Sunday mornings are a time of rest and quiet preparation for worship in the early hours at our home. We gather as a family, we eat a fine breakfast that my husband prepares, and we go to worship God together at our local church or one on the road if traveling. We are Christians. Sundays are a time to reflect and be thankful for how blessed our lives are, we gather with our community of believers for Sunday School, and share the burdens and blessings of the week as well as study Scripture together. We gather as a congregation to praise and worship God. It’s not a popular choice for many of the projects I have worked with in the past to take off Sundays from working, but it is what I believe I am called to do. God encourages in His word that the seventh day is a day of rest. Now I don’t personally care to consider whether that seventh day is Saturday, Sunday, or when ever, it simply is about seven days apart in my world.
No one has to understand why we gather as a family on Sundays, but for our family it works and it’s important to us….projects still get finished without that time.
When I remarried, my family was simply appalled. If you had been at our wedding, you’d seen Les and I happy looking through through rose colored glasses with a passel of rather dazed children and several adults around us with faces from horrified to deeply saddened and concerned. No one understood two people with as much pain as we’d seen in our lives risking marriage again. No one understood us marrying after sixteen weeks of courtship. No one understood or liked the choice period.
We’ve been married happily for a decade now and that single decision to go against the grain of my much trusted family and friends has been the greatest gift. Sometimes you simply have to do what your heart tells you is right, despite all odds.
I was trained as a teacher, a safe profession, and did graduate work in specialty areas that would further my ability in EDU to work where ever my life took me. Summers off, holidays with my family, why in the world would I consider working outside of education. It was absurd to think I would strike out on my own as a strategist and wordsmith for professionals and businesses, yet I kept being asked to do just that. It turns out the over two decades of working with highly gifted students is perfect preparation for working with start ups, CEO’s, and authors to retool their projects. My work with IEP’s (Individual Education Plans) for years involved breaking down and managing skill acquisition to meet objectives which was a perfect format for business success planning. My work with electronics and programming tools for learners who needed facilitative equipment was groundwork for work I do today in IP technology development. It turned out that working for myself meant that I could pick and choose worthwhile projects and people of integrity to work alongside to make differences for people. It gave me the freedom to work in supporting education without the control of a contract over my words or availability to travel to speak.
When I began, I assure you, no one liked the choice to go into business for myself. My father predicted that not only would I fail, I would end up with tax disasters no attorney could solve…but skills can be learned, and accountants can be hired…. No one would disagree with the choices to go into business nine years later.
As all of us do, I have had relationships that simply caused personal pain. In business that can be especially so. People get caught up in greed, in stepping on people to reach their short term goals. There seems to be an unwritten rule that if someone crosses you in business, you should do back to them something to teach them how to treat you. To wound back. I have had a few experiences of giving my all to a business client only to be used for their purposes, to believe people when they sang sweet songs of my security in their project only to hand them intellectual property and find myself not at the closing table when the company was sold. Naivity can cost you in business….so can trusting indiscriminately . I do not know of a single person in business who has not had a learning experience in that area. It would be easy to stay angry, to blame, to really entrench the raw hurts…
But God teaches that everything that happens to us can be used for good, that anger should be settled before sundown each day, that we are to forgive so that our own hearts aren’t hardened. You see when I pardon someone or even myself for wrong choices, it’s about obedience, not a feeling that I feel like doing….God simply requires obedience, and after all, the battle is His. The wheels of His justice grind ever so slowly sometimes, but it is has been my experience that they grind ever so finely too. No one has to understand my choices to forgive but I know its simply obedience….even when its very hard to do so.
The choice to forgive, to love despite pain, to pardon those who cause you harm, even if it is yourself, is your choice, and it is my experience that God honors that obedience to forgive and gives you grace to do so.
Les and I have chosen to live frugally. We drive humble cars, we live in a lovely home that is much smaller than our friends and not in the same league with their neighborhoods. We are currently looking for land to put an old cabin on to rehab and create another country space to live with our children and friends. A friend of mine dreams of a community where we gather all of our creative friends and simply create the community we long for when we gather as friends near her home in Nashville. I so can dream that dream with her, too often our virtual work communities mean that real time to create community in 3D form is missing. Lives are busy these days, Les and I love gathering friends, to cook for them, to have a houseful of happy as we like to call it, to hunt, fish, gather for movies, or cook over a bonfire together and gather the children to play with us and engage as families. We get teased often for the work that goes into moving folks in, or having extended visitors, or sharing the weekend with many families, but truthfully…the work is light with so many hands helping and the joy is ours. We are thankful we have a home to share, we are aware so many do not. We love our chosen families and we are grateful we can offer a roof over heads when they are needed or a respite for friends when they need a weekend out.
No one else has to understand the choices we make, we simply have to choose the choices that meet our needs and the needs of others we love…or who need love in their lives
after all, the choices we have for this life are the only ones we have.
This post is part of an on-going series of Owning My Life and Making it Mine
Excellent post, Sweetie. Well said that ” no one else has to like our choices.” They will frequently not understand the choices, and sometimes we don’t fully understand them either. We go where God, our hearts, soul and minds lead us. And it’s okay…
Too bad we don’t figure that out earlier in life 🙂
God warned us from the beginning that we would be a peculiar people…that His ways are not the world’s ways, yet it always makes for a life abundant when we work towards obedience. My personal row to hoe in obedience is long and the lessons many, but I find the lessons delightful after the face and so easy to see how God in His Sovereignty had a plan even in the most desolate of life experiences. You and Craig are exactly right …so many of the lessons learned simply take a life of experiences lived to see…
Have a blessed day my friend…breakfast is calling!
Sweetie
What a lovely and spiritual blog..and so true. If only everyone followed it….I remember something i learned in my childhood that went….
“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”
John Wesley
I grew up with John Wesley’s writing… how important and true it is to live…Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to comment!
Sweetie
What a great post. There’s so many people who look at decisions I’ve made and weren’t very nice in saying they thought I was off my rocker. Maybe at times I was off it…but that’s when you live and learn!
I find that most of what God puts before me to do is never understood…I suspect Noah, David, Elizabeth, and Mary felt the same way….Abraham too…but learning to do what we are called to do…called to be…doesn’t have to please anyone but God. Thanks Jason, we’re all on this trek…Sweetie