Momma lived out her last years with Alzheimer’s. As her primary caregiver, I was honored to be an eyewitness to her faithful walk with the Lord, even as memories slipped away and her body failed her. I loved to hear her pray. May the Lord bless each of my readers with the grace to live life in the hard places like my momma.
Category: faith
Anniversary Morning Coffee
Every morning, as I sit bleary-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror getting ready for my day, my kind-hearted husband brings me my first cup of coffee. That little gesture is a sweet reminder that Wayne loves, honors, and cherishes me as his wife—49 years today, in fact. How grateful I am for this man’s faithful love and care for me.
Another sip of coffee as I glance in the mirror, then I pick up my hairbrush and begin smoothing the tangles away. I smile as I think about how I was 15 years old when I met Wayne. He was a sailor stationed at a naval air station in Hawaii. We had been writing to one another for a few months but met for the first time in person at church when he was home on leave.
As I got to know him better in those few weeks, I found myself wanting to do things that pleased him—like growing my pageboy hairstyle longer because Wayne said he liked long hair.
He still likes my long hair, so not much has changed about my hairstyle since the 70’s, except that the gray hairs now outnumber the brunette hairs. I have tried to cover those gray hairs in years past but now consider them a badge of honor. As I look at my reflection in the mirror today, those gray hairs framing my time-worn face remind me that God has blessed me.
The years of marriage that lie ahead are surely fewer than the ones behind, but we have every confidence they will continue to be blessed. Even if our golden years together are sprinkled with hardship and painful loss, we have assurance of His faithfulness. The Lord promises, “Even to your old age and gray hairs, I am he, I am he who will sustain you” (Isaiah 46:4).
Linking up with Kate and friends at Five Minute Friday. This week’s FMF writing prompt is: FACE. For instructions on how to join the link-up, click here.
The Satisfied Soul
When my journey on earth is drawing to a close, I hope and pray that I will have the same attitude of heart as my friend Kathy. Even though she was going through immense physical trials, she exhibited what I believe should be the hallmark of every believer – a satisfied soul.
Kathy didn’t know why God allowed this painful trial, but she trusted He had a plan. Kathy didn’t beg for mercy from the trial. My sister in Christ implored God to show mercy to those she loved who were still without Christ. Her Jesus loving heart desired nothing more than for God to be glorified in her, by life or by death.
May I live my life as Kathy did – eager to know the Lord better today than I did yesterday. May I be as generous with the resources God has entrusted to my care, investing what I have in the kingdom.
Tonight happens to be my friend Kathy’s third anniversary in heaven, and I’m listening to the lovely music of Keith and Kristin Getty. One song in particular just washed over my soul and made me think about Kathy’s testimony.
“My soul is satisfied in Him alone.”
Sing it Anyway
As I grow older, I’m noticing that my hearing is not as great as it used to be. I’m not quite at hearing aid stage, but a recent hearing test revealed that I have the most difficulty with hearing the higher tones–which explains why I can hear my husband’s voice perfectly well, but have trouble hearing the voices of women and children. I have only a taste of what it’s like to not be able to hear. My blogging friend, Sheila, knows what it is to be profoundly deaf and yet praise God in music. You might appreciate her little devotional (below).
Devotions by Sheila
BY PRAYER AND SUPPLICATION WITH THANKSGIVING LET YOUR REQUESTS BE MADE KNOWN UNTO GOD. PHILIPPIANS 4:6 ASV
It doesn’t matter if you can read music or carry a tune. Sing it anyway. Let your heart sing old songs and new. Make a joyful noise.
29 – Fill my cup
Hymns and golden oldies music occupy a large room in my memory bank. The hymn I took the title from today is dear to my heart. Before I lost my hearing I sang it in the church choir. A hearing-impaired second soprano who didn’t want to quit singing.
After profound deafness came to stay, I learned to sign some favorite songs with my hands. Fill my cup, Lord. I lift it up, Lord. Come and quench this thirsting of my soul.
Scripture: My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed. Psalm 71:23 ESV
Prayer: Father God, since you have redeemed my soul through your son Jesus Christ, I must sing. I cannot stop my heart and mind from praising you with music. Thank you for all music written by inspiration to speak to us about love and life. Amen.
Music speaks to my heart.
If you pull up next to me at a traffic light, you might find me singing a praise and worship song at the top of my lungs. I wear earbuds when I’m at work and try to listen to Christ-honoring music. At home, I listen to music while I’m cooking, cleaning, or gardening. Every now and again, I break out in singing or humming whatever I’m listening to at the moment. Wayne can’t always figure out what I’m singing because carrying a tune isn’t one of my strengths, and I’m notorious for not remembering all of the lyrics. I’m not the best singer in the world, but I sing anyway.
“It doesn’t matter if you can read music or carry a tune. Sing it anyway. Let your heart sing old songs and new. Make a joyful noise.”
Devotions by Sheila
Whenever the road in life seems hard or takes a turn I didn’t expect, music has a way of reminding me that I am not alone and that I have a Helper. Music comforts me when I’m sad and lifts my heart to praise the One who is my comfort. When my heart is overflowing with the beauty of nature, music lifts my heart in gratitude to the Creator of it all.
When I cannot sleep at night, sometimes just listening to a playlist of the sounds of nature will lull me to a place of quiet rest. I absolutely love the sound that water makes–whether a gentle rain or a rolling thunderstorm, the trickle of a stream or the lapping of an ocean wave. There is music in all of God’s creation.
December is a time when music reminds me of the gift I have in Jesus. I’ve been creating a Spotify playlist of some of my Christmas favorites–you can find it here. I pray that you will find time in this busy season to sing along with music which will point you toward the One who is the true and best gift of Christmas.
And don’t worry if you can’t sing. Sing it anyway!
How Big is this Problem? Part 2
I just came from the post office and feel like I need to share an update related to the bumpy road of paperwork related to redetermining my brother’s Medicaid status. In my last post, I shared that I felt somewhat alone in the task of coming up with answers to the who, what, when, why and where questions on the lengthy MADR form (Medicaid Disability Redetermination Report).
Continue reading “How Big is this Problem? Part 2”Curating Life
I’ve seen this meme floating around on social media a bit lately.
I confess that I haven’t read any of this author’s books, so am not sure of the author’s context for this quote. I do know that his philosophy of life leans toward encouraging simple, minimalistic living. Its something to which I aspire, especially since I have reached the summit of decade six and am now careening at breakneck speed toward number seven. However, each time I read, “Be a curator of your life,” something strikes me as being untrue in my life. While I do make choices each and every day to simplify my life, I’m not so sure I am (or even want to be) my life’s curator.
God is a better Curator of my life.
As I look back over the past several years, I see things in it that I wouldn’t choose, but He allowed. I’ve seen family relationships crumble — not something I orchestrated or desired, but even that hardship passed the muster of His divine curatorship in my life for my ultimate good and His glory.
On this day in 2020, my life took an expected turn which left me with more unexpected feelings than I ever dreamed possible. It was the day my momma met Jesus face to face. It was fully expected–I knew in my heart she would be leaving. When my sweet momma breathed her last, my role as her daughter, friend and caregiver suddenly ended. While the weight of years of caring for her was now lifted from my shoulders, I also felt an unexpected void that my “purpose” as mom’s caregiver had previously filled. Even in the midst of incredible grief, my sadness was wrapped in the grateful realization that my loving God had edited and rearranged my life in a way I could never have planned so that I could walk my sweet momma Home.
The heart of man plans his way,
Proverbs 16:9 (ESV)
but the Lord establishes his steps.
Faded Valentines and Undying Love
My husband knows I would much prefer a new plant for my garden over cut flowers–but the fragrant bouquet he gave me on Valentine’s Day was certainly a lovely way to remind me of his love for me and fill the wintery gap between now and the time when I can play in the dirt outside.
As my Valentine’s Day flowers begin to droop and fade, I am reminded that Valentine’s Day can be difficult for some. In my personal circle of friends and family, several were bereaved of a loving spouse in the past year or two. Others are going through a valley experience in life and wondering whether their Valentine will be there to love on next year. None of us knows whether we have the next breath. Romantic love is wonderful, but temporary. Finding ways to express Christ-like love is the best. I love Paul Tripp’s article filled with 23 ideas for sharing love with others in 2023.
Did you have a wonderfully romantic Valentine’s Day? Or was any reference to romance or marriage painful for you this year? Maybe it was fun, flirty, and a celebration of the good season you are in. Or perhaps you had a conflict-filled week, and Valentine’s Day felt fake, forced, and a cover up.
Personally, I love romance. I am way over on the romantic end of the emotional spectrum. I do think romance, romantic gestures, gifts, dates, and surprises are an important ingredient in a healthy marriage.
But romance is not love. Romance is not a fruit of the Spirit. You can be a follower of Jesus, filled with Holy Spirit, lacking romance yet incarnating the love of Christ.
This is love: “Not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10-11, ESV).
Regardless of your marital status, here are 23 ways to express cruciform love—”in the shape of the Cross” love—in 2023.
1. Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving.
2. Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of another without impatience or anger.
3. Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward another, while looking for ways to encourage and praise.
4. Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses.
5. Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right.
6. Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer an excuse or shift the blame.
7. Love means being willing, when confronted by another, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus.
8. Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to another is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient.
9. Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good.
10. Love is being a good student of another, looking for their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support them as they carry it, or encourage them along the way.
11. Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face in your relationship, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response.
12. Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested.
13. Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a relationship and being faithful to your promises and true to your word.
14. Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack the other person’s character or assault his or her intelligence.
15. Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt another into giving you what you want or doing something your way.
16. Love is being unwilling to ask another to be the source of your identity, meaning and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while simultaneously refusing to be the source of theirs.
17. Love is the willingness to have less free time, less sleep, and a busier schedule in order to be faithful to what God has called you to be and to do in that relationship.
18. Love is a commitment to say no to selfish instincts and to do everything that is within your ability to promote real unity, functional understanding, and active love in your relationship.
19. Love is staying faithful to your commitment to treat another with appreciation, respect, and grace, even in moments when he or she doesn’t seem to deserve it or is unwilling to reciprocate.
20. Love is the willingness to make regular and costly sacrifices for the sake of your relationship without asking anything in return or using your sacrifices to place the other person in your debt.
21. Love is being unwilling to make any personal decision or choice that would harm your relationship, hurt the other person, or weaken the bond of trust between you.
22. Love is refusing to be self-focused or demanding but instead looking for specific ways to serve, support, and encourage, even when you are busy or tired.
23. Love is daily admitting to yourself, the other person, and God that you are not able to love this way without God’s protecting, providing, forgiving, rescuing, and delivering grace.
We love because he first loved us!
God bless,
Paul David Tripp
There are people in my life I am having great difficulty loving as I should. This list reminded me of ways I can show Christ-like love to these prickly-hard-to-love people. I plan to print it and put it in my prayer journal as a guide, not only to prayer, but for putting love into action.
My hope and prayer is that this post will encourage someone who reads this to greater love in your circle of people who need His love.
Mothering Moments
Okay friends, you are going to need to cut me some slack on this mothering moment that I’m going to share. I had only been 20 years old for about 14 days when my first baby arrived in the world and probably not even 22 when this story took place.
I was pregnant with baby #2 and exhausted. Usually a good sleeper, lately Matt seemed to sense the moment my weary head hit my pillow. Well, on the night this story took place, I was settling in for sleep for what seemed to be the umpteenth time when my not quite two-year-old little Matt cried out for me from his crib with his loud toddler voice,
“Mommy!”
I shudder to think of what I did now because it is so contrary to good sense, but I was a gullible young mom who apparently believed this ad.
On that night I grew tired of getting my very pregnant self in and out of our waterbed (anyone remember those?). I desperately wanted to get my little guy to lie back down and go to sleep, so I gave him a bottle hoping he would fall asleep and let me get some sleep. I wanted to save the little bit of milk we had in the fridge for breakfast in the morning, so watered down some Tang breakfast drink and put it in his bottle.
Not two minutes had passed after I dragged my weary self back to bed when I heard the familiar squeak of Matt’s crib. We had a tiny house and I didn’t want him waking his sleeping daddy who had to get up early to go to work, so I got up and went to his room. He was standing in his crib again, arm extended out to me with an empty baby bottle in hand.
“More, Mommy, more.”
I couldn’t believe he had drained that bottle so quickly. I made him another bottle of the stuff then checked to make sure his diaper was dry. He took the bottle and snuggled in for what I had hoped would be the last time until morning’s light. Bleery-eyed with weariness, I then crawled back in my own bed hoping not to make too many waves.
Unbelievably, before I could pull the covers up under my chin, Matt was again yelling,
“More, Mommy, more!”
I made the trek of five or six steps to his room again and turned on the little Humpty-Dumpty lamp on the dresser. I couldn’t believe my eyes – his bottle was empty again! Checked his diaper again too – it just had to be wet, but it wasn’t.
Bordering on sheer exhaustion (and also a wee bit suspicious), against my better judgement, I fixed him another bottle. I turned off the light and then headed out of his door, this time waiting around the corner to spy on him and see what on earth was going on. Sure enough, I had every reason to be suspicious. My clever and mischievous little guy sat up in his crib, unscrewed the top of the bottle, then stood up and proceeded to pour that orange drink down the wall, then picked up the nipple end of the bottle and screwed it back onto the empty bottle.
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. I did know that if he could figure out how to do all of that, he was much too old to still be drinking from a bottle. I took the bottle out of his hand before he could say, “More, Mommy, more” and told him to say “bye-bye” to his bottle.
Matt never saw the bottle again.
Interesting note: Now, 40-some years later, Matt is an elder and discipleship pastor at Wildwood Church in East Moline, Illinois. On a recent Sunday, Wayne and I were able to worship with Matt’s faith family at Wildwood and were blessed to listen as our son preached from Luke 22 using this story from his childhood as a sermon illustration. I’m not proud of this mothering moment of mine, but it did make a pretty nice sermon illustration. It warmed this momma’s heart (and his dad’s too) hearing Matt sharing God’s Word as he preached. I invite you, dear readers, to give that sermon a listen right here.
All Things Bright and Beautiful
Peonies and Iris have a way of pointing my heart to the Creator of all that beauty. Let me share a few verses of a hymn that came to mind, along with a tiny bit of my little plot in God’s Creation
“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”
“Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colors,
He made their tiny wings.”
“He gave us eyes to see them,
All Things Bright and Beautiful, hymn by Cecil F. Alexander
And lips that we might tell,
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.”
If you’re not familiar with this wonderful hymn, you may want to give this beautiful rendition by Julie Gaulke a listen.
Duct Tape Can’t Fix It
It was 13 years ago today that my dad was called Home to heaven. May I share his story of how God drew him to Himself?
My dad was a mechanical engineer by training, so could figure out how to fix most anything long before the advent of YouTube tutorials. If he didn’t have the right part, he’d get creative and make something else work. Our family jokes that he could fix just about anything with duct tape.
My dad learned later in life that there was one thing he definitely couldn’t fix by his own ingenuity. His own sinful heart. I was about 12 years old when my dad realized he needed to trust Jesus for salvation from sin. I was old enough to notice his dramatic spiritual transformation — a change that carried over into every aspect of his life.
Mom once shared with me that Dad would spend every lunch break at work reading the Bible he kept in his car. He read through it so many times that it fell apart. Dad repaired it with his favorite tool: duct tape. I displayed that Bible at my dad’s memorial service in 2008, but it disappeared sometime during mom’s battle with Alzheimer’s a few years later. I did find another Bible, similarly repaired (pictured).
Not long ago I sat down with my Dad’s well-worn Bible in my lap and began to page through it, stopping to read his notes in the margin. It was clear to me that he spent much time exploring this copy of God’s Word too. The Bible had a few special things tucked in the flyleaf, including two cards I had sent him — it meant a lot to me knowing that he had treasured those cards enough to save them.
My heart got all tangled up with emotion when my eyes spied two sheets of lined paper in my dad’s familiar handwriting. These were the notes from which my Dad shared this testimony of faith with the congregation at Garfield Baptist Church on March 31, 1971.
Today, dear readers, on the 13th anniversary of his homegoing to heaven, I would like to share dad’s testimony with you, just as he wrote it, with a prayerful hope that God will use it for His Glory .
March 31, 1971 My Testimony Jerry Boyles - A Son of God Matthew 10:32 - "Whosoever therefore shall confess me before man, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven." It is a shock to learn at the genetic age of 39 to find that you are a spiritual babe. I have been a church member since the age of 11-12 but do not recall being asked personally, 'Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?" I could not give an affirmative answer the first time this question was posed on a Monday night visitation by Gene Klingbeil and Ed Newton, but it did start the wheels turning. I admitted to being a sinner and I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior on Monday evening November 9, 1970 with the assistance of Rev. (Edward) Fuller, Mr. (Everett) Huebner, and my family. I was baptized by immersion by Rev. Fuller on Dec. 27, 1970. I base my salvation on John 1:11-13 "He came unto his own and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." My assurance of salvation is: John 10:28 "And I give unto them eternal life: and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand."
At this point in Dad’s testimony, he made a note to himself to “Give thanks to AWANA and Sunday School.” Those two ministries of Garfield Baptist Church were very instrumental in my coming to Christ and growing in my faith too. I love knowing that when God drew me to Christ, my family would soon come to know Him too. Dad concluded his testimony in this way:
Being a spiritual babe I have a lot of "catching up" to do. I'm going to need all the help I can get from God and this congregation. I feel that I've had much help from both. I hope, if accepted as a member, that I can be an asset to this church. In Jesus Name, Jerry R. Boyles Right hand of fellowship, Thursday, April 8, 1971
Barefoot Lily Lady 