When I was a girl I was very dramatic about my emotions.  I yelled loudly, I laughed loudly, I cried loudly.  Everybody in the vicinity could tell how I was feeling at any given moment.  As a teenager, I would fight with my mom and then go to my room to loudly weep copious tears, sometimes for hours.  It is to my mom's credit that though she was busy, and often still exasperated with me that she would come and hold me on her lap and rock me.  "Shhh, its okay, I love you even though I don't agree with you," she would say.  It was comforting.

Oddly, as an adult, I seem to have lost my ability to express most of my emotions.  I can count on one hand the number of times I remember crying real tears in the past 30 years.  Oh, I can still yell loudly, though I don't even do that quite as often as I used to.  I still laugh loudly sometimes.  It seems that I can express anger or happiness well enough; hopefully I am able to communicate love, but most of my deep emotions remain, well, deep. 

I was surprised therefore, this morning, when I found myself crying real tears.  I am getting over a bout of the stomach flu, so I decided not to go to church today.  I sat down with my crocheting and a glass of something warm to drink and turned on an online sermon preached by Randy Nabors, the pastor of the church we were a part of in Chattanooga.  The sermon covered alot of ideas, but one of the statements which was especially poignant  to me was about how when we do good works they should be motivated by Christ's love, not by a sense of obligation or guilt.  To expand, they should come from the overflow of Jesus' love in our hearts, not form any sense that we need to work harder to gain acceptance or approval from God. 

I am not really sure if it was this statement, or if it was just hearing Randy's voice, but I suddenly had a vivid memory of standing and talking with him in our back yard in Chattanooga.  Then, as now, our weaknesses seemed to be right out there on public view.  Our yard was messy, our house needed work, we were poor, and didn't seem to handle our money very wisely, we committed to  help with more things than could actually be done in a 24 hour day, and to top it off, we kept having more and more babies.  I kept hearing these things, but they were never juxtaposed with the things we were doing right.  I am not sure if we were doing anything right.  And, I was overwhelmed and helpless to change most of the situation - including the new babies, which we tried not to keep having.  I really did love God, and I don't think that I ever felt like I needed or even could win His approval.  I was so totally convinced of my own inabilities that I KNEW that it was all up to Jesus' work on my behalf.

To summarize, even though I was confident of God's promises for the future, I was pretty discouraged with the NOW of my situation.  One day Randy came by and picked up little Lester and took him to ride bikes with his son, Gyven while he ran.  When they came back, Randy lifted Lester's bike out of the back of his truck and said something like, " Little Lester is a nice kid.  He is polite, kind and well-behaved. He is an obvious reflection that you and your husband Love the Lord and are doing something right."

That is the memory that brought tears to my eyes this morning.  I still struggle with the same doubts that I can't seem to get things right even though I love God and attempt to faithfully serve Him.  All of our weaknesses, messy house, messy yard etc.  still exist.  I still care that we seem to be more often defined by our failings than by our strengths.  I find myself repenting for defining others by their weaknesses as well.  I often wonder if pouring the love God put into my heart, and pouring a lot of myself along with it, into other people is really making any difference.  I am grateful for this morning's reminder that regardless of whether or not we see it, when we love, we are getting it right.

Already There

One of the Bible's Old Testament stories which I especially like is the story of Elijah moping in the wilderness.  Maybe it seems like I am making light of his depression and discouragement by calling it moping, but I truly am not.  The reason I like the story is because I so often become discouraged myself.  I ask myself, "What is a country girl like me doing here in inner-city Saint Louis?  Are we even making any difference here?"  It is so easy to descend  from these points of discouragement into self-pity, or if you will, moping.

When we first came to Saint Louis, Lester had, probably for the only time in his life, a very specific call from God to come here.  I had become quite content in Chattanooga, TN, where we lived before, and God was not talking to me about moving.  In short, I resisted.  I did not want to come.  "If God is telling you to go to Saint Louis, how come he is not telling me the same thing?" I asked my husband in a thousand different ways.  He was adamant.  We are going.

As time passed, I began to see that during that time, God had given me a pretty specific calling as well:  Be a good wife and mother.  This was a job that did not require a specific location, just a commitment to serve God and my family. 

After living in a temporary apartment for nine years, an opportunity came to move even deeper into the city.  By this time, through the relationships we formed with the neighborhood kids through our church's various ministries, I had caught, if not a vision for the community, at least a sense of compassion for the needs of the children here.  I was eager to move, though I admit that the big yard and the promise of a garden and a chicken coop certainly did not harm my enthusiasm.

I suppose that there was a part of me which, despite the yard, saw myself as a light moving into a dark and Godless community.  One of the first people I met after we bought the house, was an elderly man sitting in a lawn chair in the yard next door.  As I talked to him I found out that he had lived here for many decades.  He had been a tuck-pointer by trade.  He kept this trade to support his real job, which was to pastor a church which could not afford to pay him.  Even in his late eighties after having had a stroke, he still taught Sunday School every week.  I was humbled.  Elijah, in the wilderness called out to God saying, "I am the only one..."  and God answered that he had kept a remnant for Himself.   I moved to this neighborhood thinking that I was bringing God with me, but when I got here, I found out that he was already here.