God Paints Our World

I have kept all  the cards that were sent to my husband and I over the years. Currently however, I need so much to de-clutter. So, I took a very large bundle off the bookshelf in the little passage… and lost myself reading through them. I made a decision,  I am not going to get rid of them. They will go in a scrapbook and I can read them on the ‘down’ days. I found this wonderful poem in one – and it is an example of what is expressed in the poem, because my current Bible study is on ‘How Much Does God Love You?” The poem reinforces the study.

Everywhere I look

Everywhere I look, I find

Some wondrous handiwork of Thine,

Every single day I see

Some lovely thing You’ve given me.

My heart almost overflows,

At the sight of velvet rose,

Lacey fern, and birds that sing,

Lord, You give me everything

As the early morning breeze

Softly stirs though leafy trees,

Comes the dawn all steeped in gold,

More than my two arms can hold.

Silver stars throughout the night,

Purple shadows, pale moonlight,

Turn my thoughts again to Thee,

Lord, I fear You’re spoiling me.

Everywhere I look I find

Beauty of the richest kind,

Little joys throughout the day,

Almost take my breath away.

How very precious I must be,

That you should have such love for me,

And in each cranny, smallest nook,

I find you everywhere I look.

 By: Grace E Easley

I have memories of gentler climates, of rain (we are very short of rain here in Western Australia), of snow… and I know some of you had too much… I have experienced that too, a very long time ago. But my life for more years than I care to remember, has been here in the very different beauty of Western Australia. I love the way God paints the dawn sky.

The wild-flowers here are awesome. The ‘common fringed lily’ has been a favourite since I first met it so many years ago. It has always looked to me like satin, with feathers.

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· Even the succulents can surprise me sometimes… and some plants ‘peculiar’ to Australia are evidence of the awesome wonder of God’s mind.   God paints our world with beauty. We need the eyes to see it, the time to appreciate it, and the faith to accept it.

Just thinking

Susan

Calamities and loneliness

This week, as an old saying goes, ‘the whole world and its brother’ fell on me.

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It started out okay, but my first distress was getting rid of Geoff’s chair. It was old, shabby, over the years it had been slept in some nights…  when Geoff was having difficulty breathing.

(It was replaced by two smaller chairs.) I had been worrying about the announcement that one chair made to anyone who came to the house. “I am living alone.”

A neighbour was burgled last week, and that made me feel more vulnerable. We share a garden wall; I heard nothing. Perhaps I was out… it happened during the day.

This area used to be safe. I had gone for walks in the morning, a little before dawn, to enjoy seeing God’s handiwork painting the sky. (One of those sunrises is the background picture on my Hold the Faith website and is tiled as the background to this blog.)

Periodically an electronic police notice will be placed at the local shopping centre, ‘lock up, this is a high burglary area’. (And, a neighbour told me, that recently there was a ‘drug bust’ in our street. )

So it was not without much thinking that the chair went out, to wait for a bulk rubbish pickup. It was when evening came that I started to fret. Geoff had loved that lounge suite. The couch had already gone, to make room for his hospital chair. He approved that, though I think he was sad. He knew I kept the chair, but he never saw it, because he didn’t make it home from the hospice. (They expected him to be able to come home for a while, but he deteriorated more quickly than they had anticipated.)

So while I was fretting over putting out the chair, several major calamities happened. Mostly financial, but reversible, because they were bank and other people’s mistakes, but the biggest bug-bear, that had my daughter take over to try and make sense of… was the on-going hassle over my rent. Geoff and I each  had half the rent taken out of our pensions. That was fine, until he died. Within days I had fulfilled my obligation to inform the housing authority, put in a new form and income statement, and believed it was as it should be.

Then I received a phone call from the manager of my rental. She told me the account was in arrears and she was still trying to work out what I should be paying. She needed a new income statement. I could not understand why the arrears, because the rent was taken from my pension before I received it. When she sent me a copy of the rent page it was apparent what was wrong, and I wrote a detailed letter explaining that the arrears were the attempts to take rent from Geoff’s pension and he was no longer receiving one.

Well, I don’t want all of this to be about my rent, which was a background, and on-going issue while new stuff started falling all around me.

What it really has made me aware of is how difficult it is to stay standing when there is no one to talk about it with. (Yes, my daughter took over, and I much appreciated it, but she is in a high-level occupation, and has a family.  I had no one to sit down and talk about it with.)

These are the things a person living alone faces, as well as…no one to say ‘good morning’ to, or hear it back. And of course, no ‘goodnights’, ‘how are you’ etc.

It is very quiet inside four walls. (Sometimes that is good, but when things all start going wrong, it is harder to work though.)

So I have to ask myself, what am I doing to say ‘hello’ to someone else living alone?

Just thinking

Susan

PS – I believe the rental problem has finally been worked out, and the other ‘mistakes’ are being wiped. 🙂

What Rattles your Faith?

I can think of a few things that might.

• Loss of a spouse
• Loss of a parent
• Loss of a child
• Loss of a job
• Loss of a home

So far, everything I have written is about loss, but sometimes what ‘rattles’ (or attacks) our faith is not loss, but success.

Yes. Success. For example…

Tyre has built herself a stronghold; she has heaped up silver like dust, and gold like the dirt of the streets. Zechariah 9: 3

What does Tyre have to do with success?

It was a wealthy nation, it was the capital of Phoenicia, and. the seat of enormous wealth and power-

The commerce of the ancient world was gathered into the warehouses of Tyre.

“Tyrian merchants were the first who ventured to navigate the Mediterranean waters; and they founded their colonies on the coasts and neighbouring islands of the Aegean Sea, in Greece, on the northern coast of Africa, at Carthage and other places, in Sicily and Corsica, in Spain at Tartessus, and even beyond the pillars of Hercules at Gadeira (Cádiz)”

The city of Tyre was particularly known for the production of a rare and extraordinarily expensive sort of purple dye, produced from the murex shellfish, known as Tyrian purple. This color was, in many cultures of ancient times, reserved for the use of royalty, or at least nobility. Source Wikipedia

What happened to Tyre that I use it as an example? Read about it here…

http://amazingdiscoveries.org/S-deception_Tyre_destruction_Alexander-the-Great

When things go well, whether for a country, or a person, it is all too easy to rush on, thinking it is our wisdom that is giving us success.  Who has given us the mind, or the skill in the first place? In our vanity, it is easy to think it is OUR  talents that have brought us success.

Perhaps, we rush so far ahead of God that it takes a while before we notice we are on our own.

Life without a loved husband or wife is devastating… then lonely

Life without a parent is a different kind of grief, but very hard to bear.

Life after losing a child – well, in that loss we lose future as well as the present.

Losing a home… well, fill in your own blanks.

But finding yourself alone after you’ve run so far ahead of God, must be the worst.

The scary thing is sometimes it is too far to even feel the pain of loss.

I have lost the things I listed at the start of this post, my spouse, a child, a parent and changed countries, not simply lost a home.

The one steady anchor in my life is God.

I hope it is yours.

If He is not, look for Him. One day you will meet Him

I write this out of concern. Our fast-paced world either sucks us in – or leaves us lonely. We need God as our anchor, as our friend.

Some thoughts,

Susan