March Madness

By Kim Stokely –

Ah, March.

The old saying is that it comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb.

In my house it comes in with my husband’s siren call of “IT’S MARCH MADNESS TIME!!!”

Final four brackets are discussed around water coolers throughout the nation. The merits of coaching staffs, star players and recent injuries are rehashed as the pool of college basketball teams dwindles progressively throughout the weeks.

And I am left to twiddle my thumbs and wonder what the excitement is all about. Actually, I usually use the College Basketball play-offs as a time to catch up on my “to-read” list on my Kindle.

I’m not anti-sports by any stretch of the imagination. My blood starts pumping in late August as football season arrives on the scene. It’s a game I understand. The patient boyfriend of one of my best friends in high school spent many Sunday afternoons instructing us. He joyfully explained the game’s rules and nuances. He has the undying gratitude of my husband.

I also enjoy baseball, to an extent. Take me out to the ballgame and I’m happy to root for the home team and enjoy the peanuts and Crackerjack. Watching a game on television is equal to a dose of Nyquil to me, but hey, a snoozing wife is better than a nagging one, right?

But basketball? I don’t get it. It’s a lot of frantic running around for a couple of hours until the last two minutes of the game. Then somehow, those that play basketball, are able to bend the space-time continuum and stretch two minutes into a half-hour. Endless time-outs, fouls and free throws create the ultimate drama for my husband, while I’m left scratching my head wondering why he bothered to watch the other 38 minutes of the game. I’ve told him before, they should just put two minutes on the clock, and 64 points for each team, then let them battle it out for the win.

As amusing as my limited sports knowledge is, why am I writing about it here? Well, it occurred to me to look at basketball as an example of how to live my life. I tend to take my life very seriously, running frantically from goal to goal, project to project, just like those players on the court. Trying to “score” in the game of life. But in reality, my main objective should not be in running myself ragged, but in using every moment, like those last two minutes in a game, to its fullest. To appreciate each second of the day that God has given me and use it to draw closer to Him. And besides, some of the most exciting moments of a game are played in those final seconds. I hope I can look back at the end of my life and know that I have, to paraphrase from Paul in Acts 20, “Finished the race and completed the task the Lord Jesus has given me.”

Right in Front of Us

By Dawn Wilson –

Two Facebook friends sent me the same photo on the same day. In the photo, a white dog (my friends claimed looks a lot like my own pooch, Roscoe) was stretched out asleep on a white furry rug. I had to look carefully to see the dog, so blended in with the background.

The caption read: “Day 3: Humans Still Think I’m Lost.”

It reminded me of photos a clever friend showed me—some before and after pictures of animals “hidden” in plain sight. A white dove resting on a patch of snow. An owl in the shadows of a cluster of branches. A gray squirrel scurrying over a rocky hill. A green parrot nestled in jungle brush. Even a giraffe standing in a thicket of spotty tree trunks.

Until someone pointed out the animals’ locations, I just didn’t see them! And when I did see them, I rolled my eyes and asked my friend, “How could I miss that?”

But then again, I sometimes can’t see my car keys, even when they’re “staring at me,” right there on my desk. (Please, no jokes about messy desks being a sign of genius. Mine is simply a sign of a messy desk!)

But my point is, sometimes we can’t see what’s right in front of us. Direction from God. An opportunity to serve. An answered prayer.

Maybe we’re too busy to stop and focus. Perhaps we’re distracted. Or maybe we’re simply blind to the wonders of God working in the world.

So much in the culture tries to rob us of the wonder of seeing God and His deeds. We’re so easily entertained, so quickly distracted. And we get a corrupted or diluted version of who God is from the media.

Our hearts fight against this wonder too. When we live in the flesh, rather than walking in the Spirit, we’re likely not alert to the true nature of what God is doing.

And finally, our enemy, Satan, conspires to shut down the wonder. He tries to hide the facts. He is, after all, the Father of Lies.

The world, the flesh and the devil. No wonder it’s so hard to see. So, my prayer is, “Open my eyes, Lord, to who you are, and what you are doing every day.”

Believing God helps me meditate when I store scriptures in my mind and heart, I memorized this scripture to remind myself of the wonders of God: “You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told” (Psalm 40:5 ESV).

It’s true! Our wonderful God does wonderful things. Don’t miss what’s right in front of you!

O Magnify—And Liquefy

By Rhonda Rhea –

People say that to survive a volatile stock market you should have plenty of liquidity. That’s why I’m thinking about investing in water.

When you’re investing in water stocks, I wonder if you get to decide whether to buy the hydrogen and oxygen together or separately. I don’t know, chemistry was never my thing. Knowing me I’d mix up my formulas. A couple of extra dashes of oxygen and instead of H2O I could end up with something like H2O2. That might be a better investment stock-wise, but it falls way short when you’re thirsty…what with it being hydrogen peroxide and all. Although, bonus. Instead of investing or drinking I could just forget the whole thing and go color my hair.

Sometimes I can almost convince myself this is my real hair color. Then again, it’s probably just a pigment of my imagination.

I had to laugh one time when I was whining about having to get my hair colored so often and my husband suggested I take some time off from coloring. Husbands. They’re so cute. I told him I wasn’t ready for that kind of time off. A total gray-cation? No thanks. I’d dye first.

Hair color is one thing, but it’s a pretty sure bet nobody wants me messing with chemical elements or any of their atomic structures. There’s a rather frightening thought.

I do, however, love thinking of Jesus as our “Living H2O.” Makes me thirsty just thinking about it.

An ardent thirst for the Lord leads us to a place of worship. Worship is our right response every time we contemplate our glorious God and every time we seek Him. When God told Moses to tell Pharaoh, “This is what the LORD says: Let my people go, so they can worship me,” (Exodus 8:1 NIV). God set in place the plan to free His people. But He didn’t simply free them from slavery. He freed them so they could worship Him.

Our salvation came at great cost. God freed us from the slavery of sin so we could worship Him. Not merely freedom from something. But freedom to do something. Worship. He wants an intimate relationship with each of us—one in which we recognize Him as the great God of the universe.

As we thirst for Him, He does satisfy. Jesus said to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would ask Him, and He would give you living water,’” (John 4:10 HCSB).

The more we thirst for Him and seek Him in worship, the more we see the Lord tweak all the other thirsts. Frustrations and challenges, fears and angers, heartaches and failures—they fall into perspective at our altar of worship. It’s like we drink in His glory. And that will quench.

So even if the stock market totally dries up, I think I’ll forget about all that and simply shoot for staying thirsty for everything Jesus. And I’m not even going to worry about the H’s or the O’s.

Just Do the Next Thing

By Liz Cowen Furman –

Sometimes life comes at such a dizzying pace I am unsure how to proceed. Last fall was one of those times. We have a little family motel in Dubois, Wyoming, The Black Bear Inn, that we are working hard to rebuild. We work sixteen hour days all summer. When I arrive home in the fall, I generally sleep for a week.

But this year when I pulled into our driveway I knew it would be different.

We had invited an amazing college student from the Czech Republic to live with us and intern with my husband. I’ve worked the motel for several summers, which is usually the time a person would do fix-up projects like paint the homestead, etc. So to say that our house was in need of some serious TLC would be an understatement.

During the summers my husband is busy at work and in his off time he comes to the motel to see us and help there. So when I arrived home there was a mountain of work to make our house presentable to our new friend.

I sat down the morning after arriving home and made a list. It was daunting to say the least. As I pondered the task ahead the words of an old friend that had made our motel resurrection possible, rang in my head: “Just do the next thing.”

Every morning, I said to myself over and over, “Just do the next thing”, then prayed for wisdom on what to do next, plugged in my book on CD and went to work.

A few times during the next couple weeks I was amazed at how much I actually accomplished in one day by doing the next thing. So was my family.

In just two weeks I cleaned our house within an inch of its life; re-caulked the sinks and showers, painted and installed new flooring in one bathroom; cut, stained and installed trim for same; shampooed the main floor carpets; stained part of the house; cleaned off the deck piled high with detritus; cleaned out, furnished and decorated Martin’s room that hadn’t been used since he went to college (did I mention that a pack rat sneaked in undetected and died there a few weeks before I arrived home, AAAKKKK); moved the furniture in the living room; cleaned the yard and cut the weeds which filled nearly ten industrial trash bags; moved edging rocks in my garden that the snowplow had inadvertently moved the previous winter; and that wasn’t all.

I believe what my mother told me all those years ago is true: We can do anything we are willing to work hard enough to achieve.

So if you are faced with an overwhelming task just break it into little pieces, get a couple great books on CD then proceed with gusto to Do the Next Thing and you will conquer it as I did. Oh and do what James tells us to do…ask for wisdom on what the next thing should be (James 1:5).

Puppy Power

By Kim Stokely –

I know it sounds odd to say, but a puppy brought me closer to God.

It started innocently one Sunday after church when my family and I stopped at a pet store. The volunteers from the shelter saw me coming from a mile away and set their sights. I know they did. As soon as I saw their little bundles of white fluff, they had me.

To be honest, we’d come to the open house of the Little White Dog Rescue with the intention of adopting a dog. I just hadn’t intended on coming home with two. But my family fell in love with a little Maltese/Poodle mix while my heart melted when I held the Bichon/Shih Tzu puppy. The ladies from the rescue told me they’d make us a deal on adoption fees if we took them both.

My brain argued with my emotions. Don’t do it! Two puppies at once? Are you nuts? If you’re not now, you will be when you try to train them both!

But thankfully, my heart won out. We brought the two little fur balls home with us and began the process of housebreaking.

A week of them on separate schedules and different bad habits was enough to make me tear out my hair. Not that anyone one noticed. My hair blended in nicely with the tufts of fur, squeaky toys and rope bones the tiny beasts left all over the house. My attitude had sunk from joy to frustration faster than a puppy can lift his leg to mark a piano.

One of the hardest things to get used to was waking up by 5:30 to take Ollie, the hair ball I’d fallen in love with, outside for his morning constitutional. Because his sibling still lay sleeping soundly in her crate, I hesitated to bring Ollie back to the bedroom after our walks. That meant I had to stay awake with him in the kitchen because, as everyone knows, an unsupervised puppy causes more havoc than a class one tornado.

At first, this new routine was another source of aggravation. The siren call of flannel sheets can be overwhelming on cold, dark, winter mornings. I longed to crawl back into bed and hibernate until the sun rose. But I realized something around the second or third week of this new normal.
I’d been seeking the motivation to wake up earlier to spend more time with my Bible and in prayer, but invariably would pull the covers over my head when the alarm rang. It’s a lot easier to ignore an inanimate object than a whining puppy. Ollie’s schedule pushed me out of my laziness and into a time of quiet intimacy with God.

I’ve come to love the hour or so I spend with Ollie curled up at my feet while I sip my tea and read God’s word. He may be the cutest answer to prayer I’ve ever received.

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