'Tis the Season: Schedule in the Melting of Your Heart

Someone asked me, "How do you keep from revisiting old wounds?" She knew I had many. My reply:

I schedule in the melting of my heart.

I can only credit God with that phrase. When I was a principal, a colleague asked, "What do you do with outlaw children?" I took the question to God. The answer that drifted into my mind:

Melt their hearts.

I am nothing but an outlaw child of God. I say often that adults misbehave just like children; we just hide it adroitly.

So as we usher in the season of the birth of Jesus, there is a collision of a giant to-do list with the pondering of just who this Jesus really is.

Our outlaw mentality will drive us to push, rush, and overlook.

Jesus would say pause, reflect, ponder.

Keeping my heart melted not only insulates me from visiting old wounds--it keeps my perspective reined in when a new season is upon me.

Only you and Jesus know what melts your heart. This I know: it won't happen unless you schedule it.

May your strength to get through this season be the scheduling of the melting of your heart.

Inner Workings

Each of us has a sort of deep machinery that goes into action every day.

Our day is driven by this machinery:

Is your outlook primarily hopeful or defeated?

Do you let the day happen to you or do you set a strategy that moves you forward?

Are you living within today or only waiting on some future that may or may not happen? 

It stands to reason that this machinery might need fine tuning from time to time.

Your work seems to be stagnant. Are you asking God to bless what you do or asking Him to show you how to step into His work design for you?

Your relationship with your spouse is suffering. Can you decide today that at least one thing that drives you crazy about him/her is actually, with God's grace to you, okay?

Are you helping your children navigate the inevitable pain of growing up or are you unwittingly trying to protect them so they have underdeveloped skills of strength and confidence in their own ability to interact with the world?

The tough road of life needs heavy-duty machinery. Our inner workings--what deeply drives our decisions and our daily forward motion--are best served by our alliance with God, our ability to overlook with grace, and the tough love to let those young ones we rear find their way through obstacles.

This fine tuning insures our deep machinery is hopeful, strategically moving forward and living in the present.

Filters and Stoplights

I am most enthralled with this world when meanings collide in completely separate events. I get a glimpse of God working, even if, in large part, it is on me.

Thanks for being such a detail person, I wrote to my friend, so sincere in my compliment.

She heard it through her filter of wounds and wondered at my meaning. In no way could I hear my words as anything but a compliment but respected her young hearing and prayed for continued healing of her heart.

Those lyrics you shared, I told this person, if they are meant for her, then they would doubly apply to me. Is that what you think? My nonchalant voice masked my pending hurt.

He explained how he heard the song and it wasn't even on the same planet of meaning. It had nothing to do with her or me.

Funny how our filters direct our life. Like a stoplight, saying go to harmful meaning, stop to the good stuff.

When meanings collide in the space of a few hours, I can bet God is at work.

My young friend and I sounded the alarm of our hearts and asked for the truth of the situation to be clarified. That's when God at work is most fruitful--we both made progress in our hearing and our filters take a step toward repair.

The stoplight is better directed by truth and love.

Check your filters. Keep the traffic of your heart moving in a God direction.

When Grief Comes

Not if. When.

That is Assurance #1. Grief will come through the loss of someone exceedingly dear to us. The world is broken and will remain so until we get out of here. Death is its greatest breakage.

Professionals--more trained than I--provide thoughtful assistance in getting through the identified stages of grief. Be sure to get help there.

My goal is to continue to feed our strength even in the bleakest times, so I asked God for a simple tune for us to play when grief comes.

The tune is God's heart, His frequency, His point of view. Did He just receive back one of His dear and precious children? Did God get a homecoming?

If so, ask for extraordinary peace that you can hold onto, like a teddy bear, while He ushers that person into His incredible Presence.

Assurance #2: if we truly imagine that God's heart is receiving even as ours is letting go, and we ask for the peace He always has waiting for us, the grief will be bearable little by little.

Feeding our strength is considering God's heart as we consider our own.

Rally Your Kids as a Sibling Group

I visited someone recently who floored me with his news, "My wife and I are in the final stages of divorce."

This is a young man with two biological kids and an adopted child from another country, ages twelve and under.

As I listened, I kept hearing this phrase in my mind:

Rally your kids as a sibling group.

Was God trying to tell me something?

I realized my friend's story was concentrating on his oldest son's turmoil--there seemed nothing amiss about that.

But the phrase kept coming.

I heard once that the value of siblings is that they have a sort of shared venture mentality--whatever the family obstacles, there is a sense that the pain is carried by all.

But that must be cultivated by the parents or the siblings or both. It doesn't just happen. If God wants to rally the siblings, you can be sure there is a force operating to divide them.

So, several times in our conversation, I reminded my friend to rally his kids as a sibling group.

I said, "At the end of the day, the family group that will carry on is your three children as a group. Make sure you rally them together often and strategically. There will be attempts to divide them. Their strength will be in their shared camaraderie to get through the pain."

We feed the strength of our children in many ways--include rallying them as a sibling group.

The Pause for Strength

Every time we pause we make room for strength.

If we pause before we fill our plate, our reasoning has time to argue for better eating.

If we pause before we buy on impulse, our wallet has time to plead its case.

If we pause before we fire off to that person's comment, our regret maker has less chance to take center stage.

Our strength is fed by one exclusive operation: our decisions.

Every decision of every day either feeds our strength or feeds our weakness. Few decisions fuel neutrality.

Already today you have considered or rejected (or rejected by omission) God.

Already today you have considered or rejected yourself with your self-assessment that, at least for women, spins continually in the margins of our mind.

In whatever fraction of the day that has passed thus far, are you stronger or weaker by virtue of your decisions?

Pause to answer.

If any one decision can weaken us, any next moment can hold the pause that gives us time to turn around and move toward strength.

Pause for strength.