What a friend we have in Jesus...and in the friends He sends us

Below is the note I just sent to my friend Wanda. Everyone should have a friend like Wanda. The term "stalwart" comes to mind which means marked by outstanding strength and vigor of body, mind or spirit. That's Wanda and being my friend often requires being stalwart. She is also an "anam cara" or "soul friend"...I need to write more about that relationship of soul friends. It is amazing the bond that is built and grows between women who pray with each other and for each other. I wonder if it's the same for men.

This past Sunday as I was leaving the parish hall, I came up to Wanda while she was washing up after the ice cream social and lunch and talking to someone (as usual). I interupted (as usual) as I asked her to hold out her hand. I placed in her hand from my mine my invisible faith and told her, "Here is my faith, I am giving it to you for safe-keeping. Please hold it close to you and protect it for me while I cannot. You'll know when you can give it back to me."

I have learned that sometimes our brothers and sisters in Christ, must keep faith for another whose trials and tribulations are so overwhelming they threaten to swamp someone's faith. In better days I have prayed for others going through grief, sorrow and trouble. Now, for several months, for nearly two years, other people have been praying for us. If I judge by my latest circumstances, which is my current state of mind, it would seem that so many prayers for us have gone unanswered, or worse yet, been given an unloving NO. When you are drowning in a sea of bitter tears, it's so easy to let go and no longer believe that there is even Someone to hear all those prayers.

In better days, I would know that those prayers are answered in the person of Wanda, my anam cara, who holds my hand on a Sunday morning while I weep more bitter tears. She listens and lets me say all the horrible, black things about my life and even God, and gives me a hug. She promises not to be like one of Job's friends and try to explain why all of these horrible things have been happening in my life. There is no explanation and she agrees that they are horrible, but the few things that she does say are worth chewing on. One of them is that I am in the crucible, which is a common metaphor for the Christian life. It reminds me of a portion of a favorite hymn.

...the flame shall not harm thee; I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. The problem is from the gold's point of view, being in the crucible is very painful. There is even a point in time that the gold must feel disintegrated. I am at such a point. Mercifully, my faith is in Wanda's safe keeping.

Here is my note of thank you to her.

Just wanted to drop you a note and say thank you for being my friend and a sister in Christ. I also wanted to share a couple of things with you that I think you might appreciate, which both happen on Sunday after church.

The second one first. Sunday evening I caught a portion of the movie "The Return of the King".
It was leading up to the climax of the saga, the final ascent on Mount Doom. Sam looks at his dear friend Frodo, who is collapsed in a bloody, burdened and wounded heap, after Gollum has attacked him for the next to the last time. Frodo knows what he must do, but his strength and will are spent. Sam tells his friend: "I cannot carry It, but I can carry you." and he grabs Frodo and slings him over his shoulders and the two make that final assent together. At this juncture in time, for me you are Sam to my Frodo. You are carrying me while I must bear this burden and I know that I am safe in entrusting my "faith" to you to hold for me.

The first incident happened on the drive back. I was looking at the clouds and the sky and I felt the Lord speak to me in my spirit. He told me that's it's okay to beat my fists against Him because He's big enough to take it. Then He promised me that He wouldn't let go of me, but hold me all the closer while I was so hurt and angry, yet not too close so that I would be free enough to beat my fists against Him. Now when I start to slip into despair I see myself as a child sitting on Jesus' lap beating my little fists against His big, strong chest. And then, I fall into it and cry, while He puts His arms around me and rocks me tenderly.

May God bless you and keep you, as you have blessed and kept me.

This blog must change.

I started this blog a year ago and I keep censoring myself....Why? Nobody reads it except a few friends and family and it's not functioning for what I needed it to be. So it's going to be free therapy, an electronic journal for me to vent and rant and......tell the truth.

I'll be 58 on my next birthday and I'm going to give myself an early birthday present by 2 years. I promised myself that when I turned 60 I was no longer going to self-censor. I was going to say whatever I thought and let the chips fall where they may. The most dangerous person is the person who has nothing to lose and I am that person.

If there is anyone out there you have been warned.

If I'm in the middle of a restaurant and your brats are disturbing my dinner, I will tell you that you need to keep your kids quiet. Your kids are offending me, so if I offend you by telling you the truth, deal with it. The truth is they are offending the rest of the diners, but they're so paralyzed with political correctness they suffer in silence.

I have been censoring a family tragedy that has gripped us for nearly two years. Oh, I've hinted at it, alluded to it (i.e. one prodigal), written about it between the lines. It's that story B that makes both of us being (STILL!!!!) unemployed look and feel like a cake walk. Well, no more.

And since no one is reading this, and this blog is my therapy because now we don't have health insurance, I'm not going to give aliases. I'm naming names, at least first names. The innocent need to be praised and the guilty need to be convicted. Besides both libel and slander involve false statements and this blog is all about telling the truth. And that what I'm going to do, to tell the truth, as far as I know it to be. I'm going to call them as I see them, don't like it, then sue me. Good luck with getting a judgement and even if you did...well there's that whole blood out of a turnip thing.

You have been warned, twice now. The most dangerous person is someone who has nothing to lose. Read down on this blog, I live in a 5th wheel and I had to liquidate a retirement account to buy it. There's two of us in 300 square feet and we are both unemployed and have been so for eighteen months and our oldest child has broken our hearts and keeps on doing it. And, my idiotic mother-in-law keeps on believing her lies.

You have been warned, a third and final time. The most dangerous person is someone who has nothing to lose....and who has lived a life that is all about the Truth. Everyone is fair game, from the great to the small. No political correctness, Glenn Beck reminds us that the truth will set us free, but before it does that it will hurt. Even Glenn, as much as I enjoy him, needs to take some of his own medicine.....which is the subject of my next post.

A Scolding to the Employed from the long term unemployed, Part I

We go to job club on Wednesdays, which is a networking group. Our facilitator reminds us to the employed the unemployment rate is 0%. I wrote the letter below to a placement consultant in California on July 8th this year. He appeared on that day and complained that he couldn't get anyone to work, that they would rather stay unemployed instead of take perfectly good engineering jobs in the Pacific NW rather than stay home and save daycare money. I was especially frustrated and depressed because I had just been informed that a promising job (after a good interview) had gone to another candidate who was more "on point".

I'll let the rest of the letter speak for itself. Btw, I never got a reply from Mr. Dinse. No followup, not even a request for a resume. So, Mr. Dinse, do you really have all those jobs going unfilled?

Dear Mr. Dinse,

Your comments on Neil Cavuto's show today were irresponsible and continue to foster false notions regarding the unemployed. I was watching FoxNews this afternoon, as I frequently do most afternoons, because I am unemployed. I have been unemployed for over a year and will probably one of those who will lose benefits this week because I have exhausted all of my extensions. Ironically, I support the Republican senators decision not to vote for any further extensions unless they were paid for, it's the refusal of the Democrats to fund the much needed extensions with unspent stimulus funds that angers me most.

I despise being unemployed and it's more than the loss of income, a standard of living and a way of life I have spent the past 20 years pursuing. It's the boredom that so easily drifts into a loss of purpose and, all too often, depression. I don't have any projects around the house to do because my home now is a 300 square foot 5th wheel RV. You see, Mr. Dinse, my husband, has also been unemployed for over a year and last fall we liquidated a small retirement account to buy a 10 year old RV and the truck needed to tow it. Of course we had to take the tax hit, but we had enough money to buy what we needed, hoping that being mobile would open up more job opportunities for us. So far that hasn't been the case.

Nor do we have the young children to spend time with, or be concerned with paying child care expense. We belong to the "Too old to hire, too young to retire" club. We are used goods, and with each month, with each week that passes and we continue jobless, our value declines. Most of the unemployed long for a job and are responsible about trying to find work. In Texas, we have requirements of job searches each week and we are required to keep records of our job searches in the event we are audited. Yes, there are liars and stinkers in every group, but many of us go to job clubs and networking groups where we vent. About once a month, a miracle happens and we get an interview and while we think we did great, somebody else gets chosen for a position we know that we could do very, very well. We can't help but wonder how much younger the lucky candidate is that beat us out. Then, we read articles on various websites reporting that one culling technique used by many HR departments is to just throw out the resumes of anyone who isn't currently unemployed.

What follows is often days of devastation and despair, and for me, more than a few tears, and fear, wondering what is going to happen to us and worried that our kids will feel obligated to take care of us when they need to be building their own lives. In our case, both of us are degreed professionals with proven track records in our professions. Two years ago, we were making around 100K between the two of us and living in a lovely townhouse, putting away money in our 401K's. Now we live in a RV park in a small town in Texas because it's either safer or cheaper than one in a metro area. Last fall, I had to go through all of our possessions and memorabilia and figure out what we could keep in a 10X10 storage unit. The rest we either gave away or threw away, things like kid's report cards and stuffed animals and my jewelry chest that was a Christmas gift from my husband six Christmas's ago. Things like that just don't fit in an RV. I'm thinking I should write a book, calling it "Riches to Rags".

We watch a lot of FoxNews, probably too much, because it just adds to the worry and despair with talks about a double dip recession. Then, there are people like you or some of the other clowns I hear on the financial shows on Saturday morning. They pontificate with smug tones that the unemployed are just on a vacation and to extend their benefits it's just going to encourage them to stay that way. I'm sure there's a few, but most of us live fearful lives of just getting by, still able to refuse proffered charity from our church. Yes, we make more than minimum wage on UI, approximately $400 per week for each of us, before taxes, which is another subject. We are paid that amount based on what we used to make and that is the max that is paid. For over a year, I've been applying for administrative assistants jobs that pay less than half of what I used to make, but I never get a call on those because I'm "over-qualified". We really want to be working.

I have written you this letter because what you said hurts people in a very real way. It perpetuates the myths that lead notions like: The reason that you don't have a job after a year is because you don't want to work. Maybe I don't have a job because of people like you. Your remarks were careless and unthinking, and I suspect that you took an isolated incident or two plus anecdotal gossip and parleyed into an irresponsible generalization.

I hope I have given you something to think about, and that you will think carefully before you speak without knowing about other people's lives. There are 15 million of us out of work and my gut tells me that tonight there are at least 3-5 million faces with tears in their eyes, worried and wondering if they will ever work again.

Very truly,

Settling In-Day 15. Between The Years.

Our Lord and our God. We joy in Thee. Without Thy Help we could not face unafraid the year before us.

This is the prayer for today in God Calling Journal, a new daily devotional journal I started on this January 1, 2010. The move into the 5th wheel is complete, the townhouse cleaned and emptied a few days ago and the keys returned to the property manager. But moving in is not the same as settling in, and that part is still just beginning. We are starting our 3rd week of living in the 5th wheel, which now has a name. It's the Doll House, off-handedly suggested by our daughter's fiance shortly after we moved in.

As he looked around the living area and kitchen, with just a touch of envy in his eyes, he said "This is quite a little dollhouse you have gotten for yourselves, you should be very happy here."
May it be so.

2009--The worst, the hardest, the most trial-filled, or the most sorrowful year of my life, of our life together....take your pick. My fantasy/fantastic Christmas wish didn't happen, but no surprise there, because that is not the way that God's providence and provision works. Just read Job. Nor is there magic fairy dust that happens when the ball drops in Times Square for the troubles and sorrows that began in 2009 are still very much present on this sunny New Year's Day.

And yet..."Remember that you must not see as the world sees. I hold the year in My Hands--in trust for you. But I shall guide you one day at a time. Leave the rest with Me. You must not anticipate the gift by fears or thoughts of the days ahead. And for each day I shall supply the wisdom and the strength."

It is a sunny New Year's Day. There still a chill to the air, but the temperature is starting to moderate into the 50's. (Of course, we live in south central Texas, to someone in Nebraska or Montana it would seem like a heat wave.)

We have settled into the Doll House sufficiently that I have been able to cook. V (our daughter) and I even managed to make fruitcakes and cookies on Christmas Eve Day in my tiny propane oven. I need to make mushroom soup, collard greens and sweet potatoes, and black-eyed peas for a New Year's party that starts later this afternoon. But....there are still the ocassional meltdowns, like trying to find a pair of shoes in our tiny closet before going out to dinner for New Years Eve. Another one day at a time kind of things.

Moving from from a 1400 square foot townhouse to a 300 square foot 5th wheel would be a challenge for most people. Throw in the small fact that we have never been RVers prior to the move and we are now on the ground where angels fear to tread. It is an odd combination of sheer lunacy and adamantine faith...the lunacy we come by natural and this kind of faith only comes from God Himself. In essence my Christmas wish was that all I had to face was making a life here in the 5th wheel and dealing with unemployment, but for His Purposes I am to remain in the more difficult crucible of grief and loss.

And so Lord, I pray: Forgive me when I anticipate the days ahead with fear. Help me to remember what St. Paul told us that Your Grace is sufficient for whatever thorn You choose to have us bear. In Your Mercy, help me to trust that You will supply the wisdom and the strength and guide me day by day. Amen.

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Another major curve in the road.

2009 is definitely the worst of our lives in the 35+ years we've been married and frankly it has been the worst year of my own life. It has been a year of loss and sorrow, a year of grief and letting go. Ironically, no one we love has physically died, but sometimes there are "deaths" that are more bitter and heartbreaking than a physical one.

And yet....I have come to believe that in this year, our marriage has become stronger than it has ever been and that is a great blessing. My faith in my Lord Jesus has never been as real and tangible as it is today and that is the pearl of great price. These are good things, sweet evidences of God's grace in our lives, which we will need in even greater abundance in the coming weeks and months as we face a life that we had never contemplated in our wildest dreams.

We just purchased our new home, a used 34 foot Seahawk 5th wheel RV. We are still both unemployed in spite of the job postings we've been answering for the past several months. Unemployment has been just paying the bills, but at the end of the year our lease is up and my benefits run out and we will be left with just Ace's benefits. Not enough to cover our rent and utilities, much less food, medicine and some kind of health insurance when our subsidized COBRA runs out.....also at the end of the year. The Lord does provide, but it is usually not the way in which we want Him to provide it or on our timing.

A few months ago I discovered that I had a very small retirement account from a previous employer, the old-fashioned kind that was company provided apart from a 401K. The monthly benefits would be less than $100 if I waited until retirement age to draw it. But I could take a lump sum rollover and then have access to the money. It wouldn't be much, especially after paying taxes and early withdrawal penalty, but it would be enough. It would be enough to buy us a place to live in that didn't have a lease or a mortgage. We weren't sure how it would work out, but we knew that it was a better option than moving in with my 74 year old mother-in-law or with our son and his wife. Our younger daughter and her fiance were okay with us living on their property with them, but not in a mobile home. So the decision was made to look into purchasing a used RV.

Some might wonder how did God provide the money for this purchase? After all it had been there for over five years, it wasn't like it was money from heaven. But I didn't know it was there and I didn't learn about it's existence until the right time, until God was ready for me to know about it. If I had learned about it a year or so ago, it would have been combined with another small rollover into an annuity account which is essentially locked for ten years. If I had learned about it just 5 or 6 months ago, we would have liquidated the account and given the money to the wrong person for the wrong reasons. Instead, I learned about the money approximately two weeks after learning a few other truths, such as living with my mother-in-law would be impossible and that we had to stop enabling our older daughter.

God is both efficient and economical in His providence. We learned these truths within a few days of each other as the indirect results of a trip to visit Ace's family in Oklahoma. Who knows, maybe they were the reason for the trip in the first place. I have been urging Ace for several weeks that we needed to make the trip, which he did not want to do. I told him that I felt the Lord had placed a burden in my heart that we were supposed to make the trip, but I didn't know why. Another "indirect" result of the trip was a increased willingness to let go of staying here and move to wherever a job might be. God was preparing us for the next part of His plan for us.

I did mention that it was just enough money to be able to buy the RV and take care of the remaining expenses for the transition?

I invite you, gentle readers, to come with me as we make this curve in the road. So much is now just unfolding and we have no idea what our future will look like in 2010 and beyond. There will be some occasions of looking back down the road already traveled, but mostly this is to be record of what lies ahead. This may be our journey, but it is our journey with our Lord Jesus and it is His itinerary, schedule and plan. As I said, His providence is economical and He reveals to us only what we need to know and only when we need to know it.

The one thing we did learn this week is that for His reasons, the Lord wants us to have the ability to be mobile, although I haven't a clue as to why. In a 5th wheel it's quite easy to "bug out". Taking a page from popular culture we decided to name our unit, where the M stands for mobile. We are the M*A*P*Z* unit, the Mobile Anglican Prayer Zone. I'm taking suggestions as to what we could name the 5th wheel...and no, she's much too nice to be called "The Swamp".

66 days and counting....

Our National Arrested Development

"The main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things." This was a truism I first heard when I started listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Gentle readers, if you haven't heard this amazing Scotsman preach, please check him out. He can be heard on Christian radio stations all over. If you can't find him that way go to the website truthforlife.org and listen online. He has made that statement many times when advising his listeners on the most reliable way to interprate Holy Scripture. Having left the Episopal Church ("ECUSA") a few years ago, I have witnessed first hand what happens when any church or denomination drifts from the plain Word of God.

That truism of interpretation is also my approach to the U.S. Constitution as well, which is ironic when you consider that many of its framers were Episcopalians. I do not equate the Constitution with Holy Writ, but I do believe that in the manner it was set forth, it was inspired by God. I believe that our Maker's hand was involved in its construction and like scripture it lives for all ages. That notion is not the same as the notion that it needs to be "evolving" to reflect the times, or else it can easily become a mirror to a lot of ugliness. The methodologies to interpret both scripture and the constitution are similar, and likeness have similar outcomes. I am both a constitutional and biblical fundamentalist, the plain way it has been written is the way it should be read. Today, the enlightened approach suggests otherwise and their approach is to re-write the plain word to fit their own desires. I see that interpretation has having lead to the same types of errors and problems because it is the same type of persons doing the interpretation.

For me the main distinction between Holy Scripture and the Constitution is that the Bible must trump the Constitution because the basic tenets of the Constitution flow out of the framers understanding of the Bible. This is approach in my life, but as a lover of the liberties that this country once believed, neither do I believe my understanding should be mandated by law. To do so is also a violation of God's own principle of free will, in which our faith and trust and love of Him comes freely from the heart and not by mandate. However, when the Supreme Court of the United States started making its interpretations out of a stance that is essentially anti-biblical, we became cut off from the root out of which our country grew and prospered. In so many of its rulings over the past 40+ years, they have codified the process of telling this country that we are to base our national life on the exclusion of God.

We have now become a society which enshrines the notion that we are to have freedom from religion, which is plainly not what the Constitution says or means. What we are really claiming in freedom from God, which is as old as Adam and Eve and the fall in the Garden of Eden. It actually predates them in the rebellion of Satan. It is the ugly perversion of free will, the ultimate and yet disasterous expression of the self. It says that I, the creature, demand such absolute freedom from my Creator that I expect to be endowed with all of His attributes, His power and His glory. Once I have taken them to myself that which is His by His nature, then I will kill Him. The problem in this scenario is that no creature can kill its Creator unless the Creator lets him. The other problem is that this type of creature confuses God's absence for His death.

And that, is what we have been doing systematically in this country for decades, we have been trying to claim God's power as our own and to eradicate Him from our national will and conscience. We have also had a problem learning lessons from history and are deaf and blind to the parallels to other civilizations that have risen and fallen to our own. We live in the times of perpetual adolescence, in which we arrogantly and foolishly believe that we're going to be the ones that finally beat the odds. So it is not surprising that at this time in history we most strongly manifest an arrested development. As an aging Baby Boomer, I see it far too much in my contemporaries, that unwillingness for people in their 50's and 60's to grow up and take responsibility. Too many cling to the notions born in the 1960's and which have been proven wrong countless times. They are still protesting the war in Vietnam, even if it's just on a metaphorical level. They are emotionally and often intellectually stuck in the late teens or early 20's, which is consistently the time in one's life that we are most foolish and foolhardy.

It not so much that the inmates are running the asylum, but rather the teenagers have been left with run of the house. They have the keys to the liquor cabinet and the family car, and access to all of the credit cards. While Obama is not in the strict sense a Baby Boomer, he is surrounded and influenced by them. For the majority of those in public life, it's all about decrying the wisdom of the past, the true wisdom of our parents and grandparents. We never really grew up; we got stuck in the place of "ah ha!" realization that our parents were flawed and imperfect and made mistakes. We were too busy pointing to and laughing at the nakedness of a drunken Noah, we missed our obligation as sons and daughters to cover him.

We have lived our entire lives gleefully breaking the 4th commandment; we have not honored our fathers and our mothers. We have peopled this country with now a third generation, as many Boomers are grandparents, with those who are fundamentally immature and who will strive to stay that way. We have not reached the point of another old truism: "When I was 17 I knew I was so much smarter than my father, but when I was 25 I was surprised how much the old man had learned." We refuse to look beyond the folly of those who have gone before and to incorporate into our lives their wisdom and their understanding of the basic and fundamental truths.