- Not The Only One!
- Post # 80
- 18 May 23
- ” So Clear”
- Howdy,
- Hey thanks for being there once more. So I’m in the Sunshine state visiting my daughter and her family, and on the flight down, I thought I would organize my thoughts and maybe clean up a few things that have just been lingering and floating around because I haven’t had the proper time to give it the attention it deserves. So, I’m going through some of my open post and trying to prioritize them , as to how I want to attack them and to see if I can put fire to them as in to complete and get them published. I am being so completely focused as in , nothing new until, I get some of the older ones cleared up ,as in completed or trashed. Well this past weekend was Mother’s Day and it’s one of those holidays where you check in with old friends and acquaintances that you don’t get to on a regular. And since I’m on vacation, a few of the conversations went past the usual niceties. So, with that being in mind, another new post which probably should have never been birthed , but here we are. The first thing that came up was a lengthy conversation with God about why, and the what for of all that is swimming in my head . Sometimes I feel as if God is giving me a word problem, like the one’s that I detested when I was in school. Incase you never feared the anxiety of a math word problem ,then let me bring you up to speed. First of all they are lengthy because they have a lot of useless information in them, not completely useless, but it is something that is there to throw you off track as in it has nothing to do with what the final answer would be other than to confuse you as to whether it’s pertinent or not. So, it’s soul purpose is to distract you and to make You decipher if it has relevance or not, like it has no business being in the problem in the first place. I know, I know, what does that look like? Well , you are trying to figure out how long it will take a train to travel a certain distance at a particular speed, pretty basic stuff , right? So, then they want to get cute and want to know how much time they can shave off of the trip if they increase the speed to some additional factor ,still not over complicated, but then they want to give You a bad case of busy brain by telling you what time someone woke up to have breakfast before getting on the train and they were wearing their favorite blue jacket, because the temperature outside was forty-eight degrees , I mean like are you serious??☺️☺️ Well on mother’s day I had a wealth of conversations, via text and phone calls, and just like any good child labor, they seem to increase In intensity as the day went on, culminating in me feeling like a snake charmer ,who is definitely in the wrong line of work ☺️☺️, bite marks all over. So some of this is like a soap opera, it doesn’t matter when was the last time you tuned in on or how long ago, it doesn’t take much to get caught up, jump in ,and pick up the story line, and this can be true, even if it’s been many months. Just a quick side bar, as I date myself tremendously, but I remember the whole Luke and Laura thing from General Hospital, back in the day ☺️☺️, and it’s probably been about that long since I last watched a traditional soap opera, but there are other things that may compare such as the stuff they try to pass off as the nightly news ☺️☺️. Then again Mother’s Day 2023,,just had an air about it. I will be the first to tell you that my brain is slightly off of the beaten path and if that is not true, it must be my ability to verbalize and put thought and words to things that most people, would just mull over for a second or two and think, nah, not going there , whether it’s to chase a rabbit or to entertain some weird thought, and so here we are. So as I weigh through the fabrics of different things that people shared throughout the day it was like ” So Clear ” I have the ability to see everyone’s junk at face value as in I can see things that they either have blinders on about, to close to it, and not being able to take a step back, or ie to emotionally invested in. So I’m going to characterize it as a day with a high, low and a medium, and with some amazing take aways, as in I’m not a snake charmer,, we will get back to that one. The big umbrella idea is that we can see, so Clearly into other people’s dysfunction and completely miss ours right in front of our proverbial noses. I Have been praying and asking God to help me to see people and situations as He views them and I’m not even sure that there is a little bit of that ¹ going on here. I would not likely tell you that my vision is anywhere close to how God sees things. I know that He wants me there, and I believe that is what the process of sanctification is all about, but as my daughter’s pastor expressed so eloquently , if we are fully there, viewing and in complete agreement with God and understanding it from His perspective and producing all of the right kind of fruit all of the time, then we would be dead ☺️☺️. On one hand sad and true and on the other hand uncontrollable and uncontainable joy. I’m constantly amazed that so much of life is about perspective and timing and so much the” so clear” falls under that. One of the most simplest examples of this is my eighty-five year old mother being able to call her siblings out on clutter, while being completely oblivious to being a pack rat herself, can’t see it in the least, while most people stepping into her home would wonder if this is the latest episode of hoarders ,ok, probably not that bad ,but again it is about perspective. This isn’t anything tied to Mother’s day 2023,,it just happened to coincide with it, but its something that happens each and every day and not just to me, but we all posses the ability to peer into others messes and think how simple this would be or work out if they would just do this or that, or take this course of action, or if they would just eliminate this from their lives. It’s easy for us to do and say peeking in from the outside, or from a distance, but rarely having the entire story or all of the relevant details. Then again there are those times when we have way too much information about something that we honestly shouldn’t know so much about, either through the grapevine, ” gossip “,,, being to nosy, or having people in our circle who shares without boundaries, or a filter. Don’t get me wrong, we all need someone, or ones in our lives that we can be completely vulnerable with and share our deepest and darkest with, but it shouldn’t be common conversation in a chat room, or something that the whole neighborhood knows about. Let’s get back to so clear, I’m going to lean in to the medium first, my new friend in Florida, a very scrumptious woman that has high end dividends. She is some one whom I would refer to as the total package. She is attractive, intelligent, mad sense of humor, multi lingual and I usually like to give extra kudos if they don’t make my crazy meter go off or off the charts☺️☺️. If you remember the post the about the ” Chicken or The Egg” , she is in a similar situation with an elderly parent that she has just moved in with, she still has two kids in the home, older ,but still present, but the kicker is she just enrolled in an advance graduate program to become a Chaplain. It’s a three year deal, and with all of her amazing accolades, she does not posse the ability to clone herself ,,so that she could have some kind of a personal life away from work, family and school, “So Clear ‘”, for her looks like pulling back from everything and anything that doesn’t fall in the before mentioned categories. I think on some level that she is ok with that, maybe mostly because of her mom, or mostly because of the calling that she feels God has placed on her life to be a Chaplain, but still there is just something about feeling that you are in your prime for so many other ways for so many other things. Prime or not , it doesn’t change what is so clear, that everyone can see it, including herself. I really want to do the high next, but so I don’t leave us deflated, or finish on a down note, we are going to do the low next. This was the latter part of the day, and honestly some what disappointing. I have mentioned before about me being more aware of bridge building opposed to bridge burning. This one goes back to my visit to the Midwest back around the fall of the year. I met this extremely busy and successful business woman. She is an alpha, and use to playing with the big boys, aka, the powerful and rich. There is something to eat or be eaten, the problem is we often become the thing that we are not to fond of in the first place. This is someone who is a self professing believer , but fully in control of most aspects of her life. The parts that are probably not within her control is her health and her over involvement in her children’s lives. Her health has been a tradeoff for her success, and she is holding on so tightly that she can’t see a path to take a step back. I get it and completely understand when everything is completely within our control that it can be a fragile balance to hold it all together. I’m not going to knock her or beat her up, because she just epitomize someone who is to close and holding on to tight. It’s a place that any of us can find ourselves, but it’s should never be that way for a confessing believer. I’m not going to tell you that I’ve never been there myself, I mean this blog was birth out of a similar situation. Sometimes we need to take a step back or let go, to see what it could be or what God will do with it. We may have very little , such as the boy with the two fish and a few loaves of bread, but when We give it to God, the end result could be nothing short of miraculous. Sometimes we may have just pieces of it, such as a raw egg, or some flour, maybe butter, or some sugar, and just not know how all of it comes together. Things we can’t see or perceive in Gods hands can become a very delicious cake. We had or at least I think we try to talk about some possible options for doing something different , but sometimes all we know is what we can see, and if we are operating from that vantagepoint, then faith is definitely out the window. It kind of reminds me of my friend Kevin, who has done consulting work for years for various school boards across the country about becoming more efficient or about cutting cost,, or even about how to retain key staff members. His services are not cheap, I think that he has put a kid or two through college off of his side gig consulting . The thing is a year or two would go by, sometimes a new administration, but more times than not ,one in the same, and they would invite him back to reassess the situation, pay his fee, only to find out that they have not followed one single solitary recommendation from before. What again is that definition of insanity?☺️☺️. Isn’t it doing the same thing, while expecting a different outcome?. My friend from the Midwest is overly involved in her kids life, but its out of guilt going back to her parenting skills and her choice in men and there is absolutely nothing that she can do to go back in time to change that . I have tried to council and comfort her with the fact that our adult children make choices, just as we did when we were their age. We will not always be happy with the choices that they make and while we may have played a part in the influences, it is still their choices and decisions that they make. I will tell you that this is the part that makes me feel like a snake charmer and a not very good one at that. It could also be the thing that makes me wonder what they are putting in the water in Kansas. They can hold a very deep belief about something and even when they are shown concrete evidence that contradicts that belief system, they continue to hold fast to it and become an immovable rock on it. She has told me things that she believes that I said or did, but when confronted with the truth of it,it has become ingrained in stone, much like the original Ten Commandments☺️☺️. In her mind the male population is dominated by narcissist or more accurately are one until proven otherwise. ☺️I say something in the water,, because this was a common thread with my kids mom, and her father who were also from Kansas. I think it is some new screening process for getting to know people. If you can throw all people in to a pot and already make your own determination about who they are or are not, it saves you the time and aggreivation of actually getting to know them for who they actually are. I think it’s a kin to making a call on a kids sex without an ultrasound, does that make them who they are or who we say that they are ☺️☺️. I get it, when we do allow someone in our world they are not who they say that they are ,, and even worse be a scammer, and wanting to separate us from our sometimes precious or few resources. I think that we stop trusting ourselves and I have certainly been there. This one is going to be one of those, me not trusting myself, because she has shown herself to be very little of who she said that she was outside of a businesswoman and devoted grandmother. It doesn’t matter if I try from the left or the right ,the top or the bottom to grab the head of that snake, i extend a hand and it has fangs deep within . I can ” So Clearly ” see this one for what it is,, and it’s dominated by a life of mistakes and poor choices ,, no different from myself or many others, the real tragedy here is a person who can’t forgive themselves, so they continue to try harder and harder to make amends rewrite history that can never be changed or altered. The real irony here is that forgiven people so rarely live in the forgiveness that God has so freely offered us. It’s no wonder why we struggle forgiving others, when we can’t forgive ourselves. She constantly talks about an old love who past away and she can’t experience a new one ,for living in the past. Oh man! Spent to much time here. Real briefly on the high. I met someone well over a year ago on some site and we were fire and ice, oil and water ,or any other analogy you want to use about two things that are polar opposites ☺️☺️. I think that we spent the majority of our time taking shots and jabs at one another over politics and religion, the usual stupid stuff, noticed that I didn’t say sex, which is usually the third wheel. ☺️☺️I’m not saying that those things aren’t important, but when they consume you and become the totality of your existence , then it is a bit much. We had a lengthy conversation on mother’s day and I want to say that God has been alive and active, making renovations to both of our lives. There is this reference in the Bible to God making the rough places smooth, I know that the Bible reference was about something completely different, but the thought process , does apply here. We had a good time catching up. The saying is what a difference a day can make ! ,and that must at least be 365 times more true of a year ☺️☺️. It was something far superior to just being more civil, but at this point a mystery that I can’t put my finger on, or summarize into words. I will just say that I was presently surprised and leave it at that . At the same time those things are never a surprise to God, as He works through all of the details of our lives. As usual, I’ve been all over the place, I wouldn’t want to disappoint you guys who are use to and have come to expect that of me☺️☺️. I want to give You guys my closing thoughts on “So Clear “. My brain was thinking how awesome it would be if someone whom I trusted, just came along side and was just brutally honest about all of my junk and dysfunction, and just gave it to me straight. I’m talking, not just pointing an accusing finger, but honest to God telling me how to fix it ,,and me not being to offended as in” How dare they ” and being able to receive all of the blessing that could possibly come out of that . I dare to say that few of us love ourselves enough to surround ourselves with those kinds of people. There is the flip side to that coin, and that is that when we do surround ourselves with those kinds of people that we have the tendency to be less than transparent, as in we don’t want them to know just how bad it actually is. I mean we all need people to speak life and light into our world, but that can’t take place when part of our lives is hiding in the shadows. This is where and how confession is good for the soul. There is also a psychology here about how we try to hide things from God, who is all knowing, somewhere in the back of our brains we know that, but not always willing to acknowledge that, so there are certain things that we just won’t trust Him with, even though He knows about it , but it becomes our own little part of the world, where we are God and He is not ,,and it just encourages this tremendous growth in our lives , not so much!, I was just demonstrating a little stupidity to show you how it works ☺️☺️!
- Till Next Time ✌️ Peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
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