fragrantdevotion

I’ve always struggled with how to act when someone I know is going through one of life’s hardest moments. I used to think that if I was happy or enjoying anything while they were going through so much pain it was inconsiderate and unfeeling of me. But today, as I am faced with this same question, I realize that by experiencing the beauty and joy in my life when it shows up – more fully and more intentionally because of what a friend is going through – I am honoring them and honoring the beautiful gift of life that we have both been given.

So today I’ll hug a little tighter and longer, I’ll remember to say I love you, again, I’ll take that moment to let someone know I’m thinking of them, I’ll be more patient and overlook the minor irritations, I’ll put the chocolate kisses in the girls lunches and I’ll forget that my husband did this or didn’t do that and instead remember that he did this and he didn’t do that, and I’ll take a moment to record these thoughts even though what I should really be doing is working.

And I’ll say with tears in my eyes how much this hurts, knowing that the hurt I am feeling is only a drop of what my friend and her family are going through, which makes it hurt even more…

And I will thank God for the comfort of His word and His promises, and that my friend and I both know exactly how this is all going to turn out in the end.

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I was listening to a story on NPR a few months ago about a segment of the real estate market that is rapidly growing even as the rest of the market remains in a stall.  I’d never heard of the market until then – Survival Realty.  It wasn’t really surprising once I’d thought about it.  We’ve all heard about people building bunkers in case of armageddon or apocolypse, and it makes sense that at some point those properties would become available.  And it makes sense that there would be other survivalist folks interested in buying something already set up rather than having to create their own little survival haven from the ground up.  The story included conversations with real estate agents who have come to specialize in this kind of property, most saying they had not intentionally gotten into the market, but rather that during the housing crash they’d just kind of fallen into it.

Survival homes have a number of typical features – they are usually on large pieces of land, with any structures well hidden from roads, they have a live water source (creek or stream), and they have redundant power systems.  People looking for survival properties are also looking for one more important feature – defendability.  They want their survival home easy to defend from “zombies”, a survivalist term for “the hoards of un-prepared city folk they predict will loot survivalist retreats” in the event of a major catastrophe.  It all sounds pretty logical to me.

At one point an agent said that though it may surprise most people, the stereotype of a survivalist being someone who drives a pickup and carries a chainsaw and a shotgun is wrong.  He said most of the people who contact him are well-off, highly educated urban professionals who want to keep their survivalist interests confidential for more reasons than because they don’t want to tip off the “zombies”.  I don’t know why, but I didn’t find myself very surprised that the survivalists come from both the right and the left, and that many of them can be found in corporate boardrooms and at elite country clubs.  But it wasn’t until later that the reasons why that might be started forming in my mind.  And I truly don’t find any of the reasons surprising in the least, because the Bible is full of stories that clearly illustrate the parts of human nature that make this so.

But even without opening a Bible it’s easy to figure out.  Just look around you.  What I see is that many who have much spend a lot of time, money and energy protecting what they have and setting up their lives to make sure they are comfortable now and in the future.  They often believe that the abundance they have is of their own doing coming only from their own hard work and smarts, and they believe that by those same efforts they can keep themselves secure throughout their lives.

The other things I see are those with less.  Many of them here in the U.S., and definitely in those parts of the world that have never known the kind of widespread abundance that we have here. They are the ones that know first hand that even their hardest work will not necessarily translate into enough food to feed their family, or to a life free from the fear of persecution or oppression. They are used to sharing the little bit they have, and to working together in ways that are uncommon to the “rich” of this world.  And then I find myself struggling in judgment…

… of those I consider greedy, arrogant, and proud. Of people I deem to be blind to the fact that though they have financial stability they are spiritually poor.  I have particularly found myself struggling with one particular person in my life who in my opinion covers their fear of their mortality with selfishness, greed, and egotism.  It’s something I pray about – Jesus said to love everyone so there is no question what I need to do, I am just far from being who Jesus calls me to be in this area; but I keep praying and the Holy Spirit keeps leading me moment by moment.

And then came the moment in the mirror, the moment that I realized that this story was an answer to the prayers I had urgently prayed in the middle of one night.

I’d found myself awake, extremely fearful about the future.  What happens if the industry we work in, like so many others, dies? What will we do for a living?  It’s not like the old days when jobs were around every corner.  There are many talented, experienced people unable to find decent work.  I started working out a plan, checking off what to do around each and every “what if” corner.  The internal conversation went on and eventually I heard that little voice calling to me.  I found myself praying and confessing my lack of faith, acknowledging to God that I know He has always taken care of me, and I again committed to trust Him no matter what the future would bring.  (I want to be clear hear that I’m not saying that God will save my business or that we’ll always have money in our bank account.  I’m saying that even if I lose everything, I know He will care for me.) And as the loving Father that He is, I felt His comfort and reassurance that I have nothing to fear as long as I walk with Him.  And then I slept, clearly finding some peace in my prayers.

That next day is when I heard this real estate story, and as I was thinking about all those “rich” folks who don’t even know they need Jesus, or even worse, those rich Christians who think they are relying on Jesus but who are really still relying on their own efforts…in His gentle but direct way the Holy Spirit showed me…

…how I am comforted by all my bills being paid, by having money in the bank, by having a good credit rating, by a full refrigerator.

What broke my heart about my fear was that I had thought about getting prepared, and worse, about keeping what I have for myself if all goes to hell in a hand basket. And I prayed with all my heart and asked God to change me, so that if the world were to fall apart that I would not be one to hoard what I had for myself, but that I would share and give from my poverty as I try to do from my wealth.  I just had a thought…as a parent it changes the picture a bit. It’s one thing to give my last piece of bread if it means I will starve, but my children…and my heart breaks for the people who live daily watching their children starve, and worse, when there is more than enough in this world to go around.

So as I listened to the survivalist story I realized they could be talking about me…

Thank you Holy Spirit for opening my eyes to my own duplicity.  Thank you for my heart that is breaking over a world so full of need and for again tenderly showing me all the ways I am not trusting You.  And thank you for calling me back to you.

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If you haven’t read C.S. Lewis’ book “A Grief Observed”, I highly recommend it.  It’s more a short story than a book really – only four little chapters. But somehow within the few pages the author expressed so much so well.

I got to thinking about this book today, as I felt the ache in my heart swell and ebb throughout the day.  My situation is quite different of course. I am only anticipating the passing of our faithful canine companion not living the moments after the death of my spouse as Mr. Lewis did.  But it still hurts, and the love is still real, and there are still moments when my mind and heart are overwhelmed by this experience.

One significant difference in my situation (besides the obvious difference in species and relationship) is that I am facing the choice of whether or not to have her euthanized.  The last thing I want is for her to suffer; it is not a question of us doing this to make things easier or more convenient for ourselves.  But she is old, and she has cancer, and it breaks my heart to think she might be in misery.  I will do anything to prolong her life, but I will not prolong her death.  So I watch and wait and guess and try to figure it out – and I pray, and pray, and pray.  And at the moment this is the greatest part of my pain – my fear that I’ll wait too long and she’ll suffer, and being afraid I’ll act too soon and….

Last night we started to prepare the kids and ourselves.  She had refused to eat all day, and wasn’t drinking water either.  Then today the same. I contacted the vet, got the emergency number, and kept trying to get her to at least drink some water.  The questions kept coming – should I try a different food? Buy a roasted chicken (her favorite) to see if she’ll eat that?  I just kept hearing Tim say the other day, “We have to trust the process.”

So I decided to trust the process and let her go.

It was so hard not to do anything except stroke her and talk with her and just be there for her.  So at one point I squirted some water in her mouth just to make her more comfortable; or maybe it was to make myself more comfortable. Two days of no water must feel bad.  She fought me, then hid her head under the couch. She was telling me she was done, or so it seemed.

As we were sitting down to dinner I had the thought to offer her some of the meat from my plate.  She took it eagerly, then some more, then some more.  Next thing you know I had cooked up a pound of hamburger and she had devoured almost all of it.  Suddenly our energy had shifted and it was about getting her to drink some water.  Tim suggested he take her outside to see if she’d drink, because her favorite water bowl has always been a mud puddle and with all the rain there were plenty of puddles.  Sure enough, after a little coaxing and a potty stop she was lapping eagerly from the pond that on dry days is our lawn.

I was amazed at how uplifted I felt just knowing that her tummy was full and her thirst was quenched.  Will this change the outcome of the situation? No. This is not about healing or lengthening her life by any significant amount, but it did momentarily relieve my feelings of helplessness and the pain of imagining our sweet Caia in quiet misery.

Tomorrow is another day, one that I suspect will be emotional too. The waiting is hard, the experiencing is hard, but I will try to savor each moment that my grief is bringing into sharp focus.  I dread the experience of dealing with her actually passing, of watching my family mourn the loss, of living with 12 years of daily habits that will have me missing her many times each day for months to come.  And of course I dread facing the truth that there will be even greater times of grief in the future.

But for today Caia is sleeping peacefully on the floor next to Tim’s side of the bed, and all is well - even though there is this terrible weight on my chest, an ache in my stomach, and tears in my eyes.

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Okay, I give up. I give up that I don’t feel like writing and that it’s too much work. Because for whatever reason I have been unable to shake the desire to write even after months of feeling very uninspired about actually sitting down and doing it.

Really, I’ve tried over and over again to convince myself that I’m done for good. And some of the arguments are quite convincing, even noble. But then I feel it again, that need at some level to express what is going on inside me and in my life in the written word.  Not that I think I’ll ever be an author per se, or that what I’m writing will really make much of a difference to anyone in particular or the world in general, or even that more than one or two folks will ever read what I’ve written.  Whatever this is that won’t allow me to let go seems to just be about writing down my experience of living my life at the foot of the cross, period.  So rather than ask myself why I want to write, I’m just asking myself, “Why not?”

Okay, so the main reason why not is so typical it’s almost too silly to mention- I’m afraid of what people will think; about me, about my writing, about my motive, about my topic. And that thought, oddly enough, just gave me the “Why”.

This writing for me is a form of worship.  It comes from the overwhelming joy that I feel from Jesus being water and air and life to me – me, the one who used to call Him the “J” word and cringe.  Since my conversion my life is so profoundly altered, so wonderful and different and amazing that I cannot keep it inside. I need to express it in every way possible, even if it means I am judged by the world as a bad writer, and even if the whole world knows I love Jesus and condemns or ridicules me for it.

So here’s to my future in cyberspace, however fruitful or unproductive it may be.

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I don’t know how it is for you, but I find that God speaks to me through just about everything in my life.  Of course, I have to be paying attention and I have to be able to recognize His voice from other things that try to masquerade as Him, like my own thoughts, the world or the Enemy.  But the more time I spend in relationship with Him, reading His word, praying, listening, and obeying, my ability to discern His voice from the background noise becomes easier and more natural.

And so it was as I was watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Since the story of Narnia is sort of a metaphor for Jesus it only stands to reason that there would be wonderful, Biblical messages in it.  But for me, within the story there was a very personal and very clear message; “You are not fooling yourself, I have changed you.”

It came toward the end of the film when Edmund, Lucy, Eustace (their very ill-natured cousin), and Caspian were rowing toward Aslan’s country.  Eustace had recently been turned back into a boy by Aslan after becoming a dragon from putting on an enchanted arm bracelet (in the book he turns into a dragon from his ”greedy, dragonish thoughts” ).  Sitting in their small boat Edmund asks Eustace what it was like when Aslan turned him back, and Eustace replies:

“No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t do it myself. Then He came towards me…it sort of hurt, but it was a good pain. You know, like pulling a thorn from your foot.”¹

The description in the book is a little different, and more detailed.  In the book Aslan comes to Eustace in a dream and tells him to “undress” himself.  Eustace scratches at his dragon skin and peels until he can just step out of it.  But then he notices that he has another smaller skin underneath. So again he scratches, sheds, and steps out of the dragon skin, only to find yet another beneath it.

Then Aslan says, “You will have to let me undress you.”²

Eustace goes on to describe how painful Aslan “undressing” him was.  He says, “…it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”  Eustace continues, “Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off-just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt — and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been.”²

Oh how I can relate.  My whole life there were so many things I wanted to change about myself.  But no matter how I hard I tried (and I did try very, very hard), no matter what method I used, no matter how many desperate attempts I made, I could not affect any real or lasting change, particularly in my temperament.   I kept peeling off layer after layer just to find another beneath that was even more hideous to me than the one before it. 

(Which points out a significant difference between Eustace and me.   It wasn’t until he became a dragon that he realized what a disagreeable boy he had been.  I, on the other hand, have always been acutely and painfully aware of how unpleasant I can be.)

For some reason I kept on trying to be someone else even though nothing helped.  But what I didn’t realize through it all is that what I was trying were those things that were the least threatening to my personality. I’m not saying some of it didn’t go deep enough to hurt, I’m saying I chose things to do that fit my temperament.  So they weren’t painful in the way that true change is painful, they were painful in the way that staying the same is painful.  My persona is highly critical, negative and self-deprecating, so the methods I chose to “fix” myself put my faults under the microscope for me to scrutinize, or up on the big screen for others to judge, and just made things worse. 

Eventually I found myself drowning in a quagmire of my own creation.  And it was then that I finally became desperate enough to do the one thing that I had until then been unable to do: I relinquished the aversion to Jesus that I had adopted in response to some early childhood religious experiences, and submitted myself to the authority of Christ. And since that time changes have been occurring in me that I know could only have come from God, because of all those years and ways I’d tried to change myself with no success.  And pretty much every day I pause in awe and wonder because God is transforming me from the dragon that life, circumstance and my polluted way of thinking had turned me into, to someone that is of use to Him and that I can stand to be.

Meanwhile, back in Narnia (the book), it is said, “It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.’  To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses.  There were still many days when he could be very tiresome.  But most of those I shall not notice.  The cure had begun.”

And so it is with me.  I too have relapses, and in those moments my critical viewpoint doubts and disputes that anything really has changed about me. And there are certainly those who might say I haven’t changed at all.  Which is why the loving reassurance I “heard” as I watched the movie meant so much.  It was an affirmation that the cure has begun.  And it is with a grateful and unpretentious heart that I relate to you one of my very personal and intimate experiences of what our powerful, gracious and loving Savior can and will do for us if we will just let Him.

¹The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 2010

² The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

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I can’t believe I’m doing it – I’m joining the frenzy and blogging about what everyone is talking about this week.  No, not that one; I mean Mother’s Day!  It’s so…conformist of me and for some reason I typically avoid conforming in this kind of way.  I much prefer to leave my conforming to things like being on time, not causing a scene in public, and volunteering for the socially-acceptable amount of things at church and my daughter’s school.

Daughter…that brings me back to Mother’s Day.  I actually have two daughters; well, one and a half.  First there’s our beautiful, brilliant, very creative and extremely willful Emily, who will turn 11 in July.  We met Emily in a very God-like way (which is a story for another time) not quite 5 years ago.  Her adoption of us was final December 19, 2008.  She’s the one.

My other daughter is Emily’s almost 3 year old half sister who is still our foster child.  We nicknamed her Izzy and we don’t yet know if we get to keep her.  We have loved Izzy since the moment we received the call saying she was born, we met her for the first time about 10 weeks later, and she has lived with us since she was 7 months old.  I call her my “half” daughter not because I only love her a little, but because despite the fact that in my heart and hers we are mother and daughter she is not legally mine.

The story of me finally becoming a mother at 45 is complicated and full of so many God-incidences that it needs to be told at another time.  What is on my heart to share now is what I have been thinking about this week as I approach my 5th Mother’s Day since Emily came to live with us.

Every time I try to write about this it gets too complicated and it ends up sounding like I’m just venting about my mom and dad’s weaknesses and failures as parents.  But some of the “negative” is important to tell because it provides a perspective on what I really want to talk about, so I will state here loud and clear: I love both my parents very much.  They gave me the best of what they had to give, and I forgive them for not being able to provide many things that are critical for a child to grow up well-adjusted, healthy and equipped for this broken world.  I understand that many of their shortcomings are because their parents fell short in providing for them as well.  In other words, it’s generational.  Probably back to Adam and Eve…

So to keep it simple, I arrived at adulthood fully equipped as follows:

Of course, my parents also gave me some extremely useful tools for my bag: loyalty, perseverance, fairness, passionate conviction, a strong work ethic; all of which saved me from a life even more painful than the one that I ended up creating.

Fast forward, if you will, through a lot of missteps, bumps, bruises, broken bones and almost destroying my marriage, as well as past our deciding that since we could not have children of our own and because private adoption is so expensive, we’d just live our lives loving on other people’s kids.

Then God said, and I quote, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”  Actually, what he said was, “Alana, stop being so selfish, I have something for you to do.”  And so it was, about a year after dropping out of foster parent orientation because I couldn’t handle the thought of falling in love with a child only to see them returned home (no matter what the circumstances), God made me a mom in a way so miraculous that it would even give an atheist reason to pause.

What is even more astonishing and wonderful to me is how God took a very broken little girl (me), and answered her lifelong prayer to be part of something really, truly important, by bringing into her life three other very broken little girls (Emily, Izzy and bio-mom).  And that important thing, much to my surprise (I’d imagined some combination of Mother Teresa and Celine Dion), was the most precious of all things on earth; a family.

And as if that were not enough, God has shown me that His vision of my future is one far beyond what I would dream or hope for.  It includes healing for me, for my girls, for bio-mom, for my parents, and for many others that I may never even know about.  And all it will cost me is my agenda and a lot of obedience.  A swell deal, don’t you agree?

So now I want to get down to what this is really all about.  It is about is me acknowledging and praising God for the work He is doing in and through me.  It is about gratitude for the Holy Spirit living inside me, calling, nudging and urging me forward every day of my life.  And it is about me accepting and confessing that God has made me something I never believed I could be: whole.  Not perfect (fortunately God is not done with me yet), whole.

As an illustration I’ll share a little story.  It was last summer and I was sitting around a table with some other moms.  Our daughters were all in art camp together and the last day we decided to take the afternoon off before picking up the girls and have lunch together.  I sat there listening and watching and felt totally out of place.  You see, I had nothing from my childhood to relate it to.  There had been no play dates, no after school activities, no mommy groups, no sleepovers.  Everything I knew about family and a “typical” middle-class childhood was from outside observation.

And as I sat there, listening to these genuinely nice and friendly women chit chat and laugh I thought, “They don’t understand that I don’t belong here.”  And they didn’t, because, you see, I did belong there.  I’ve earned my mommy badge, I’ve “paid my dues”, I’m not just a waste of space.  Not because of anything that I have done, but just because I am God’s precious and deeply loved child.

It’s like the day when I was sitting in a training class listening to other foster parents talk about all the kids that had passed through their home or that they had adopted.  I was thinking I wasn’t good enough, that what I was doing was unimportant because at that time we were only fostering Emily.  Then “that” voice inside me said, in a way that even I could not argue with, “Emily would think what you’re doing is important.”

“I thank you Lord for your faithfulness throughout my life even when I did not know or recognize you, even when I turned away from you.  My whole life you placed in my heart desires that were right and good, and though I often looked for love in all the wrong places you never gave up on me.

I am amazed and humbled by the changes I see in myself, changes that can only be your hand.  I know this because of how many years I tried to fix myself, to make myself the loving, nurturing, caring and generous person my heart ached to be. 

You and I both know the results of my efforts.  I love how you do not wave my failures in my face, but rather you beckon me to come closer, because your ways are the ways of life and peace and unspeakable joy.  And I love that you are doing all of this for your purposes, your glory, and because you love me.

And I thank you for being a God who invites us all to join you in the work you are doing all around, and for asking us to sacrifice everything for your glory just as you sacrificed everything for us.  Your love is truly amazing.” 

Okay, now to comment on the other subject everyone is talking about.

• Human solution: Kill the wretch and gloat.
• God’s solution:  Redeem the wretch, celebrate his return and invite everyone, then send him back out to do Kingdom work.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go looking for one of those parties.

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I know this is common, but I’ve been feeling quite a bit of pressure about getting a new post up for my blog. At first it was because I couldn’t choose what to write about. Then it was because I was writing furiously but the end result wasn’t expressing the point I had been inspired to make. Add to that another deadline – I’m leaving on a jet plane, and I found myself frustrated that what I had written was just going to have to be good enough, despite the fact that I wasn’t happy with it.

I finally pulled myself away to do something I truly enjoy, working out. I thought that maybe if I took a break when I came back my mind would be fresh with ideas…and it was, but not exactly in the way I’d expected.

What came to me during my brief period of respite was that I needed to remember why I was writing my blog in the first place.  And that reason is to share joyfully from my heart about topics that touch and inspire me, which more often than not have something to do with God.  And since my blog is entirely an act of love, I should stop behaving as if I work for a magazine or newspaper where I have to meet a deadline and just let it be a creative process.  FYI, I don’t really have a creative process, or a creative anything for that matter, so I think my moving this from my “to do” list and having it be on my “solely for my own enjoyment” list might keep me from crushing the tiny bud of imagination that I possess.

So without any further blah, blah, blah, I am setting aside the other wonderful idea that I was working on to allow it to ripen in its own time, and instead I’m going to share how I came up with the names for my blog and my Twitter account.

The desire to gush about God more fully has been on my heart for awhile.  You see, He is amazing and wonderful and He has done for me things that I truly believed could never be done even by Him.  Plus, well, He’s God, and if that’s not enough of a reason to want to gush about Him I don’t know what is.  When I decided it was time to actually start writing I desperately wanted the name of my blog to express how I feel about God, and I was hoping it would somehow relate to one of the scriptures that seem to accompany me on my walk with Him.

So I called on my dear friend Angela who has a way with scripture and words (she’s an amazing writer).  I told her I want my blog name to bring to mind the essence of what I see and feel when I think about my beautiful Savior.  The picture I get is one of falling to my knees is total adoration, of being mesmerized by His face, of waiting with excitement and anticipation to hear His voice and His words.  It is a feeling of complete and total love, of unabashed affection, and of all encompassing, eternally grateful worship.  In those moments I would give my all and my everything to the one who saved me, and that’s what I wanted to express.  And I had to do it in a couple of words and preferably with less than 15 characters (darn you Twitter!).  

The scripture to go with it was easy; summarizing that scripture in a way that expressed my feelings and sounded like me was the challenge.  Angela got me started with some wonderful ideas that unfortunately were too frilly for anyone to recognize them as me.  But the process of us talking, sharing ideas back and forth, of me gushing and expressing and reading and praying was wonderful, and from it came the first word:

fra·grant –adjective

1. having a pleasant scent or aroma; sweet-smelling; sweet-scented.

2. delightful; pleasant

The second word gave us a hard time, but it was definitely worth the wait:

de·vo·tion  –noun

1. profound dedication; consecration.

2. earnest attachment to a cause, person, etc.

Synonyms

2.  zeal, ardor. See love.

As for my Twitter name (@ASimpleToken), well, Fragrant Devotion is 16 characters and it just didn’t seem right to abbreviate it in some way to make it work.  So back to my prayerful quest, but this time the inspiration came almost immediately in the form of a favorite Vineyard worship song that expresses perfectly why I so strongly desire to write about God:

A Simple Token

“All I have to offer is my heart laid bare
All that I can bring You is my life laid down
But it’s just a simple token of my love for You my precious King

 In awe I bow before You giving all I have
Kneeling at Your feet I submit to You
But it’s just a simple token of my love for You my precious King

All to You and so much more
I long to lay before Your throne
All to You and so much more
How could it be enough to fully say ‘I love You’ “

I’ll leave you with those happy thoughts for today.  I’m off to Texas for my niece’s wedding.  I am so looking forward to the time with my sister and her family, and to meeting my new nephew-in-law.  And, thank you God for this time traveling with my father and step-mom.  I pray that whatever these few days hold, that I will step aside and let you have your way.

PS Before my next post I am going to get the formatting issues resolved – for some reason WP won’t let me add code to make things look right.

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I’m sure many of you are like me.  You’ve thought about writing, about joining the world of bloggers, but thinking seems to be about as far as you get.  I’ve had fits and starts but every time  I open my laptop to get going something seems to get in the way – writer’s block, exhaustion, my big fat furry cat Fuzz…

But mostly what has been in the way I think is the idea that I had to give all sorts of background about who I am and why I’m blogging, and the thought of doing that is overwhelming for a newbie, inexperienced writer like me.  Then I realized it’s okay to start with today and to fill in the history as I go along and as it naturally fits in.  So ready or not world, I’m a blogger.

I still have a bunch of setup to do.  My business website is in WordPress but someone with much more serious technie skills than me set that all up.  So please bear with me as I figure out how to get all the features up and running. 

For now I will just say this: I am someone who doesn’t do superficial conversation very well, at least, not beyond a certain point.  All my conversations eventually (and usually quickly) turn to meaning of life sort of stuff, which is what I’m here to talk about.  This natural tendency for “deep” conversation doesn’t make me the life of the party, but it does seem to make me a good friend and the kind of person folks come to depend on. 

For a long time that kind of bothered me.  I’m not the first one picked for the team, not the one everyone clamors to be friends with, not the one people brag that they know, but I’m also not the last one picked for the team and I have lots of good friends – the high caliber kind, so I’m learning to be okay with my somewhat serious approach to life.

I’m going to talk a lot about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit because they are the focus of and measure for my life.  Over time I will tell the story of how I went from someone who loved God but cringed at the mention of the “J” word, to someone who is passionately, hopelessly in love with Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and Papa God.  It is this story that has been on my heart to share because I know someone out there is desperately needing to hear it.  It’s not really my story though, it’s God’s, and I will always do my best to remind you of that.  I would never want anyone to think I could have done what was done of my own devices or from my own efforts.  As I tell the story that point should be clear: the best I could do brought my life crashing down around me, and that is when I finally recognized that the face of love that I had seen alongside me all my life was that of Jesus.  And (not to sound overly dramatic) that He had come all the way to hell to lead me home.

I’ll close this first post with the scripture that inspired the name of my blog.  I definitely have a Martha style, but my prayer is that this little writing adventure will be an expression of my ardent Mary heart.

Jhn 12:3  Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

Alana

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