Passover preparations

This year is my second Passover.  Last year I was very worried about how my kids would survive when I was finding yeast in the ingredients of most the foods they ate.  I try to eat mostly kosher, but do slip up from time to time. I grew up not worrying about it because it was just the Mosaic Law and after Yeshua (Jesus Christ' Hebrew name) it doesn't apply any more (a more careful read of my Bible has convinced me that the clean and unclean animals are more than just part of the Mosaic Law, after all Noah brought seven of each clean animal instead of just two on the arc). So I have many habits that can be hard to break, and many foods I simply didn't know where they came from, I'm learning many foods I didn't know where they come from, really come from pork (apparently marshmallows aren't just fluffy sugar).  So I decided to really try to be kosher for Passover.  My mom came to visit and wanted to help with the shopping and decided to buy a pizza.  It had yeast and pork!  I figured, "Oh well, I don't want to offend her and she's even less used to thinking about it than I am."  Other than that pizza we enjoyed lots of homemade Matzah, and my kids survived coming up with creative ways to eat it.  Like Matzah pizza, and the good reliable peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Preparing for Passover this year consists mostly of slowly buying less of the products with yeast in them and phasing out what we have to make sure it gets used up before Passover starts.  It's a good time to check the pantry for mixes that over time the leaven would get old and become ineffective anyway.  Like the nasty pancakes that have been a past result of using an expired pancake mix. My kids were scared of what my next pancakes would be like and talked about them for at least a year.  Passover is the opportunity to save myself from such cooking or baking disasters with subsequent embarrassment as it is talked of till I finally live it down.  I just make those pancakes and buy a fresh box of mix when Passover is over.  The kids will be happy and so will my pantry. 

As a Gentile who believes in Yeshua I don't prepare or eat a Passover Lamb because He was and is our sacrificial lamb.  It is a good time to look to Him, remember Him and ask Him to reveal the leaven that needs to be removed from my life.  What wastes my time that could be used better to be more in line with his purpose for my life?  What attitudes and thought patterns need to be removed?  What is hiding in the back of my heart that should just be thrown out like the expired pancake mix in the back of my pantry?

Passover and First Fruits are a great way to teach kids about Yeshua the Passover Lamb and the First Fruits of the resurrection.  I'm preparing my children for this lesson by teaching them the Scriptures in 1Corinthians 11:23-26 about Yeshua ministering the bread and wine to His disciples at His last supper before his death. As I've celebrated the Biblical feast days over the last year I've learned more about the God I worship. I've also found it refreshingly easy to use these Holy days to teach my children about God since they were designed by Him to do just that in the first place.

Whether you celebrate Passover and First Fruits or Easter or Resurrection day remember it is all to point us to God's grace that can show us what we need to change and also give us the power to do it while removing our guilt when we realize what we still lack.  Isn't grace wonderful?

How One Recited Prayer has Made me a Better Mom.

My Synagogue does a liturgy each week consisting of several prayers recited together as a congregation in Hebrew and English.  When I first encountered this practice I thought of the vain repitions Yeshua warned against.  But I did feel directed to be there so I did it because I was there and it was what they do.  I continued to ponder about the teachings of Yeshua about prayer.  After a month or two of pondering I concluded that if I mean what I say every time I say it, it isn't vain repition.

One prayer in particular we call, "The Shamah" always stood out as being particularly important, maybe because we face East for it, maybe because kids could enter or leave during the other prayers but not this one, or maybe because it seemed more readily applicable to my life right now.  The prayer comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, and part of it says, "And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you retire, and when you arise."  And in an effort to be sincere in my prayers and not use vain repetition, I would reflect on how well I'd lived this commandment to teach my children.  Most weeks we were in survival mode just getting through a week.  Breaking up fights, feeding, and puting to bed seemed to take all my time and energy.  I hardly did any teaching, if I did any at all.  I would commit to do better at teaching my children over the next coming week.  This went on for months week after week I'd do it all over again.  I'd pray the Shamah and realize I hadn't taught my children a thing and think I'd try to do better in the coming week.

All the while at church no one ever spoke in a condemning manner of me or my parenting or my kids.  They only spoke love and encouragment, while setting examples I could learn from.  There was never a guilt inducing tone in talks or comments.  After some time instead of vague commitments to teach my children I would think of a specific way I could fit in some teaching in the week, and I would make small improvments.  I thought of a scripture I thought would help teach my kids something they needed to learn, and we would recite it together and discuss it while driving to various destinations.

Now after a year of reciting this prayer every week I've helped my daughter memorize a scripture and we discussed what it means and how we apply it.  My boys didn't quite memorize it, but were familiar with it.  They all told this scripture to the our Rabbi after church last Friday.  On the way home during our conversation I came up with the next scripture I feel they should learn and apply, and  something I could do to add a method of teaching.  I wrote it out to put up on our wall so we could see it and learn while we sit in our house, as well as reciting in the car while we drive.  And I've seen changes in my children for the better, some is likely just natural maturing over growing one year older, but I am a better mother than I was a year ago.  And I can say the scriptures are being written in my heart and I am finally teaching them dilligently to my children, and seeing them start to be written in their hearts.  The Shamah has made me a better mother than I was a year ago by Yeshua's grace to strengthen my weaknesses.  Praise God!

What have you done to teach your children dilligently when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you retire, and when you arise?  Prehaps an exchange of ideas can help us all be more dilligent than we are now.

Pruning the Rosebush: A Parable

I've lived in this house for three years, and there's a group of rose bushes next to the carport.  These rose bushes weren't neatly pruned when we moved in and I only pruned back a branch here or there if it poked me getting in and out of my car.  Last year these bushes had many flowers.  With the coming of spring this year, as leaves and new buds started showing up, many dead branches sticking up above the new growth became obvious and ugly.  I knew I had to, at least, trim out all the old dead branches.  I had no idea how much that would entail after so many years of neglect, and after getting started it proved to be a much bigger job than I initially thought it would be.

I started with the ones up at the top of the bush and worked my way down, and the more dead branches I removed it seemed I just kept finding more dead branches deeper in the bush.  Some branches were dead all the way down to the bottom cane of the bush and were dried brittle thorny sticks and easy to remove aside from the thorns.  Trying to save the parts of the plants that were still alive while removing dead and withered canes from the middle of these overgrown bushes meant getting poked and scratched by the thorns many times.  Most these scratches didn't hurt much after the initial scratch, but one kept hurting with each movement of my finger, till I looked at it to find the thorn was still stuck in the scratch and I removed it. The thorns also made it harder to get a branch out of the bush after I'd clipped it.  The thorns of the live branches would catch on the thorns of the dead branch I was trying to pull out.  Often I would find where I wanted to cut a branch and I would then have to cut it in several places to get it untangled from the rest of the bush.  Other branches were only dead at the top.  Some canes looked greener than others, and when I followed some brown canes to their branches up higher they eventually did turn green and produce leaves and buds.  After two days of solid work on these bushes I could still see much more that needed work, but our trash bin was completely full of the dead branches I had already pruned away, and the thorns covering the branches prevented me from trying to smash them in tighter.  This forced me to take a break and give my wounded hands a rest.

The pruning of an overgrown rosebush is very difficult.  I decided to watch a video about pruning rosebushes, and it looked so easy, but the man in the video was working with a bush that had obviously been regularly pruned and maintained.  What a contrast it was from the painful experience I was having.

Churches claiming to belong to the scriptural Church of Christ have become overgrown with dead branches that do not serve true followers of Yeshua.  From pagan holidays and traditions of men to the judgments of others based on things that can't be understood without really experiencing it, there are many dead things that need to be pruned out of our hearts, to make room for the life giving unconditional love that needs to grow, if we are ever to become like Christ as his true disciples.  This can be a painful process.  We had a very fun Easter last year with our children, and this year we had a Christ centered Passover.  Passover was a beautiful and enlightening experience that brought me closer to Christ.  I worshiped with Davidic dance, and I fell short of being completely yeast free, but I did my best with a family that wasn't observing kosher rules with me.  It felt surreal walking through stores and seeing things that once made me excited for a coming holiday, which now instead, made me feel distinctly different from the people around me.  I found myself wondering why more people didn't educate themselves about these holidays and choose to replace them with God given Holy Days.  But I was one of them only last year.  My eyes have been opened, and I can't close them again.  Once a dead branch has been found and cut out, it can't come back to life again.  It is time to open our eyes and cut the dead traditions of men out from our hearts.  Make room to be filled with unconditional love, so it can have a place to bloom in your heart.

What you trim first is up to you, and between you and God.  I've been actively trimming false traditions and unbelief for a year and a half now, and would be lying if I said it hasn't been a painful process.  But the joy and beauty that can grow when the dead works are cleared away is well worth the painful process of clearing it out.  Just as Paul, I too have a thorn in my flesh that must be discovered and removed before full healing can occur.  Some traditions have become so entangled it might take multiple cuts to rid ourselves of one false tradition as we find deeper ways it was intertwined with truth and life.  It is a process, and a much longer one than we likely anticipate when we first take it on.  But the good news is that we don't take it on alone.  My children have eagerly helped me in little ways with trimming the dead out of my rosebushes, and likely the efforts of my children could be a parable for my efforts to get rid of unbelief and dead works, and there is an older more experienced gardener doing much of my pruning for me, working on my heart in ways I will only understand when I look back.  What are the dead works you need to prune from your life?  What is your thorn in your flesh?  Who is helping you tend your garden?  There is likely more than one helper.  Take some time to praise the gardeners of your heart today.  Shalom.

Stuck in an Eddy in the River of Life

Yesterday and this morning I've been pouring my heart out to God asking for answers and asking for help.  My husband is working 60 hr weeks at two jobs, and with my kids home all day for the summer I feel like I'm barely maintaining my household, and not very well at that.  If I get any cleaning done in one room I'm sure to find another that my kids have messed up worse than the one I was just cleaning.  I don't feel like I'm making any progress in any areas of my life right now.  Then while praying this morning the word popped into my head, "eddy," so I asked God, "Who's Eddy? I don't know anyone named Eddy."  I can feel Him almost laughing at me, "Not 'Who?' what!" It suddenly clicks!  I'm in an eddy in the river of life right now.  Just swirling around not really going forward or backward.  What are the eddies of life for?  What should I do about it?  The answer came to just keep doing what I can to strengthen myself and to practice the essential things I really need to master as a mother and homemaker.  Once I'm strong enough I'll be able to break out of the eddy without getting swept away by the current or smashed on the rocks up ahead.  Life isn't like the lazy kind of rivers I see in Kansas it's more like the mountain rivers and streams that have rapids, cascades, and waterfalls with huge rocks every where.  So I should be thankful for the little eddies too that give me the time to strengthen myself and prepare for what is coming down stream, even though I can only really see a small unsure glimpse of what's downstream from where I am.  And most of all it's okay to be in an eddy for a while now and then.  They are there for a reason.

Grace and Repentance

Sorry for taking such a long break.  I feel like I'm in the process of reinventing myself.  I've changed what religion I identify as, one stage of life is ending and a new one beginning, and the dream I always thought I would be pursuing at this point in my life is not even in the picture and a new dream completely unlike anything I imagined (prior to several months ago) is beginning to take shape.  Anyhow for the past month this blog has been about the last thing on my mind.  But none of this is why you chose to read this post, though it does relate, so I'll show you how God's grace has been transforming my life.

Each Sunday I've been trying something different a while of just staying home trying to figure out the best thing to do as a family without going anywhere.  I've attended random churches, and I think we've found one that's a good fit at least for our current needs as a family right now.  I've realized some interesting contrasts by attending experimentally some other Christian churches, then contrasting it with a chance LDS meeting I went to on a whim.  The other Christian church was focused on the joy and the miracle that is available to us through accepting the atonement of Christ in our lives.  The LDS meeting was about repentance and was full of sorrow, and the hardship of life and the failings of us as humans, and the sorrow of these failings was the focus.  When we make our focus on the negative things in life that will be what our life will be full of.  When our focus is on the positive, the joy of Christ's grace to become a new person, a better person, in Christ we change and repent without realizing it.  We can't white knuckle our way to heaven!  If you have to "white knuckle it" to resist temptation your heart is still set on the thing you are tempted with and not on Christ.  If your heart is set on Christ, He will help you through His grace to become the new person He wants you to be.  I want to be clear grace is not the ability to be forgiven and never have to change anything about yourself.  It is by grace we are saved because we all are sinners and fall short of the glory of God.  But that grace is something we must accept and embrace and allow it to work in our lives, and as we do we literally become a new person.  I'm so completely different as a person than I was six or nine months ago!  It is all by God's grace that I've had the power to transform my life into something different than I ever planned or thought possible. 

I was going to write a separate post about all the life changes that have happened to me lately that distracted me from my writing for over a month.  But I realized as editing these two separate posts that they really are the same thing.  I have been shifting my focus and changing lately, this is what repentance is.  And through the grace of Christ I'm realizing greater purpose and happiness in my life doing things I never thought possible.  The story of my sabbatical from my blog is the story of God's grace being manifest in my life and me taking the time I needed to accept and act upon this gift.

For the last seven and a half years of my life I've been either pregnant or nursing a baby.  As this stage begins to wind down for many reasons, I've been overcome with the desire to make a difference in the world.  I even wept one night talking to my husband about this desire it was so strong, but without any clear direction.  I want to do something beyond raising children who will have the skills to make a difference in their world.  Don't get me wrong, I believe motherhood to be extremely important and I love it, but I also believe my example of how I use my time and what I do to change my world will also make me a better mother and motivate my children to find their niche to impact the world for the better as well.  I once thought that when this phase of life came along I would start offering private art lessons, perhaps to home school kids.  But there just isn't a demand for this, especially with the advancing pace of technology.  My skills are obsolete.  Now I've made the bold decision to become a lapidary (one who carves and polishes stone sometimes for jewelry, sometimes larger works like spheres, or small sculptures).  Thank goodness for youtube training videos!  I'm trying to settle into my new identities.  And I am full of happiness with this choice.  When I got just a few supplies and started working I knew this was the right path for me.

Hopefully as these aspects of life settle down a bit I should be able to write posts a little more regularly.  How has God's grace manifest in your life?  If you are resisting change that God wants for you, you are essentially rejecting His grace and Christ's atonement.  Embrace his love and his grace and let your life take the beautiful shape He has in store for you.  It is likely better than anything you could dream up for yourself.  May God's grace manifest in your life journey too.