Love!

1 John 4:8 “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

I LOVE YOU!

Three simple words can change someone’s day, make their life feel worthwhile, send out positive signals of endorphins to move you and motivate you to go and have a positive productive day. 

I found this interpretation of love extraordinarily spot on! A good read on understanding the different levels of love. 

While love seems hard to define, my simplest explanation is this; God is love! If you can feel an intense compassion for everyone and everything in this world without being wrapped up in hate and finger pointing, you have found God and know all that He is! He IS love!

2 Tim 1:7  “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

When someone asks me how I’m doing, I’m thinking to myself, ‘well, I’m getting through every day and every single moment in love.’ Love is my emotional blanket and the one thing I will carry with me to my death. God is my love. This might sound weird but Jesus is the first man I fell in love with and to this day I still love all that He is to me. 

God is not anger, God is not frustration, so when you feel these things toward people you are not feeling God or displaying all that He is. The past couple of days feeling those emotions sent me into a repentance phase. Anger and frustration are not me and if any of my friends know one thing about me is I’m all about love. They see God in me through the love I emit.

Angry and bitter people say, ‘I have a right to be angry’ and maybe they do but it is not of God. I understand being angry some of the time but to consistently every day spew hate, anger, and frustration is a negative aspect that really hurts innocent people. Is that the intention of the grumpy angry person? It is certainly not who I am! When I feel that way I feel utterly remorseful and feel a need to repent and search my soul.

Just like this disease I’m carrying around, I didn’t see what my bad eating habits were doing to my body until it was too late and inside smothering me. This is the same effect that anger and hatred have on the people around you, you won’t know the damage you’ve caused until it is too late.

This isn’t just about food and what I can and cannot eat. I may come off as being consumed with telling you all of my eating woes. It has some to do with the Season of Family gatherings. When you say very clearly I can’t go to a restaurant or a reception where meat, booze, and more unhealthy stuff abounds because I don’t eat meat, I only eat organic veggies and fruit. They say oh, I understand, but then turn around and ask if they’ll see me at the Memorial Day cookout they have (every year). Well, the answer is NO, but then I’m explaining myself all over again! And no, booze is never ever served at their family gatherings.

I don’t want people to change for me, I want them to change for themselves. But please don’t expect me to be the same person I was a year ago because guess what, my life HAS CHANGED DRASTICALLY! I am not the same and I am all the better for it, too!

People don’t understand when a person is consumed with love and trying everything in their power and the Higher Power to bask in a healing waterfall. They only understand love when the need arises or when it fits their life. Can you imagine if God only loved you some of the time because He has a right not to love you ALL of the time? How unrealistic is it to feel that way? Well God does love you ALL of the time so what is so hard for people to love all of the time? I know... they're human. 

The enemy is out there lurking, trying to turn the love in the world into hate. I strive every single day to bring forth love and when I can’t, I close myself off from the world until I can come forth in the Light of Love once again to share a positive reflection of God in me. 

This week I lost an uncle, in April his ex-wife (my aunt) passed, and in December his son (my cousin) passed. Their deaths, three in the same family, have left me wondering, why has God taken them and left me alive? In the thirteen years that I’ve been away from my hometown I have lost seven family members that I can remember, it seems they just keep going. I know we all must go but seriously, why keep me alive? Is this the reason He brought me out here?

Mortality is not what I’m consumed with, I’m drinking in LIFE and LOVE and if you’re of the life and love portion of my life, I LOVE YOU; three words that can mean the world to someone. If you’re reading this, I THANK YOU for being on this journey, accepting me unconditionally and truly understanding what I’m going through! 

Thank you for reading. I’m healing and loving the world and embracing LIFE! Praise be to God! 

1 John 3: 22 “And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.”

Woeful Wednesday?

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ~Eric Fromm
***

Seems like I have a lot of those days lately doesn’t it? It’s okay when it is only one day out of the week or perhaps a day out of the month. As long as I keep the Lord and my relationship with Him in perspective, life will work out just fine for me.

We haven’t gotten any calls from Omaha to say, “Come on down! You’re the next in line for The Cornea Transplant!” Of course I don’t think they’ll be as enthusiastic about it as the Price is Right guy, but that is what it will sound like to us, who are here waiting for that call. I’m sure people on the outside are wondering, “Did they get the call yet?” and we here on the inside have to go through each day, wondering if the next time the phone rings it is going to be ‘the call’.

I’ve been keeping myself busy, cleaning like a mad woman, since I missed two weeks of work due to my twisted blue smurf foot! And thanks for all of your concern, my internet friends. My foot is healing, I can walk around on it, but please don't ask me to put a sneaker on, it just might hinder all the progress that the foot has gone through the past two weeks.

I did something that I rarely do, and that was REST! I kept my swelled and blue foot up for almost two weeks, only walking on it to maybe wash a load of clothes, or fix dinner, then it was back to the sofa to rest! Me! For those of you who know me, and know me well, Joni does not rest, even if she has impending pneumonia!

Now my grass outside has grown to impossible heights. I like to keep up on it, and yes I have a son who has been mowing, but I’ll have you know, my mower does not like wet grass and it conks out about every minute of mow, so that then the thing is so worn out from inhaling all the wet grass, it won’t restart again!

Woe, Woe, Woe is me! Not! Today is beaus and mine’s ninth year together. In all its color and craziness, highs and lows, ups and downs, to see and not to see, we’re still together. So while I have a lot of woeful sighs, bad days, lowest of lows, I have high highs too! AMEN!!!

Even after the barn caught fire the other day. The owner and his workers were well on their way to reopening this Turkey Ranch I live on. They had the barn all cleaned out and the wood chips were delivered and while spreading them on the floor for the soon to be arriving turkeys, the place caught fire and by the time the fire department arrived, the roof of the place had collapsed and not one wood-chip left over.

The only affect it had on me was the sadness to the workers who were excited to see, after two years of being closed and job losses, the Turkey Ranch was re-opening and giving hope to possibly new workers! We go on! It is what we do!

I’ll continue to rise at the crack of dawn to write and have a great and glorious day today and always. Now I expect you to do the same! :) Godspeed!

Computer Woes

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it. ~Jacques Prévert
***

As one blessing comes in, one must go. It seems the computer is doing it’s crazy little game playing that I’ve come to expect upon start up every morning. I wake at 5:30 in the quiet peaceful stillness of the morning, the ultimate time to get some writing done, but by 7 a.m. I am still sitting here trying to get this thing to work.

After it finally decides, “I’m warmed up”, it works for everyone else and the muse has slid into the back of my mind, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write, and so yet another wasted morning of writing has slipped through my fingers.

I remember about nine years ago, when the computer first came into my life. I hadn’t owned one or ever dreamed of having one. I had never used a microwave, my clothes were hung on a clothesline and life was simplified, and I never sought out more. The writing I did was with a pen and paper, and the only markets I sought were poetry contests in the local paper.

At that time, I had not seen the inside of a library for decades, my son was the center of my world and life went on. Although I craved for more, I had no idea that there was a world out here wanting me to embrace the colors and all the beauty. I assumed life was what you make it, and my life was made to be a domestic goddess, a household engineer if you will, or simplified, a housewife.

My husband at the time didn’t ‘let’ me work outside the home and with every job I did obtain (working for family who had business’) my husband became more and more paranoid, untrusting, and downright obsessive. I wanted to run to the hills but I had no license to drive, so where were my two feet going to take me? Not far I can tell you that.

To make a long story short (yes, I’m writing my memoirs) my life changed the day my brother-in-law gave me a computer, FREE! It was then that my writing took off. I searched google like it was an infinite library of sources, I wrote and wrote and spent way too many hours on this thing! So much so, the obsessive hubby tossed me and my son out!

I didn’t turn to my controlling family, I turned AWAY from Baltimore and headed to Texas! Guess what, there was a world out here waiting for me to embrace the beauty and all the magnificent colors of God’s palette. And embrace and move on I did.

Eight years later I sit enthralled in the writing world. I’m allowed to do my work, write, and no one is obsessive about my use of the computer. The ex has not seen his son for eight years, nor paid one red cent child support, which goes to show, I did the right thing in getting out and saving my son. But God also showed me, I was saving my soul.

Now if only I could get this thing to work! *BANG* *knock* *KICK* *pull* *TUG*
Just trying to ‘reboot’!

***

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die. 

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Facebook Woes

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt it didn't matter.
~Edward Albee
***

I remember a few years ago a friend told me about facebook being a place to hook up with fellow writers and the possibilities of networking. I saw that as a step in the right direction, then I started getting friend requests from people I hadn’t seen in thirty years, so I clicked the ignore button and accepted mainly writers, and very close family.

The site quickly became a game. Sure I loved Farmtown, loved the Garden Patch, Yoville, Frontierville, but they soon became a place where there seemed to be a hidden agenda behind every game I liked to play. Then my computer stopped allowing the games to load, which was a blessing in disguise really. It unhooked me from the claws of doom. But not before I met some awesome friends through the games!

I post scriptures and well wishes and spread good, positive thoughts to everyone who enters my page. I’ve met new Christian friends along the way, and quickly I’ve been a positive link in a negative society.

Here lately the Social Scene that I liked, has now become the scene that I loathe. I’m not a political person by any means. I don’t bash our government for every little thing they do wrong and I certainly am not a partaker of spewing hate to the masses. I go to Facebook for a positive experience, but lately, (until I change my settings) a lot of negative is surfacing.

I don’t care if the president plays golf, is an ‘original born American’, if he had peas for breakfast, if HE is the one who made the call on getting bin Laden. I care, as an American citizen, that other American citizens who have freedoms BEYOND what many countries have, can sit on a high horse and declare their Christianity and in the same breath HATE.

Am I not to love my enemy? Am I not suppose to turn the other cheek? When has facebook become the end all gateway to information, much of it in way of virus’s and more hate?

People love to hate. People love to question. I love to write, share, spread good and call humanity on their ignorance. I am not perfect, I am a sinner. I am tired of facebook and the people who spew hate, and the people who LIKE the people who spew hate. I will limit myself on the scene for a while, rethink my plan of networking, and continue to write what is near and dear to my heart. I will love all, no matter what the others want me to hate.

There are a lot of good people on facebook, sure. But there is also an agenda.  I was told that with this Government of ours that my Christianity was in jeopardy. Little does that person know, the government doesn’t hold MY Christianity in its hands. God does. Her Christianity may be in jeopardy, but mine was built on a Rock!

Ho Hum Monday...

Well my friends it is Monday again. It seems like it was just Monday the other day. Maybe all days are beginning to feel like Monday. Oh dear. Ho hum...

This weekend was our (I say our, as in America’s) Fourth of July, Independence Day. That means cookouts and fireworks!!! We didn’t have any cookouts to attend, but we did go to Bobbi’s for some fireworks. Her kids just love putting on a show of spectacular fireworks and I have to admit, they did a great job. The rest of the country remembers our FREEDOM and Independence on this day.

We didn’t get home until the wee hours of the AM, about 12 am. I have trouble driving on these dark roads with blinding headlights and swerves and curves, so it took me longer than normal to just ‘drive home’. But it was a fun evening, for me and Adam.

I imagine my beau had a nice time. I can’t imagine being blind and hearing all that commotion, loud noise and popping sounds without being able to see the arcs of the brilliant light showering down. Ho hum...

There is something I look forward to this week and that is the beginning of F2K. It always gives me a sense of purpose, running around the halls, helping people along in their writing endeavors. I love helping people and most of all, I love teaching people something new and answering questions. There’s not much that I look forward to, but this is something I look forward to four times a year.

I’m going to put my writing on hold for a while. Don’t know if that means my blog or not, but I’ll keep on writing my poetry. Why am I putting my writing on hold? Well, sometimes in life, things happen and we just have to do what we have to do, and I have to prepare my son for school.

You see, he’s been home schooled all these years and now he wants to go, and really it is quite a necessity in the money department. I need a job so he can get new clothes, books, shoes, and tools, and everything that a real school entails! Home school has always been frowned upon. I hear, “It’s nice, if you can AFFORD it.” or “Wouldn’t he be better in a school doing ‘normal’ things that kids do?” and so many other demeaning, hurtful comments.

Yes, I’m proud that all you parents did such an exemplary job in sending your kids to school and showed the world how great a parent you are. I hope all your kids grew up and turned out to be all that you expected them to be. Me, I expect nothing from my son. If he succeeds in life, great. If he fails, I’ll be there to catch him. It’s what mother’s do, I think. It’s called support your child? Home schooled or Schooled, we all are the same, we’re mother’s.

Writing for an hour here and there is just not cutting it for me. I need to expand, grow as a woman, and be a ‘real’ mother. Ho hum...

Have a sun-filled Monday and hang in there...life has a way of taking the hum out of the hoe. lol