Crabgrass or Blessings?!

I am perfectly capable of looking past the very great blessings in this photo while focusing on the crabgrass.  Praise changes my mind and heart. 

I am ashamed of my reluctance to give the Lord the praise that is due His name.  I hate to admit that my self-talk probably runs like this:  I'm so sad about Mom, and weighed down by worries about the future, and I don't feel well, and things haven't worked out the way I thought they would,  And thus I avoid the sweetest portion of focused time with the Lord, because nothing but praise brings us more expediently into His presence. Our worship of God has nothing to do with who we are, or our circumstances; it has to do with who He is: perfect, beautiful, unchanging, faithful, and praiseworthy in all seasons of our lives.

Yesterday morning I drug my tired self over to stand in front of the picture window in Mom's apartment, the now silent space she inhabited for 12 years following her Alzheimer's diagnosis.  There is a sweet peace in those rooms, and it is a good place to read my Bible and pray. On this morning I determined I would lift my hands in praise and, thinking the green beauty of an early June morning would fuel my worship, I reached forward and pulled the window shade open.

Branches from the elm tree had blown down in the night.  The container I'd used as a water play area for my grandsons had been flipped over and lay at a haphazard angle in the unmown, patchy crabgrass.  The weeds in the ditch had become untidy and overgrown due to recent rains. As I stared at all of this a vulture flew overhead, his shadow casting a dark, foreboding path across the scene.

I burst into laughter. I'm sure this is not the response the devil might have anticipated; I laughed so hard that I had to sit down to recover. It was so awful it was funny...overkill, Satan!   And when I stood back up I burst into an enthusiastic song of praise to our Lord.

Sometimes, our circumstances don't appear praiseworthy, but this has nothing to do with whether we ought to praise God as He has asked us to do. Our God is beautiful, perfect, and always worthy of our praises. The Bible repeatedly exhorts us to praise the Name of the Lord, not only because it is good, right, and pleasing to Him, but also because it is very good for us.  Yesterday praise changed my perspective from how irritating it is to have the yard in such a mess to how grateful I am for rain and, most especially, for my precious grandsons.

Praise the Lord!

God Is With Us in Every Present Moment

Although  I rarely attempt to make my phone photos look better than life, I do sometimes edit them in an attempt to more accurately reflect the beauty I saw in the moment I captured the scene.

Even a professional photographer would have struggled to accurately record the photo above, because scents and sounds were a part of its beauty. The vastness of the sky overhead, the waning sun's rays permeating every leaf and blade of grass, the haze that formed beams of light through my phone camera's lens: oh my it was lovely.  The photo also could not accurately show the true color of the old-fashioned roses, and I hadn't even noticed that pipe from our waterline intruding in the foreground.  And so I cropped, adjusted exposure, and applied filters, and although the edited photo still isn't nearly as beautiful as the real-life scene, it is a closer approximation.

As I was editing this photo, it came to me that it is important to allow the Lord to edit my memories of upsetting events in my past.  I've been struggling with memories of an emergency surgery I endured a few months ago.  I hate anesthesia, and the drugs I was given for pain caused hallucinations.  I do remember  I wasn't afraid during that long dark night immediately following the surgery, even though each time I closed my eyes, weird hallucinations began like a film resuming play.  I felt immobilized by the drugs and was unable to tell anyone what was going on. 

As I was praying about all this, it came to me that it isn't that the events surrounding my surgery weren’t as bad as I remember, but that I was more helped, more sustained through the ordeals, more loved than I remember.  Our memories can't be trusted because we remember facts, but the beauty of God's comforting and sustaining presence, although very real in the moment we are in, is more difficult to recall later on. This is probably because our physical senses have trouble recalling spiritual realities. Just as my phone camera doesn't pick up the full depth of beauty of the real-life scene, our memories have trouble "seeing" the very real comfort God provides through every ordeal.

As Micah Taylor's song, Never Been a Moment says, "...there's never been a moment I was not held inside Your arms, never been a moment You were not who You say You are..."

Dear Lord,  we release our memories of those hard things we've endured to You.  Help us remember with the eyes of our hearts Your love, Your sustenance, and Your strength that have seen us through every moment of our lives.