The inspiration for this post came from a conversation with a friend earlier this week.  She has something she is trying to work out and said she was asking for a small portion of what she ideally wants to see as the end result.  She said she felt asking for more was selfish.  During my morning reading time that same day, I had just highlighted Mark 11:24 “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (NIV) My response back to her was asking for the full desired end result was not at all selfish and “you gotta ask big to get big.”

So easy to say and yet oftentimes so difficult to do. I know there have been several times in my life when I have not fully pursued something I wanted to see happen for any number of reasons  – feelings of fear (the most frequent culprit), unworthiness, self-doubt or pride, just to name a few that immediately come to mind.  There have also been times that I’ve been willing to “put it out there” and ask for something bigger than I thought possible and have seen them come to pass.  In high school, I set my sights on going to a top rated school for physical therapy, and I received an acceptance letter to UNC.  After grad school, I wanted to stop paying rent and instead put my money into a home.  15 months after I moved back to Texas, I purchased my first home at the age of 26.  When JJ and I were looking to buy an “our house” we wanted a home close to our church and was set up well for small group meetings.  God showed us our current house (which is a 2 minute drive to our church and has an ideal floorplan for small group meetings) while we were driving around neighborhoods one day as our old house was being shown.  When my sister was pregnant with her second child, we prayed for a healthy child to be born and our niece is now 5 years old.

Believing that you will receive what you ask for is a common challenge; let me say this – it’s a common challenge for me because I can struggle with “what if it doesn’t happen?”  James 1:6-8 says “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.  That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.”  (NIV).  Sometimes I wonder how many times I have not seen something come to pass because I have second guessed myself or the process.

Over the years, I have also learned that when you’re believing for something big, it helps to tell other people.  Friends and family can help keep me on track and focused on the desired end result if my courage or faith start to waver.  Matthew 18:20 says “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” (NIV).  I find it helpful to have people pray with me and for me during times of great challenge – simply knowing that someone else cares will often relieve some of the stress I feel (whether the stress is good stress or bad stress).

So, what happens when you pray and you believe and the outcome still is not what you wanted?  Is that the million dollar question or what?  Just like I have had several great things happen in my life (the list above is not exhaustive), I have had several times where I hoped and prayed for things that didn’t come to pass as well.  Some of those experiences have been devastating – not being able to have children, having two opportunities for adoption fall through for various reasons, my sister losing two of her children, various personal relationships that didn’t turn out the way I hoped they would.  In some of these instances, I have seen how the prayer I thought was initially unanswered turned out to be answered in an entirely different way.  For instance, we are very involved in the marriage ministry in our church and are honored to pour into other people’s lives and relationships the lessons we have learned so far.  Some unanswered prayers will perhaps remain unexplained this side of heaven and for those, I don’t have a good answer as to why they are unanswered or answered differently than hoped for, other than what I read in Romans 8:28 “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  (NIV).  Sometimes the waiting and the not knowing of how He is working things out, especially when the time stretches into months or years, can be frustrating and confusing.  The challenge then becomes to continue to move forward and ask for the next big thing in your life.

What big thing are you hoping or praying for currently?

PS – I had a really tough week at work and the girls in my office surprised me with flowers on Thursday morning, so I thought I’d share them with you too.  (Thanks again, ladies!)

Last Sunday, we taught the communication portion of the premarital class at our church, including how to navigate common challenges typically experienced during the first few years or marriage, which we refer to as “baby marriage problems.”  Doing so is as much a help and reminder to us of what is really important in marriage (and how far we’ve come in the last 14 years) as it is to the people in class.

One of the topics we talk about is the kind of issues you have when you are first married that often cause what I like to call “moments of intense fellowship” – things like the person who leaves the dishes in the sink when the dishwasher is literally a foot away, how the other person makes the bed (or doesn’t), or who leaves their shoes in the middle of the living room floor.  The last one is probably my favorite – we finally came up with the 3-pair rule.  JJ can leave two pairs of shoes in the living room and I won’t say anything, but when the third pair shows up, it’s time for them all to go back to the closet.  Honestly, at this point, I’ve learned that it’s just as easy for me to pick them up on my way to the bedroom and put them away so I don’t get to the point where his shoes bother me in the first place.  I also decided that if the bed is made or my clothes are folded and put away in my closet, the fact that those tasks are completed is more important than the fact that JJ does both differently than I do.  Different doesn’t necessarily mean worse, it just means different.

When you’re first married, it seems like every decision is a big one and the smallest issues can cause the biggest fights – the kind of fights that you look back on and can’t remember what in the world you were fighting about.  This is a natural process that all couples go through when you first combine space and now someone else is (seemingly) messing up the way you do things (do you squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom or the middle?).

When you have a conflict to resolve, or even just a challenging topic to discuss, establish a safe place in your home for these discussions.  For us, we would sit on the couch facing each other.  We have to turn off all our electronics.  JJ is prone to “ooh, shiny” or “squirrel!” if the TV is on, his computer is open or his phone is pinging.  (He admits this freely, so I’m not throwing him under the bus).  Holding hands is also very helpful.  It is difficult to not stay engaged in a conversation if someone else is holding your hands and looking you in the eye; you can’t lean back from the conversation and it is much harder to look away.

Posture, body language and tone of voice communicate as much for more than your actual words do.  Crossed arms, rolled eyes and leaning back while saying “I love you” communicate anything but love.  JJ found this State Farm commercial that is great example of how the exact same words can have two completely different meanings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ultPAIkFoRw).  Words are like a hammer – they can either be used to build something or to tear it down.  Same tool, but two very different purposes and outcomes.

What you are trying to communicate may also have two very different purposes.  Let’s be real – ladies often times only want to be heard and guys primarily want to fix things.  If the rules of engagement are not established at the beginning of a conversation, chaos is likely to ensue.  Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg.  Over time, JJ has learned to ask and I’ve learned to preface conversations when all I’m doing is venting and I’m not looking for input or a solution.  If I am looking for advice, I’ll ask him for his opinion at the end of my story, and then it’s my responsibility to be open to his recommendations.  Otherwise, JJ puts on what he calls his “stone face” and adds only some well-timed “mmhmm”s while avoiding any facial expressions until I’m finished.  Once I am finished, if he has some input and I don’t ask for his advice, he will ask me if I want his recommendation.  Typically once I can get something off my chest, I’m must more likely and more able to hear his perspective than if he launches into his “fix” mid-topic.  Are we perfect at this?  Nope.  Not by a long shot.  But we have gotten better over the years with lots of practice.

Good communication does take practice and lots of it.  Communication is an acquired skill, like any other.  It takes two people both committed to the process and being willing to forgive a lot and say “That didn’t work so well.  How can we do this better next time?”  If you’re out to win every time you have a disagreement with your spouse, Mark 10:7-8 says “ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be unite to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (NIV), so if you win and your spouse loses, you have also lost.

Good communication is the foundation of what the rest of your marriage is built on, no matter what area.  You will likely find over time that issues that may take you days or weeks to work through when you are first married, eventually will only take you a few minutes to work through and the number of disagreements you have decreases significantly because you’ve discovered that the issues that used to be SO big are now no longer an issue or aren’t worth arguing over.

Don’t be afraid of conflict in your marriage.  Proverbs 27:17 says “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” (NIV) God puts these small issues (only in retrospect do they seem small) in your path at the beginning of your marriage as a way to practice working through disagreements.  If you can learn to work through the small issues with your spouse, it builds trust that even if we don’t agree, you’re still going to be here for me and I’m still going to be here for you.  As your marriage matures (and you get older, I mean mature), you can lean into that trust as you start making bigger and bigger decisions – what kind of car are we going to buy and when? Where will we live?  How many children do we want to have?  Will those kids go to private or public school?  What are we going to do about Dad now that his health is failing?  Making the bigger life decision without the practice of the smaller decisions can be much more challenging.

If you’re newly married, experience as many of the #babymarriageproblems as you can in the beginning.  They will serve as touch points to look back on and laugh as well as help build a strong foundation for the rest of your marriage.

Here’s my last piece of advice for today to make your household a happier place – dual sinks and closets in the bathroom.  Just sayin’….

 

JJ and I went to a training on Friday night and Saturday presented by Paul L. Henderson, J.D., LTC (ret.) US Army, on how to help vets with post traumatic stress (PTS) adjust to civilian life once they leave the military.  Even though JJ is not a combat vet and does not have PTS (for which I am eternally grateful), I still learned a great deal about him related to his military service over the course of the weekend.  The timing of this class was rather ideal as JJ’s retirement date is now just a few months away.

One of the things that struck me during the class were the number of words used that started with “de.”  Deployment, detachment, demolition, DMZ (demilitarized zone), defined.  The prefix “de” is defined by Dictionary.com as “used to indicate privation, removal, and separation, negation, descent, reversal, intensity.”  With military service, there is an inherent level of separation (from your family, civilian life, creature comforts, among other things) upon joining.  Depending on which branch and what kind of job you are trained for, there can also be separation from a prior moral compass and sometimes even from yourself in order to get the job done.

As a civilian, who lives in the United States, while society today certainly has a much greater respect and appreciation for our military, it is still very easy to feel detached from those that serve since (for the most part), the war of the past 17 years has been fought on foreign soil.  In high school, I can remember watching bombs exploding on a green screen on the TV news feeds of Desert Storm in the 1990s and not knowing how to process what was going on half a world away.

Almost thirty years later, I feel only slightly more connected to the military, even being married to someone who serves.  I filled out a survey a few months ago, part of which asked about my experience with military service.  Despite the fact that JJ has been in the military for 11 of our 14 years of marriage, I have not considered myself a true “military spouse.”  Yes, I have gotten used to him being gone one weekend a month and two weeks a year, but I have never felt like he was going somewhere that was dangerous or that he might not come home and I have not had the experience of having my spouse be gone for six, twelve, even eighteen months at a time, with the possibility of not knowing exactly where he was stationed.  My hat is off to service members who deploy and to their spouses who learn to live with those conditions for a few years of an initial commitment and especially to those who do so for the length of a full 20+ year career.

When a vet comes home (after whatever length of service), the “de” words turn into “re” words; reenter, reestablish, reintegrate, retire.  The prefix “re” according to Merriam-Webster means “1 : again : anew. 2 : back : backward.”  If the vet went straight into the service out of high school (either enlisted or to one of the Academies), they don’t have much frame of reference of a life to go back to.  All they have known as an adult is the military – they are defined (back to a “de” word) by who they became while they were in – their sense of purpose and belonging, their community, is tied up in this group of people who are separated from society.  Their vocabulary is different, their customs are different, they are bonded to the people in their unit (another word that very sterile, separate) in ways that cannot be duplicated with even the best of their civilian friends or frequently even family members.  Many times a vet will “re-up” to return to an environment that makes sense to them, an environment that may hold some of their worst, as well as their best memories.

JJ returned to the military with an enlistment in the Reserves seven years after leaving active duty.  Our decision to do so was primarily for the retirement benefits in the future, but he talks fondly about parts of his experiences in active duty that he was unable to duplicate elsewhere during those seven years.  He has told me that he had a greater challenge transitioning to civilian life after active duty in 2000 than he anticipates doing so when he retires in August.  I’m not naïve enough to think that there won’t be some period of adjustment for us both; he says he will miss the people and the comradery the most.  For me, I think it will be strange having him around every weekend.  I’ll likely adjust more quickly than will he.

This photo is a few years old and is the most recent one I have of the two of us with him in uniform.   He does look great in his dress blues!

For more information on the program for returning vets, go to www.soldiersheart.net or contact Lt. Colonel Henderson.  His bio and contact information are below.

Paul L. Henderson, J.D., LTC (ret.) US Army, is a combat veteran who served in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division during 1969 – 1970. He was later commissioned and graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course. He served a total of 23 years in the Army, retiring in 1996 as a lieutenant colonel.  In 2009 he attended a Soldier’s Heart workshop in Colorado and became convinced that the approach of Soldier’s Heart, pioneered by Dr. Edward Tick, was the most effective method for dealing with the psychic wounds that often follow service in combat. He eventually became a workshop facilitator for Soldier’s Heart. Paul also conducts workshops and lectures across the US on the subject of PTSD and warrior healing. He has worked with both veterans and active duty military personnel and has appeared on radio and television.

He can be reached at:  Phender745@gmail.com, (360) 901-3748

As we were walking out of the Nazareth Village, the verse on this sign caught my eye and stirred something in me.  I originally asked JJ to take a picture of just the sign and JJ was smart enough (as usual) to have me go stand in front of it while he took a second picture.

Perhaps you are like me and the thought of expansion is sometimes (okay, full transparency here, frequently) daunting.  I like routine and predictability and enlargement/expansion delves out into the realm of the unknown.  And yet, after a period of time, I also become restless if I feel like I am not growing or learning something new, which forces me to confront the decision of whether or not I want to make changes and step out into something new or learn to be satisfied with the status quo.

I won’t lie – there have been times in my life where I was happy to stay at status quo.  I didn’t want to put in the time, effort, emotion, money, whatever to take the next step forward.  There have been times that I have stepped forward through what I felt was the correct open door in front of me and an amazing opportunity was awaiting my arrival.  And there have been times that I have stepped forward into something that has not worked out the way I thought it would and I had to step back, reevaluate and regroup to see if I needed some course correction to continue down the same path or if I needed to take a new path altogether.  Some of those mis-steps have turned out well with some tweaking and some have not turned out well at all and been quite costly.  What I have learned is that every experience (good and bad), every learned lesson (especially the hard ones) add to the sum of who we are and both prepares us for what continues to lie ahead in life and be more patient with other people when they encounter similar circumstances.

I have read several personal development and “self-help” books over the years.  Most of them seem to boil down to the same general set of recommendations: decide what it is that you want to accomplish, visualize yourself succeeding at the goal you set, put a team in place around you to help you succeed and keep going/maintain your focus until you accomplish your goal.  Easy to say, harder to implement.  For me, I think it all boils down to choosing to put one foot in front of the other every day to walk towards whatever your goal is (getting out of debt, losing weight, improving your marriage, furthering your education, etc).  There will be days that you make tremendous strides forward.  There will be days you fall down.  There will be days you choose not to walk at all.  The important thing is make a new start the next day and take the next step.  Lamentations 3:22-23 states “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (NIV)  And then there is the old Chinese saying by Lao Tzu “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  In the same vein, the journey of a thousand miles also ends with a final step, which may become your first step on the next journey.

For me, this blog is my current step of faith in enlarging the place of my tent.  My current goal is to have a weekly post on Sundays and to develop a consistent international readership.  My hope is that the words God gives me to share my experiences help someone who may be going through something I have already walked through, even if it is just to let them know that they are not alone and that someone else has made it through something similar.  If something you have read has spoken to you, would you please do me a favor and click the “follow” button on my blog and/or share a post that is meaningful to you?

What are you currently hoping to enlarge in your life?  How can I assist you with your goal?

Happy Easter!  I have a new appreciation for Good Friday through Easter Sunday and the steps that Jesus literally took from Friday leading up to today.  After standing in the Garden of Gethsemane and trying to imagine what that night must have been like for Jesus (and his disciples), we went to the house of Caiaphas, where we saw the steps that Jesus walked up when he was taken to Caiaphas for questioning and then back down when he was taken to Pontius Pilot.

The courtyard of Caiaphas’ house is also where Peter denied Jesus three times as He was led away.  Pastor Amie taught us that Peter’s denial of Christ was not that he denied actually knowing who He was, but that Jesus had not turned out to be the conquering hero that Peter had anticipated. Below is a statue of Peter denying Jesus to a girl and a Roman solider in the background.  I was surprised at the proximity of Caiaphas’ house to the temple, as you can see the Temple Mount from the courtyard.

Caiaphas’ house is now The Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu (complete with a rooster on the roof). In the basement is the cell where Jesus was held for three hours before he was taken to Pilot.  There are now steps that lead down into the cell and lights on the wall, but at the time, the cell was literally a hole carved into the ground and prisoners were lowered into and pulled out of the cell by a harness.  Seeing the reality was much different than my mental picture of Him being kept in a more traditional holding cell. I now have a visual reference for the verses in the Bible (like Psalm 88:4) that mention “going down into the pit.” (This photo was taken by one of our friends on the trip, April Pointer).

We walked along the Via Dolorosa, which demarcates the various places Jesus stopped on his way to the cross after he was taken from Caiaphas’ house.  We walked from the end to the beginning, which is kind of like watching a VHS tape in rewind (if you’re old enough to remember VHS).  None of the stops along the way are far apart (some only a couple hundred feet), but the walk for Jesus was all uphill, after a beating, carrying a heavy cross.

We saw a replica of a cross when we stopped previously at the Nazareth Village.  The cross was gnarled and uneven – not the even, squared off cross you typically see in Easter movies or pageants.  I became aware of an added level of discomfort that Jesus must have had that I had not previously considered.  My photo of the cross did not come out very well since it was behind glass, but well enough that you may get the gist of what we saw.

Caroline, our guide, mentioned something that I have heard over and over, but for some reason it struck me new that day.  She reminded our group that Christ gave up his life at the cross.  In all my years, I have known that Christ went to the cross willingly, but I have mis-read the sequence of events, thinking that Jesus died and then his Spirit returned to the Father.  The day I stood in front of that cross, I realized that Jesus returned his spirit back to the Father by choice as He had completed the work for which He had come to Earth.  Only after that conscious choice, did his flesh succumb to death, not the other way around.  That was a huge paradigm shift for me.

Golgotha and the Garden Tomb were both much different than I had pictured in my mind’s eye.  I wasn’t quite sure why the hill was named “the place of the skull” but it is because there is what looks like a skull in the rocks on the side of the hill.  The nose used to be more pronounced, but the tip has fallen off over the years.

The Garden Tomb for me was the most impactful place of our whole trip.  I had expected the tomb to be much larger and laid out differently.  The door was very small, which explains why Mary had to bend down to see into the tomb (John 20:11, NIV).  The original door has been enlarged to make it easier for visitors to get in and out.  Even with the enlargement, I had to duck, (which is saying something since I am only 5’1).

In front of the tomb a track was carved out where the stone was rolled back and forth.  You step through the door into a visiting chamber and the bodies of the deceased were laid in niches on the right, each carved at a slight decline.

Jesus was not a tall man, as I’m not sure that JJ would have fit in the place where Jesus was laid (JJ is 5’10).  There is a low wall where the angel would have been sitting when he spoke to Mary (Mark 16:5, NIV).

The tomb is still empty.  I’ve seen it with my own eyes. (Matthew 28:6, NKJV)  Hosanna in the highest!