My how time slips away from me.  From day to day I have good days and difficult days and days I want to hide.  But then again I can see how God is enabling me to use this experience too to see a bible lesson, for me and maybe for you!

I went to FL via the airport in Charlotte NC. My oh my, that is a big airport-made all the bigger by NOT having the right kind of suitcase!  [Read this as ...no wheels.]  AND I found out that arrival time is the time your airplanes wheels touch down so that is not the time you have between flights [read this as .... no time for lunch!]  I plan to write again soon and tell you of some of the lessons I learned while in FL.  I also went to Mississippi and then to Louisiana for a day and there were many lessons to be learned there as well.  Back to NC and an hour in Georgia in the mountains where it was quiet and peaceful and too short a stay.  There were lessons there as well.  But I was ready to be home again.  More on all this later.....

Then began the new job, and I had a couple of hard cry days in between because I don't want change.  Do you like change?  I like change when it means the furniture is in a new position or we are having a different dessert.  I thought I liked changes when they brought new learning but I found a big part of Gene's homebody sunk in to me during the last 26 years.

Yet I LIKE the new job, doing photography for an e-bay company.  I have filmed all kinds of things from an art print of a cowboy shootout to rusty cast iron.  There is a constant challenge to get the right angle and right lighting to sell the object.

This week I was listening to a CD I bought in NC of children singing faith filled nature songs.   Some were nature songs and some were faith filled but one really lit my fire. When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder words and music by James M. Black written in 1893.  You must know a little background to make the story matter.

I grew up without recorded music for a section of my childhood.  My father who sadly was afflicted with drug addictions, often was sky high and manic and when he was, he would play symphonies and classical music all day and all night.  I have no memory of that time period but my mother was overburdened with the facts and when she chose to separate herself and the 4 children from my father's additive behaviors [believe me -- playing classical music was not the problem area!!!!] she craved SILENCE!!!!!  Thus we did not have a radio playing music in the house or car, we did not have a record player or stereo.  We did attend band concerts, organ recitals, choir and Christmas performances of music.  We also listened to the weather man on the radio WCOJ in PA but when his report was done we turned it off.  We lived like that for about 6 years.  The year I was 12 my 13 year old brother discovered WFIL out of Philadelphia. [He also taught all of us to say BIG WHOOP! to just about everything......this thrilled my mother ......not.]  so music came back into the house ...until Bruce was killed in an auto accident just a year later.  Again our house was silent.  But somewhere in there I was given a record player and a record.  I think for my 13th birthday.  Somewhere in the next years I found the voice of Tennessee Ernie Ford.  Man, I loved his singing.  I would go to my third story bedroom and open both windows and play his music on volume 11!  It was so loud I could sing with all my gusto and no one could criticize me because they still couldn't hear me!

Oddly one song I loved but I certainly did not understand it:  When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder   I had never heard the idea of salvation though I attended church weekly and sang hymns regularly, I know I did not understand there was a way into heaven and I was unaware that I had not established the relationship with Christ that would make that entry possible.  But I loved the song.  I went on to teach Sunday School and lead youth group at that same church as well as leave home for Nursing School before I discovered a thing called salvation.

Now come back to the other day when it was playing on the children's CD.........My life feels upside down and backward, nothing   feels  right, there are so many times of grief and sadness and disinterest and confusion and changes I didn't ask for.  [Some are from Gene's illness and death but some are from a new roof and new kitchen and new car and new paint color and new relationships with my children and new plants and new hose pipe and new........ well just tootootoo much!]

BUT....When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there.  Because I know in whom I have placed my faith and my trust and my depth of being.  I DID ask Jesus to be MY messiah, to redeem me of my sins, to restore that which has been stolen by the enemy.  Because that relationship is strong and secure and committed there is a surety in my voice and in my spirit when I make or sing a proclamation like I'll be there.  Because I choose to remain tucked in God's arm, as a secure child when a loving parent holds them snug.  I will not fall, I will will not crawl down or struggle to get away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MebP3NhFwSw

Perhaps I have done a good job at explaining this idea...It is so deep in me I feel I do not explain it with all the love I feel in saying it.  So very deep and it has nothing to do with Gene or the children, it has to do with my own personal relationship with God.  He did not bring me this far to leave me.  And I am not leaving Him so we are good to go.  Onward to the next steps.....oh now that makes me cry again.

I choose to be Thankful...every day even when I don't write about it.  AND I am looking for the bible lesson in in all....are you?