I have often wondered about those people who are content to live in one place for the duration of their lives. I have often wished that I could be one of those people. But, I am not built that way. The desire to experience new things; go new places; meet new people does not allow me to remain content and stationary for very long. Unfortunately, I am married to a man who is about as stationary as they come. Even a short trip to town throws him off his axis. Still, for the most part, we balance each other out.
He keeps me grounded and gives me a place to come home to. I help him to realize and experience a bit of the world outside the parameters of our farm. It is generally a good relationship. For the last two years, however, we have struggled on our own. I lived in a city, which was much like where I grew up, and he remained on the farm. This experience taught us that we both need a bit of what the other brought into the relationship to give our lives just the right balance and flavor.
For me, all of the special moments and experiences lost something because he was not there to share them with me. For him, the farm felt more like a place, than a home without the special touches that I added. It was obvious to both of us that neither of us could be completely happy nor content without the others presence.
So, after two years of trying it on our own, we reunited as man and wife. Being in the same house, on the same farm, with the same furniture/dishes/bedding, etc. may sound like we have gone backwards, but actually, quite the contrary.
We are both much wiser and both realize just how much we love and desire to share the rest of our lives with one another. We had lost that in the day to day struggles of life. So, being back together we find that we are both much changed for the experience of parting. We no longer take each other for granted. Every day together is a blessing which we both appreciate.
Now, God willing, we will have many years together to grow and experience and share together. For myself, just the fact that we were able to reunite shows me that both of us are pretty special people.
So, my friends, where-ever you are, who-ever you are with, know that if you step back...Perhaps not as far as we did...You will, once again, remember just what it was that made you pick that particular person to spend your life with. You will realize just how much they complete and compliment you. I pray that you are all as blessed in your relationships as Brian and I are in ours.
Through the love of Christ, Jude

Never ask God to teach you patience. This advice was given to me on many seperate occasions, but, being rather impatient, I kept praying for God to teach it to me. DUH Talk about learning lessons the hard way.

One good thing has come out of this constantly re-taught lesson. The more I am forced to sit and be still and wait upon the Lord, the more I am learning to trust Him. This was not what I thought I needed to work on. Of course, God sees me better than I see myself, and He knows just what areas of my being need the work.

I remember counselling one gal that when she asked for healing, God was not necessarily going to heal what she thought He would. He knew the intricities of her being, and knew far better than she did, what needed healing. Well, talk about eating my own words/practice what you preach/a lesson in verbal gravity! My very wise words have come back to me. Hopefully, I will listen and learn from them, just as the gal I counselled did.

Which leads me to wonder why, if I can come up with such wise words for others, do I tend to be a total idiot when it comes to counselling myself? While I am running here and there, all willy-nilly with no rhymn or reason, where are my calming thoughts, and God purposed words? MAN!

So, here I sit, waiting. Trying, ever so hard, to be patient and wait for God's timing. Will I be moving, once again? Will a contract open up for me right here? Will I be able to find housing if I am to move? How will I get all of my stuff packed, and who will help me, if I am to move? Once I get where I am going, who is going to help me unload from the truck? How will I afford the cost of moving? And, one million and a half other "while I am being patient" questions that keep me awake until the wee hours of the night.

Okay, so I don't have this patience thing down pat, yet. And, I must admit, that I need to work a bit harder on the trust issues, as well. Still, I am trying, and I am willing to change. That stands in my favor, I figure. Just like the alcoholic who can't really be helped until he/she recognizes that he/she has a problem. Well, I recognize that I have a problem, and am patiently waiting for God to fix it. ha ha ha

For now, I am finding that while I wait, I can at least go through my home and reduce the clutter. This should help with the volume I will have to deal with if I move, as well as making my home less stressful, and a whole lot neater.

So, until I get my marching orders, (or my staying put orders) here I am working on patience. How patient do you feel today?

Be blessed, my dear ones. Know that God loves you, just the way you are. In fact, He loves you far too much to leave you that way! ROFL

Love in Christ, Jude

Trying to survive. It has been two years since I left the farm. Still, each day starts out with wondering what my husband is doing, how he is feeling and if he is okay. "Will that ever pass," I ask myself as I start the work of surviving through the day. For more than two years, I have been in survival mode. Ever since I was told that I did not have bone cancer, and felt so very disappointed, as at that time, I just wanted it all to be over. The shock of those feelings propelled me into action. Something had to change, or I would be destroyed by the depression that was so consuming me. Still, I did not want to leave, as I dearly love my husband. Life has a way of taking control, however, and I became very ill and the choice of whether or not to stay was taken out of my hands.

That was two years ago, and I am, just now, starting to slip out of the survival mode and starting to relax a bit. It is hard to be a peace when you are running. While my life is not ideal, my finances are in the toilet, and I will even admit to being lonely, once in a while. Basically, I started to care whether I lived or died agian, and for that I am truly grateful. No more going through the motions of being happy. No more pretending to be someone I am not, just to please someone else. Not saying that being just who I am is especially pleasing, but at least it is honest.

Once more, I find myself at a bit of a cross roads. My job, which I am enjoying, is the type that depends on bidding for various contracts. The contracts which I am presently working on are soon going to be coming to an end, and there is nothing local in sight. That leaves me with a big concern, as my savings are now completely gone. Still, I try to rest in the fact that God has never let me down. When I have been in this frightening position before, He has always provided something. So, I keep watching the contract postings, and am once again, sending out my resume looking for work. The part that tempts me to despair is that now, I have absolutely nothing to fall back on, while I am searching.

I am learning how to trust God through the hardest of times, in a way that I never before had to. I am learning to wait on His timing and how to pay attention and stay in His will. Believe me, my friends, all of that is a lot easier when the hard things are taken care of. And, not very easy for a person who is basically impulsive. With the need for supply to pay my rent, bills and yes, maybe even a bit of food, it is a lot harder to be patient and remain calm.

Never again will I have the pomposity to assume that someone is weak because they don't completely trust God when things get tough. He has brought me to a position of humility and need that dispells all of my vanity. For this, I praise Him. Now, maybe I can become the woman who I dearly desire to be. The woman who has been so broken that there is nothing left of the old me, and only Jesus shines through.

Through this time, I also have found that even in my brokenness, God has used me to minister to others. It always amazes me that when I feel like I have, or am, nothing, God still finds something good there that He can use. For this, I am also very grateful. These small glimpses of Christ in me are what keeps me waking up with joy and the courage to face each day.

Be blessed, my dear ones. Never take any supply for granted. Don't be foolish with the things or people that God has placed in your life. Look upon everything as a gift from God and He will honour your rejoicing with further supply.
Love in Christ, Jude

After many minutes of hard labor, my blog-page has been fixed!
My beautiful daughter was wonderful and gracious enough to figure-out what I had done wrong and to rectify these wrongs.
She's not only gorgeous, she's intelligent.
And I love her.
I'm so glad that I have her in my life-where would I be without her? Heather, you're my hero.

What Now, God?
In the last three years, I have been faced with cancer, suffered life-threatening lung damage, had my marriage disintegrate, moved to a strange city, and been forced to learn how to live alone for the first time in my 53 years. What a blessing!No, I am not nuts...while I realize that all of this is enough to give me good reason to be so. My father always said that I was the kind of person who had to learn lessons the hard way. Well, God has had some lessons to teach me, and believe me, I have had to learn them the hard way.Now, with more maturity and more of an honest sense of who I am and what I am capable of, God has me at a bit of a cross-roads, once again. My contracts at work are all concluded by the second week in August, and I must scan the job postings, within our organization, for what God will supply, next. With this process, has come the opportunity to apply for a position which would look after my worldly needs, but require me to uproot and move, once again, to a place where I know no one, and nothing of the city. Do you think God is still working to break my dependance on others for my happiness, for my self-esteme and self-worth?While I don't know what God has planned next, I do know what He has taught me in the last couple of years. Now, I understand why we are instructed to boast about nothing, save the healing sacrifice of Christ. All of those talents and skills, in which I placed my value, have been stripped away. They have only been given back as He has willed them to be; to His purpose, and for His purpose.I now understand why He instructs us to place our value in Him alone. All that I thought gave me my value has been lost, with nothing but an empty shell remaining. He has chosen the bits of things to start filling this vessel with. While I must admit to still having some difficulty in the wisdom area, I am far more honest, with myself and with others, and through this new-found honesty, has come a new budding sense of wisdom, which is God-based and God-purposed.I have grown up past a lifetime of struggling to be what everyone in my life expected or desired me to be. Now, I am in the adventure of finding out who I really am, what I really want, what I am really capable of, and more excitingly, what His purpose is for my life. All of this, only by His grace, in His strength and for His glory.The more I am less, the less I am more. That leaves only room for Him--as it should be. With that, I am more blessed, every day, with fresh opportunity to serve and honour Him. And, wonder of wonders, I have learned the humility it takes to ask for help; learned the courage to turn my back on things that do not include nor honour Him; and, learned that I can trust again. First learning to completely trust Him, then learning to trust myself, and through those steps, learning to trust others.Oh, I won't lie and tell you that it has all been an easy road to travel. Delving into the unknown areas of our personality and past lives is always front with obsticles. There are going to be some nasty bumps and bruises. Thankfully, I serve the Great Physician and He is more than capable of healing me through the process.I remember when I broke a bone in my arm. The doctor explained that, when healed, it would be stronger than the one in the other arm, that had never been broken. This is the kind of healing that my Abba Father is doing in my life. It is painful, I have had to ask for help, but when the healing process is all completed, I will be stronger than I ever could have been, had He not broken me.So, my dear ones, I have no clue what God is up to now. All I know, for certain, is that He loves me, as He loves you. Whatever His plan is, I am trusting that He will supply what I need to meet the next change and challenge in my life.Be blessed, and remember:"Not everyone can do great things; but everyone can do small things in great ways." Mother Teresa

As a member of the American Christian Fiction Writer's group, I am privileged to listen and learn the business side of being published, from many who have already crossed that threshold. There was a post the other day, about how Christian writing should always have proper grammar, even when writing dialogue. While it is true, no matter whether we are Christian writers, or secular, our grammar should be proper, I had to wonder about stretching that to our writing dialogue. People, for the most part, do not speak with proper grammar. We use slang, catch phrases, and partial words to get across what we want to communicate. My feeling is that writing dialogue applying all the proper grammar rules, would make our work seem uppity and unrealistic. In a way, we would be bastardizing the conversation, much in the same way in which we would be trying to fix the bastardization of English grammar. Mother always said that two wrongs never made a right. My concern for correcting normal speech comes from working in journalism. I took great care to make sure that people were being quoted directly. I learned how changing one word in a quote could change the entire context with which it was said. A person who did not understand that retyped my writing into the paper’s computer, and it was often changed. Not only was my sentence structure changed, my grammar destroyed, but also, direct quotes were edited. It got to the point where I had to send a copy of what I had submitted to the people I was writing the story about, so they could see that I had respected them, and written a proper piece of journalism. This lack of professionalism and respect for responsible journalism finally caused me to quit the paper. This decision hurt a great deal, but there are times, we just have to stand up for what we believe to be right. The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back came when a teacher in our high school found out about his parents committing suicide, by seeing their address posted in the paper. The police had not yet been able to contact the entire family. One of the paper's writers wrote that he could not name names, but the address was... Being appalled, that was the last week I wrote for that paper. Up to that point, my readers respected my writing, constantly told me how they enjoyed my articles, and column. Those same readers were very understanding when I quit over the suicide story. It is because of their encouragement that I continue to write. It is because of their encouragement that I went back to school, at the ripe old age of 50, and worked to earn my Honours Certificate in English Creative Writing. As you can see, I still haven't gotten over being paid by the inch as a journalist. Love in Christ, Jude

My Easter was spent in Toronto, with folk that some would call "the least of these". After spending four days in their company, I have struggled with what my perception of "the least of these" actually is. For the most part, my family are people who are hardworking and live a fairly comfortable live. They all have dependable cars; some of them have two. They all have beautiful homes with all of the latest conveniences. From a worldly perspective, I would say that they really live the good life. My companions, over the Easter weekend, however, have caused me to rethink just how fortunate these, my siblings, really are. As a virtual stranger, I was met with love and generosity by Toronto's poorest citizens. These people scraped by with next to nothing, but were still more than willing to share what they had. The preciuos little in the way of luxury was shared with everyone. What an example of God's provision and what we are supposed to do with it. My siblings, on the other hand, covet what they have and what each other has. They spend a good deal of their energy and money trying to make sure that none of them has something that the other doesn't. Nothing is shared, and definately not shared with anyone outside their immediate families or circle of intimate friends. Even some in the family are not allowed inside this privilaged circle. At The Salvation Army 614 Corps, I see what family is all about. It is taught to me by people who are unrelated, except as part of God's family. These people, love on each other, share with each other and support one another in ways that I have never before experienced. Their love and support does not depend on what they can get from each other, but it is based on the simple fact that God loves them, and commanded them to love one another. The big difference between them and my siblings is that they know God on a personal level, and for the most part, my siblings never even think about God, nor do all of them claim to even believe in God. It is hard to learn what true love is all about, when you deny the One who created it. So, to me, it is my siblings, and those like them, who are "the least of these" and not those financially strapped people that I spent my Easter with. I can think of no greater destitution, than the poorness of soul and spirit which is their lot. So, my friends, I praise God for the lessons He taught me through Easter. Mostly, I thank Him for the love and grace that was extended to me by those who most of society look down on. I am eternally grateful for the faith and service of my daughter, who leads me to those places of instruction and increase. Through her, I am learning to see the world through more Godly eyes. I am thankful, even for my own poverty, as because of it, I am able to understand what real love, giving and grace really are. May God richly bless you all with things that really matter...and, for your enjoyment, a few that don't. Love in Christ, Jude

Today is one of those days when my plans changed on the whim of another. So, in an attempt to continue to be productive, I started to do the miriad of little tasks that I kept setting aside for "when I get around to it." Since this time to myself was a gift, I decided to honour it by shortening my 'to-do' list. So, I started out my day by creating gift scrolls for my daughter-in-laws baby shower. What fun to play in the baby graphic sites online and put together a nice creation that reflected our love and excitement at the bending new arrival. Then, the nightmare started! My printer, which has been tempermental, of late, decided it was going to make the job as difficult as possible. It took turns giving me different frustuations from munching over 10 pieces of paper at one time, to printing all but a small patch on the page. I tested several other documents, and they printed just fine. But, all it would give me was 1 good copy out of every 5 or 6. Then, it would also decide there had been a scanner error (I wasn't using the scanner) and just shut down and refuse to print. The whole job took me over 3 hours to do what should have taken only about 30 minutes! I had to baby the machine and feed it one page at a time, and ask it only to print half a page at a time, then turn the paper to do the other half. (2 scrolls on each page) Anyone who knows me well, knows that I have little patience for equipment which I have paid good money for that does not work properly. So, knowing that, you can imagine how I was tempted to just pitch the thing out the window and go and purchase another one. But, as I worked, slow and steady, to get the job done, my frustuation turned to humour and I won the victory over the predicament. Feeling brave, I moved on to job #2, business cards for a gal at my Corps. These have a lovely soft pink background of roses, and a cheerful green writing. Now, to find just the right verse to place on them. So, from fighting with the printer to delving into my Bible and various concordances in my quest for a verse that would witness, while reflecting the gals personality. Next thing I realized, it was almost 3 pm, and I had spent over an hour in the Word! No matter why I open that Book, lately, God has something to give me from it. What an awesome God! So, here I am, at the end of these tasks and a few others in between. Sitting and praising my God for a very productive and pleasant day. My sweet friend, Heather Oliver, is doing well after her surgery, I have been blessed with a few phone calls, emails and encouragement from my last bog...THANKS! One friend told me I was being too hard on myself. She has known me for almost 20 years. But, when push comes to shove, to completely open myself up, I must be willing to open even those places where my hurt, fear, shame and regret are housed. My heart and prayers are with you all, today, my dear ones. May you be blessed as I have been with the reminder that we are only required to do one thing at a time. Just get up and start, keep a steady pace, and focus on God's promise for your reward at the end of the day. Love in Christ, jude

I chose this as my first subject because it is something that I have to keep reminding myself of, every single day. You see, I am one of those types that thinks that my situation is a bit more unique than most. So, to my scripture reading, there is often a, "yes but" added to the text. Admitting that I read the Word, a great deal of the time, looking for what I want to get and not for what God wants to give me, is the first step to letting go and letting God in my daily reading. Letting go, and letting anyone is not something that comes natural to me. Mostly, I like to control situations in an attempt to protect myself from as much pain as possible. What has happened, over and over again, is that I make a big mess of things, and God has to swoop in, like a father eagle, and catch me before I plummet to the ground in a broken heap. I am learning, slow but sure, that to really be free, and to really protect myself from needless pain, I have to learn to trust. First, I have to learn to trust God 100%. Then, as I lean on him, live in His Word. Let the living Word teach, guide, change and grow me up, I can learn to trust myself and others. So, what I am working on, with a vengence, is believing every word that comes from the mouth of God. Being one of those who accepts only what I find logical...stories like Noah and the flood, Jonah and the big fish(there is a debate about that fish in my salvos group, right now) need to be either accepted in faith or discarded, making the rest of the Book loose its legitimacy. "In a humble and gentle spirit, receive and welcome the Word which implanted and rooted in your hearts contains the power to save souls." James 1:21 (Amp) It is time for me to stop walking on the fence, and to make some very tough growing choices. I have been a believer for several years, but always picked and chose what I would believe, and what I wanted to do more research on. I was walking the fence. Through it all, that elusive happiness seemed never to be mine. A dear man, who was very special to me, passed away, this week. All of my family went to pay their respects and join together as a family to support one another....all of my family, except for me. I was not welcome, because of choices I had made in the past in an attempt to avoid pain and suffering. What a lesson, God taught me, as I sat alone, thinking...with an honesty that I would rather have avoided, and realized that I was paying for years of not completely believing His Word, and trying to control my own life. Well, I controlled it, alright...not only has there been more pain and suffering than was necessary, but I have an extended family which does not exactly welcome me with open arms. I have quit on them. I have cast them off, in an attempt to protect myself. My dear friends, beware of those you willingly cast off. Some day, you may find yourself, just like me, hurting and sitting alone. So, that is my big lesson for this week. God has taught me lots of smaller ones, too numerous to mention, but it is all a growing process. When I was young, and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered, "happy." My life has been a quest for that elusive state of being. Only now, after causing myself and others so very much hurt, do I realize that true happiness has been with me, the whole time. It has been right there, for me to embrace. "Truly happy people are those who carefully study God's perfect law that makes people free, and they continue to study it. They do not forget what they heard, but they obey what God's teaching says. Those who do this will be made happy." James 1:25 (NCV) As Rick Warren says in his book, The Purpose Driven Life, "The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable." I pray that you are all being far wiser than I have been in reading, studying and believing His Word, every day! Love in Christ, Jude By His grace; In His strength; and for His glory!