Quick Coffee Chat: Two part Harmony

Well hello dears.  Come in, grab a cup of coffee and let's chat.  We'll have to make it a fast one today, it's really all I have time for, but I'm alone and it's quiet and I have a whole 30 minutes I can spare to do what I please and a chat sounds fine to me.  There are Banana Chocolate Chip muffins on the counter that are still warm. I added a bit of coconut to these and it's so good! I took them out of the oven only about an hour ago before I sat down to eat my salad lunch.  Have one, then come on in to settle with me at the dining table.

What a difference a little sleep can make!  I'm serious...I had the most abysmal sleep three nights running.  Not jut waking in the wee hours but waking again after sleeping only an hour and then lying there all night long...If I did doze off, it was into the lightest sleep level so one move, sigh, or noticeable change in temperature, etc. jerked me right back awake.  Saturday night was the worst one of all. I saw 4am and 5 am and wandered the house and settled in the kitchen chair to await dawn at 5:30, since it appeared I wasn't about to sleep.  Of course, I went right off to sleep and jerked awake snoring  with my head thrown back in the most uncomfortable manner.  I went back to bed and it must have been about 6:15 then.  And John woke at 6:30.  He left me to sleep after I told him I'd of my miserable night and then he came into the room at 7:30 and my eyes flew open and that was that.  There was no return to slumber for me.  

I could have been mighty grumpy but I can't blame him nor any one or any thing for my poor sleep.  And he really doesn't understand it.  He is one of those people able to close his eyes, doze off and sleep just anywhere.  He told me he once slept through an entire concert and he in the front row!  He is convinced if someone is sleeping you should not tiptoe about but make the same noises you'd normally would anyway.  Obviously he's no idea what I go through when I can't penetrate to the deeper sleep cycles and I jerk awake at the tiniest thing.  But no I'm not grumpy with him.  My poor sleep is my issue not his.

 I did however, look like I'd been awake all night long and there's nothing quite so awful as a sleep deprived 60 year old woman!  Well in the end, I threw together a quick meal, had coffee and tea and did a few  household things and then settled into the kitchen sitting rocker, not to return to sleep but to listen to the church service.  I have noted that I tend to leaf through a magazine or turn on the computer and putter about onscreen when church is on and I wanted to really listen.  So I did and took notes in my journal as it was quite a good sermon really.  I'm linking to it in my 'Worth Sharing' post for this week.

I do appreciate when a Pastor shares a lesson from a passage that confirms some opinion I've held but no one has ever backed up and this sermon did that for me.  

John told me later that he always makes notes on the Bible page such as  the date a sermon was preached and a base outline of it.  He asked "Do you know how many times you can preach the same passage and have a different message?"  Well, I don't have a record of it  as he does, but I do know that it was just a few weeks ago I was reading the same passage and I was intrigued at what the Pastor took away from it.   I've heard it preached upon for years upon years but no one else has ever mentioned that aspect of what it showed.  But as I told John, "Do you know how many times you can read a passage over and over again and suddenly it clicks into something that makes you stop and say 'Wait!  I never saw that before!' even though you thought you'd pretty well understood it up until now?"

John has been intent on teaching me to memorize passages.  Our church has been praying II Chronicles 7:14 twice a day since the whole social isolation shut down began.  Well he took up the challenge and kept repeating it at night and eventually I said "I want to learn this...But I'm utter trash at memorization."  Well we've been working away at it and in the past week I've gotten it right word for word at least 3 times which is rather major.  And on the nights I don't have it exactly right it's still 90% right.   Then we decided to learn a Psalm so we take it in turns to each say a line.  Between us we are learning that Psalm.  He asked me last night, "What do you want to learn next?"  I'm going to sit down with my Bible and choose something else for us to memorize.

Have you ever heard of Marilyn Hickey?  She is an evangelist who has traveled the world and she set herself the task of learning every word of the Bible. I mean memorizing it.  And she did!  Now that is no small feat.  Her reason was that she never wanted to be without her Bible and knew that eventually she would have to travel to countries where it might be illegal to carry it.   

I don't expect I'll ever have the opportunity to travel to anyplace where it's illegal to have my Bible, or really even to too many places period.  But I should like to teach my mind to remember the passages and know 'chapter, scripture and verse'.

Granny used to quote poetry all the time.  She was trained to memorize it in school.  I don't recall us being taught to remember too much more than the times table or the tenses of verbs.  Swim, Swam, Swum...And a little rhyme that told which months had 30 days and which had 31 "Except February alone...It has 28 so fine until Leap Year gives it 29..."  That and a few song lyrics have been about the sum total of any real memory lessons I've had in my lifetime, but I'd like to stretch my brain a bit more and really try and memorize things.

Gee...My time is up!  And it seems such a short chat that I think I might well just leave off here and when I come in later chat some more.   So how about I just ring you up when I get back in? 

Next day...Isn't it funny?  All last week I had the most horrid attitude and aside from being busy, not a great deal to concern me.  Yesterday, I was relaxed and calm and even though by day's end not one but five things arose to cause me worry and anxiety, my attitude overall remained good.  Some weighty, some ongoing concerns and none of which I have any control at all over.  

John and I discussed all of the incidents save one, which I told him about this morning.  And we laid them all (except that one I didn't share until today) before God last night and said "Look.  We've prayed over this and this and there's this and this now too and we really have no clue what we're meant to do.  HELP!  And thank you for allowing us to put it down here.  Remind us that we've laid it down and it's no longer OURS to struggle with."   After all there are things in this life that concern us but too often aren't really ours to deal with.  A hard fact when you're talking adult children or circumstances that really are not in your control regarding finances, etc. 

Aside from a fifteen minute bit of time worrying once I'd gone to sleep and then was awakened by anxiety,  all was well.  I prayed.  I laid it down again.  I went back to sleep and slept like the tired woman I was and I dare say my attitude is decent enough today.

I did have a rather interesting/disturbing dream in which I quarreled with a family member and threatened and stormed and they, much as in real life, played the victim of my rage rather than acknowledge their own actions which caused it.   I am not saying that when one is angry everyone else is to blame but that in this particular instance, the person does cultivate through constant irritation and aggravation a righteous anger.  However...  In my dream,  I was fierce, more so than I ever am in real life and as harsh as it might sound it felt rather nice to be that sort.  I do wonder at times exactly why we'll dream what we do and equally wonder at others why it takes a dream to show us how we really wish to be stronger and more sure of ourselves and stand up for ourselves when in real life I am not that at all, though I've learned in the past ten years to not cower and hang back either but no...not the sort to rail at bullies.

Well back to the day.  We woke early and John had a message from work asking him to come in again, asked what I thought and I pondered my answer.  Truthfully we hadn't made any plans, we've really no money to do anything with at this point and likely we'd have stayed home anyway.  Then faced with a day alone my mind raced with what I might do.  I ultimately told him if he wanted the shift to go ahead and because earning this bit will allow him to buy a needed and necessary yard tool that he can do a few more jobs about the place with.  And as for myself,  I dreamed of what I'd do and then let reality settle me down to real life once more.

After John left, I quickly realized two things: the day be me to do whatever I please in is lovely, but I very much needed to do three things: I needed to do some transplanting of items (done) and set up outfits to wear (need to do that) and to figure out my finances (done).  That last was the decision maker for the day.  I stay at home.  I decided after the first and last item were done to take time to PLAN before I do anything.   It doesn't always come naturally to me to stop and plan but I know too well that I can find myself overwhelmed with tasks, over spent in funds and energy and frustrated because my failure to plan has generated more work than I can manage in a short period of time.  I want to work smarter as well as make our money work harder and I can only do that best if I take time to plan.

By planning I mean learning exactly what I need to do in order to do things rightly as well as making a plan of action.  I'm notorious for diving headfirst into new projects and having NO idea how to go about executing things and then I must stop and study and learn.  This time around, I mean to determine what I need to learn first and then make a plan of action from there.  

In the meantime, however, what I could do was a bit of transplanting.  A tomato, the green beans needed to be moved apart, a Dianthus was not particularly happy in the shady spot where I'd put it, a surprise forsythia stem rooted nicely, there was a tiny bit of oregano in a huge old pot all alone, an Angelonia that was struggling in it's pot of soil (root bound as it turned out)...And indoors there was ivy rooted and ready to plant.  I trimmed the ivy on the back porch two months ago and those stems had lovely roots on them.  

What I didn't do but  which also must be attended to is a fat lot of replanting divisions that I've taken up both last fall and this spring.  And yes, I am one of those sorts that takes up plants and piles them in a bucket and the next year there they are still alive and waiting on me to attend to them.  It's nothing to do with my skill but the fact that most of my plants are passalong plants, old varieties that have survived far worst over the years than a mere year in a bucket where they are occasionally dampened.   This is also part of  where the planning stage comes in...  Where to put these lovely plants that have multiplied and grown? And enough room extra to plant those things which must be thinned again...Iris, my eye is on you!   I need to prepare a planting area and get them all in the ground!   I spent a goodly portion of the intended time in the yard this morning and tomorrow and Friday perhaps I shall get in a bit more time, so if I have a plan I'll know what to do next .

One thing I managed with all the appointments this past week is to finish the book, Nourished by Lia Huber.  I mistakenly snatched it up thinking I'd never read it.  I remembered as I read that I had indeed read it but it's been a couple of years at least and I did rather enjoy it in the re-reading.   Each chapter ends with a recipe, as most books by a chef (real or just self professed foodie) usually does.  This book is about faith and food but it's not the perfect Christian package.  It's all about struggles in a marriage and with health and the combination of elements that brought about change and about relationships.  A sort of mish mosh.  

But what intrigued me was near the end of the book when she writing about her journey into being a parent of a baby and how lost she'd gotten in the struggle to find routine with an infant.  "Who am I?" being the eternal question most teens and later new moms ask.  What they don't know is that they will ask themselves again and again as they traverse their life, in seasons of strain and as they age and as life changes occur.  Each moment redefines who we are at that time and is just a stepping stone to who will become with the next change.  I see that now.   So from 12 to 25 to 34 to 55 and now in what is proving to be like a second flourishing of life in a season when I thought we'd be free to do our own thing, I see that I am still evolving.

Yet again, I am reminded of the dragonfly which for years I felt was my symbol.  At the time I adopted it,  I was taking online writing courses through the University of Berlin in a pilot program  that a professor was working upon.  At one point we were asked to choose a symbol that represented who we were.  I've never been one for having a spirit animal and all that, but I'd been seeing loads of dragonflies that summer and was curious about them so I did what I do with most things about which I'm curious and looked them up.  Well, as I read about the many life stages they go through and their long life cycle which is transformed almost 3/4 of the way through, and being in my forties at the time, I decided that the dragonfly was my symbol for my life.

A dragonfly goes through 12 life stages.  11 of those stages is spent becoming what it will be in it's final life stage.  Up until then it is always developing and growing and changing, until one day it sprouts wings and becomes a dragonfly.  Nearly all of it's life is spent in a pool of water, as an egg and then as a worm of sorts.  And then one warm one day it crawls up a stem of grass or reed and sits in the sun and it's wings begin to dry and shift and the dragonfly is formed.  It will likely live six months as a dragonfly but given that up until that point it spent 4 1/2 years or so in a puddle...what a glorious last six months it is!  

Now given the great length of time we humans may live, it doesn't seem to me that spending three fourths of our years developing into who we are meant to be is really the time to go about asking who am I?  From this side it seems to me the real questions are "Will I have learned enough to be the very best me when my flying season arrives?  Will I have the strength to do the things I might do then?  Will I have learned wisdom enough to make the most of those years?  Will I live up to the potential God saw in me when he chose my season?"  That's the important stuff...Not who I am when I'm sleep exhausted while nestling a teething infant, nor who I am in a season of marriage that is less than satisfactory, nor who I am when my last child has left the nest and I realize that 'mommy' was a seasonal occupation (kinda yes, kinda no), nor when menopause hits and I am wondering if I'll cease to be womanly (We don't...), or even if this season is really meant to be so busy (apparently it IS).

Well there you are dears, a bit of chatter and now I am off to find another cup of coffee and then get myself back to work and making my plans...

Talk to you later!