Reflections
In Cadence
September 25, 2008
When the sun rose today, my collie began his usual morning ritual. I think he is practicing to be Lassie. He begins crying as though some lost child needs our help outside. “Come on, wake up, we have to go out looking for the child!” he whimpers. I ignore him hoping for a few more precious moments of sleep. Moments later a wet nose nudges my arm and exhales in a playful sneeze. “Let’s go, the day’s wasting away,” he wags.
“Ok, I’m yours.” I’m outta bed and getting ready for our morning walk. He’s already waiting at the door for me. But today is different. When I open the door we’re greeted by cool air, low humidity. Florida’s beastly long summer is fading. This is the first day in six months the temperature had dipped below 70. We drink in a long breath of this beautiful morning before we hit the road.
The dog is alert and excited because of the cooler air. We’re off. I start praying, beginning with my thankful thoughts about this gorgeous morning. But I can’t stay focused. The dog is criss-crossing in front of me. He nearly trips me as he darts back and forth across the sidewalk sniffing everything.
As a puppy, my dog was training to be a guide dog for the blind. Although he flunked out of the program, he habitually walks on my left side slightly ahead of me. No pulling on the leash like a sled dog either. Because of all that training, he’s fun to walk, except that he likes to stop and smell all kinds of things along the way. Today the sniffing is ten times worse. Does cool air make things smell different? I finally correct him and tell him to get in line. “You’re getting in my way, cut it out, K.C.!” He gets in line. For a minute. Then he’s following his nose again.
My frustration mounts. What’s gotten into him? I’m trying to get some exercise and instead I’m falling over the dog. I have a sudden realization. I get in God’s way too. Just like this. I become so excited — or sometimes so fretful — about things that I forget what I’m supposed to be all about.
I tell my Father I’m sorry. I’m so humbled and embarrassed by this realization that I have to stop and listen for a minute. I see a few things a little more clearly. He tells me to stop worrying. Worrying contradicts faith. “I love the person you are praying for. I am on his side. Stop pleading with me and start agreeing in faith that I have the situation under control. I’m almost tripping over you. One minute you pray in faith, the next minute you’re complaining and confessing all kinds of problems. You’re criss-crossing all over our path. I’ve shown you what that’s like in the natural through K.C. so you could understand it in the spiritual.”
As a result, my prayers for my son change. I feel the Spirit pray through me, as though I have not come up with the words. I am less pleading. The worries are gone. I submit to what my Father is doing. "Lord, I come into agreement with you about Jon because I know you want the best for him." This replaces my usual, "Please help Jon, Lord," type of prayer.
Yes, God is for us. The more I think about it, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is simply coming into agreement with God.
I get it. I’m so refreshed by today’s revelation. Today I’m in cadence with the One walking beside me. He’s in control. I make the choice to agree with Him, trust Him, obey Him. I’m enjoying my walk a lot more now. Oh what a sweet breeze!
by Sue
Please Continue to Hold
“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.” Proverbs 24:10
Doubts are innate in the human race. But somehow, we think that as followers of Christ, we should never experience them. From the obvious in Thomas – “unless I see with my own eyes…” – to the Baptist who sent a final message from that dark chamber in which he awaited his beheading – “Are you really the one?” – doubt is universal.
Being on the other side of an intense darkness with my granddaughter’s puzzling salmonella bone infection, it is time to reflect.
Reflective listening is the best way for me to hear what God has to say, to see from His perspective, the hidden meanings behind the events and circumstances of life. I yet need to be on the north side before things come into clear view. I guess that’s the same as “hindsight is 20-20.” Perhaps one day that will be different. In my autumn years, I still long to trust God more deeply and to follow His directives more closely.
During Jayda’s three week dance with the salmonella bacteria which attacked her knee, her bloodstream, and our hearts, I pulled out every prayer tool I had in my backpack. As the intensity of her infection stole her ability to walk and placed her in the hospital with two surgeries and IV antibiotics, I put together a world-class prayer team that started in Naples, FL and had delegates from India, Bolivia, Brazil and England, but still the darkness pressed in. These faithful friends helped us shoulder the weight of warfare, but answers came with maddening slowness.
In addition to the prayer chain, I quoted scripture to encourage my lagging faith, I journaled, I laid on the floor – the room filled with worship music from a CD – and wept outright. At times my desperation bordered on begging rather than trusting (trusting children don’t need to beg, I realized later). I wobbled on the rim of a black hole. The silence of God and a seemingly stone heaven were impervious to the “whys” bombarding me like mosquitoes on a hot Florida evening.
It was at the edge of the crevasse, however, that God spoke one simple sentence that reached me and hauled me back to hope. He likes desperation, I think. Once we reach the end of ourselves, His voice often comes shining through.
On that morning, I called to add a feature to my local phone service. After dialing the Comcast number, a recorded voice said, “All operators are assisting others. You have approximately 10 minutes to wait. Please continue to hold.”
I turned on the speaker phone feature, set the phone beside me, and tried to read my book. Every 30 seconds the silence was permeated with a voice that said, “Please continue to hold.”
After about the fifth time of my attempt to ignore that irritating message, I looked up from my reading, and with startling awareness said, “God – is that You?” I already knew it was.
“Please continue to hold,” became all I heard for the next 36 hours. At first I complained about that message. After all, we had bombarded the throne of heaven with our “fervent, effectual” prayers. We stormed the gates of hell demanding the release of our little one from the clutches of the enemy. Why wasn’t that enough to move the hand of God?
Puzzling isn’t it? We just can’t manipulate the circumstances, even with intense prayer. Sometimes all we can do is “continue to hold.” Eventually I came off my high horse and surrendered to my Father’s request. Within another week, Jayda went home. Now, another month later, she is walking again.
Since then, the bottom has fallen out of the US economy, we have a polarized election gearing up for the final death blow, and there are so many unanswered questions in my life and future that I can’t begin to name them all.
The holding is necessary. God works within the medium of Chronos and Kairos time. He has limited Himself to set times and seasons. The fullness of time has not yet arrived for many of our prayer requests to be answered. I know, I hate waiting too, but it’s useless to fight it. Like a cricket with a pickaxe trying to chip away at Mt. Everest, it’s a rather silly thing to attempt.
The Autumnal Equinox
 When we agree to let go of our demands for immediate action, trust begins to form in the center of who we are. It’s the sacredness of letting go and we see it demonstrated every autumn.
Last night friends called and said, “Let’s pack a dinner and go down to the beach to watch the sunset on the autumnal equinox.” It sounded like an adventure. September 22 heralded the first Day of Autumn and while there’s no chill in the air yet, it was a lovely evening watching busy sandpipers and interesting cloud formations close in around the sun as it set on a day that has equal amounts of light and darkness.
Reflecting on autumn today, I am reminded that the fall season is one of letting go. I wonder if it’s painful for trees to be stripped of everything familiar – first the green, then all the orange, red, and yellow. Eventually she must let go of the last brown leaf and enter a period of stark nakedness and bleak cold days. As one writer puts it, she enters “her vigil of trust.”We don’t like standing in the silence with only our emptiness, wondering if we’ll be called upon ever again to shade another.
Keep hope alive because even though the sap is down, it will rise again in the spring. You are celebrating the sacrament of waiting. Another season is on the way!
by Cathee
Return of the Cicadas
“You are part of a universe to which you are so intimately connected that the rhythm of its movements affects your very soul.”
Song of the Seed
Macrina Wiederkehr
Every morning when I let Maggie, my little Maltese dog, out for her morning run, I am arrested by the loud sonorous buzz of cicadas and my heart skips a beat. Fairly large for the insect world of which they are part, they mark the return of dog-days and the end of summer. The season is changing. But not quite yet.
It’s dreadfully sultry in the sub-tropics now – wet, sticky mornings, daily rainstorms loaded with lightning and thunder and 80° temperatures at 10 PM. Cicadas adore this kind of weather. Easily  recognizable with large transparent wings and huge black eyes, they are often misnamed “locusts,” though they are not related to that species at all. Neither do they make their strident noise by rubbing their wings together, as crickets do, but instead have built-in timbals along the muscles of their abdomens which they expand and contract to make a clicking sound. The unison chorus is almost deafening at the hottest parts of the day in late July and August. Their miniature conductor raises his baton and they all stop at once.
I’ve heard them all my life, and as a kid, loved finding their pale silvery shells lodged in the bark of pine trees after they molt. But only in the last few years have I come to recognize them as part of the rhythmic cycle of my life. Harbingers of cooler days, I now anticipate their return every year.
They join a set of distasteful appearances that mark the cadence of my days. Here in Lake Placid, Florida, where I’m writing today’s blog, another signal that fall is on its way, is the predictable arrival of banana spiders. I don’t like spiders to begin with, but this variety is particularly annoying because of their abundance. They are half-way grown right now—maybe two inches from tip to  tip—but they will reach a size to fit the length of an average hand. The picture aptly shows their length – and that’s not my hand, just in case you wondered! Their official name is a golden silk orb-weaver. What a lovely name! It’s so Anne of Green Gable-ish.
Quite colorful, with orange, yellow, and black markings, their venom is similar in chemistry to that of the black widow, but not nearly as potent. They stretch between every available branch and bush, spinning webs up to 15 feet in diameter with yellow threads that shine gold in the sunlight. Growing bigger and bigger they make their mark on the last days of summer until cooler weather arrives or hurricanes drive them away overnight.
Which brings me to the final menace of the trio. Hurricanes. While Hurricane Season officially begins on June 1 every year, it isn’t until mid-August that the temperature in the Gulf of Mexico reaches its maximum height. Today it registers 88.7°--the average temperature of a comfortable hot tub. As the slowly-heating sexpot of brewing water reaches its peak, it begins the siren call to storms, beckoning them seductively to enter her boudoir. Caught in her web, like the prey of the banana spiders, they find her warmth irresistible. When they consummate the marriage, it can be deadly. As I write this, hurricane warnings are posted in Cuba for a tropical storm named Fay who is setting her sights on southwest Florida.
So much for last days at the beach or lazy picnics by the lake. In Florida, we live for much higher adventure. The changing seasons of my world reminds me that while the earth is a globe of indescribable beauty, it is also wild, unpredictable and ever shifting into another phase of its rhythmic dance.
Let me move with You, my Christ. As I dance to the rhythm of my seasons, let my heart rest in the surety of Your grace, the confidence of Your love, the assurance of Your protection.
Blow winds blow. I am nestled in my God. I am safe.
by Cathee
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First I remembered early security as my small hand wrapped around my dad's finger while I toddled beside him. Other memories flashed in my mind: the crushing experience of ridicule, the thrill of winning a race, the paralysis of fear, the pain of being victimized, loneliness, falling in love, childbirth, the support of true friendship, the struggles of illness, finding faith, the ache of seeing a child suffer, the excitement of learning to read and the delight of passing the skill to others, and the pure joy of leading another to Jesus.