A Legacy of Beauty

(Most of these words are a re-post from August 2016. This is the original post that the Lord used to spur me on to look at the Legacy of Faith passed down to me.)

Her stories now reside in a bin in my closet. My Grandma Hazel, the Mother of my own Mom, used to point me in the direction of those stories whenever I went to visit her. She knew that after I was finished taking a walk around the farm, I would want to come inside and read her memories of what it was like to grow up and then raise a family in the early part of the 1900's.

 

I loved to look at the photos of her younger self. This is her wedding picture, in 1921, just a few years before the Country entered into one of its worst economic times ever: The Great Depression.  

But instead of coming out of that time with a bitter heart, my Grandma Hazel showed me what it was like to look for beauty in the everyday.  

  

"Let others tell of storms and showers,
I’ll only mark your sunny hours."    

   

I have always loved sundials.  Maybe it's because my Grandma loved that particular sundial quote, and spoke of it in her writings. So I googled "Sun dial mottoes and quotes" and found a list from "Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations"

"True as the needle to the pole,
Or as the dial to the sun."

--Barton Booth—Song.

 

"Give God thy heart, thy service, and thy gold;
The day wears on, and time is waxing old."  

--Sun Dial in the Cloister-garden of Gloucester Cathedral.

 

"If o’er the dial glides a shade, redeem
The time for lo! it passes like a dream;
But if ’tis all a blank, then mark the loss
Of hours unblest by shadows from the cross."
        --On a Sun Dial in a churchyard at Shenstone, England. 

 

As a child I was fascinated that time could actually be marked without a clock! Funny how the childlike brain works sometimes . . . 

And yet, I am making an effort to keep my mind and heart soft, to be more childlike in sensing the wonder of things all around me,

to sense God's hand at work in places where I might have missed Him if my eyes weren't kept seeing.

Should we only mark the sunny hours then?  What if there is a joy to be found in the shadows as well?  What if there is a Blessing to be had when the shadow of the cross marks our days?

I can look back on days when I felt the dark would never end, but it was in the dark-seeing where lessons were learned that sunlight could never have taught me . . .  When the curriculum that we had spent so many hours creating didn't sell, and when the printing business that we had gathered fell apart at the seams, our family was carried by a God who never left us alone. When the relationships were torn asunder, and when the church that we had loved fell apart, our view of God's love was suddenly stretched beyond the easy phrase memorized and spoken by rote.

Even now, when the fatigue or the pain come ready to swallow my nights and steal my rest, the peace that only Jesus brings teaches me to wait upon Him in a stillness that is new to me. 

"Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings."

--Psalm 63:7 

 

So, should we mark only the sunny hours,  
or should we mark the shadow as well?  
Can we take the risk to embrace them both?  
He has a purpose for us in the shade and in the sun. 

One of my Grandma's stories tells about living through The Great Depression, and the hardness that was endured.  She ended with this thought:

"The people who lived then have forgotten about the long days of hard work without modern conveniences. Like the sundial, folks only remember the happy, sunny days of long ago. I also remember the kindness of so many people who made 1930 a time to remember." 

Singing in the shadows, or dancing in the sun, it is the kindness of the heart that opens the way to see God's Beauty in our days. 



This is Week 3 in The Legacy of Faith series here. Within a few weeks I hope to have an updated blogspace to call my home. Can I ask you to pray for me during this transition? Even in these days of pain and weariness, my Jesus would yet teach me more about seeing the beauty of HIS sufficiency.  


I would love to pray for you,
as you also seek to see His beauty.
Leave me a comment below
if there are places where your own heart is aching.

  

This week I am linking up with these great bloggers:

#Glimpses 
#Teaandwordtuesday 
#Sittingamongfriends 
#Tuneinthursday 
#chasingcommunity 

A Legacy of Praying Faith

I tenderly opened the journal, and its pages almost crumbled in my hands. It’s over 100 years old, after all!  And there I saw the handwriting that tells the owner’s name: Mabel Salsbury Dohm, my Father’s Mother.

           

And I cried as I read her opening Scripture:

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” 

Revelation 3:20 

For you see, I know a part of her story that makes that verse so very valuable.  But maybe I should back up a little, and explain how I know these things, since Mabel died almost a decade before I was born.

I grew up hearing about Grandma Mabel, and what a Godly woman she was.  She was the second wife of my Dad’s Father, after his first wife died, and she, who was known as a beloved Sunday School Teacher soon found out that a pre-teen stepson was a bigger handful than a room of docile Sunday School children.  My Dad told us that this petite little woman wasn’t afraid to be stern when firmness was required, and she had soon won the affection of her new stepson. 

Not too many years later, and their home was filled with the addition of a new son, my Uncle Murlin, and four years later my Dad was born, the baby of the family.  These were the early 1920’s and modern day medicine was still a long way off. So when my Father contracted polio, the family all huddled together to do anything they could to save his life.  But my Grandma Mabel was a woman of prayer, and she sought God to preserve her son’s life.  A miracle happened on the darkest night, and my Father was fully healed, with only a paralysis of his eye movements!

But the bigger prayer life that consumed my Grandma Mabel was for the Spiritual lives of her sons.  This quote in her journal went deep in my heart as I read it: 

“O Lord, cleanse us! O Lord, keep us! O Lord, accept of our persons and services, through Him who is our ‘strength’ and our ‘Redeemer.’"

 

I am so honored to be sharing the rest of this post over at

Beloved Prodigal

with my good friend, Anna Smit, and the team there.

God is doing an amazing work

as He is calling the prodigals

home to His heart. 

Come join me to read

about the bigger miracles 

that came because of Grandma Mabel's prayers

by clicking here.

And this is Week 2 for The Legacy of Faith series that I am sharing weekly in January. You may subscribe to this blog to get these posts delivered directly to your inbox.

I am linking with:

Barbie Swihart,#Glimpses 
#LMMLinkup 

#Teaandwordtuesday
#Sittingamongfriends
#Tuneinthursday

New Word--Old Word

She seemed to be smiling all the time . . .

By the time I knew my Great Grandma Roth, she had lived a lifetime already. I heard all the stories from my Mom: how she felt that she was the Grandma who used to love pretty things, the Grandma who used to play the piano, until a conversion to a stricter way of life changed her. I heard about the hurtful memories of money not shared for a desperately needed surgery.  

But by the time I knew her, all of those things were part of a distant past.  What I remember is a Grandma who never had a harsh word to say to anyone. I can see in my mind's eye the Grandma whose eyes would light up when we walked into the room of her nursing home, and the largest smile you could imagine would cover her wrinkly, sweet face.

And I am sorry to say that I remember the inside joking that would happen between my siblings and myself when we had to sit at the table before and after every meal for the Mennonite way of silent prayers.  My mind, that was used to loud Pentecostal praying, somehow could not comprehend her old-fashion way of praying silently.

Until this past year, when God spoke an old-fashion word over me for my #Oneword last year:

 "He says, 'Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.'”

Psalm 46:10 NIV 

If you have been following me this past year, then you might remember some of the lessons that God walked me through,

here, or here,

on this journey of learning to be still. At the beginning of the year I felt a sense of being crushed, when I thought about being still.  You see, I was continuing to grieve my past life, Pre-RA, of being strong, and busy, and full of movement.

But God's convictions always come with such a sweet

intimacy when we will stop and listen.

He has had beautiful times in mind for me in the days of forced stillness.

And He has had beautiful love-notes to speak to me

only heard when I would slow and wait on Him.

And, so while I was reluctant to begin this past year of stillness, now I have found myself reluctant to move onto a different word.

Am I the only one who faces change in that way?

Do you ever find yourself in a similar situation?

But as I have heard the whispers of the Lord moving me ahead into the new #Oneword for this year, I have only begun to realize that the stillness of last year has prepared the way for the fullness of this year's word to be possible. Unless I had allowed Him to teach me the blessing in the still place, I would not have been ready to learn now that my own self-sufficiency had gotten me nowhere during all of those "strong" years.  It has always been only 

Christ-sufficiency

that has given my life any true value.

And so, I pray that my heart 

will be opened

to see

to hear

to learn

a deeper beauty 

than I've known before:

My Jesus is sufficient for all I need.

#Oneword 365~~2018

 

Is God calling you to journey forward

with Him this year?

Will you join me in prayer

for a willing heart to walk with Him?

Dear Lord Jesus,

Thank you that your shed blood

is sufficient

for everything we need.

Thank You that you gave 

everything

so that we could live.

May we open our hearts to receive

from You what we cannot

earn or strive on our own

to complete.

May we swing wide the gates

and allow Your Spirit

full access

to the deepest caverns

inside our souls.

You are all that we need.

In Your Sweet Name we pray,

Amen.

I think that my Grandma Roth must have learned

the secret of finding Christ's Sufficiency

as she shone with such a deep and inner 

sparkle of love.

Join me back here each week this month for a series on 

The Legacy of Faith that I can see when I look back. Thank you to Jaime Wiebel for her inspiration last month as she shared her own story, and then asked us to think about our own history.

And perhaps Jesus will show us more about what it means to find Him as all-sufficient as we travel together.

Are you hearing a #Oneword for this new year? I would love to hear your comments below! 

I am linking with:

#Glimpses

#Teaandwordtuesday

#Sittingamongfriends