Heal me...

So I have been traveling a lot this last few months.  Many of you know that my youngest brother, David, died unexpectedly this month from a heart attack.  I came home immediately to be with my family.  I have a huge family here in Honduras, but I have a big family in the United States.  There were 8 children in our family.  WE had never really had anyone from our immediate family die.  I prayed as I went home that I would be able to share something with the whole group that would make them know Christ more or that their hearts would be revived to experience that love from when they first believed.  I had an opportunity as we were sharing at the memorial service, but I just shared about my memories and the love that I had for my brother, as many others shared that same love for him.  It was not just in those things he did, but for who he was, a kind gentle man who just loved everybody, except for people who drove to slow or who talked on cell phones while they were driving in front of him. I loved the memorial service and the testimonies that we shared about David.   He shared his conversion with me years ago, when he was a young man. I had shared with David over the years about my heart for him.  I encouraged him to go to church, not because he needed to, but because the church need him to be there.  He had so much to offer.  He was just a kind man that did things behind the scenes, and was always ready to help someone and was always ready to give someone a serious hug.  

When you experience a death in the family it causes you to reflect on what is going on in your life.  Because of all the travel, back and forth to Honduras, I have to listen to the schepeel at the beginning of the flight about the importance of using your seat belts and your seat being a flotation device and that if the cabin of the aircraft loses pressure, a mask will fall down in front of you and you need to place the mask over you nose and mouth and breathe normally. (which I don't know how you would breathe normally when you were in a crisis 10,000 ft in the air)  Then after you have your face mask in place then  help if necessary help the person beside you.  I think while I was home for the funeral, I was dealing with fumbling around with getting my own mask on that I really was able to help anyone else struggling with their mask.  I couldn't breathe normally because I was in a crisis.

When I got back home to Honduras, the girls were already on the beach trip that we had planned for them.  I had time to walk the beach and seek God about my healing my heart.  After everything that happened, I have been really seeking God about my life and my love relationship with Christ.  I have been a missionary for 20 years now.  Our official time here at this mission will be 20 years in 2015.  So much has happened in these 20 years.  So you would think as a Christian missionary that I would have all of this together.  There is so much going on here all the time. NO day is the same.  Everyday has large challenges. Many have asked how I do everything I do everyday.  I even ask myself that almost at the end of everyday and my response is the same every night when I put my head on my pillow, as I am reflecting over my day that I function here only through God's power and His grace.  There simply is no other explanation about how I accomplish things here.  When I try in my own effort of works, I come up woefully short on every count.  I have learned to give God the first part of my morning.  During that time I ask Him to be with me in my day and help me at every turn and He does.  He is faithful and He helps me get everything accomplished that I need to get done for the girls and the community in which I live. When I get in a hurry in the morning, or have a crisis and don't do what I know to do about looking to Him to get my day started, it is a disaster on every point.  So I have learned to depend on Him, and that is good, but get so accustomed to my morning routine, I have left something important out, which is my love relationship in Christ.

Marriage is mentioned in scriptures about how it is like a mystery to our relationship with Christ.  I was married for 35 years.  During that time we learned to depend on one another and we loved one another and functioned well together as a team making our plans for the day. My husband and I were super great missionaries. We accomplished so much here.  But I found out that sometimes in our familiarity with each other, some love areas were not attended to.  We took our love for granted. That is where I find myself right now in my life with Christ.  He is there for me, and He helps me attend to everything that I have need of, but I am so assured He helps me in the areas that I need doing the mission here, that I assumed when something like the crisis of my brother's death came at me, it took me totally by surprise.  My routine that I had with Christ was broken.

So, I am at the point that I don't want God to be my routine.  He has been faithful and I praise Him for the lovingkindness that He has shown to me and to the girls here at Project PTC.  But because any of life's  unexpected situations, I could find myself scrambling like I did this month,.  There is a song that God reminded me of from years ago.  It is called Heal Me by Aaron Jeoffery   The whole song is anointed but this is just the chorus, but expresses the place I find myself.

Heal me
Heal my eyes
Heal this heart
Heal my mind
Breathe your breath of life
Wake my soul from this sleep
Give me back the joy of when I first believed
Heal me..

I don't want to waste another minute
Taking all your love for granted
I just want to feel your Holy Spirt
Rushing over me..

If I had been where I needed to be, walking in the flow of His love, I could have expressed the love of Christ completely to my family.  My heart was for them to be healed and have His breath of life poured over them.  I would have had my oxygen flowing over me and I might could have been a little more effective to help them with their masks.
 I pray that I won't waste anymore time taking His love for granted.  It is good to know you are loved, but there is a lack of love on our part in knowing this,  we just take it for granted and not keep our focus from where this love evolves. Pray for me that I keep my focus on the source of that Love. That I would pray without ceasing to Him.  Love is the only thing that will remain after this world is no more.  I want to make sure that I keep breathing deeply from the source and be able to share it with others here in my Honduran Home as well as my home in the States.  Blessings, the Healing Honduran MOM

Swimming in the Rain

My brother died this week. He was my baby brother even though he had just had his 50 th birthday on the 18 th of January. I got the call on Monday morning. I had some important things happening with contracts employees and a medical team from Texas who had just arrived the day before. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing.  David was the most laid back person. I had joked with my Mom about how "chill" he was that he was going to out live the other 7 siblings. The other seven of us are a little on the hyper side and have been known to be stress heads.  God has been dealing with me over the years and I had hoped to achieve Dave' s level of peace. God probably wanted me to achieve that too, but I had a living example that God had dropped in my family.

So I abandoned my team, said goodbye to my girls, and jumped on a plane. I thank the team for helping make it easy to leave. They were a blessing while I was there and a blessing to my girls and the community while I was away.  I thank my girls for praying for me while I was away.

We had a memorial service for Dave and so many people came to share how David had blessed their lives. He was a good man, a servant ant as faithful as they come. He received The Lord years ago and we talked some about The Lord, but now I wished we had shared more. He used to write me to play Candy Crush but I didn't have time to play. I know that if I started I would be pretty competitive not to mention obsessive about some of those games. I have whiddled my online game playing down to Scrabble with my sister and brother and a dear friend. However I am competitive about it. At one time I was playing complete strangers. I cut back and then Dave started inviting me to play with him. There was no competition with Dave. He would have slaughtered me. It would be a daily dose of humiliation. When Dave was a younger man he could go to the arcade and play all day and use a quarter for the entire day. He had a mind for any type of game. I just told myself that I didn't have time for that. I wish now that I would have accepted his Candy Crush Challenge.   I regret not setting aside that time.  We all think we have forever with each other here on this earth, but we don't..  I know I will see him in heaven but man I miss him here and now.

I got home and through a series of plane delays I arrived with my daughter number 2 and she was coming to surprise her life time friend and our girls.  During my duress and all the planning I ruined the surprise that I had kept for weeks. I was heart sick. Angela's birthday surprise ruined. Grace flowed from Angela Charity and Kansas. God is good even when we mess up royally.
Angela  Serrit and her husband planned a beach trip for the girls and they arrived at the beach a day before we did. When we got there it had been raining most of the day. It slacked up that night and the girls wanted to go swimming in the rain. I started telling the the practical reasons why that wouldn't be a good idea and then remembered Dave. He would have swam in the rain with them and I decided I would too. I was a cold time but a good time and I am glad I went against my own stuff shirt ways and just jumped in the pool.

The only good thing that comes out of losing a love one here in this life is changing your perspective and try to make every moment, every touch, every look count for something in your heart. I would encourage all of you to swim in the rain with someone you love, and not to be so practical all the time. God gives us zillions of opportunities to connect with others. I am thankful that I am now looking a little harder for those opportunities.

Thanks to all the folks who were praying for my family. Thanks for all the special stories about Dave I had never heard. Thanks for the folks who came to the memorial service and who helped in some way. I will ever appreciate your acts of kindness. Blessings, the Hurting Honduran Mom