Making Sweet Memories

For the sake of the one or two who are interested in what is going on in our lives here, I am posting a few pictures from our last weekend. I didn't get very many pictures and didn't take any when we went to the lake for a little while after we finished this job. But we had a good time with four families getting together and processing between 55 and 60 dozen ears of sweet corn for freezing. We ended up with almost 120 quart bags of corn to freeze and still had over a couple dozen left in the shucks for any of us to use in the coming days at home.

The people we bought the corn from were very nice and not only threw in one to three extra ears per dozen but also gave me several bags extra just because we bought so much. I thought that was very generous of them especially since they also rounded the price down several dollars as well.

As you can see we had a good time together that day. Late in the afternoon some of us hurried off to the lake so that one of my friends here could try out some skiing. He had not tried to ski since he was a young boy around nine or ten years old so I wanted him to have a chance before the weather turns less warm soon.

He did very well and got up on the second try after the support pole on the back of the boat broke on the first try. He skied very well for never having done it before and took two trips around the lake for a good time before we had to get the boat out of the water for a quickly approaching storm hit. We hope to get a chance to do it at least one more time before the summer is too far gone if we can get our schedules to match up and the weather to line up at the same time.

This is the second year that we have frozen this sweet corn. We just finished up all the corn we froze last year and it has been very good. This year we decided to do a little more than last time but also wanted to get other people involved this time partly for the fun and to get the work done quicker. Of course certain people also had to indulge in a number of “corny” remarks throughout the day which kept some in stitches and others rolling their eyes. But hopefully everyone will look back on this as a good memory to repeat again sometime in the future.

Cleaning the Garage

Last weekend I launched into a project that I have been procrastinating for a number of years – cleaning the garage. Now that may not sound so profound to most people, but then they haven't seen the ghosts or know the history lurking in my garage. This is a very complicated place filled with relics of old memories from many years and leftover tools of various trades I have been involved in for a very long time. It also contains much of my Dad's leftover tools and items that I have never dealt with since his passing.

A number of problems have inhibited me from tackling this project for a long time. It began when we first moved here in a big hurry a number of years ago. My step-mother was killed in a car accident suddenly while my Dad was in a nursing home and I rushed down here from Michigan with my sister to deal with the situation. A week later we were forced to move here very quickly and since the house was already full of my parent's things much of our stuff ended up filling the garage rather tightly as well as some of the bedrooms.

Over the years we have whittled down much of the pressure and reduced the height of the stacks of boxes and furniture stored there, but I have never really taken the time to sort through everything thoroughly. Part of the reason for this was that I have always felt a mental block against doing this. I simply couldn't get myself to make so many decisions about things from every area of my life since childhood. The clutter was quite representative of the way I felt inside emotionally and I felt stuck for many years.

But events over the past few months have brought me to a major crisis and turning point internally and seem to have had the unexpected effect of breaking loose the log-jam emotionally preventing me from tackling this enormous undertaking.

The first thing I felt I needed to do was to fix the garage door header. Whoever built the garage originally had undersized the header and it had sagged dangerously over the years. When I replaced the shingles on the roof a few years ago before Dad died, I jacked up the header to its proper height and installed a temporary post in the center of the doorway until I could deal with the problem correctly. I had already purchased a ten inch wide steel plate the full length of the header to fasten to its face but I had never taken the time to install it. Now I finally got the initiative to do it.

Part of my initiative came from the fact that I had something else very pressing that I needed to do that I really did not want to face. Ironically it is those situations that have sometimes given me the most motivation to do other things I have been putting off for years. It seems that one unpleasant job can suddenly become very appealing to me when something even more unpleasant becomes urgent. While I am stalling against dealing with the most unpleasant job I suddenly become very motivated to accomplish all sorts of other unpleasant tasks that I could not bring myself to do before.

So I extracted the steel plate from the floor of the garage from under the clutter and began to drill holes for the bolts to hold it tight to the header. Then I cleaned and painted it to keep it from further rusting and took the garage door supports loose so I could insert it behind them. A friend generously came over to help me lift it into place and we were able to secure it enough to allow me to finish it without him. After I released the supporting post in the center it still sagged around ½ to ¾ inch even with 50 strong lag bolts holding it in place. But that is just going to have to be good enough.

With the door opening now cleared I felt one less obstruction to really getting serious about cleaning the garage properly and facing all my ghosts from the past lurking in there. Since I was between jobs right then I also didn't have the distraction of needing to spend time away and could focus all my energies and attention making the difficult decisions required to deal with all the things I would uncover. For two days straight I sorted and cleaned and tossed and agonized and moved things around. At that point I had filled 8-9 large construction garbage bags full of items to throw away and still have much more to go. Many things had simply deteriorated over the years or had been damaged by mice and rust.

All through this time I could feel my emotions going through some similar and parallel sorting processes. I feel like internally I am also sorting through many things from my own past and being forced to toss out some things I have clung to for years as being very important in my life. That too is a very difficult and painful process that does not happen easily or very quickly. But I know God is in charge of that process and is likely even using this external occupation to facilitate part of that internal cleaning operation.

In my sorting and cleaning and tossing I was keen to find some things that have been missing ever since we moved here. One of them is some journals that I was writing from my first days studying the Bible inductively, but unfortunately they still have not appeared. Another was a large number of CD's that contained music that I realized was missing a few months ago that I wanted to share with my quartet. That was discovered in the furtherest drawer in a desk in the far corner of the garage including a good number of much valued cassette tapes from many years ago.

In that discovery I also came across a recording of the very last time the Praise Team I sang with years ago ever sang together. We had gotten together for one last program all the way up in Canada and presented a whole service in a church pastored by the former leader of our team. As I sat down and listened to the songs that I had not sung in many years I couldn't help but begin to feel very emotional and nostalgic. I have deeply missed the opportunities to worship God collectively with others through praise music ever since that last day we were together and this recording only reminded me of this deep emptiness inside as I once again sang along with the team and thought about those times of joy long ago.

I have still not finished this project. I have quite a ways to go and I hope to make more progress this week as I don't have any work lined up right now. I think that God intends for me to deal with this issue because it really is connected to things that need to be resolved internally as well. It has certainly stirred up many old memories as I have gone through old boxes and drawers. We even came across my wife's wedding dress which we have not seen for quite some time.

There is much more going on in my life that I cannot talk about publicly right now but that is creating a great deal of opportunity for me to trust in God very intently and consistently. Yesterday I found myself slipping into some old emotional habit patterns that alarmed me. They are not easy to shake off and I had to pay extra special attention to my own spirit for quite awhile to keep me from launching off in the wrong direction and possibly loosing some divine protection inadvertently.

So pray for my project, both internally and externally, that I can become free and open and more usable for greater things than just storage. I hope to have the garage actually usable to put a car in there this winter for the first time since my parents used it for that years ago. I also hope to have my own heart cleaned up enough soon so that God can park His possessions in there and have free access to do more with it besides just house-cleaning.

New Life

I realize that I have not posted much on this site lately. That is because I have diversified my output to 4 different blogs according to content. This one is more for just life which at times is not necessarily either real interesting or too interesting to put on the web. Anyway, I took a few shots of our plants that some call resurrection plants. I probably did the same thing last year and I know I posted a few pictures of these when they came up the first time around this last spring. It seems to me like they are coming up the second time earlier than usual but maybe I'm wrong. I would like to get some picture of the many hummingbirds that crowd around our feeders just outside our bay window but that is a much greater challenge photographically. This last picture is one of the very first of these plants to bloom. Each time they come up like this is gives me a little shot of encouragement, even though in my opinion the flowers are not all that glamorous. The first ones to bloom were close to the house while all the others all over the yard are playing catch-up.

Music and Work

Just a little note here to post a little of what has gone on in my life recently. Last Sunday we took our boat out and had some fun on the lake with some friends. The week before we did the same thing with some other friends and ended up having to be towed in by the lake police after the boat refused to start again and the wind blew us to the shore.

After that frustrating experience which has been plaguing me for several years (the boat starting to stall out and run rough after about an hour), I installed an electric fuel pump replacing the mechanical one that we suspected might be overheating the fuel. This time we only experienced a few minutes of rough running and then it seemed to clear up. I still don't know for sure what is going on but this was a big improvement over previous escapades.

I have been painting and replacing some of the floors in a church member's house the past few weeks and took a few pictures to document what it looks like. The floors are so much nicer than the old ones and I took the liberty to paint the doors a little more interesting than they usually get painted.

Last week our quartet sang at our church as the very first time we have sung in public. Astonishingly the visiting pastor showed up wearing an identical outfit including the exact same pattern and color tie that we were all wearing. Tonight we sang in another much larger church and tomorrow morning we will sing again in both Sunday morning services where one of our quartet members attends. We are also scheduled to sing later this summer at a home-owners association meeting and also at a church picnic program.

So far we have only learned three songs during the last 2-3 months but are getting better at reading music and picking up new songs more quickly. We have a large resource of music from which to choose including quite a number that I used in my previous quartet about 20 years ago. We hope to learn enough songs soon so that we might be able to put on a whole program at some point.

Our church appointed me to be director of music along with director of audio-visual services this coming year so things are getting even busier. I am encouraged at some of the changes people are willing to do in our services and we are experimenting with things never done in this church before as far as I know.

I also took a picture of the new sound room that I recently built in the back of the church. It is such a help in getting the mess out of the main part of the church and getting everything centralized in one place for a person to operate without being in the way and so conspicuous as it was before. We are now set up to record directly to CD's which has also allowed us to provide copies immediately after the service to those who want them.

I am still planning to install a fold-up shelf for a laptop for projecting images in the front of the church which will be added just under the window.

Joy or Fear

I am sensing one of my natural tendencies that much of the time keeps me focused in the wrong direction. It is the natural attraction toward thinking about fearful things, foreboding thoughts or scenarios about the future more than spending much needed effort and focus on developing joy strength within my own self and with others.

What I have learned, at least intellectually, is that the only real preparation for times of crisis when fear is overwhelming and unavoidable is the inner capacity and strength that only comes from joy training. That is the way the brain is created to operate. But ironically most Christians have been trained to assume just the opposite when it comes to preparing for trials. Somehow we have come to believe that dwelling on fear itself is supposed to get a person ready to successfully face events that induce fear in us. Thus the penchant present in my life to more easily think about fearful possibilities rather than exercising in joy building activities.

Of course all of this discussion is dependent on one understanding the true definition of joy as seen from the neurological standpoint of the nervous system. Joy creates that inner stamina, that endurance and strength and capacity that is so needed whenever the brain is exposed to trauma. Joy itself is the energizing, exhilarating sensation that the brain feels when someone else is genuinely glad to be with me, when I sense that I am very special in the eyes and heart of someone who really cares about me. It does not matter what emotions I may be experiencing at the time, if they are glad to be with me and share in my experiences then my brain will experience the effects and benefits of joy.

The side effects of joy is the stimulation of the growth of certain regions of the brain that are needed in order to process difficult situations more effectively. It is repeated experiences of joy that grow this important part of the brain that increases our capacity and maturity to face fear. So the best way that I can prepare for future trials and pain is to spend much more time and energy today on sharing joy with others, not in foreboding about future pain and suffering.

This is very clearly why Jesus spent so much time talking about joy just before His trial and crucifixion. He was not trying to distract Himself from the coming pain and suffering, He was simply following the principles that He Himself had created into the design of the human brain that He was now using. He was “topping off” all the joy that He had been exercising with His disciples for three and a half years to prepare Himself to face the events just before Him.

...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)

Yes, I have been learning more and more about the benefits of joy, my need for much more joy and the critical nature of how joy prepares one for dealing with suffering. But then when I look around at my relationships with those around me I see all too clearly that I really don't experience joy very much at all. I am not a source of joy to others and I am seldom experiencing joy in my own heart. As I observe the general trend of what occupies my imagination and thoughts, too much of my time is spent seeking happiness for myself instead of real joy for both myself and others.

It seems obvious that one of the best ways to experience joy is to choose to be a source of joy for someone else. That means that I need to be genuinely glad to be with them no matter what emotion they are experiencing presently. But in reality that may at times take supernatural desires and empowering, for I, just like most others, do not naturally feel like being glad to be with people who are not in turn making me feel good. I naturally gravitate toward people who are outgoing, affirming toward me and encouraging. But I find it much more difficult to be that kind of person for others. Therefore, my own joy strength and my own joy capacity is growing much slower than is needed. I am not feeling the increased inner strength from sharing joy with others in reality. I am not obeying the principles of reality and design hard-wired into my brain by my Creator. I am too often following the natural tendencies of my fallen nature in seeking feelings of fulfillment and pleasure for myself directly instead of learning to give myself away to be a source of life-giving joy for others who also need more joy strength.

So do I have a nice answer all in place for this situation? Not really. I am just expressing what I feel right now at this moment. Maybe I am hoping that in expressing it I can motivate myself in some way, though I am not sure how effective that really is. Or maybe I am secretly hoping that someone else will come along and motivate me with joy. I don't really know. I just know that I feel the need to express what is inside me at times even when it does not fit into the nice packages that are expected in most articles or discourses. I am just monologuing about what is going on inside my head for whatever reasons.