A saving nightmare

I really wasn't going to tell you about this. Especially it being ANOTHER post about God so close on the heels of yesterday's chat about God... but it was a nightmare! I awoke this morning with my pulse racing and my hands sweating. I immediately grabbed my cellphone and dialled my friend's number and told him what I'd dreamt and that we need to make sure we're ok. OK with God, that is. I know - now I'm freaking you out too, right? * Eish! *

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Here's what I dreamt.

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In my dream a bunch of my friends and I were walking along the Durban beachfront, talking and having a good time together. It was evening. Most of us were barefoot and wearing jeans. Casual stuff. All of a sudden this enormous wind was whipping up sand, and the waves on the seashore became enormous terrifying tsunami-like tidal waves. The ground started rumbling, then shaking. And the sky started rolling back. And I felt a heavy, earth-shattering fear unleash itself from deep within me. I immediately grabbed my friend's hand and said to him, "I think Jesus is coming!" In the same moment as I grabbed my friend's hand, the others around us started levitating toward the cloud in the sky. But my friend and I stayed put. We were not saved! We hadn't spent time with Jesus. He didn't know us.

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Talk about a nightmare of epic proportions! And I awoke feeling absolutely terrified. And then I realized that maybe God was trying to tell me something. Maybe this was God's way to saying to me, "Char, let's spend some more time together. I want you to be saved. I want to know you. I want you to know Me. I want you to be ready when I return to take you to this amazing place I've built for you. Don't you want to spend some time with Me, so that we can get to know each other better? I already knew you before you were born. I knit you together in your mother's womb. All the days of your life I have already seen. I know where you're headed, and it doesn't include me. Come away a while. Let's spend some time together, just you and me. I want to teach you how to just be still in my presence. To know that I am God. How else will you ever learn to trust me again?"

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And who am I to refuse such an invitation? Of course, I realize that there's nothing I can do to save myself. That's what Jesus had to die for. To offer me forgiveness and grace. You guys all know that stuff too. What I hadn't realized, fully, was that I need to take time to spend with God regularly. It's not about me earning salvation at all. It's about me learning to know and trust God again. And to build a relationship with Him. A saving relationship. So that one day when He comes on the clouds to take us home, and to raise the dead to life at the resurrection, you and I won't be left behind on a planet bereft of His presence.

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Isn't this God we serve just totally amazing?

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* That's South African for anything similar to "OH MY WORD!" or "WHAT THE ?" or "OH NO!" or "WOW!" etc.

Progress with a capital P

I suppose you could call it progress. This thing about me not really being "interested" in having a baby anymore. The pursuit of parentdom holds nothing for me anymore. It's about friggin time though, if you ask me.

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Christmas 2007 was exactly one year since I last took a fertility drug. I remember it so well: Christmas morning 2006. Shucks - I popped that handfull of pills with a prayer and a tight squeezing of my loins, in the hope that any spermies trapped inside there would stay put JUST IN CASE there might be, say, one little ripe egg awaiting a visitation. In a manner of speaking. But it was not to be. And so I struggled through last year - on the one hand really desperate to get back into that fertility treatment torture chamber programme, and the other hand clawing my way out of a pitt of despair and disappointment and shattered dreams.

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Two or three years ago, I did not even want to consider giving up that dream. The one that was rosy-coloured and had me sitting in a swing sipping iced tea, watching my children playing in the playground. Or the one where I wake up to the sound of my child's voice calling for me at night. Or the one where fifteen years from now I'm standing at the door with a shotgun awaiting my daughter's first date. OK, just kidding. Make that a bazooka.

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It was too hard to give up. I was addicted to a future of my own making. I was a slave to the hoping and the waiting and the treatments. My life revolved around appointments. Blood tests. Needles. And pills. Endless bottles of pills stacked neatly in a row. I even remember the dosage still today.

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I eventually came to the place where I begged God to remove the desire from me to have children, if it would never come to fruition. It was so weird even asking that of God, because for so long I had been shaking angry fists at Him, telling Him how He had let me down. I was livid that He would give children to teenagers. And drug addicts. And abusers. But not to me. Where was the "fair play"? Where was the "believe that ye receive it and it will be yours"? What about the "ask and it shall be given to you"? And the "if you have faith like a mustard seed..." What about all those promises? Why did they apply to others, but not to me? What made me the exception? Had God forgotten about me?

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I still don't have answers to any of those questions. Maybe one day in Heaven I can take Jesus aside and ask Him why. For now there still aren't any answers... but there is peace now. Peace that even though things don't always work out the way we want them to, we can still be happy. And at peace with God. He doesn't deserve the bad rap He's been given. Remember who Satan is - the accuser. And I was buying into all of his accusations. I shudder to think that I was standing side by side with him, shaking my fist at God because I didn't get what I wanted! How very selfish of me!

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And yet, this path I'm walking on was paved with special stones... stones Jesus handpicked for my life. Pebbles for the easier times, boulders that He would help me over and give me a hand up, if I let Him. Because He has a very special plan for my life, that will only happen when I seek for Him and find Him, if I seek for Him with all my heart. (Jer 29 v 13.) The harder times are just that: harder times. But they're not permanent. I'm almost halfway through my three-score-and-ten (that should give you an idea of how old I am), so there is still plenty of time ahead for me. God willing. Time which I can choose to allow God to lead, time to be happy and useful and a bearer of good news for others... or a bitter, sullen, angry person harboring resentment and standing on Satan's side. And that's not who I choose to be.

"Trust in the Lord with ALL your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths." Proverbs 3 v 5 & 6

I learned that verse many years ago, when I was still a springchicken teenager. At the time it was an easy verse to learn. In theory. It was stored in my head for these times, I'm sure. Now, when I'm learning to trust Him again with my future. Learning again how to not use my own initiative or think I'm more clever than God - I mustn't lean on my own understanding, and yet that's what I was doing. I was shaking my fist at God, and then tapping my body clock with the other hand and saying "God, look how old I'm getting! I don't want to be an OLD mom!" and then I stopped acknowledging Him at all. Prayer times, church times... all of it. I avoided any contact with God like the plague. No wonder He stopped directing my paths!

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It's not easy coming back to Him again. But I am reassured that He loves me. That He died to save even battleworn sinners like me. ESPECIALLY battleworn sinners like me, actually! And that makes me all the more grateful for the grace He's offering me. Because I don't deserve it. I wear the grace He offers me like a bright new shiny garment. It's all about Him. Not me. And that's what I call progress with a capital P.

Who can resist?...

... a sexy guy and his cute new puppy? Meet Baxter, our new little corgie...



And this here is Baxter's mom, Kiara, the other newest member of our family:

And then there are a few new additions to our kitchen...

My new african masks. I just luvvem! (I had to show a closeup so you could see the scale of these guys!) Way to usher in the new year, that's for sure. Let's just say I was starved for some serious retail therapy, and Durban still doesn't know what hit it when we arrived!