Time is a THIEF!

Like the title says, Time is a thief.  He steals the potency of our medications, the efficacy of our wrinkle creams, but worst of all, he steals our lives.  Not that I believe that Time is the reason we, as humans, or even the rest of creation dies.  What he does is something far more subtle. 


He gives us things to do.  That is his first best line of offense.  He gets us busy, and we pass up all the good things in life.  And to top it off, he has quite a few cohorts he has employed in his effort to waste our lives. Technology being top on the list, so far.  Technology now has new and even more subtle tactics to steal from us.  Such as virtual farming, virtual treasure hunting, talking with people you never will meet, and meeting people you never should have, but only online.  Then there is the ever-vicious cohort named Random Duty.  He has plans to steal your time by making you mop that floor just one more time, and keeping you awake at night thinking about that spot on the ceiling that you couldn't remove after hours of scrubbing.  He packs other weapons too.  I am convinced that he is the one who makes sure EVERYONE goes to the store at the same time, and has to wait in a long line just to get the commodities needed for daily living.  (He may be the one who actually prints those darned coupons.) Work is another one of Time's chief petty officers.  He has life long plans for you, to spend behind a desk, or whatever it is you do, that will keep you occupied with hours of travel just to get to the place he assigned you to, and mindless tasks to keep you there for a full 8 hour day.  Not that Work is a particularly bad fellow, but he seems to replace all the important things in life.  I am convinced, after much long thought, that there are things I will not be wishing I had missed doing when it is my time to leave planet Earth.


For one, I am sure I will not be saying to myself, "Just one more case, Lord, I need to finish just one more case!"  I also am sure I will not be begging time to shampoo my carpets or do laundry.  Most assuredly, I will NOT be asking for more time, because my virtual farm has to be harvested, or I need to collect my daily "reward" from Treasure Isle.


I think one of the things high on my list would be spending time with my adoring grandchildren before they get lives of their own and find their own work, computer gadgets and plant virtual crops.  By SPENDING time, I mean, telling them stories, taking walks with them, doing things together that they will never forget. 
I also want to spend more time with my friends and family, laughing with them, consoling them in their grief, supporting them in their lives, sharing my life with them, and theirs with mine.  I want to see more sunsets, and capture them not only in art, but in my heart.  I want to smell flowers, see trees blossom, watch puppies come into the world.  I want to wake up those around me who are asleep to all the wonders of the world God has created.


But most of all,  I want to tell everyone I know that I love them, and then back it up with actions. That takes time.  Yes, Time has set up all of his powers to attempt to steal that from me, also. Because he knows that Love is the most important thing of all, and, as I said before, loving people takes time.  It takes time to form lasting relationships, to show care for someone.  Love is not an instant thing, or else Time would have it on the shelf at Walmart, so we could buy it and be done with it.  Then he would attempt to steal the reward of that too.


When I die, I do not want people walking by my shell and saying "Well there was a real nut."  I want them to maybe say nothing, but know that they were loved.  I want them to feel that always, and know deep inside someone with skin on truly loved them, and that because of that, they came to know what love was about, and who Love really is.


In short, I don't want Time to steal my opportunities in life to show everyone I meet the love of God.  Someone once took that time for me, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Natalie Grant-Held-lyrics video

Do you believe?

I am struggling today.  Lost in grief, frightened, troubled.  In less than a week, three people that I know, and loved have died. Last month was better, but still lost two who it seemed were too young to go.   I began to wonder what was going on, how does this happen, why does this happen?  It seemed to me the world has become a place of peril rather than something to embrace.  But then I remember it always has been.  As long as the world has gone on, people have died.  That those around me are passing on is not anything new to the world.  And yet, it feels like my world is crumbling around me.  


I went for a walk to try to calm my heart.  Grasp a moment of coherency, before I went to a funeral tonight.  The sky is still bright blue. The birds are still singing.  Nothing is different there.  I thought perhaps that would ease my grief, but I only cried all the more. And then I heard that voice. That still small voice. 


"You believe in God, believe also in me."  I stopped.  I looked up at the sky.  I do believe in God.  I do believe in Jesus as my savior.  It was like I could hear his voice, speaking straight to my heart. When I got back from my walk, I went straight to the Bible and looked it up.  There is was, in John, Chapter 14.  I read it over and over again.  


I have obviously read this many times, hidden it away in my heart.  I have heard over the course of the past 58 years probably hundreds of sermons on this subject.  But nothing like what I heard today.  Nothing like hearing it direct from God, with his still small voice, comforting my heart.  

For those of you grieving today, let not your hearts be troubled.  Just believe.  

Copyright © 2011 by Susan Linn-Gomez. All Rights Reserved.
John 14:1 - 6.  


"Let not your heart be troubled, you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also; And where I go, you know, and the way you know."  
Thomas said unto him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how can we know the way?"
Jesus said unto him, 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."  

My Help Comes from the Lord - The Museum (Let Love Win)

Keep Your Chin Up!

"Keep your chin up, Kiddo!"  I used to hear this said whenever hard times hit, and understood it to mean that I needed to keep going.  But this morning, I find a new meaning to these words of encouragement.  


Last night an old friend of mine went to be with the Lord.  We had not spoken in many long years, but that did not diminish the love I had for her.  When we were young and foolish, she was one of few who stuck by my decisions, when I finally chose to do what was right.  Although her own life, had many, many trials and failures, all I remember of her, is her beautiful smile and her love of life. I know that last night she walked through those gates at Heaven, and met our Savior.  


I woke feeling kind of empty this morning, shedding a few tears, mostly for her family and her children.  Her last days were a struggle for them.  How do you deal with the loss of one who is so young?


I went outside just to view the morning, and to share my personal grief for her loss with God, and there was the most glorious sight.  Dark clouds, but behind them, a glorious light, which colored the edges of them in golden and orange and pink.  I had to tilt my head back to take it all in, for it ran from one side of the sky to the other.  As tears rolled down my cheeks, I lifted my face to the sky, and in that moment, all of my thoughts and heart poured out to the Lord.  I knew that Toni was with Him.  I knew that she had seen Him face to face.  I knew her suffering was over, and her life was just beginning.  Behind all of the dark clouds of her life, there was a glory waiting to shine through, and she was seeing it now, from the other side. 


If I had kept my face in my hands, grieving, I would not have noticed the beautiful sky.  If I had just kept my thoughts to myself, head bent in sorrow, I would not have seen the glory of the morning.  I had to keep my chin up in order to clearly see all of that.  


My words of advice... Keep your chin up!   Look to the Lord for all of your comfort and needs.  


"I will lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.  My help comes from the Lord." 
Psalm 121. 
Copyright © 2011 by Susan Linn-Gomez. All Rights Reserved.

What you can and cannot do; knowing your limitations.

I can hear my Grandad singing his little diddy in my ear about some train that pulled some horrific load and managed to accomplish it.  I am not that train today.  I think I can, I think I can did somehow turn into I thought I could, but not with the positive spin on it that the story has.


What I THOUGHT I could do is create a website, have my own domain, and have it work.  However, what I accomplished was a total train wreck.  I won't go into all the particulars lest I bore my readers, but I will tell you this, I definitely was not acting very much like a Christian as I tried to recoup all my work.  I had lots of expletives to delete, enough so that the dog went into the corner and hid, and even the cat forsook me. I am SO glad that there were no children within earshot. 


But, the positive thing is, that once I settled down and reasoned my way around my limitations (which I have a tendency to ignore to my own undoing), I was able to reason my way back to having a blog.  Hopefully.  We will see. 


It is not that I am not fairly accomplished in the things of the new technology, it is that I think I am more accomplished than I really am.  And it doesn't just fit the technology thing, it goes for all my walks of life.  I have a tendency to take on more than I can handle, and still try to handle it.  Sometimes the finished product is nothing like what I intended it to be. 


Take my Christmas sewing project.  I intended to make (1) a nightgown for my dad, (2) a dress for my grand daughter (3) A Patriots shirt for my son and (4) a hunting shirt for my oldest son.  I started off well.  It only took me umpteen hours at the fabric store to begin to understand that the cost of these projects was beyond my current means.  But no, my train was in drive and I kept chugging.  At the realization that I could not do what I planned, I switched to plan F, because all the other plans were out the window.  I worked and worked until I was grumpy, and not very Christmas like. 


But I accomplished something.  Here were my results.  Dad got a nightgown made out of soft baby blanket material to keep him warm.  It did not matter that the sleeves hung to the floor and looked like the sleeves on a monks robe.  I just cut them off and sewed up the ends and made nightcaps.  I thought that was resourceful.  Until he put it on and looked like an 88 year old Wee Willie Winkie. 


My son's Patriot shirt went in the wash after the next game and came out.. well.. blank. 
My grand daughter is still wearing her nighties.. No dress.
My oldest Son has his hunting shirt, but it has a stick figure deer on it with a stick figure man that says, "Me hunter, You dinner." 


In all fairness, I tried.  Just as I tried with my website.  I think perhaps it takes a little humbling to understand your limitations.  I seem to be getting a lot of that these days.  God must be preparing me for something, I just hope that I can do what He wants, and I hope it is not a website or a nightgown.

Copyright © 2011 by Susan Linn-Gomez. All Rights Reserved.

TECHNO FREAK OUT

Ok, I have tried all day to make this web domain work.  I clicked, uploaded, saved, changed, signed in and out, and apparently, either I am not TECHNOLOGICALLY advanced, or I have come up against .. I hate to say it..
Buyer Beware....

I paid for the account, I did everything I was supposed to do. whine whinge, whine whinge.

I wonder if God ever laughs at us when we are like this?  Because of course He knows everything, so He knows just what button I am supposed to click to get the thing to work, and IT WONT.  I wonder if He is just sitting back, relaxing as I unravel like a really ugly spool of thread?  Right now I am hoping He will rescue all my work, my sanity and my website!

But of course, I know there are other things far more important than this blog that he has to take care of.  However, I also know He can handle all of it at once.  And suddenly I find myself in temper tantrum mode, or nearly.

I have to stop to think about this.  The last time I had a temper tantrum, I ran over a parking block and broke my car.  Not that that is what I intended to do, but unfortunately, I did.  It seems that when I get in the way, I mess things up.  It is a forte of mine.

And my grown children will tell you about it.  Incidents like the meat cleaver applied to the bathroom door to open it.  I attributed that one to red haired temper, but that didn't make it any nicer to see. On MY part that is. The children found it quite entertaining.  It seems every time I ever flew off the handle, they would just pull up a chair, pop some popcorn, and invite their friends to watch.

Ok, Kids. I am going to attempt this one more time today.  Call your friends. The show must go on.

Copyright © 2011 by Susan Linn-Gomez. All Rights Reserved.

A new web site coming!

In about 3 days, my new website, A Journey To Find Joy, should be up and running.  Until then I hope my readers will be patient with not just me, but the technical me.  There are a lot of settings for the web domain, and I am not fluent in "Techno speak" so it will take me a couple of days to figure it out, and then probably a couple more weeks to tweak the system.

Until then.

Susie.

Copyright © 2011 by Susan Linn-Gomez. All Rights Reserved.

Watermarks Of Life

Recently, I inherited an old dresser from my dad.  He had inherited it from his dad, and who knows where my Grandad got it from.  But the memories of that old dresser are not contained in the beauty of it's finish, or the antiquity of it. The memory that is the best of it, is the stain that is on the top right hand corner. 


When we were moving it, my son noticed this mark and commented that he could remove it for me and polish up the old piece.  My answer? No. That watermark contains the most precious memory I have of my grandparents. 


When I was just 6, I went to live with my grandparents because my mother was far too ill to care for me, and Dad was far too busy making a living.  My grandmother, the most meticulous person born on the planet, taught me to carefully dust every thing, and put things right back in their place. I can still hear her voice " A place for everything, and everything in it's place."  I would dust, and sometimes I would move things around, but she would always come back and put everything right where she had it before.  At the time, I never thought about what those things meant to her.  I was just doing my duties, as any child would.  


I was barely halfway into my 7th year of living, when my grandmother fell in the garden on the brick walk and broke her hip.  A week or so in the hospital, surgery, prayers, and careful watches, did not keep her with us. I know at night my grandfather must have cried, but I never saw it.  I remember on the way to the cemetery, sitting next to him in the hearse, and watching this slight little smile, his face turned toward his hands, his eyes downcast, and I wondered, what on earth could possibly make him smile?  After all, we were all alone now, he and I, and I could not see how we would make it without her.  


Weeks later, I decided to take up my housecleaning duties again, and began to dust.  I started in the living room, worked my way around and then into my grandparents bedroom.  My grandfather was off doing farming things, and I supposed that when he came back he would be very proud of my labors.  I toiled away until everything was nice,shiny and clean.  And yes, since Grandmother wasn't there, I moved things around a bit.  


When he returned from the fields, his pleasure at my accomplishment was obvious, but he carefully eyed where I had placed everything.  As he walked through the house, I could see him mentally noting where I had moved things.  Then he spoke very softly to me.  "A place for everything, and everything in it's place, Susan."  He picked up a pencil and walked with me to the bedroom.  


He then did the unbelievable.  Something that Grandmother would never approved of, in my opinion.  He took a pencil, picked up her bottle of Old English Lavender from the top of the dresser and carefully placed it back where she had always kept it.  Then he drew a nice little outline around it on the dresser top, and said,"Be sure to put the things right back where she had them."  Continuing throughout the entire house, he marked each shelf, each piece of furniture with that pencil.   


I was careful after that to always put things back where they belonged, but one day, I washed the cologne bottle before I put it back in it's place, and it made a horrible watermark.  This is the same watermark that is on it to this day.  At the time I noticed it, I as horrified that now there was not only a pencil mark, but also an ugly stain. It is still there, blaring out a message to me from my grandparents. 


As I looked at it today, carefully polishing the top, the message it spoke to me from so many years ago has changed.  Where it used to be an ugly mark, a reminder of my inadequacies and carelessness, now it is a reminder of the beautiful people who caused it to be there.  

People come and go in life.  Some leave your life unmarked, some leave watermarks.  Treasure the watermarks, and remember those who made them. 

Photo of Charles E. Linn on his farm in Pueblo, Colorado. 

Copyright © 2011 by Susan Linn-Gomez. All Rights Reserved.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

I have been chatting back and forth on Facebook with some old friends from home.  We all went to an old school in Colorado, Pinon Elementary, that many would have probably thought was from the days of horse and buggies.  But we have such tender memories of the old place, and we were just sharing them.  When I got off line, I just stayed in that mode, driving down Memory Lane, back to my childhood. 

The old school had these wonderful wooden floors that were polished to perfection.  I always wanted to just take off my shoes and go "skating" in my socks on them.  And the smell of the wood polish hung in the air with the most wonderful aroma.  The big old gym, the sacred old gym, used as the place for the locals to vote, for Christmas plays with all the mistakes and frivolity, and as a lunch room on rainy days, seemed to me the biggest place I had ever seen.  The big old playground with that wonderful tether-ball, that I promised no one could beat me at, the swings that swung right up to the sky, and laughter that rang through the halls; the squeak of chalk on chalk board, the click of the prinicipal's heels on the wooden floor, every bit of it brings back a time that was the best in my life.  A time where I was safe and loved, and everyone was my friend.  


I do admit there were things I didn't like, such as Monty B trying to kiss me on the playground, and Mrs. A, the teacher/principal drowning my brain with fractions.  But other than that, and a few hairy rides on the school bus in the winter snow, I can't remember too much that was unpleasant. 



I went back years later, just to visit Mrs. A, and discovered some very strange things.  The gym was no longer so very big.  The desks, which used to be so roomy, were so tiny that I couldn't sit in one anymore, without scrunching up my knees under my chin.  The playground that I used to fancy as wide open as the prairie was only about the size of a city lot.  Things had shrunk, or I had grown, I wasn't sure which.  


The same strange occurrence happened when I returned home for my class reunion in 2010.  My hometown, in comparison to where I have lived the past 40 years, is a lot smaller than it used to be.  Driving across town takes all of 5 minutes on the freeway, where before it seemed to take forever.  Comparatively, it takes any where from 40 minutes to an hour to get all the way across town here in Tucson. But that was not all that had changed. Even the Rocky Mountains seemed smaller than I remember them, as did the hills I ran across and the river I played in.  


And then I realized that what was wrong was not that things were smaller, but my perception of things had changed.  When I was a child, everything was wonderful, magical,larger than life.  Even the smallest of things brought an element of wonder to my life.  But, when I became an adult, a lot of the magic left out the door, when trouble entered in. Things that were larger than life, that had overwhelmed me with their imposing presence, no longer impressed me as they had, because, to put it in a nutshell, I had lost my child like wonder. It is true, hard life can drive that out of the best person in no time flat. When I pondered this problem more, I found I could not just blame a hard life. The majority of the problem lay in the fact that I had given up the best part of my life, to get on with the necessary parts of my life. I cannot say I was the better for losing the wonder of it all.   

I decided then and there, to find something to rejoice about every day.  I can't say that, as of this writing, I have succeeded, but I am not going to give up trying. I will succeed at this just as I did at achieving a tether-ball game that no one could beat me at.  I am making a promise to myself to recapture the wonder of childhood, and hold on to it until I am in the grave.  And I am going to start right now, once again, by going to curl up with my favorite blankie and say my prayers. Perhaps that is where the wonder will really begin again. In the prayers from a heart that longs to be held in awe by the wonders of God's incredible world.   


Photos of the Rocky Mountains, Near Rye Colorado and the Pueblo Dam and Reservoir.