to do what we thought we were being called to at that moment.  Maybe it was actually leading us somewhere else.  Or maybe we were called, and as scary as it may be, we should embrace it with God’s help and be the best we could be.  It’s a growth process.  Learning to trust the Lord will help us grow in Him, and we will be able to do things we have convinced ourselves we can’t do.

I’m still not sure what my answer will be to the position, but I’ve been praying about it, seeking His answer to the question of whether or not this is what I’m being called to.  My daughter will, bless her heart, still complain about the foods she swears up and down she does not like whether she has tried it or not, but I know one day she’ll start trying new things and realize just how much she does like.  I know that from experience with myself and my change in attitude toward food over the years.

What have you been struggling with, telling yourself that you can’t do for reasons that seem perfectly logical to you?  Bring them all to Jesus.

Lord, I just thank You for promising to always be there for us when we need you, knowing that You are always by our side.  Remind us daily to bring our cares to You, Lord, and help us to trust in You so we may be able to step out of the comfort zone that we have created for ourselves.  You did not create that for us, for You want so much more.

What is wrong with this world?  Why do these tragedies have to continue?  Why do we have to put up with it?  And, Jesus, WHY do these people have to remain on the face of the earth?

Life on the earth, I feel, would be far easier if all the evil were gone.  Nothing remaining.  Just happy go lucky people, serving and praising God.  There would be no senseless killings, no kidnapping, no hurting.  We would no longer be scared.  We could sit back, relax, and enjoy the life we have here on this earth until we are called up to heaven.  And everyone would be called up there if there was no evil driving people to turn from God.

After the tragedy in Connecticut at Sandy Hook Elementary I was devastated.  That day I had just been in my son’s Kindergarten class as I volunteer there every Friday.  I also volunteer every Friday for what’s known as Caring Kids Club, where two kids from each class are picked each week to participate because they have been caught being “caring kids.”  These are Kindergartners and first graders.  I heard the news and my mind immediately went to the school I was at not all that long ago.  Devastating.

And then it was time for their funerals.  Heart wrenching, but what made it worse was the fact that Westboro Baptist Church was protesting their funerals.  These were people who had done nothing worth protesting.  They were attending school, they were teaching, they were trying their best to protect the lives of the little ones.  Why would these people come all the way to Connecticut to protest?  There was even talk about them coming to my home turf to protest funerals of firemen who were taken down by a sniper during a house fire that said sniper had purposely caused to draw them out.  I call this group a hate group.  There is no love.  They are working for the wrong side, and I don’t think they even realize it.  They have been blinded.  They have forgotten what they’re protesting.

It was because of the protest of the funerals in Connecticut that made me cry out to God and ask “Why?”  WHY are there people like this in the world?  Why do people have to hate?  Why do people have to kill?  Why can’t they just go away?  God has the power over life and death.  Why can’t He just get rid of them all?

And then I opened up my Bible.  That night’s reading was Matthew 13, and in that reading was the Parable of the Weeds, verses 24-30.  God spelled out the answer right then and there.  This parable is about a man sowing good seed in his field, “but while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat” (v.25).  So, in this field, that was originally planned for good crops, both good and bad grew.  Good and evil.

vv.27-28: “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field?  Where then did the weeds come from?”

“’And enemy did this,’ he replied.

“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’”

See?  Even they wanted to get rid of what was bad.  Why can’t we just pull them up?  It doesn’t make sense to let them stay here.  Or does it?

V.29:  “’No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.’”

Oh.  So, let me get this right.  If we purge this world of all the “bad people” some of the good may be caught up in it?  Hmm…so because of this whole Salvation thing, there’s still a chance for those who are doing wrong to turn before their time comes?  It’s true that Satan has his workers.  There’s no two ways about that.  “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.  He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding the truth, for there is no truth in him.  When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

But he also tries to get others to go along with his plans, those who have been called by God but have yet to answer.  “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).  And weren’t we all there at one point?  We were all sinners until we asked for forgiveness and asked Jesus into our hearts.  And for those who have not done this yet, God has made time for it to happen.  People would completely miss their opportunity to change if the world was “cleansed” prematurely.  Okay.  So, basically, God is telling us that we need to recognize that, yes, there is evil in this world (we should never turn a blind eye to it), and that we need to continue to do as we have been taught.  We need to pray for the lost, and we need to witness.    

If we stayed in our homes, locked away with our families in a hidden closet, frightened of what is out there, praying that God just takes away the evil so we could come back out, we would be ignoring our part in this life.

The finale?

v.30: “’Let both grow together until the harvest.  At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”

God is our judge.  As promised He will separate the good from the evil when the time finally comes to do so, and because He is perfect He will not make mistakes.  At that time, those who have accepted His son, thereby accepting Him, will go on to life everlasting.  Those who do the work of the devil until the last day will descend to be with him.

But for now, we need to do the Lord’s work.  He loves it each time a lost sheep is found, every time a prodigal son returns.

Dear heavenly Father, help us not to get caught up with the evils of the world.  Help us to remember that we were once lost, and by Your grace we have been found.  Help us to be a reflection of you.