pieces and ponderings

I realize that my last blog entry was about warnings…I don’t think I’m on a “warning” kick…not a kick I like to be on anyway…but maybe I am and just don’t realize it yet.

Anyway, yesterday,  after a wonderful Saturday with all of our children in Montgomery, Alabama, the city where our second-born is in college, our three youngest sons and their dad (Bryan Darling) and their mom (me) drove up to a state historic site located near the Tallapoosa River and just walked around the fort sites there and along the river and had a great time being surrounded by nature and a lot of Goldenrod, which is also nature I realize…but which I am also highly allergic to.

I love hiking around in wooded areas and meadows and along rivers…it’s just one of my favorite things in the whole wide world, even when Goldenrod is present.  It was fun even though it rained occasionally and we walked with umbrellas…a very un-hiking-like thing to do…but I wanted to walk around and enjoy nature and didn’t want the rain to stop us…so it didn’t.

On our drive to the historic site I saw some caution signs along the road…they reminded me of some caution signs I had observed a couple of years ago and wrote a devotional about.  This morning, back at home, I looked up my devotional thoughts.  What follows is taken from what I had previously written.

“On the road that I travel every day to my children’s school, there is work being done by the utility company.  The power company workers have cleared trees and erected these giant poles, which hold up a lot of wires.  It’s been a process to get the work done and I’ve spent some time thinking about the road signs that they have placed along the road to alert drivers to their presence and caution them to drive safely.

The first sign that I noticed was a “men working” sign, which I thought conveyed a good message in light of today’s economy.  It’s a good thing to have a job, especially when there are a lot of folks that don’t have jobs right now.

The ‘men working’ sign got me to thinking about God working.  What if, as we went about our daily lives, we saw bright orange signs that told us where God was at work?   I think we might be surprised at some of the places these signs might show up.  It’s a comforting thought to me that God is always at work, likeJohn 5:17tells us, ‘Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at His work to this very day, and I too, am working.’

So every day I drive to and from school, sometimes multiple times and I think about men working and God working, especially the God working part, and then one day a new sign popped up.  It read, ‘Be prepared to stop.’  That simple message got my attention.  Not only did it tell me to be aware while I’m driving because I might need to stop, which means I don’t need to be driving too fast, but it got my attention in relation to the way God works.  I felt like God was using a caution sign to relay a message to me.  I need to be prepared to stop when God tells me to stop.

I wonder if we’re more used to God saying, ‘Go,’ rather than God saying,  ‘Stop.’  Sometimes I think it’s easier for me to just keep on going; and then God decides it’s time for me to stop for a while.   He might say, ‘Stop.  You need to rest.’  Or He might say, ‘Stop,’ when He wants to point us in a different direction.  Or He might say, ‘Stop,’ when we’re focused more on activity than on just being with Him.

I know that there have been times when God has told me to stop.  I didn’t see the stops coming, and that’s ok, God knew where all the stopping places were.  But I think that God has been teaching me over the last few years in various ways to be prepared to stop if that’s what He wants me to do.

Since March 28, 2009,  I have been living and going and preparing to stop all at the same time.  On March 28, 2009, our family came to a huge stopping place when my daughter, Amy, had her first seizure.  Life as we knew it stopped in many ways.  Even now we stop and go a lot.  Sometimes that is so hard, but God is right there, step by step, saying, ‘Go’ or ‘Prepare to stop.’  He has been very gracious in that way.

I remember reading a devotional which spoke about how George Meuller, a great man of faith, had made a notation in his Bible concerning Psalm 37:23.  The verse reads, ‘The steps of a man are established by the LORD, when He (God) delights in his way….’  George Meuller added, ‘The steps and stops of a man are established by the LORD….’

That notation is now in my Bible also.  I have found it to be true.  God directs us when we are to go and when we are to stop. Psalm 31:15a tells us, “My times are in Your (God’s) hand.”  I think that includes times to go and times to stop and that is a great comfort to me.

God has going times and stopping times. God sometimes tells us when to stop, and sometimes He may send a bright orange sign to tell us that we need to prepare for just that.”

Even though the road signs informed us yesterday on our way to Fort Toulouse that we needed to be prepared to stop, there were never any road workers that actually appeared on the road we were traveling to tell us to stop.  We paid attention to the signs, but we kept on going…driving cautiously… just in case we needed to stop our car we were prepared to do just that.

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So I just finished reading the book of Joshua recently and I’ve been thinking about warnings because the last couple of chapters in Joshua have some pretty stiff warnings for God’s people, Israel.

Joshua had followed God’s instructions throughout his life. He had been careful to obey God’s commands and Joshua wanted the Israelites to continue following God’s commands. He warned them of dire consequences that would result if they turned away from the LORD and embraced the idol worship of the pagans around them: “But if you turn away and ally yourselves with the survivors of these nations that remain among you and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the LORD your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become snares and traps for you, whips on your backs and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land, which the LORD your God has given you.” (Joshua 23:12-13)

The warning was clear, the consequences were clear…and they weren’t good consequences.  Sometimes we might receive a warning and know that there might be harmful or bad consequences that could result from our decisions, but we might not know the extent of the harm that could come.

One day this past summer my family had been out somewhere and returned home in the evening, after dark.  We must have been in two vehicles because my husband and our sons got home before I did.  I remember walking into our garage and seeing my husband and our fourth born child looking around the garage.  My son asked me to close the garage door and I asked them what they were doing.

“Dad is trying to catch a stray cat,” my son informed me.

My first thought was that this might not be a good idea.  We have a cat and our cat’s food dish was located in the garage and evidently a stray cat, actually a wild cat, had come into our garage and helped himself or herself to our cat’s food.  When my husband and son had arrived home, they had stumbled onto the cat eating and they decided to try and catch the cat.

Now, my husband is an intelligent man.  He is also an animal lover and likes cats in particular.  While my son had been explaining to me what was going on in our garage, my husband had cornered the wild cat in a closet in the garage.  I was hearing very strange and terrible sounding cat noises coming from the closet.  My son continued to ask me to close the garage door, so the cat could not escape.

My second thought on this matter was much like my first, “This is not a good idea.”

I called to my husband and he assured me that he would be careful…more low pitched, growling cat noises came from the closet.  I closed the garage door after warning my husband again that this didn’t seem to me to be the best of ideas.  I left the two cat wranglers in the garage and went inside.

My husband and son came inside after a little while and told me that they had decided to let the cat go.

The next day, I was headed into town and my husband called from work and asked if I could pick up a prescription at our pharmacy for him.  I wondered what kind of prescription he needed, but didn’t ask when he called.  He informed me when I took the antibiotic to him at his office that he had stopped in to see our family doctor that morning on his way to work.  Then he showed me a very red and swollen and warm-to-the-touch index finger, the result of a cat bite from a wild stray cat which was trying to get past the crazy man that had him cornered in a garage closet.

The cat had not only bitten my husband’s finger, but had bitten through work gloves that my husband had been wearing and still left a deep puncture wound in my husband’s finger.

I just looked at my husband with his boyish, “Oops” grin AND I reminded him that he is a grown man who should know better than to corner crazed wild stray cats, which are emitting low-sounding growly noises.

After one round of antibiotics, my husband’s finger was still red and swollen. He was prescribed more antibiotics and then he was sent to a hand specialist at the orthopedic clinic.

My husband would wind up having numerous appointments with the hand specialist at the orthopedic clinic.  He took three rounds of antibiotics.  He received two different steroid injections from the hand specialist at the orthopedic clinic and they talked about possible surgery if the inflammation didn’t go down.

Thankfully, the second steroid shot seemed to help enough that my husband decided not to forego the surgical procedure.

Like I said, my husband is an intelligent man; he knew some of the risks involved in trying to catch a wild cat, but evidently he didn’t know ALL of the risks involved in trying to catch a wild cat.  He went against the warnings of his wife AND  his own common sense and unfortunately had to suffer the consequences of a wild cat’s fury.

Warnings are good.  Warnings have a purpose.  Joshua gave the Israelites warnings because he cared about them. God gave the Israelites warnings because He cared about them.  God gives us warnings also…because He cares about us.  And most of the time, probably ALL of the time,  it is just a good and wise idea to heed the warnings.

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