STUCK, SILENT & STUBBORN

I feel STUCK in so many ways…

Firstly as I stare at this blank page in front of me I wonder how I am going to fill it. I’m trying to catch my ideas and pin them down but they fly off in all directions.

But I know deep down that writing may be profitable, it will help me align my thoughts and perhaps allow me to move forward.

The biggest sticking point is, as it ever was, the house!

If you had told me when Andrew died that I would still be living here five years on I truly would have wept.

I love my house dearly, it is our forever family home but circumstances have changed to a point where it is no longer fit for purpose. It far exceeds adequate, therefore I desperately need to move to somewhere smaller and more manageable. It is more of a burden than a pleasure to live here.

I was out shopping yesterday and when I returned home I checked my mobile, I never hear it ring if I am out, and discovered I’d missed a call from the estate agent.

Calmly I put the kettle on and made a cup of tea before I rang them back.

“Was it still possible to be moved before Christmas?” I pondered as my mind raced ahead imagining a potential buyer had found the money and was ready to proceed.

Of course it wasn’t anything as exciting. They were updating their records and wanted my email address. Sounds to me like they were bored in the office and made up something to do to pass the time.

The housing market is as dull and dreary as a wet Wednesday in winter!

I receive Bible readings as an email every day and some days I even open and read them! 

Yesterday’s was called “Get into place!” Well how could I resist reading that one?

I desperately want to know where I should be and what I should be doing. To be honest I am STUCK in a rut in more ways than one, so aware that there is more out there that I have yet to grasp or comprehend.

‘Get into Place!’

18 November 2015

‘There was not a man to till the ground.’ Genesis 2:5 KJV

The Bible says, ‘The Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.’ At the beginning of creation God caused a mist to come up from the earth and water the ground. Up until that time there had been no downpour from the heavens. That’s because there was nobody to do the prep work and ‘till the ground’. There’s a spiritual lesson here! There are things God has planned to do, made provision for, and desires to do – but He won’t until you ‘get into place’ where you can receive what He longs to give you. The blessing is there, safe in God’s keeping. The need is there, persistent in its pain. But the blessing can’t come until your heart is in the right place for God to act. Right now you may be enjoying a ‘mist’, but you know God has more for you. You’ve a frustration that causes you to say, ‘Why am I not further along?’ Rather than blaming people and circumstances, you need to pause, look up, and ask, ‘Lord, are You waiting for me to get into place?’ When you ask that question, be prepared to hear the answer and obey it, even if it means rearranging your priorities and paying the price to receive what God wants you to have. What does He want you to have? Not a mist, but a downpour! He’s willing and ‘able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us’ (Ephesians 3:20 KJV). But first you must ‘get into place’.

                                                                                         Word for Today -18th Nov 2015

The answer in the text above is predictably to take your burdens to God and pray “are You waiting for me to get into place?”

Of course place is not just geographical, if it were I would be stuck until the housing market picks up, which as it stands could be FOREVER!!!!

I do need to come before God and ask what He would have me do but I find praying on my own so difficult and I confess I don’t do it often enough. I honestly can’t remember the last time I really poured out my heart to God with my own personal petitions.

It’s been five years since Andrew died, I feel my life is STUCK, every time I get proactive trying to move my life forward it feels as if a door slams in my face.

I have come to equate each slam of the door as a sign from God I should WAIT. The timing is just not right. One day a door will open but not now. I keep taking the wrong turn and trying the wrong door handles.

I worry if I really pray that heartfelt prayer God will be SILENT. I will get NO answer and still be here treading water and waiting for the echo of the final door slam to die away….

So I dig my heels in and shake my STUBBORN head. It's better to bury my head in the sand than cope with the painful silence.

This is obviously how it has to be, if God wanted my life to be different He could change it!

I’ll admit it’s not a great attitude.

As I see it I have 3 choices.

I could sit and wait forever until something gives, all the while feeling sorry for myself or I could run around chasing my tail trying to make things happen and getting more and more frustrated in the process of busyness.

But somehow I’ve got to choose option 3 and fit God into the equation and ask Him properly what I should do instead of second guessing His great plans.

It sounds clichéd and stale. I'm sure I've written this before....

This week’s Open the Book school assembly was a story called “A Long Journey” about the Israelites wandering in the wilderness.

No wonder my own story sounds clichéd, I am not the first person to walk in circles, not listening properly and being STUBBORN. Ignoring the good things God has provided and moaning instead.

My wise friend told me “God is our hope and He will keep you SUSTAINED until the time is right.” 

Of all the words I’ve highlighted today beginning with S – maybe SUSTAINED is the best.

It doesn’t mean an easy life or that everything will go your way but SUSTAINED is a soothing word. It keeps you going when times get tough.

Maybe that’s what I need to remember at this time.

I need to make time and space to really seriously pray, believing God will listen. Perhaps he will be silent but maybe if I listen hard for more than 5 seconds I will hear something that will keep my going and lead me a few steps further on so I am in the right place to receive His promised blessings.

Last night I dreamt of Andrew...

Last night I dreamt of Andrew. It happens very rarely but last night he disturbed my sleep.

 

He returned to us from beyond the grave and disturbed my world.

He came in, took one look at our “chaotic” existence and quite literally moved the furniture in the house around to suit his own needs.

He couldn’t understand why we had changed things, why things no longer worked the way he had planned them to.

Slightly rattled I woke early, decided to get up and make a cup of tea, the panacea for all ills, particularly at half six in the morning.

I climbed back into bed and read for a while to stop my mind from wandering. I don’t want my thoughts to drift in this direction. I’m already in a fragile state.

I like to think of Andrew looking down at us with a benevolent smile on his face, proud of all we’ve achieved. Although I confess in the early days I still worried what he would think about the things I did. I know I do lots differently but people tell me we are doing well.

It’s nearly 5 years since I’ve been doing “this” solo. I won’t say it necessarily gets any easier.

Quite often I long for someone to put their loving arms around me and hold me tight – but I have youngest son to snuggle on the sofa with and given half a chance he would never let me go. A ploy to extend bedtime he has never quite grown out of.

Meanwhile our house is quieter than ever as oldest son is off at Uni – forging ahead with his own path.

As I keep saying some things change and others just stay the same.

Here I sit in the same too big house, with the big lawn surrounded by such magnificent trees.

And once more its autumn and the leaves are falling down, weeping for a time that’s lost.

And that’s the other bit of the dream - as Andrew moved the furniture and re-wired the speakers so I could listen to a CD once more, I caught a glimpse out of the window, there were fewer leaves on the lawn and maybe they were mixed with a scattering of bright red poppies.

I gazed wistfully, pondering and letting everything wash over me. Holding “same” and “different” in my head.

After reading for a while I knew it was time to get up. The radio alarm had gone off and a new day had arrived.

It would be all too easy to pull the covers over my head and hide, but I’ve not got this far by shutting myself away from the world.

So I carry on, towards Friday 13th, the fifth anniversary, knowing that if I hear a bump in the night, it’s probably just Andrew re-arranging the furniture!

I’ll put it back where I like it in the morning!!!

same ... but different

I’ve been pondering for a while whether I should start blogging again. My fingers are twitching and ideas are bubbling but is that a good enough reason?

Blogging can take over your life, the same as any obsession and I have a tendency to get carried away, my ideas become all consuming.

When I started writing almost 5 years ago it had a purpose. I needed to write to clear my head. I needed to make sense of my world after becoming a widow at 42.

Unravelling Edges and subsequently re-ravelling was a cathartic experience and I met many new friends along the way. It all helped at the time but then…

…there was, I hesitate to say a darker side, but I stumbled into a world where sharing my innermost thoughts became self-defeating.

Everything spiralled and my own self-importance grew as I believed my “readers” were hanging onto my every word.

In the end I didn’t like living in an artificial world, I lived in a virtual bubble and one day it went POP!

In the beginning I thought I would be “discovered”, I would write a best-selling book about my experiences, dispensing my wisdom and honesty would be the silver lining to the dark cloud that had crossed my path.

Of course these sorts of things only really happen in fairytales and Hugh Grant movies.

I went back to living in the real world…

… and that’s where I still reside today. Oh I still have dreams, I couldn’t live without them they are an essential part of my make-up but I have filled my life with REAL stuff and that’s OK.

So should I write again? 

Well I certainly don’t think my words are filled with importance and this time I truly don’t care if no one else reads them.

The truth is I like to write, I like to play with words and phrases. I enjoy crafting them, shaping them creating the perfect sentence to express exactly what I want to say. I already keep a diary, some of it is the prosaic “what I did today” kind of stuff mixed in with personal stuff I’d never share in a blog in a million years, but blogging my thoughts is … different.

Which brings me to my title today “same … but different!”

It was something I remember saying a lot when I was growing up and that’s the point, I am still the same person I was all those years ago, I am the same person I was 5 years ago before Andrew died and the same person I was when I married him, the same person I was before the boys came along and after.

... but now the circumstances I find myself in are different.

… and then again, sometimes to my utter despair, lots of things haven’t changed a bit but I shall leave those thoughts for another day!