God's Mercies

I appeal to you therefore, brothers by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  

                             Romans 12:1

The other day I was sitting in church and this verse popped up on the screen. And I jotted this thought down in my journal that I keep sermon notes in -

    "Offer our lives as a HOLY and LIVNG SACRIFICE?  Our lives ARE holy and        acceptable BECAUSE of His mercies and grace.  We do not and CANNOT          do anything..."

This thought just washed over me like a warm and wanted wave.  Paul was not saying "do this and THEN your lives will be holy and acceptable".  The next verse goes on to say:

 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

I think the order of this is VERY important.  He does not say "be transformed and THEN offer your lives"  He says to offer them first.  

I think Paul is saying present your life to God, Holy and acceptable because it is. It is already acceptable.  It is already holy.  

Read that again.  

MY LIFE...YOUR LIFE... IS ALREADY HOLY.  There is NOTHING YOU OR I HAVE DONE OR WILL DO TO MAKE IT THAT WAY.  IT ALREADY IS.  

How?  BY THE MERCIES OF GOD.  His mercies that sent a tiny baby into the world.  His mercies that grew that baby into a holy and acceptable living sacrifice.  His mercies that put that man on the cross so that everyone could be saved.  HIS mercies.  


 And after you present your life holy and acceptable?  Then... THEN do not be conformed.  Give.  Give first.  THEN be transformed.  

I spend A LOT of time wanting to be transformed.  Waiting to be transformed.  But I realize that I have not fully offered my life as a sacrifice.  I felt like I had to be transformed in order to be holy.  I got it completely wrong!  Praise God for His word that is always revealing so much to us!!!!  

What is your Isaac?

What is your Isaac?

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"
      "Here I am," he replied.

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."
Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, "Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you."
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?"
      "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied.
      "The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"
Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!"
      "Here I am," he replied.
 "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."
 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, "On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided."
The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me."
From Genesis 22


This story ALWAYS comes to mind on certain days... mainly the birthdays of my 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th children....

  My husband and I had never intended to have more than two children.  Two boys, at that.   Just days before Evynn was born (our 2^nd) we were talking with my OBGYN about our options for permanent birth control.  Circumstances beyond our control (but clearly within God’s) kept us from taking any steps in this area.  When my daughter was just two weeks old, she started suffering from what we thought was colic (she would cry every night from 1 am to some time after 4am).  This went on for a few months and right in the middle of it all, my husband had double hernia surgery which left him completely laid up for some time and I started experiencing some late arriving complications from the delivery. 

It was at this moment that God spoke clearly to my heart.  Isn't that just like Him?  I love that about Him.  He does not wait until my baby is sleeping through the night and my husband is at 100% to speak to me about this.  He goes in at the worst possible moment and says "Trust me".  The storm is raging and He says "GET OUT OF THE BOAT!!!"

Our church had been doing a sermon series on Abraham and trusting God.  I can remember this moment like it was yesterday.  Keith and I were sitting in the back of the room, in the newborn care area with Evynn, when our pastor asked THE question… 

“What is God asking you to trust Him with? What is YOUR Isaac?”

The answer was immediately clear to me and tears sprang to my eyes.  God wanted me to trust Him with my child-bearing decisions.  Now, God had been laying ground work for some time.  A friend had recently introduced me to several families who had already come to terms with this in their own lives.  I had been reading books, studying the Bible & praying.  Keith and I had had countless conversations about it.  My head knew quite clearly what God was calling me to do but my heart was not willing to agree.  I wanted my life, my way. CONTROL.

So there we were, sitting in church and it was like God was standing in front of me saying “Trust me.”  

Keith saw the tears and asked what was wrong and I simply replied that I did not want a hundred children and I do NOT want a 12 passenger van.  He knew immediately what I meant and he smiled at me.  He took my hand and said “It will be okay, if this is what God wants than He will take care of us.”

The story of Abraham and Isaac has SO many layers, it is so rich in meaning.  I imagine that Abraham and Sarah, after so many years of waiting, could have easily slipped into those well-meaning parents that place their child at the center of their universe.  We have all done it.  This child, clearly from God, needs to be THE most important thing... maybe more important than God? Perhaps this act in obedience was about reminding Abraham WHO was really at the center?  Perhaps, in the few years since his birth, Abraham had forgotten the miracle that this child was?  Maybe he needed to be reminded who was The Provider of all?  I don't know.  I will not pretend to know WHY God does anything.  But I do know there is a lesson for all of us here.

As I sat in that church, almost eight years ago, I had NO idea what my life would look like.  Just as, I am sure, Abraham had no idea how God would provide a sacrifice.  But he had trust.  Radical trust.  

Today is the first birthday of my sixth child, the fourth one to bless us since that moment.  Some of the thoughts I had in that moment have come true. This life is crazy.  And it is hard.  

God has used this trip into Moriah for me in so many ways.  He uses it daily.  I have learned so much about sacrifice and how to serve.  I have been pushed beyond my limits emotionally and physically.  I have been brought to my knees more times that I can count and I am daily reminded that, just as Abraham said to his son "God will provide..."   


I do not share this story to bring up the ever controversial issue of whether or not to control.  I bring it up because we all have an Isaac.  Some of us have more than one.  We all have something that we love so much that we cannot imagine sacrificing it to God.  Maybe it is something given to us by God, a blessing beyond imagination that we never expected but now we have. Sometimes the biggest blessing in our lives (the ones given to use from God that answer the desires of our heart) are the very thing that stand in the way of our true, radical dependence on God.   We are holding on to it so tightly we no longer see God in it, we just see it.  

Abraham, walking out to sacrifice the promise of God, was about as radical a thing as had happened up to that point in the history of man.  And it is a mere shadow of the radical sacrifice the world would witness a few thousand years later, when Christ walked up that hill at Golgotha (a hill that can be seen from the spot that Abraham laid his own son on the alter to sacrifice).  And it is what God has been calling us to from that point on, radical sacrifice.  Sacrifice that clears the way for us to have more of God.  That is what God has wanted for us from the beginning.  Him.  All of Him.  What do we need to give up to have that?  Christ cleared the path, He made the way 2000 years ago, that is true.  But we all have something that has gotten in the way, something that we hold on a little too tightly that keeps us from truly experiencing all that God has for us.  Something that keeps us from complete reliance upon Him.  And even as I live each day, I realize, I have a whole lot more Isaacs that I need to let go of.  What is your Isaac?

My Grandma Kay

First, let me say thank you to whoever is reading this.  My heart is sad today that I am unable to be at the celebration of my grandmother’s life but I am grateful to still be able to share some thoughts on her. 

What is there to be said about my grandmother?  She lived right around the corner for as long as I could remember and sometimes was more like a mother than a grandmother.  We spent hours swimming in her pool, we used to get in trouble for splashing the windows.  And if you have seen her pool, you know the windows are just about two feet from the pool.  Not splashing them was a pretty tall order for a bunch of crazy young girls.  My grandmother’s house was the hub of activity for us as we were growing up.  Birthday parties and holidays were always big events at Grandma’s.  I can still see us sitting around her living room, with the organ in the corner, singing an atrociously slow version of happy birthday to whoever’s special day it was.  Christmas time – when we were young- was always exciting.  We would have Christmas Eve at her house and Christmas day at ours.  It was on those days that us children could clearly see the difference between our mother and our grandmother.  Grandma would make a great meal topped off with this amazing pie but EVERY dish in the kitchen was out and dirty by the time the meal was done, waiting for us kids to clean up!  As she got older and we decided to only have one big meal, I remember always saying “How about if we have dinner at our house and Grandma can bring her fabulous pies?” Knowing that my mom never, shall we say, cooked as enthusiastically as Grandma did!

As I think about my life with Grandma Kay, I remember the matching outfits she used to make for all of us – out of terry clothe.  Very nice.  I remember all the trips she and Grandpa Ed used to take and us getting to look through all the pictures and feel like we had been on the adventure too.   We spent many years having Sunday night steak dinner at her house.  There would be Star Trek watching and for the younger crowd (including my mother and grandmother) Pac Man tournaments.  My grandmother never seemed very grandmotherly to me.  She had a pool table in her garage and could often be found out there in the evening playing pool in her night gown.  Her favorite summer activity was skinny dipping after dark.   She could always find an occasion to open a bottle of champagne, even if it was just because it was a Tuesday.  She enjoyed her senior years to the fullest.  I believe there was even a broken bone or two as a result of some enthusiastic dancing at the club.

As we all got older, there was evenings spent sitting at her kitchen counter, enjoying a drink and the peanuts that were always on hand while we talked about what ever was going on at the time.  When I think of the images of my grandmother’s home, which make up so much of who she was to me, the things I remember are the moon landing pictures over the bar, owls and frogs everywhere. Music boxes, she loved a good music box.  And plants.  Everywhere.  She was a wonderful gardener, a legacy she handed down to her daughter.  

And if you think about legacies, the one that is clearest to me will always be my grandmother and her two sisters.   Katie, Alys and Dorothy will forever be linked in my mind.  I do not pretend that their relationship was perfect.  They were all three different as the day is long.  But there was a love there that was deep.  They were not just sisters they were friends.  As a mother of six children, I look at that and desire the same thing so deeply for my own children.  I am grateful that I was able to grow up watching those strong willed women enjoy each other, struggle with each other and ultimately love each other.  I pray daily that my own children will be committed to one another throughout their lives as they were. 

If I had to pick one word to describe grandma Kay, I guess I would choose feisty.  One of my favorite stories I like to share is when she was in a parking lot at Christmas time and some woman was standing in a spot – apparently trying to hold it while the person driving the car came back around- my grandmother, feeling that this went completely against parking lot etiquette, just pulled into the space, almost running the woman over (in grandma’s defense, she did go slow so the woman had a chance to move).  That is how I will always remember my grandmother, the feisty woman who would not let people get in the way of what she wanted, of what she thought was right.   I miss you very much grandma and I am grateful for all you taught me and did for me and mostly for the way you just loved me!

A day in the life of The Jones Academy

So a blog I follow has been doing a series on what a day in the life of certain homeschooling families looks like.  Inspired by their very organized and beautifully flowing days, I have decided to write a blog about what our days look like at here at the Oasis at Eleanor.

I am Natasha, I am homeschooling my three oldest (8, 7, 5) while caring for my three younger children (4, 2, & 7months).  After spending the night getting little sleep because I am awoken by littles wetting the bed, wanting to nurse, needing snuggles, lost pasi's.....  I struggle out of bed around 7am.  I generally feed the baby about this time (unless I was up holding/feeding her from 3am to 5am).  My children have been trained to stay in bed until 7am but we can usually here them making noise before then.  When the clock hits 7, they burst forth, ready for the day with the dog nipping at their heals.  My husband and I pray together (sometimes the children join us, other times they run willy nilly through the house screaming) and then he heads off to work.

If I have not managed to get dressed before feeding the baby, I get that done.  Sometimes I put make up on.  Most of the time I do not.

I really like to have the bedrooms cleaned up and beds made before we go downstairs but I found that sometimes this creates a lot of stress so I just see how it is going.  What I do not understand is how, after making sure the rooms were cleaned up before we went to bed, they are such a disaster not long after we get up?  Seriously. How does that happen?

I stagger downstairs to chase down the one year old who has run off before I can change her diaper.  I dress her and maybe the four year old (if she wants to get dressed on that particular day).  The others are on their own as far as getting dressed.  The seven year old likes to get dressed, the others are wishy washy about it.

Finally, about 8:30 am, I manage to get everyone downstairs and we have something healthy (like cereal or pop tarts) for breakfast.  Every once and a while, one of them will beg for eggs and I will manage to get it done.

I like to start school at 9am.  But it is usually around 9:30.  Once I get breakfast laid out and we eat it (between hanging off the backs of the chairs, jumping on the table, swinging from the fan & spilling twelve glasses of milk), the baby usually wants to go back to sleep.  So I head back upstairs where I have to spend a ridiculous amount of time getting her to go to sleep because even though I was a Babywise nazi with my first three children, I have gotten more and more lax with each child after that and I just love the fact that she likes to look at me so much.

Then I come back downstairs and any school that we had managed to get started is no longer being done because I was upstairs so long the students have all run off.  I coral them back to the table.  I assign my son his work, I attempt to teach phonics to my 5 year old while pretending to pay attention the six year old who basically taught herself to read.

About this time, the two year old opens the refrigerator looking for more food (because in order to keep her happy, I just feed her all day) and gets out a container full of yeast and spills it all over the kitchen floor.  The four year old wanders over and refuses to play with the two year old, demanding to do school with us.  I bribe her with promises of getting to cut and paste after quiet rest time if she will just go play with the two year old while I try to clean up the tiny granules of yeast that are everywhere.

Now the 8 year old starts hooting loudly (yes, hooting... I don't know why.  Sometimes he clucks, sometimes he roars, sometimes he makes robot noises, sometimes he just hits himself in the head with his plastic lightsaber.... he IS and 8 year old boy) and wakes up the baby, who has only slept for 20 minutes.  I decided to let her cry a little bit to see if she can get herself back to sleep.  I turn my attention to teaching reading again, only to have my son interrupt to ask some random question that he already knows the answer to.  The dog starts barking at a squirrel outside and the four year old runs out the front door to say hi to our neighbor.

Somehow we manage to get through a couple of subjects before it is time to make lunch.  I feed the baby again and we go through the crazy ordeal of eating again (although, I will not lie, I have just figured out that our computer faces the kitchen table and a couple of times a week I go to pbskids.org and put on an episode of WildKrats.  The benefits of this are two fold - one, they are quiet the entire meal and two, we can count it as science).  Then we have an hour of Quiet Rest Time, where I sit on the couch and try to ignore the children who have forgotten what the word 'quiet" means.  After that, the big three finish up whatever is left while the four year old gets her promised "cut and paste time". She sits at the table and cuts up paper into thousands of tiny pieces and glues them together.

Later in the afternoon, I throw something together for dinner and then try to get the house cleaned up before my husband gets home.  It is important to get this done before the two year old and baby get up from nap because after that it gets tricky.

Around 3:30, the neighborhood kids all get home from school and start coming over to play.  By this time, if we do not have school done, it is not getting done.  Any hope of getting them to focus at this point is gone.  

Our days are CRAZY.  I have had six children in eight years.  I never wanted to homeschool.  I homeschool because God has called me to it.  A clear calling.  It is hard and my days look nothing like I thought they would when I started down this mommy journey (I had visions of volunteering at school, morning jogs down Hinson and lunches at Trios with my friends... all while my husband worked!!! ;) )
But here is what I know, it is a good life.  I have my children's best hours.  I get their best and their worst.  They get my best and my worst.  Every single day God is growing me past myself.  I have no idea if I am doing a good job of educating my children but my goals for education have changed.  The three Rs are important but my overarching goal of this whole adventure?  That they would know, love and serve Jesus with their whole lives.   And I trust He will be faithful in what He has called us to!

Oh that elf

  

We had an elf.  An elf on a shelf.  And each day that elf looked at me and reminded me that I would never be good enough.  That I would always be naughty.  He looked at me and denied the truth of the Gospel, that Christ came and died for my sins WHILE I WAS STILL a sinner.

Then he looked at my children and told them that mommy and daddy did not really mean what they said, sure there was always the threat of not getting any toys, but that threat was never realized.  My children learned two things from that elf.  They learned that mommy and daddy did not mean what they said and they learned that they could not be ever be good enough either.

I mean just imagine it, an 8 year old who is REALLY trying to be good but messes up again.  Imagine the guilt and shame they would feel when they saw the elf looking down from the ceiling fan at them.  There is no grace in that elf, he reports to Santa.  There is no sacrificial love in that elf.  And let's be honest, Santa is not about sanctifying us.  He is about rewarding our good works.

So, our little elf went back into his box.

I LOVE CHRISTMAS.  I love the celebration.  I love the songs, the food, the gifts, the decorations.  I love it all!  I love what the original St Nicholas was all about.  I think God loves a good celebration too.  The Old Testament is filled with them.  I have struggled with this.  Isn't the elf and Santa just a little bit of holiday fun?  There is no harm in that, is there?

Yes, there is.  I hate it, but there is.  We are in the middle of a battle.  A battle of good and evil.  And evil wants our children.  Evil wants our children to live lives that are just like everyone else.  Evil wants our children to look like the world.  Evil wants us to believe being set apart is not that important.  Evil wants us to believe that we CAN work ourselves into being good enough.  

Some day our children will be forced to take a stand for their faith.  A stand that will have eternal consequences.  Each tiny step we take towards a works based gospel, a watered down gospel is weakening their ability to stand up and proclaim who they are in Christ.

Celebrate the season.  Shout to the hills that LOVE came down on that Christmas day.  Celebrate that God's grace came to us BEFORE we were good.  We did nothing to earn it.  We are saved by grace.

Wow, it has been a long time since I have posted.  Our family has grown by one...  sweet baby Loryn made her entry on September the 17th.  God has been working overtime on my heart.  I was reading over some past blogs and I realized that there are some issues that I seem to doing worse at than when God pricked my heart about them a year or two ago.  Ouch.

What I do know, is that I miss blogging.  Not because anyone reads it but mostly because it is where God reveals a a lot of insights to me.  I work through things through words.

Our church has been doing a study in our small groups called The Gospel Centered Life.  I highly recommend it.  Each week, I am struck with a new insight, a deep reality a stronger truth that reveals more and more of God's love for me.

This last week I looked straight in the face of my hardest struggle.  My need for control.  I want to control everyone and everything around me.  I gain some deep peace from thinking that I can and do have it all together.  The thing I find discouraging about this is that I have been well aware of this struggle for four years.  I look myself in the mirror and ask myself "How long?  How long will you get wound up?  How long will you lose your temper and lash out at those around you, how long will you struggle with this?"  I pray and pray and pray.  But it is still a struggle.

The thing I find most encouraging is that God knows exactly where I am and He is NOT looking me in the mirror saying those things.  Perhaps the most powerful thing that I have gotten from this study and the messages at church lately is this one thought - the same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, defeated death, is in me.  IN ME.  That power is IN ME.  Waiting.  Waiting for me to let go allow it to go to work.

There are several verses in the NEw Testament that talked about how "I can do all things through Christ"...  "All things are possible..."  "With God nothing is imporrible..." and yet, I struggle.  And then my heart leads me to another verse "Lord, I believe, help me in my unbelief".  That is my cry.  Oh I do believe, in the big picture.  But I struggle with the day to day.  Help me to believe that when the chaos is around me, You are enough to get me through in a way that shines glory on you.  Because it is not just enough to just get through.  I want my life to shine in a way that shows Your glory each day!

Whining

So Bowden's reading assignment came from Numbers 11 today...  it struck a nerve with me...

 Then Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, everyone at the door of his tent; and the anger of the Lord was greatly aroused; Moses also was displeased.  So Moses said to the Lord, “Why have You afflicted Your servant? And why have I not found favor in Your sight, that You have laid the burden of all these people on me? ..... that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom....,’ to the land which You swore to their fathers?  Where am I to get meat to give to all these people? For they weep all over me, saying, ‘Give us meat, that we may eat.’  I am not able to bear all these people alone, because the burden is too heavy for me.  If You treat me like this, please kill me here and now—if I have found favor in Your sight—and do not let me see my wretchedness!”

Sometimes I feel like Moses in this passage... everyone is whining ALL THE TIME...  then it dawned on me...

the hard reality...

Moses was whining the LOUDEST... straight to God.

What a privilege it was for Moses to be called to shepherd these people, God's chosen people.  What a privilege it was for Moses to be WITH God, to speak to God.  And most of the time, he seemed to cherish that role.  One paragraph before this, God sent a fire to wipe out the whining Israelites and Moses prayed to God to save them.  But it seems like it just got to be too much for him on this day.

Like he just started thinking, "REALLY PEOPLE?  Didn't I JUST save you from the wrath of God yesterday?  Why do you not get it?  Just stop whining and TRUST HIM!"

On this day, it just seemed to be too much for him and there we find him, whining louder then all the rest...

That was me today.

I just do not want to hear it anymore.

And so, instead of praying for them to understand, I become the LOUDEST whiner in my family... 

I have missed the point, the privilege that it is for God to have chosen ME to raise these children.

I have stopped trusting Him.  I have stopped seeking Him.  I am looking only at my circumstances and how it makes me FEEL... and that is always a bad place to be!

As I read this, I realized I do not want out.  I want to press in even further.  Just as Moses prayed for God to spare them so many times, I want to pray for my children when they are at their worst!


And what I love about God, about His Word is that it found me and spoke truth to me in the midst of doing school with Bowden....

Pretty AWESOME!