My Easter Season...and God's Gifts to Me

Easter.... GLORIOUS!!

A few days ago it began with a family/friends gathering at our home my DIL put together. We had a Seder plate with many of the symbols of Passover and such. Read so many scriptures! I can't quite describe the beauty of it all. Anyway, that certainly put me in the Resurrection Day frame of mind.

Yesterday, wonderful message at church...kids and their spouses at our side...another wordless feeling...such depth of gratitude to God for His blessings.

Then, I went that evening to the grocery store because we really needed some items. Through the aisles I was remembering our budget said we had 18Cents left in the grocery column and wondering where else in the budget we could take the money from for the groceries. But I had to get them. I get up to the checkout...behind a woman and her husband. They were done, and my groceries were getting rung up. But the wife just hung around. I thought maybe she needed change or something from the cashier... The cashier finished my groceries and handed the receipt to the woman! I said, "those are my groceries" so that she would see her mistake. The cashier said, "no worries". The woman smiled...and paid for my groceries! All I could do with tears in my eyes was say thanks. We introduced ourselves and she said, "just pay it forward". All I can say is, GOD. God knows. He hears. He moves. I am still stunned by the grocery incident. Humbled. And excited. I cannot hardly wait for when God will prompt me to pay it forward, for I know He will! That was my Easter season! Just had to share my praises! He inhabits the praises of His people!♥

Sometimes God is moving in so many ways in my life, I can hardly keep up it seems! He so loves each of us and desires for us to grow...more like Him...more in knowledge of Him. And sometimes, I just wanna be me...what I mean is....focused on me and MY wants. MY preceived needs. What I WANT...you know, gimme, gimme, gimme oh and then I'll be happy, God! This is a story of what God did in me very recently. It is transparent, vulnerable to put it here but what I wrote here was written the day after all that took place, and posting it here is a monument to Daddy God and His amazing grace. Be blessed. - Jeanette

This weekend He had me do something I thought I would never do. In fact, when it was first brought up, I truly almost physically vomited. But God has a way of talking and correcting with gentle love...and 24 hours later He had me seeing it His way...My mom and I, well...we've had issues. He's shown me her and how she got the way she is and has been...but it still doesn't take away the anger, rage and almost a hate that revisits even though I have thought I've forgiven her. Talking with her this week on the phone...she asked me to come up to cut her toenails. She is 84 and has three hip replacements (one redone twice) and for her to do this task herself is virtually impossible...I understood that, and still...vomit rose to the surface. The thought of bowing down to serve her when all I've ever felt was dislike from her, lack of approval...and that "I'm not good enough" stamp across my forehead that she put there through years of negative talk and belittlement all at my expense...well, to bow down in service...caused bile to rise up in me. I sat and talked withGod long and hard asking WHY did I react that way...and He showed me. He moved me around to having His heart by simply speaking to me, "pray for her". I KNEW I could do that...so I did. Then He spoke again saying..."go wash her feet". Well that covered a whole lot more feelings and emotions let me tell you!!! I knew I had to do it, I squirmed because I wanted to obey yet wanted to run...I had to do it. It wasn't about my mom. It was totally about my healing in that part of my heart that she occupies. I went. And when I first got there, it was bad...it was ugly. She was mean, bitter, angry, ugly in words and face. The usual Mom. I wanted to run, boy, did I want to run! And then, I think God, knowing my heart, SILENCED the demons, silenced the oppression, and light walked in. The mood got better, we had a nice lunch together in her apartment. Then I said, "I have something for us to do after lunch". She said ok. And that's how it all got set up. Over the next hour, with my mom sitting in her easy chair, I soaked her feet...I trimmed her jagged, long toe nails. I smoothed them with an emery board. Then I said, "I brought some nail polish, Mom. Do you want me to paint your nails?" And that was when the most amazing part of this time began to happen. In a wonderful childlike voice, she said, "oh yes!! please!" And so I did. I sat on the floor and painted her nails a lovely light purplish pink. And the entire time, she spoke positive after positive. "Oh Sha-Netty (that's what she has always called me)they look so nice! You could have a job doing this! Look how pretty they are! Oh, they are beautiful! She cooed, "My Sha-Netty"...When I moved to her second foot leaving the other to dry...she said it. The statement that HEALED my heart. "Oh Jeanette, (using my name this time)I know I talk awful. I know I say awful things...but you have to know that I LOVE YOU TO DEATH". Wow. In those words the gates of Hell shuddered. Time stood still. I had waited 50 years for those words, in that loving tone...no strings attached. God in his graciousness had held tears and any overflow of emotion in check for me because He knew how hard this all was...but when she said that, I felt tears...and I could not look at her for fear I would begin to cry and never stop. I finished painting her nails...and left them to dry. We watched more of the Cooking Channel, and later I massaged lotion into her beautiful feet. When it was time to leave, I said, "well you're gonna need to take you socks and slippers off to see your pretty toes!" She smiled and said, "I will in just a minute. I'm gonna put on my sandals and go get them mail, and tell them all about my pretty toes". I left then. I got down the second hallway of her building before I began to cry. And I cried and I cried and I cried. God's goodness makes me wordless. It's why I couldn't write this all earlier...I had to wait for the words to catch up with the actual happening. A simple sentence said with the tone and depth of love HEALED THAT PART OF MY HEART. Amazing. And all because I listened to Him. I washed my mom's feet and He cleansed my heart. Amazing.

WORM-EEEES!!!!!

WORM-EEEES!!!! That's the cry of my grandson Immanuel as he realizes Grandpa and Grammy have a cooler filled with dirt and his newest delight, earthworms!!!

He was here the other day as Grandpa was getting ready for a trip that would include fishing, and he was needing to transfer some of those nice fat worms to his bait box to take along. It was precious to watch "Manny" as we call him, pick up a "worm-eee" fold it around itself and place it in his hand then move it to the bait box where he would ceremoniously deposit it with a word declaring "WORM-EEE" with the biggest sweetest smile! About three dozen times!!

The simple pleasures. That scene has warmed my heart for days! I just wanted to share it with you all!

A Display of His Splendor...

That "Breaking Free" study...written by Beth Moore and God...WOW. I have completed the study and the road has been littered with broken chains. It was arduous (still is, this journey), very thought provoking, very self searching, very UGLY at times...but as I stand at the end of this stretch of road, and before embarking further along the road God has called me to walk, I look back and take in the carnage. I assess the twisted links of chain, the varying thicknesses of links....the lengths of chain....and I am GRATEFUL.

Grateful to the God of heaven for showing me as I persevered with this study, things I've glanced at before, in my life and dismissed...I'll take care of that another day, it doesn't really bother me so much.

Grateful for Him showing me tough, embedded thick chain links that have been happy to hold me captive and reside in me for YEARS. In an odd way, those are the ones that have been COMFORTABLE..I'm used to those shackles digging into my skin.

Grateful for Him showing me pieces of chain securing me down in areas of my life that I was not EVEN AWARE OF. I was shocked.

Grateful for His grace in removing the chains. No yanking and pulling here! Some of them go deep, and to be abrupt with them would just kill us. He does it with such priceless amazing love and ever so gently removes the offending metal.

He watches us shuffle through life with chains dragging everywhere. He knows that we could do so much more for him if we would simply let go of the chains, that we would be so much happier in this world without the extra weight on our spirits, but He is a gentleman and He waits for us to 'SEE' them ourselves...asking for His help to remove them...and of course, He is right there to grind that chain into dust. If we let him. That's the problem with comfortable chains, the ones that have molded us from childhood...we WANT to be free, but to be free means to NOT have that comfortable bondage to lean on. It means having to lean into God as He reprograms that space in your life that once held captivity. It means CHANGE. And sometimes change is scary to our human hearts and minds.

I am walking out one of these times where a life long chain has been removed...I am leaning SO HARD into Him. I keep telling myself, God can take my leaning on Him this hard. He can. And of course, He can.

Now at the end of this study, I am able to see FREEDOM in so many areas of my life. Walking it out is kind of tough. At times the chains seem more "sure", again that comfort thing...but with God's help, I will not go back to look for the broken links and try to piece together a blanket of bondage. NO. Besides, daughters of THE King, don't wear chain. They wear royal robes flowing and swirling around their feet...they are light on their feet and run and dance in fields of grace, and make daisy chains for their hair...that is what a daughter of the king looks like...and every day, I take on that likeness more and more, by the grace of God, my Daddy the King.

I have personalized this scripture, it means alot to me and I learned it during this study. Take it and personalize it for yourself. It's powerful. It's His desire for you too.

"Jeanette will be called an oak of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of His splendor." --Isaiah 61:3b

I want to spend all the days I have left on this planet displaying His splendor...hearing Him and doing it, reading His word and living it, speaking His word when and where He moves me to it. And in so doing, I pray to be a mighty oak displaying the God of heaven's splendor. It's all I want...to radiate Him.

LEGOS...PART THREE!!

LEGOS.. Well, last time I left you with the promise of Part three in our Lego adventure!!! I found out from a mom in my Amazing Moms Group, (we all have kids with special needs and meet together once a week for support and God time) that there was an on-line class available for kids with Asperger's Syndrome. It is a Lego Engineering Class. After some checking around on the internet, I found the class, its description and the price. UGH.
It was $199.00. That may not be alot to some, but to us, it is HUGE. So, my husband and I added it to our prayer list and we stuck it on the back burner in our hearts. I shared our dream with a couple of the Amazing Moms...this group of ladies is awesome. We are all about how can help our special ones excel? If they show an interest in ANYTHING how can we best use that to fan it into something they can USE in their lives??? Anyway, they began praying too for the funds.

That was before the Heart-y Party I had for the Amazing Moms...please see my older posts to find out what the Heart-y Party was. The leader left a coffee carafe at my home from that event, and so she stopped by the next day. As she was talking with me, she said, "the group and I discussed Tyler's intense interest in LEGOs and we think he should have the chance to try out this engineering course to see if it will spark something more in him. He deserves a chance to be successful." She then took two one hundred dollar bills from her purse and gave them to me. God is SO GOOD. I cried.

He had provided the money for the course through these sweet women and their hard work. You see, our group has a fund established. We do fundraisers throughout the year (our biggest one is a HUGE yard sale in September) to "fund" this fund. We use that money to help people with disabilities throughout the community. We've built wheelchair ramps, put in a kitchen floor for someone, sent kids to special camps...and other things. Those moms decided to help my Tyler...and I'll not forget it!

Well, I signed him up and we received a 1,000 piece LEGO kit to complete the class with!!! These are not regular legos...many specialty pieces..it's AWESOME! The pictures here are Tyler with his first completed project... a CHAINSAW! You turn the handle, which turns the gears, which turns the "chain". Amazing!!! Honestly, the reading and understanding of the booklet about LEgo is a bit beyond him. But his Dad and I are helping him through it. Also, his Dad had to help with interpreting the illustrations...but Tyler built the chainsaw.

It IS success. Success in self-esteem, success in learning a new thing...success in accomplishment!!! Not to mention the God lesson about provision that we got to share with Tyler about how we got to sign up in the first place!!! It's all priceless. It's all God. And I wanted to share it with you all!!!

He IS in the small stuff. And HE cares.

LEGOS...PART TWO!

Alright, so I feel the need to keep going with the Lego adventure we've been on!!!

Tyler has, since the creation of the first planet probe, added to his fleet. He now has 15 planet probes...he calls them rovers. They each have a name, I can't keep them straight...with different details on each one...no two rovers are alike. Anyway, after the first probe was completed, my DIL was over and mentioned to Tyler, "you should write to NASA and tell them about it." She left to go home, and I didn't think anymore about it. Tyler however, stayed in the office. For about another hour. When he emerged, he had three letters in his hands. One to NASA, one to Kennedy Space Center and one to Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He had used the same letter for each, but had changed the salutation to each one. As he handed them to me, I was well, STUNNED. Tyler has Asperberger's syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, and some wacky sensory issues. He has a one on one aide in school to keep him on task and to help smooth over transitions. This young man, emerged from the home office with a DETAILED paragraph about his creation. There was humor. There was information. There was description. Sure, there were typos, sure some thoughts weren't followed through to completion totally. BUT, the point here, and amazing MIRACLE here, is that he's NEVER before been able to but down on paper two thoughts that flow together. Yet I held in my hands an entire single spaced paragraph!!!! I cried.

Well, I took that letter and wrote a cover letter for it...explaining about Tyler, about his limitations and challenges. About how they were part of a miracle from God. We took pictures of the probe to include with the letter. And then, I mailed it all...to NASA, Kennedy Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Here's the last paragraph I wrote in my cover letter...

"If there is any way that you can acknowledge receipt of his letter back to him, that would be so exciting for him! Thank you for your time and for sharing in this MIRACLE with me!"

We heard back from all three places. With posters, pictures of space shuttles, of crews, of planets, and myriads of facts about space, missions there, and these three centers. He loves to receive mail!! And it all meant so much to him...and me and his dad.

What an absolute treasured gift this has all been from God above!!! Just for us! To add to that, at Christmas time, our oldest son and his family flew home...he is in the Air Force. And he had a gift for Tyler. It was a patch that was exactly like the ones the astronauts wore on their sleeves in space aboard the Endeavour. Zach had received it for working on some of the details concerning that shuttle launch!! That was great too!

Then....yes, this IS the never ending miracle from God to my son...

We heard about a LEGO class that was on-line...a class geared specifically to Asperger's children...about LEGO and engineering... TO BE CONTINUED.....PART THREE TOMORROW!!

LEGOS.....

LEGOS.... Tyler discovered them about six months ago. He's had them forever, but his newfound love for space, stars, planets, their names and their sizes...and the space program...prompted him to begin building his very own planet probe. Taking ideas from all the facts his brain holds and adding that to pictures he has seen on the NASA website of the Spirit and the Opportunity (for those of you who don't know, these are rovers actually on Mars at this very moment!!) he created an original probe. From LEGOS. I was stunned when I saw it all those months ago, he had NEVER done anything like that before. And the detail on this thing...well, to give you an idea...there are 11, yes, eleven cameras on this probe that turn 360 degrees ...there are detectors of all sorts, filters for one thing and the other... it's quite amazing. Here's a picture....

There is much more to this story...and tomorrow I'll write about NASA, and the letter we sent. Then the next day, I'll write about the on-line class he is taking and how that came to be!!! God is amazing and I am eager to share it all with you!!

A Holy Moment...

Well the worship event I was working on has come and gone. My daughter in law truly has a talent...yes, she can sing and the group she formed, Reclaimed...they are great together. But she truly has a gift...the ability to not care who is around when she wants to worship....SHE falls away and there is her SPIRIT worshipping her Daddy God...and you can see it, feel it...what a gift. I wish to be more like her in that respect. The worship was glorious, pleasing as a fragrance to God and the evening was over far too quickly.

Me? Well I learned much in preparing the atmosphere for worship at that event. That's why God had me doing that, so that I could learn. I explored in prayer what it would be if you could feel, taste, smell, hear and see worship...and that was how it was "decorated" if you will. In the past few weeks as I asked God about worship and what He wanted there, I kept hearing "rustic, simple". And through my journey of listening to Him, it just awes my spirit. Anyways, there were old wood ladders, old wood fruit crates, other assorted crates, small wood step stools, scattered across the front of the stage in various degrees of rest...no straight lines here! There were six inch mirror tiles positioned where He wanted them, and old boards leaning in assorted places and resting in places on the stairs from the stage. Then there were various carved wood frames of all shapes, colors and sizes in each of which was framed a name of God in big black lettering, in the font God put in my head which of course I found on my computer. Over by the large cross on the wall to one side of the stage, is communion with a framed name of God, printed larger than the others and printed in red. I had no idea what He wanted to do with that one...but I KNEW this word was bigger and red. So I did it. Well, it belonged where communion was taken and it is the name ELOHIM. Which means GOD. And the finishing of all this simplicity on the stage was tea lights in sand filled jelly jars sitting all over the mirror tiles, the old wood. Grouped, singly set...candles...to welcome the light. There were assorted wood bowls scattered among the other stuff holding dried flower petals, fragrant. And lastly, there were small wooden crosses about 3 inches tall with a 2 inch crossbar, tied around with jute, a jute hanger threaded through the top. They rested in a bowl beside the communion place for people to take if they wanted.

Long post here, I know. God was glorified. It was a teeny weeny itsy bitsy glimpse of the smallest piece of heaven.... HEAVEN IS GONNA BE....INDESCRIBABLE!