Encountered while checking out “Canadian Secrets” on the Postsecret Facebook Page:

“I’d rather be spiritual than actually pick a religion.”

That’s like saying, “I’d rather be hungry than pick what I want to eat.”

And it is about as healthy.

Here’s to making decisions!

Cheers!

A few years ago I worked at a local hospital and had the pleasure of being surrounded by an amazing team. I was a brand new nurse, fresh out of nursing school and the staff I was with took me under their wing. They encouraged me and were patient as I ventured out of the academic world and into nursing fulltime. The transition is a rough one as you only get a taste of it as a student. Once you take the instructors away and you are suddenly on your own, it is quite intimidating. I was very grateful for the support that they gave. Besides the support, they were a lot of fun. We were always pulling pranks on each other. I have good memories of my co-workers there.

After about a year Shane and I learned that Lyndan was on his way. I was already struggling with having to leave Dylan with my parents while I went to work and so I was wondering how I would handle leaving two behind. A few months in, I developed sciatica. I found work to be very challenging as I was in pain all the time. Soon after, I went off on medical leave.

I tried to stay in touch with my co-workers but I admit, I have been terrible at maintaining relationships. I am trying to get better but I rely on body language when I talk to people so emails and phone calls really are hard for me. They really aren’t my thing. I seriously hate the phone. Every time they would call about getting together to reconnect at a potluck, my kids were sick or I was sick. I thought they would think I was lying given the number of times I used that excuse, but it was the truth. Soon, we lost touch and I wished I had known what had happened to them.

One co-worker inparticular I was wondering about just recently. She had come to our home about 5 years ago for a visit and that was the last time I saw her. I wondered if I had somehow offended her. I couldn’t think of anything during that particular visit but I over-analyzed everything to try and come up with my errors. There were no more emails or phone calls after that day. I was beating myself up just last week for offending her and making her not want to contact me anymore.

Today I was visiting my nursing students in the community placements. Normally I start at the far end of the city and work my way back but today I messed up and bounced everywhere. I wasted a ton of gas. It was $94.9/L today so I filled up but that is beside the point. I ended up going to one particular placement last when normally it is first. I had no other students to see except for this final student. I pushed the button on the intercom and told the woman on the speaker I was there to visit my student and she invited me up and pushed the button upstairs to unlock the front door. I walk all the way up to the care floor to the nursing station. I say “Hello” and begin to ask where my student was when the woman looks at me with these big eyes “Cheryl! How are you?! How long has it been and where did I work with you again?”

It was her! She confessed later she only new my name because I was wearing my name tag but I knew her name and she wasn’t wearing one. Since this was the last placement I had to visit for the day, I walk into the nursing station and pull up a chair. We spent 30 minutes or so catching up on old times. She told me who left to work where (The hospital was downsizing when I left and our ward had been closed spreading our team throughout the hospital while other chose to quit to work elsewhere or retire). I found out how her family is and I told her about mine. Last she knew I had just had Lyndan and she didn’t know about our youngest two. I told her about how I’ve grown since I last saw her and that I was terrible with maintaining relationships before and I am really striving to improve in that area. I explained how I have always regretted losing touch with everyone and that I would love to exchange contact info so we can connect again. It turns out she’s on Facebook, so I hope she accepts my friend request. She said she would. She recently went out for lunch with a few of my old co-workers and says she would love to see me join them sometime.

Remember how I said that I thought I had offended her? Several, several times during our conversation she stated, out of the blue for no reason what-so-ever, that I am a good person and that I deserve to be doing so well. I finally feel like a little burden has been lifted. I was able to basically apologize for being a bad friend in not doing my part to stay in touch and I think she appreciated that. Today was a good day. I’m thankful.

I am a perfectionist. I guess you could classify me as Type A. I like to plan everything out and implement everything according to my plan. Don’t get me wrong, I can be flexible but I prefer not to have to be. If things go according to plan then I don’t have to be flexible because I would have already planned for everything that could happen.

As I blogged before, I have been working on reading through the Bible in a year. It seems that as I start reading, something comes up to distract me and keep me from my “plan”. Historically, I would give up if things drifted too far from my plan and would try again another time but every time I’ve had distruptions with my self created reading plan, I get right back to it and haven’t let it deter me. I am working on my nursing research course which has taken a fair amount of time from my life. I have a couple of projects due, one of which mysteriously disappeared and I had to start from scratch on with a due date of this weekend. The second project was also due this weekend but I needed to get the other one done first as it was a group project and I wouldn’t be the only one with consequences for my portion disappearing. My professor kindly gave me an extension on the second project which I am extremely grateful for. Needless to say, I am really feeling the time pressure right now and I neglected my Bible reading all week long. But…. (there’s always a but)….

I am pleased to say that as of this morning, I have completed all of the Old Testament. I can now say that I have read the entire Bible. I have read the New Testament in the past so now I have read both but my goal is to read both in a year. I chew through the New Testament because I know the stories so I anticipate that as long as I keep pushing forward and not get discouraged by time or forgetting to read for a few days that I will actually finish according to plan and a lot of flexibility.

Shar was in our community group last year, and I’ve known her father for a few years via the Diplomacy hobby.  I had no idea she had a story done on her while she was in Schwarzenau!  Go Shar!

Oh look! A post from me! It has been a while folks. I’m very sorry. My life has been… wait for it….. busy. As a mother of 4 kids, an instructor and Masters student my time gets eaten up rather quick. While I was working on my Summer course I was thinking about how I wanted to get back to reading my Bible and finish my plan of getting through the Bible front to back in a year. Thoughts of getting back to reading my Bible always came when I was procrastinating on my course work and since I paid tuition for my course and I felt guilty about not doing my assigned readings, the course work would win and Bible reading would wait.

I am now onto my Fall course (3 more courses after this one and I will complete my Masters degree) and I realized that December is coming and I again am faced with course readings versus Bible readings. I reached a deadline for an assignment and found myself feeling behind and stressed. I wasn’t behind in my readings but I felt out of control… and I like being in control or at least feeling like things are being controlled for me. After my assignment was in I made the decision that I was going to make time for working on reading through the Bible in a year.

I had left my readings last time somewhere in Ezekiel but decided to pull my bookmark out and start at the beginning of the book. I didn’t see the point in starting where I had left off and then read everything out of context because I didn’t remember what happened before. I have since chewed through Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea and Joel. Amos is next on my hit list.

I have read all of the New Testament many times in the past so once I get through the minor prophets I can say that I have read through the entire Bible. If I can get through the minor prophets and the New Testament before January 1st I can say I’ve read the Bible in a year. I don’t want to rush myself as I want to be able to learn as I go along but I hope that God will help me reach this goal. It is doable and as long as I continue with the habit that I’ve had this past week or so of reading every night, I should be able to accomplish it.

And as a side note, I find that now I have more time since I have been taking time to read my Bible. How does that work? I think I am less wasteful with my time now although there is still plenty of room for improvement.

I’ve been watching the blog of the Wilks Family, in Medicine Hat planting Pathway Church, for probably close on to 6 months now.  It has been a fascinating journey with ups and downs, and it’s been a privelege to be an eavesdropper on a church coming into being from nothing.

When I started reading them, they were just a lone family, trying to network and integrate into the community.  I read about god contacts, which evaporated it seemed.  I read about mission teams coming up from the USA to help them raise awareness and give into the community, and prayer walk.  I read about momentum, and discouragement.  But now, it looks like they have finally broken through something and are moving toward launch.  A worship team is forming, a location for the church is becoming clear, and more and more people in Medicine Hat are jumping on board.

Check them out and celebrate with them.  Lift them up in prayer that God blesses their ministry and brings many into the Kingdom through them.

Oh Lord, sustain my children’s hunger for your Word.  Don’t let my own laziness or selfishness keep them from it.  I am so proud each and every night they beg me to read them a story from the Bible.  How easily that feeling is overwhelmed by the urgent, or by fatigue, or by petty distractions.  Thank you for each of their souls, and use them for great things, Lord.

Amen.

Ed Stetzer recommends this book for those looking to do mroe mentoring and coaching.  I certainly have a couple of uses for such a book, and I do feel I have some deficiency in my skill as a mentor.  If anyone who reads this feels like passing on an early Christmas gift, this would be a great one!

Hospitality. What a big word that is. I’m not talking about the number of letters but rather all that it means at least for me. I have been thinking lately about how I need to open up my home a lot more to others but I find it overwhelming. I like people, however, I do like my privacy and my space. My home is where I go to recharge when I am not picking up after my kids and doing what seems to always need done; from the dishes to the laundry. At the moment I have three sick boys. I did have all four sick at one point but one got better.

Already we’ve been opening up our home on Friday nights to our community group (aka small group/care group) but we could do more, right? I look at my schedule for this Fall and I know I am very busy teaching students and marking their papers, my studies, kids schooling, Awana team meetings, community group meetings, leadership meetings and church events. Somewhere in there I have to fit in mentoring, couple meetings with community group members and connecting with Awana leaders plus time with my family and God. How does one make it work?

Shane keeps bringing up having people over and instantly I think of all the preparation I have to do to have someone over for dinner and more preparation if they have kids (especially if they are young and will want to put our kids’ smaller toys in their mouths). A negative attitude creeps in as I list off all the ways having people over is going to impact me. Honestly, I start to panic.

When I get stressed I slow down. It feels like I never get ahead and so I feel like I shouldn’t even bother trying which is of course a bad attitude to have. But how can I change that? How do I make myself want to have people over and on short notice? If we are going to plant a church my home will have to be pretty open to company. I’ll have to make it visitor ready at all times. It isn’t a disaster it’s just lived in. I have a certain standards regarding how I want my home to look like when I have people over but it is difficult to maintain that standard when I have 4 little boys to take care of. I really need to work through this so I guess I will have to create a game plan as an attempt to eliminate some of the excuses I make for not wanting people over.

My “Simple” Game Plan:
1. Keep the kitchen clean at all times.
2. Entrance way must always be clean.
3. Living room always neat and tidy.

Three rules for myself. I’m not taking on all the rooms of my house, just the ones most frequently visited by company so I have one less panic attack when Shane tells me he invited someone to our house after church and they’ll be here in an hour.

This is my second attempt at writing this blog entry and it’s a long one! I’ve been so busy with kids and my studies that I haven’t had the free time I’ve wanted to write my thoughts out here. I wanted to talk about my trip down to Florida. Shane has already covered the experience of the conference but I wanted to focus on my travel down with the kids.

We all traveled together from Vancouver to Toronto, however, we had to split up in Toronto with Shane taking Aydan (age 4) and going by car to Buffalo where they would fly out and we’d reconnect in Orlando. I stayed at the Toronto airport where I would depart with Dylan (age 7), Lyndan (age 5) and Dannan (6 months) and the bulk of our luggage since it was uncertain how much time Shane would have to check in once he got to Buffalo.

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