If you have followed my blogs over the years, you have found how ridiculous and fun my life can be, how I spend my time looking for hub side-kick, hiding from me at the golf course or his 5th trip to Lowe”s in one day… how to spend $1 at a garage sale silly and then redo a complete room around it! For sure you know that my house never looks the same 2 days in a row. Hey! God gave me His personality. I am not responsible for the creative notions I get, well maybe all those magazines that come every month with all those ideas. OK, I am just a nut!
In the mix is my life and dealing with God. It is not easy being the daughter of a concentration camp refuge being raised with bitterness and hatred. When I was 10, I met the Nature of God when my Babcia (Polish Grandmother) got her visa and she came to live with us. She was all love. In her eyes I did no wrong. She was 4 ft 10 and when my 6 ft 1 stepfather got angry with me, she would come flying thru that kitchen door, slap her forehead with her hand, yelling Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Polish and he would go running… Now ya’ll who have a babcia know EXACTLY what I’m saying and how they can move…
Things being dicey in my life with my mother, I got put in a foster home 2 blocks away from her for my junior and senior year of high school. After school, I would stop and get hugs from Babcia and something to tickle my taste buds. Right before my 18th birthday I told her I was getting married. She said…don’t tell your mother till you have so she can’t do anything to stop you. She did later attempt to hire an attorney to file for annulment.
The most important thing my grandmother ever said to me, impacted my life forever, “if I EVER hear that YOU have committed a murder…I will know you had a good reason!” I have told this story a hundred times. She loved me unconditionally and that love has carried me all my life because I know that God created her and HE is love and HE loves me that way! It is wonderful to know that HE never holds my sins against me because He send His son Jesus to pay for my sins.
But the struggle is real. You can’t go thru life without pain, failed expectations… wrong decisions; I swear there are permanent tire marks scarred across my body. Sometimes I tell Russ when I’ve had it with him… “let me put you out of your misery…go lay in the gravel driveway, I’ll get the truck and drive over you, stop and back up.” I have to ignore him when he pleads… “please please do it!”
So I spent the last year crying. Yes I forgave everyone over and over constantly and/or continuously…the debate of the evening in our small group…but why am I always crying over the same pain? I excel on forgiveness. The beauty of my God is that when I lay it at the cross LOOKING for answers and SHUTTING UP and for real, waiting and EXPECTING the answer…it comes.
REPENTENCE BUSTS DOWN DOORS that won’t open otherwise. REPENTENCE makes peace with the past. The goodness of God is waiting for us to humble ourselves so we can move forward. I’m the only one I can control. Consequently, I have had a week unlike any week in my life, because I knew that I knew that God THIS week has confirmed the love that HE has for me…
I went shopping at Thrift World for fitted twin bedsheets because I saw on FB that you can drape it over a picnic table and it won’t fly off in the wind. So being the nut that I am, I told the young handsome man cashier…”I suppose that you are wondering why I would want 2 twin bedsheets?” I suspected he would play along with me and he said “of course”! A beautiful woman standing behind me in line screamed OMG OMG!!! She had spent the previous night fighting with her vinyl tablecloth trying to blow away. She said she was going to go home and do the twin sheet thing immediately. I told her I was thrilled that I impacted her life…she said not only was she always going to do that…but spend the rest of her life telling others my hint.
Silly, but I went to my car feeling like Babcia had given me a hug.
I got home and saw I had a text from a friend saying she was “Stef” today and told of all the numerous things she had done on her farm, things the way I do, things like gathering all my metal projects together and painting all of them. That brought tears to my eyes cuz Babcia kissed me again…
Well, if you know God, you know HE works in 3’s.
Another friend out of the blue told me how I am loved, it was almost embarrassing…that I would impact a person’s life as my Babcia impacted mine. God not only affirmed His love for me, but I finally GOT IT! And I’m SHOUTING IT LOUD! Repentance…Forgiveness=equals the peace that surpasses human understanding…quote GOD(not to be confused as an original statement from me)
