Sidewalk Prophets- Help Me Find It (Official Lyric Video)

Nothing left to sow

I have always been a firm believer in. "What you sow, you will reap", and so I have always given my best to all circumstances even if my best wasn't so great. I always believed that the harvest will be better than the seed and that the harvest will sustain the seed. In other words, “if I continue to do my best, things will get better”.

Today I feel exhausted... like I have nothing left to give. It feels like someone or something came in when I wasn't paying attention and burned down the entire crop.

How will I survive this? This is the worst feeling ever... 

There I go again… Feeling sorry for myself… I hate it when I do this... I guess the questions remain.What am I going to do about this? What can I do about this?

I guess the same thing I have been telling others to do in similar circumstances... Trust the Lord! The Psalmist says in Psalm 27:13, "In this I have confidence, that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living" or something like that. So even when I have nothing left to sow I will trust the Lord to provide the rain that will revitalize my soul. 

I HOPE I GET THIS RIGHT!

Daddy, You didn't eat yesterday

This morning my son, Jeriah, forced me to sit with him at the breakfast table. He said, "Daddy, you didn't eat yesterday, that's why you were sad." These words pierced my soul. I thought I was doing a good job fooling him that I am OK.

It was really tough yesterday... for no apparent reason my heart was just very down. The only way I can explain it is by saying that I felt like 'Judah's holiday' is just too long now. Somehow, I guess I convinced my heart that Judah just went to visit a friend and he'll be home any moment, but yesterday out of the blue I realized... He is not coming back. This truth is hard for me to accept. This is a truth that I can not accept...

I keep re-living the 6 April over and over in my mind. I feel like I am stuck and I do not have the willingness to get myself unstuck. Why can't I just let go? Should I let go? What must I do? I just don't know...

So in all my confusion and pain, today, I chose to have breakfast with my kids. Not sure what the next step is suppose to be...

At any moment now

Last night I watched as my daughter just broke-down for no apparent reason. In the middle of doing homework she suddenly realised that Judah was no longer with us... I know the whole "he is always present in our lives" thing, But he is not here for us to hold, to kiss, to just... whatever.

That's when it hit me... this is our condition now. We live between breakdowns. All that we can hope for is that the moments between now and then would extend a little longer every day.


Realising this I went on-line to search for a poster that says "breakdown in progress, approach with caution" but all I could find was, "Quiet please...Nervous breakdown in progress".

This got me thinking. NO! I do not want quiet! I need a friend... someone who doesn't expect me to breakdown any moment now. Someone that can just help me forget this pain. I do not want to deal with this. I want to forget. I want to go for a walk, play pool, do anything except live between breakdowns.  I know it's unhealthy. I know it is probably not the Christian thing to do... BUT I like to pretend everything is alright. Because when everybody else thinks you're fine, sometimes you forget for a while that you're not.

I hope I get through this quickly. I feel like such a hypocrite... Like I am letting someone down by feeling this way. O my word, it is happening again.I am in the middle of another breakdown.

I hate feeling this way!

This is me trying to be real... This is me hoping that saying these things would somehow help me get through this pain. This is me me hoping that any moment now this breakdown will pass and I'll have a few moments of living. This is me pleading with my real friends, Please do not give me my way, don't let me pretend that all is OK... because it is not.

Waiting...

Waiting is tough! I absolutely am not good at waiting… yet that seems to be the only thing that I can do at the moment.

Maybe I should explain what I am on about…
When this tragedy struck I did everything I knew and understood so as to be able to make sense of it all, but it was all in vein. All my knowledge of scripture and ministry seem to give me nothing more than questions.

I began to question my Faith and the validity of Scripture, my existence and the reasons for pain. I got angry and depressed, as if there were no other emotions in between.  But as much as I tried, two things remained… Two things remained a certainty no matter how hard I tried to discredit it…  The Reality of Jesus and the authenticity of my Call… The more I wrestled with the “why” and “how come” questions the more I got confronted with Jesus and my Calling.

It did not make sense… you see these were the very things I sought out to discredit. I wanted to hurt God just as much as I was hurting. I am going to make invalid these two things because I know is very important to Him.

Yet the more I wrestle… the more I struggle the more I hear God’s voice, “Wait, wait for me… wait for my power to be made manifest in your weakness.” I am reminded of the disciples before Pentecost Day. They were terrified because they could not understand… or because they thought to themselves, ‘surely if He rose from the dead, He has the power to do anything… we will take our Kingdom back’ but instead it would seem like He leaves them with only a promise to hold on to. A promise that if they wait, they will receive power.

 So here I am, waiting… I am scared because I have this certainty within me that God has called me and that Jesus is my Saviour, but I don’t have the words or the strength to preach. So I lock myself away, waiting because it’s the only thing that makes sense right now. 

Thank you God that You are with me! Thank you that you called me! Thank You that I can WAIT with You!

Singing through the storm

"Living in the light makes it easier to sing in the storm." (Rev Christopher Saaiman)

These words have been ringing in my ears ever since I heard them. So I got up Sunday morning very intentional about singing through the storm. It was the first Mother's day without Judah, I knew it was going to be a difficult day,  but I was gonna put on a brave face and sing through the storm. But my faith let me down (or so it seemed) when I could not convince my heart that The Light didn't cause the storm.

You see it was easy to convince my heart to sing when I could conveniently blame someone or something else for the storms within my life... but when my theology or understanding of God and what God does or allow doesn't match the neat boxes that I created, it all falls apart. Grief is messy... It is messing up all of what I believe to be true, true about God and true about myself.

You see... I was deceiving myself thinking that I was gonna sing through the storm... Instead I was singing and pretending that the storm didn't exist... and that is not what it is about. Living in the light and singing through the storms calls us to be real! Real about who we are are and what we are about (at least at that moment in time) and Who God is and what God is about.

So here is the deal I struck with myself this morning, "I will will be as real as I can be for as long as I can... Singing about the light that sustained me through the darkest moments in my life". - I hope this blabber makes sense, because this is all I have today.

In my brokenness

Psalm 55:6 

And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest;(ESV)

Today I felt like running away. I felt the pain was just unbearable. How will I ever shake this pain? If only I had wings to fly away.

I attended our Church Synod and part of the meeting was the celebration of the call of people in the ministry of word and sacrament. As I was listening to a young man articulate his calling into the ministry it dawned on me that I might never be able to articulate the real sense of brokenness I feel inside of me, but one thing that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that my God is with me. It is He who called me to touch the lives of others... even if it is only in my brokenness. Henri Nouwen writes, “The man who articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering. He is able to create space for Him whose heart is greater than his, whose eyes see more than his, and whose hands can heal more than his.” (The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society)

So here I end my day with tears flowing down my cheeks, coming to terms with the brokenness that is in and around me. Brokenness that I might never be able to understand or explain completely, yet I will endeavour to no longer be a victim, allowing my tears to be the balm that will bring some healing for others... The Lord being my helper!

So I end my thoughts today with the thoughts of Henri Nouwen, "The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."

― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society