Tag: happiness

Wonderful Beautiful Monday

It’s a bright crisp Monday morning and I just got home from a two mile walk with my dog through the neighborhood. The sun was making the world glitter and the trees were just starting to show off their new autumn streaks of red and gold. It was cool enough to wear a thick sweater, but not freezing. Basically, just a perfect Fall morning. The song “To God be the Glory” has been running through my head since we sang it in church yesterday and I woke up humming it as I started my day. 

We had a really busy weekend and I’m looking forward today to just being home, keeping the laundry going, practicing piano, starting a new book I’m doing with a women’s bible study, maybe reading some more of my fun book I’m working on too. 

I feel happy. Joyful. And thankful. Because I know that this joy and happiness is a gift from God. It’s not my normal way of starting a Monday. The gift is that somehow God made himself present in my thoughts first thing today. Instead of waking up feeling tired and grumpy from having to get up early, stressing about the busy week ahead, I woke up singing. That was not something that I manufactured and did because I’m just a great person. Only the work of the Holy Spirit can make me wake up cheerful on a Monday morning. 😀

Last night before I went to bed, I finished the last chapter of “The Heart of Jesus How He Really Feels About You” by Dane Ortlund. I loved how the author ended the book. He concluded that instead of trying to figure out how we can take all the lessons we learned in the book and apply them to our lives, instead we just need to follow Matthew 11:28 and “Come to Jesus”. Bask in his love for us, his forgiveness, his heart for us. Just go to Jesus. Be with him. 

When you learn that Jesus is not angry with you. That his forgiveness is eternal, he is rich in mercy, that he yearns for us, that he is gentle and lowly, that his ways of loving and showing mercy are so much higher than our ways of loving and showing mercy. When you learn that he is gracious and slow to anger, that he is a tender friend, that his heart is beautiful. When you learn these things and then realize that you can actually spend every moment of your day with this God who loves you so richly. That you can talk to him and share your life with him, every good and bad moment. That you can spend your days seeing his goodness surrounding you and be able to thank him personally, and continually..Oh, what a wonderful day it is when you can live this out. 

This Monday is no different from any other Monday. There’s work to be done, stress to live through. Things will break. Money will come up short. Kids will fuss and fight. Bad news will show up. But, oh the difference, when you start the day with Jesus, feel his love, see his goodness. What a wonderful, beautiful Monday it is. 

The Power of Small Changes

This past week I’ve had something unusual happen. I’ve been waking up in a good mood, feeling happy. As someone who has spent her entire life fighting lowgrade depression which occasionally morphs into full blown deep depression, waking up feeling happy feels strange. It’s not that I normally wake up in a bad mood. It’s just usually very neutral. Yes, I’m awake. New day. Better get moving. 

I find myself kind of poking this happiness. What are you doing here? Isn’t there something that I should be worried about or feeling upset about? I find myself examining every aspect of my life. Am I being a good mom, wife, friend? Am I using my time well? And while everything can always improve, I feel like everything is moving in the right direction. Huh.  

Is happiness simply the lack of conflict and problems? I hope not, otherwise, I can count on this disappearing pretty quickly. Life has a way of throwing stuff at you at a pretty regular pace. 

But, I don’t think that’s what it is. I think that I am finally seeing the fruit of a lot of small decisions and disciplines I’ve been slowly implementing. I think allowing myself a good six months to just sit with my grief when my foster daughter left was the beginning. Then tackingly my health with diet and exercise and working on getting back into music. All individual choices that have required daily discipline, but I am starting to see fruit, and easing of depression seems to be one of those good benefits. 

I was thinking about this same concept in the realm of parenting. I have concerns for some of my kids. Things I want to see changed. Things that worry me. And this morning as I sat at the breakfast table, my youngest sitting in my lap having a cuddle before school, I thought, this is how change happens. One day at a time. Me consistently loving them, pouring into them, providing a peaceful home where their needs are met. Correcting unwanted behavior as it happens. 

Sometimes when I am dwelling on things that are going wrong with my kids, I want something big and drastic that I can implement that will solve all the problems and fix it immediately. But that is rarely what works. Instead it is small changes, small choices, daily disciplines. 

For example, my son was having a really negative attitude about school starting up again. Everything he said was negative. His attitude was horrible and he was angry and in a bad mood constantly. After checking out the facts and realizing that the only real problem he was having was that he didn’t want to stop summer break where he could play all day and resented having to do actual work every day, I wanted his attitude to change immediately. I wanted this negativity to stop. I lectured him quite a bit. Surely if he just faced the facts, he would accept it and move on. Nope. No change. I finally implemented a “GOOD ATTITUDE” chart. Every day after school he had to tell me three good things that happened that day. And then he could tell me one thing that was challenging. Each day he could get a sticker for doing that, and every week that he filled his chart with stickers, he would get a dollar. 

The first day was comical in how hard it was for him to tell me three good things. It took him all afternoon and it was like he was fighting a lot of inner demons to be able to get the words out his mouth. (He really wanted the dollar, so he persevered.) The next day was a little easier.  By the end of the week he was getting in the car after school ready to tell me his three good things right away. By the end of the second week he had already forgotten about the chart. The negativity had ended and each day he was able to casually mention good things that happened during the day. And his mood had vastly improved. One small discipline, implemented daily. Long term results. 

I think it’s tied up with faith and hope. I have faith that God’s word is true, and I have hope that if I follow God’s precepts, I will see fruit which will come at the right and proper time. And for that, I am thankful. 

Grief, Joy, Christmas

It’s Christmas Eve and I find myself wavering back and forth between joy and happiness and guilt and worry. 

In other words, I am fully human. Even though I somehow think I will get superpowers when holidays come around and I will cease to have stress and grief and daily troubles. After all, it’s Christmas! Right? 

This Christmas I have all my children home, the first time in three years. My heart is full. Our house is cheerful, we were able to get presents for everyone, we have everything we need and a little extra. We’ve had a great advent season of daily bible readings with the kids. We’ve had great church services helping us bring our focus on Jesus. It has been a good Christmas season. 

And then, at the same time, a friend of mine unexpectedly died a couple days ago. Another friend of mine is in the process of losing her mom to cancer. Another friend just lost a famly member unexpectedly. So much grief. So much heaviness. 

Kind of like the first Christmas. 

Mary, pregnant and unmarried, having to deal with all the presumptions people are making of her. Joseph with a new wife, but in name only, watching her carry someone else’s child, not the way he was planning on starting his marriage. A trip to Bethlehem because of the whims of a conquering nation. Bad timing, Mary is about to give birth. Then, they get to Bethlehem, the baby is definitely coming, right now. No place to stay. No warm welcome. No comfortable place to settle in. Birth. Mary’s first. First labor, not knowing what to expect. Not knowing if you will survive the process. And then the baby is here. But no proud grandparents to announce the news to friends and family. No friends and family. 

But then a bunch of shepherds come running in. Telling stories about angels and heavenly hosts. And I’m sure Mary and Joseph remembered vividly their own encounters with angels. And there is of course this brand new baby filling their hearts with joy as only a new baby can. 

Grief and Joy. Suffering and Hope. Christmas.

We are in good company. 

This season I pray that we can have peace. That we can accept our grief but give ourselves permission to have joy as well. That we can have happiness and not feel guilty for feeling sad at the same time. 

In the end, we cling to the hope that All is Well. 

“All is well all is well

Lift up your voices and sing

Born is now Emmanuel

Born is our Lord and Savior”

Michael W. Smith

Emmanuel, God is with Us. We go through our trials here on earth, but we are no longer alone. We have hope for a future with Jesus where every tear will be wiped away. No more sorrow. No more grief. 

Until that time comes, we move forward. Tears in our eyes. A smile on our face. Grief, Joy. Christmas. 

May you all have a Merry Christmas filled with joy and may you have peace to feel all the emotions that face you this season.

Sunrises, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and My New Piano

Sunrises. I love sunrises. For many years I have been too tired to get up and enjoy them. Nowadays, though,  I am driving my kids to school early every morning and during the winter I have been enjoying a lot of sunrises. My kids’ school is only about two miles away. It takes us maybe five minutes to get there. Part of the drive to the school involves going up a big hill and then we crest at the top and suddenly we have a big view of mountains and mist and red orange light peeking through the clouds. It’s amazing. Every morning I can’t stop myself from exclaiming to the kids, “Everybody look at the sunrise! It’s amazing!” And the kids have learned to oooh and aaahh right along with me. Thanking God for the sunrise is part of our morning prayers. I have always imagined God standing at an easel, throwing paint on left and right, painting the sunrise every day. God the Creator. The Creative One.

The other day as I was driving along, enjoying the beautiful colors, I thought about how we are created in the image of God. I’ve always wondered about that, what it means exactly. I thought about God painting the sky every morning, making art and it occurred to me that when we create things, make our own art, we are, in a small sense, being like God. We were made to create because we were made in the Creator’s image.

I thought about music. I love music, but I have struggled with music over the years. As a teenager I used music as an emotional outlet. A way to vent, a way to express emotions, a safe place to feel emotions. As life got more and more complicated, harder, I found myself shying away from music. As I look back, I can see where I struggled to keep depression away, and one of my solutions to not dealing with depression or anger or a bunch of other unresolved feelings, was to shy away from feeling any emotion. Just stay neutral. Calm.

The only problem with this approach is that when you don’t allow yourself to feel bad emotions, the really good emotions go away as well. I don’t think you can fully live in joy if you don’t also allow yourself to mourn. You can’t have peace if you don’t go through the conflict first. You can’t have happiness if you don’t deal with the anger. I think that as I shut myself down emotionally, I also shut down music. I just couldn’t do it. Music was too closely tied to emotions. I could sometimes sit down and play through some Bach or Mozart in an attempt to make my brain feel orderly, but I wasn’t feeling it. And so I mostly avoided it.

Lately, I have been looking at getting back into music. My husband, excited that I was showing an interest again, went out and got me an old 1935 Wurlitzer Baby Grand, for a really good price off Craig’s List. I went with him and helped him move it. It’s a perfect fit for our house.  It’s got some history, apparently it’s original owner was a violinist with the Knoxville Symphony and she died after a long happy life at the age of 103. It’s also a bit dinged up and scratched here and there which means we won’t have to freak out if our kids add another scratch or ding. I rearranged our entire living room so that I now have a Music Room at one end. I have started practicing a bit every day. Scales, warmups, old songs I played in high school. Just easing myself back into it. I have really been enjoying myself, but I’ve wondered about the emotional side of it. Can I relax enough to let myself play with feeling? Can I let myself feel the sadness in the song? Can I let myself feel again? I’ve been a bit worried that maybe I can’t any more. Maybe that part of me is gone. 

Today I was working on getting my piano music moved to a different bookcase and I found a piece of music that I didn’t even know I owned, “Pie Jesu” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s REQUIEM. My copy was a vocal duet with piano accompaniment. It’s a beautiful, simple song written in latin. The English translation that is written on the music gives the words as this:

Merciful Jesus, who takest away the sins of the world, grant them rest.

Oh Lamb of God, who takest away the sin of the world, grant them eternal rest.

I sat down and started to sing it and play along. Alas. I am not a talented soprano and there was no way I could sing that high. My voice couldn’t bring justice to the beauty of the song. I stopped playing for a minute. And then I remembered my piano teacher, Ms. Wong, telling me to make the notes sing, make the melody sing. And I realized, I can’t sing the song, but I can make the piano sing it. And I did. And my fingers made the melody sing and it was beautiful. When I finally finished I sat there, feeling fidgety, like I needed to get up and do something. I stood up and went over the other side of my living room where I was still rearranging other books onto a shelf. (Moving my living room around created a couple projects I hadn’t been anticipating.) I was putting books back onto an empty shelf and I picked up my old Bible from years ago. I flipped it open and found myself in the book of Job, and I suddenly just wanted to read this chapter. Job 9. In this chapter Job talks about how powerful God is and how unworthy he, Job, is. In verse 33-35 he says,

“If only there were someone to arbitrate between us, to lay his hand upon us both, someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that his terror would frighten me no more. Then I would speak up without fear of him, but as it now stands with me, I cannot.”

I stopped reading and thought about how horrible that would be to have the full burden of your sins on your shoulders and no way to approach God because He is too Holy. And I suddenly realized that the song I had just played was an answer to Job’s predicament. Jesus takes away the sin of the world, and grants us rest. He removed God’s rod of punishment from us.

I went back to the piano, stared at the music again, and with fresh wonder, played the song again. And while I played, some tears fell, and I felt just a bit like my ice wall around my emotions started to crack a bit more. And I felt hopeful. Excited. I have missed music and I hadn’t even realized how much I missed it.

Here is a link to a recording of “Pie Jesu” if you’d like to hear it.

“Pie Jesu”