Month: August 2019

friends, God, Laughter, Life, People, Uncategorized, Writing

2:48 AM

dana2day

2:48 AM.  The last time I looked at the clock this morning. Here I sit.  Awake. Miserable.  All because of a large unsweet tea from Foosacklys.  That’s right.  I’ve been robbed of blissful slumber because I can’t handle my caffeine.  I admit it.  What was I thinking?  That’s the problem, I wasn’t.  I just rode through that drive-thru with my daughter, chatting away, ordering dinner, and as bold as a twenty-something, I ordered a LARGE unsweet tea with my meal. I’m 58 years old and I know that I cannot consume anything caffeinated after 5:00pm!  I admire those people that can guzzle coffee or tea, or even devour chocolate at any given time of the day and not suffer from sleep deprivation!    The sad part of this saga, is I have lay in my bed for the last 4 hours straining to go to sleep, my eyes feeling like sandpaper, but my mind running in five different directions all at once!  I have redecorated soon to be vacated bedrooms, organized things to do for a ministry kick-off, planned rehearsals and costumes for student choir, sent out texts to people (and that should be interesting when they get up and read the time I sent them), reviewed details for a meeting I need to have on Thursday, planned out how to help two of my daughters get settled in their new houses over the next two weeks, hold on, I’m not done yet, made notes of editing I need to do on my childrens book, chided myself for not being more disciplined about dieting, planned Christmas gifts for family members, planned dinner for tomorrow, I mean today,  made a list on my phone of anything and everything I need to do in the coming days with neat little check off circles so I can feel good about myself when I check them off, and considered what kind of things we want to do on the Alaskan cruise we’re planning for next year.  I’m just going stop right here.  There are probably twenty more items I could add to that list.  Now you see why I just surrendered and got up, I mean I had already started writing this blog entry in my head, so why not just get up and go ahead and put it in black and white!  Why not, I’m awake, right?  Did I mention in that crazy, chaotic thinking, I was counting forward twenty years to 78 and wondering if I’d be still kicking!  I mean, who knew I’d get to 58 so fast, and still feel 38 in my head?  The last 20 years have flown by so fast, I’m sure I’ll wake up tomorrow, if I ever go to sleep, and be 78!  I won’t be drinking any tea after 5:00pm, you can bet on that!

So, as I get ready to post this and try to leave you with something spiritual to chew on, check out this verse I found during my sleeplessness:

“In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

Psalm 4:8

I think that’s a sweet promise.  A promise that if we will quit trying to plan, make lists, re-think our lives or even plan out the next twenty years, we can know a peace that passes all understanding, we CAN lie down and sleep, for in His arms we are safe, knowing He is our Lord, our Father, our Savior, our Provider, our Redeemer, our Healer, our Everything!  I think I’ll sign off now, and go lie down and sleep.  He is such a sweet and loving Father to give me this verse in my delirious, caffeine induced insomnia.  He is bigger than my sleeplessness!!!  Goodnight!

answers, friends, God, Life, People, searching, Uncategorized, Writing

What Now?

dana2day

I am in a weird place.  Not like an actual location or anything.  I haven’t taken a road trip that has gone awry.  I am not in a crowd of people that have an agenda I know nothing about.  But now that I read back over those last three sentences, I have to back track and say they all are pretty accurate, generally speaking.  I’ve been chugging along for the last twenty-eight years as a mother of three daughters.  Thirty years as a wife.  And here and there for periods of time as an employee.   I have been mothering, pushing, washing, feeding, nurturing, loving, disciplining, teaching, wife-ing, cooking, chauffeuring, guiding and loving three girls and a husband.  Mixed in with that, I have been teaching Sunday school to mostly 11th & 12th grade girls, serving in Women’s Ministry, singing in the choir, and many other ministries here and there. But today, I am sitting in a quiet house, wondering.  Wondering what now.

I’m not sure who I am now.  Before you become concerned that I am a writer with dementia, I know who I am, but I don’t know WHO I am.   I’m not despondent.  I’m not even downcast or depressed.  I’m trying not to measure myself to unrealistic expectations or compare myself to all the amazing women of God out there making a difference!

I know things I want to do.  Like have a clean house.  Don’t laugh.  It hasn’t been uber clean in months.  Our oldest daughter and her family have been living with us while they are looking for and buying a house.  So, keeping the house perfect has been low on the list and enjoying our grandson living in our house 24/7 has been at the top of that list!!!  I have to say he is the cutest baby you’ve ever seen and having him here has helped us acclimate to being Lolly and Pop, especially considering he’ll be getting a baby sister in four short months.  They are now about to close on their house and will be moving next week.  Our middle girl child has been living her new married life to her sweet man  in a downtown loft.  She is now realizing her dream of working from home and as we’ve always said, we’ll all be working for her one day!   The baby girl of the family is getting married in just over ninety days.  Ninety-four to be exact.  Our baby girl.  She was an unexpected blessing twenty years ago.  I know God has her here for a specific purpose because she was not in our plans, in fact we were done and moving on in life with the two beautiful girls we had!  I have both smiled at her boldness to get married so young and cried that she’ll be off doing her own life without me in ninety four days.  I keep saying she’s not old enough, that they don’t know what they’re doing, they aren’t ready.  But then God reminds me that He created her, He saved her, He has a plan for her life, not me.  She and her fiancé love Jesus and are gonna follow Him, not my plan.

Back to this weird place.  So I am soon to be out of the mothering job and I am not working a job outside our home any longer.  This happened last year while my sweet man was going through cancer treatment.  It was both a blessing and a difficulty at the same time.  But God has taken care of us, as always, and after much deliberation (mostly on my part), my man said he wanted me to stay home.  So this weird place has taken away the two things that have been consistent for some time in my life.  I don’t know why I’m so lost, because I have wanted to have the freedom to write and now I have it.  And yet.  And yet I don’t know what to write.  We write to inspire others.  We write to tell stories.  We write to unleash the words that fill our brains every minute of every day.  I am sure if we could look inside an average person’s brain and the brain of a writer we would see that the writer is constantly writing about life as it is observed.  Always adding to the story.  Always editing.  Always creating. The words never stop swirling.

So this weird place is me standing, no, sitting, in my chair, staring at a computer screen.  Me, looking around at the things that need to be done.  Me, longing to be some kind of spiritual giant that could inspire people to cling to Jesus in every area of their lives.  Me, longing to finally get a handle on losing weight and finally finding victory over the scale. Me, measuring myself up to the expectations in my head and failing miserably.  Me, crying and asking God to please help me be good at something.  Help me find success at something.  And ultimately, just giving in and finding a quiet, cool place in the house to take a nap, to think about these things another day.  I’m 58 years old.  I have no degree.  I’m an okay writer, but not a profoundly gifted writer.  I am not particularly disciplined.  I don’t look like Beth Moore or speak like Priscilla Shirer.  I never quite meet the expectations in my head.  I think I may have wasted this life that God gave me.

This weird place has locked doors right now.  I feel like I’m standing in the middle of this weird place, completely baffled at what I am to do next.  What door do I choose? I’m frozen.  Not sure what I’m supposed to do next.  I preach to my daughters and my Sunday school girls all the time that “God has a plan for your life, now go walk in it”.  But here I am, in this weird place, wondering if there really is a plan for me and, if so, what that plan for my life is!