Let Me Tell You One Thing

August 4 2020 These days I am walking around with a sick feeling in my gut.  I have lost to death some very significant people in my life. There was my dad when I was six years old. At twelve years old I lost my grandpa who had stood by me thick and thin through all kinds of trauma as a child. Besides my great grandfather, various aunts and uncles through the years whom I loved dearly, ( I only have one living uncle now on both sides of my family),  besides my other grandfather, my husbands grandfather, whom I loved, and both my grandmothers in the eighties, I have no one living in my family now that is from the generation above me except one uncle and my mother. My cousins now have begun to die.  I have lost two first cousins recently and one of their wives.   Over three years ago I lost my husband.  Death has become real to me. Tomorrow is burial of one of the few  best few friends I have ever had.  We went back to the 70's.  My mother is 9...

7/21/2020 Today is July 21, 2020.   I was up at 6 am, cleaned my face and moisturized, made my bed, and   listened to a sermon by Clyde Johns entitled, “The Mysterious Kingdom of God” posted on May 14, 2014 on therain.podbean.com. Around 8 am the city utility department came to mark the natural gas line in my yard because I was expecting a septic tank cleaner company to come to pump my septic that had backed up my entire system the day before.   It never dawned on me that septic tanks actually fill up after so many years.   Mine had not been pumped since it was installed in 1989.   Needless to say, it was solid waste.   After many questions to the owner, he   tells me about a new system called Aerobic Tank System that puts oxygen in the tank which actually eats the waste and keeps the septic clean.   While I am talking with the septic guy about how he got started in the poop business the air conditioner installers come to begin moving the d...

Psalm 88 11/1/2019 A song, a psalm of the son of Korah. Verse 1 O Lord, God of my salvation, I have cried out day and night before you.                  Psalm 27:9 Do not hide your face from me; do not turn your servant away in anger; you have been my help; do not leave me nor forsake me, O God of my salvation.                  The writer in the 2 7 th Psalm has clearly been helped by calling on our Father.   This 88 th psalm begins with a reminder to the God of our salvation that he has cried to Him day and night.                   How can we ever expect God to answer prayer if we are so sporadic with our prayers?   A consistency would seem a rather important thing to God.   Seeking Him not only in times of trouble and crisis, but also seeking Him because we just want to be with Him, desiring His presence, giving tha...

Reflecting on a picture of my grandmother I realized someday I will be a picture on the wall; Great -great grandfathers and great-great grandmothers Whom I really never knew at all. Their blood still flows through my veins Their prayers for me still simmer before Yahweh; Just a picture on the wall I will be someday An unknown, strange, disconnected highway. The best I can do at this point in time Is to send my prayers and have no regrets; Just a picture on the wall I will be someday   My father leans and sees what my prayer pot begets. Prayers spent in pain and tears will never dry They live and breathe and stand Just a picture on the wall I will be someday Looking over the pots’ rim to see how grand. How many prayers went to earth answered How many prayed and still simmer; Just a picture on the wall I will be someday   Look into my prayer pot and catch a glimmer.

You Can Count on That August came in and I welcomed her with aching muscles from the previous day loading things that had been in my ninety year old mother’s barn so long they had forgotten how to rust.   They decided they had no more strength to fight the cockroaches and the fish bait worms.   They made room in their decaying existence for things that lived. They bowed out knowing that they had given a reprieve and a home for life, unappealing as it may have seemed. The rusted shelving and the rotted doors, buckets of Christmas lights hiding for years with no interest from anyone glared at us. The buckets of long forgotten Christmas lights that had not shined for baby Jesus in decades: one of them had accumulated instead a rather humongous frog that just wanted to live out his days in the bucket croaking and living in stagnant water; it’s skin a red hue which had absorbed the rusty looking water, comfortable with the pungent and offensive smell, but ann...

Devotions in Psalms pauladayjohns Psalm 95 August 2 2019 Heart Posture 1 . Oh Come let us sing unto the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. 2. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.                   Strongs # 8426 Thanksgiving (todah) (toh-dah) is derived from the verb Yadah (to give thanks, to praise) the root of the word, is yad or “hand”.                   How incredible that thanksgiving is given with the hands, not words. A remarkable demonstration of thanksgiving merged with praise. 3. For the Lord is the great God, and the great King above all gods.                   Psalm 94:4 for the Lord is great and greatly to be praised!                   God is no better or greater whether we praise Him or not. ...

There are seemingly different theatrical stages in our mind where costumed visitors come to dance in our head.  They seem to be cast as the realities of failure, despair, and  hopelessness paralyzing us into immobility.  It causes us inability to think or act and we are frozen in panics and fears.  It seems our mind has flatlined and life is done, over. We sink into the bankruptcy of hope, dreams, expectations, and happiness.  We have feelings of being doomed, lost, void, and forgotten. Hopefully, when we have been in this paralytic position, a faint ray of hope streams from our past experiences with the realization that we have been here before and we lived again. That realization comes from our deep seated faith in God, through Jesus Christ.  Many times, when we feel the visitors dancing on the stages of our mind, we are often alerted to the fact that we have seen this production before, and the end of the story is one of a window of hope opening...

3/16/2019 The spring flowers are blooming without you Without you here to see with me, I look to see if you are here to see with me, but you are not. The children are just what we hoped they would be without you Without you here to see with me, I look to see if you are here to see with me, but you are not. The grandchildren are coming up into their own without you Without you here to see with me, I look to see if you are here to see with me, but you are not. The great grandchildren are the epitome of perfection without you Without you here to see with me, I look to see if you are here to see with me, but you are not. The house you left to me is staying maintained without you Without you here to see with me, I look to see if you are here to see with me, but you are not. The wife you left behind is realizing she is a woman without you, Without you here to see with me, I look to see if you are here to see with me, but you are not. The h...