A New Blog

Every time I finished a pregnancy, I wanted to change my hair style and buy some different clothes.  I wanted to have an outward change to reflect all of the changes going on internally.  Have you ever had that happen?  Even now that we are done with tummy babies, I go through times of change and growth when I need what we call in our house a "do-over."  For those who don't know, the past four years of my life have been what I would call turbulent.  Emotionally hard, relationally lonely, and spiritually confusing.  Things were so bad that I found myself unable to blog about anything good, kind, noble, or uplifting.  The only words that came out were hard, complaining, and depressing.  "If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all."  I didn't have anything good to say, so I didn't say anything.  This blog was, for the most part, very silent.

After a long fight, I am out of the darkness.  Not out of the fighting, but out of the darkness.  Because of the changes in my heart and in my life, I felt it best to have a blog "do-over."  So if you are interested in the happenings of the Rhodes family, link on over to How My Garden Grows.  I'd love to share my life with you!!  (And if you are one of my blogging friends, please take this blog off of your friend links and replace it with the link above!  Thank you!!)

The Birds

We expanded our garden this year. It's ridiculous how much bigger it is. The reasons behind the expansion will make for an entire post that I'll have to type out at a different time. Right now I must tell you about the birds....

Our lettuce was beautiful. The spinach growing by leaps and bounds. The peas were climbing each other and almost a foot tall. The swiss chard was glowing in yellows and reds. And then it happened--large chunks of leaves being eaten! Not MY plants! I planted those veggies for ME to eat! We couldn't figure out what was going on. I googled. I researched in all of my vegetable gardening books. You know what I found out? Nothing. Not a single site saying anything about pests for the aforementioned plants. In fact, everything I read basically said "If you can't grow these, you should stop gardening!" Didn't help the dying plants. Didn't help my curiosity.

It didn't look like bug bites--there were no holes at all. I thought that it had to be birds. My neighbor (a gardener of 25+ years) said that she has never heard of birds eating lettuce. Jeremy thought I was crazy. Tonight I got my answer. Jeremy went outside to make a fence around the raspberry bushes (again, another posting!) and found EIGHT chickadees eating my pea plants! It feels good to be right! Now I just have to figure out how to get the chickadees to eat the bugs that are in the garden rather than eating the garden!!

A Pause Button

I wish that there were a pause button for life. I feel that I have wasted a few good years of my children's early childhood when I could have been thinking through the way that I really wanted to parent. What was I doing while nursing Hannah with no other babies at home? Why wasn't I reading the blogs that I read now, being mentored with wonderful words from the Word, praying through a vision of what I want our family to look like?

My mind is filled with all of the household skills that I have never learned (but want to so badly!) and homeschooling ideas and celebrations to have and coupons to clip. I know that it will just take day after day of putting them into practice and then I won't have to think in order to do them, but I wish that there was a grand "pause" button that I could put on my life so that everyone will stay the same age, everything will stay just as it is, and I can learn all the things I want to learn. It seems that in the crazy of my everyday I just barely get done the necessities and can't seem to find to add life to our life.

I suppose that my American instant mentality causes great complications in all of this. I want to read something, know how to implement it into my life instanteously and continue life--only better. I hope that somehow I can add in the fun and the celebration and the new skills little by little. And the good news is that I have tax season of 2011 to work on it all :) I don't know what I'm going to do with myself in January, February, and March!!

Another goodbye

Pain is in my heart, words are in my head, and I really need to have His words to heal the heart and fill my head. I wake up early, but not early enough. Two of my three blessings have already emerged from their beds. I've had enough time for a shower and a half of a cup of coffee, but not enough time to fill pages with words and get the Power to make it through this day. A tough day. A day of leaving and goodbyes.

The past three years have been full of hurt and lonely and rejection. Full of loving and waiting to be loved. And waiting some more. Of pouring out and learning that only God will consistently pour back. Then He gives me a friend. A dear friend who comes over and watching my "big" kids (who are three and eighteem months) while I lay in bed with a newborn and the flu. A friend who keeps me up until 2am scrapbooking and talking, talking, talking. A friend who calls and says "I'm coming over with quiche. What kind of coffee do you want?"

Why do the people who love me have to move? Why am I starting on the journey all over again? Will the winter season ever end? I don't know the on-this-earth anwers to these questions. I know that in my real Home, this sadness will not be part of my story. There is no leaving, no crying, no lonely. There are no questions of why I can't break into the lives of the people around me--only answers. Or at least the lack of questions.

The hard part is to not shut down. I need to push through pain and remain open to the possibilities of someone new. {Sounds like a high school break up, doesn't it?} It's much easier to stay locked up in our suburban world of house and kids and grocery shopping and dinner preparations. It is acceptable (and, really, valued} to be "busy." It's hard work to reach out and risk and love, especially with the knowledge that it will end. By death or by moving, our lives never stay the same with the people we love. Isn't this one {of the many} reasons that Jesus was a "man of sorrows"? Because he loved and didn't always get love in return? Because he poured out into his disciples, knowing that he would leave them soon?

Hopefully I can put the words and hurts on hold. Hopefully I will be awake enough after the kids go to bed to process and give all of the words to Jesus. Between now and then, I'm saying my goodbyes over a piece of quiche and a coffee.

Labels and new thinking

I remember in college learning about how the brain "labels" 90% of what we see, who we met, and where we go so that we have to do less thinking in a day. {I don't FEEL like I do less thinking in a day!} We spend time analysing a situation, come to a conclusion and stick a label on it. Not new information, I'm sure. We know we do it, but are we aware of how much we do it? Or the affect it has on our relationships?

I've been thinking about how I label myself. I'm a pretty analytical person. {Some people in my life would say a critical person, but that would be a different post, right?} I've spent a fair amount of time analyzing myself, knowing my strengths and weaknesses, knowing my spiritual gifts and my sin tendancies, knowing my personality types and my teaching style. And with each conclusion I've reached, I've taken my mental label maker, printed off a sticker, and put it on myself.

I've realized recently that it is hard for me to make decisions that are inconsistent with the labels I've created. Seems a bit silly, doesn't it? There are areas of my life where I would like to see change happen. I hear the Lord say "You can do all things through me!" I have His word telling me to pursue a new direction. But in the back of my head I hear "I'm not that person! I know how You have made me! I would be living a lie if I try to be like that!" Why do I hold myself back that way? Why can't I just purpose in my heart to make a new label? Or better yet, why can't hand the label maker over to the Lord?

I want to wake up this morning and say "But the grace of God I will be who God has called me to be and not the person that I am" without feeling so fake. I know this "fakeness" is really just living out a life that it inconsistent with the label I have made. The Bible tells me that I am a new creation but I want that "newness" to be a one time event that I can then, you guessed it, stick a label on. It takes an emotional and mental boldness to drop the labels and be a new creation today. And to wake up tomorrow and be a new creation tomorrow.

If I am to be growing in holiness, shouldn't I expect to be living differently each day? To be loving differently? To be growing in knowledge and depth of insight must result in a changed life! I can't be the same today as I was yesterday. I can't cling to the old thoughts and old behaviors just because that is who I am. "Who I am" must become "who I was." The labels I make aren't without purpose. However, they shouldn't be the filters by which I make decisions and respond to situations. They should only be benchmarks that show me where I need to grow and change to be made into the likeness of Jesus.

Healing

I was in the habit of blogging fairly regularly until about 3 years ago. And then my world completely fell apart. And I fell apart, too. I found myself logging into my blog site and not having a single good thing to say. As happens so often with my children, I had lost my "happy heart." As a result, I gave up on blogging to fight the war that was in my heart and in my head. I fought and fought, but without a community around me to help (note--if having a major emotionl crisis, try not to MOVE in the middle of it!), I finally gave up the fight. Sometimes it is easier to be depressed than to fight for one more day. Or hour. Or minute. I didn't want to be there. I knew that I should have joy in the Lord and in his Sovereignty. I knew that I should trust Him, trust His promises, trust His word. I knew that I was not bringing Glory to the Savior. But how in the WORLD was I to live honestly about what was going on in my world and at the same time not live in an emotional trash heap?

I'm not sure I have the answers to all of that yet. I can say, PRAISE THE LORD, that my happy heart is returning. Three years and seven months after my life was shattered, I am finding peace. And maybe, somehow, when I log onto my blog site, I may have something to say that will be a blessing to any reader who comes across the site. (And I'm sure my family would appreciate some stories and pictures!!) Now, to find the time to do it...

Breaking the Silence

Because I'm leaving with my children on a road trip across the country, it is only fitting that I sit down and blog right now. (Why do we like to avoid doing what we need to get done???) To dear friends and family who frequent my blog and see nothing for months on end....It's been a tough go for the past several months. Mama always said when you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything. Not that there haven't been good things going on, but I have found that my blog tends to be a dumping spot for words, and the words that needed to be dumped recently haven't been good words. They have been words to spoon out to Jesus, my husband, and choice friends. One day--maybe when I get to NC and don't have a lot of "real" work to do--I will have a long glorious posting on all that the Lord is trying to teach me in this the upcoming third anniversary of my time in the desert. I hope that maybe a cactus will be blooming in my soul soon :)

Seriously. I need to pack.