Brave, Anyway

Tag: prayer

  • Starting My Day

    Starting My Day

    Father, I thank you for today and I ask you to help me today. Help me to do your will in all things, act like your child, and be a good citizen and representative of your kingdom. Help me to stay on your straight and narrow path, and not stray into sin traps and mud puddles. Help me to steer clear of reasoning, people-pleasing and pride, and fear, anxiety and worry.

    I thank you that this is the day that you have made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. I believe the love that you have for me and I expect great things today. I thank you for supernatural favor everywhere I go and in everything I do. Traveling, in the car, with family and friends, with my clients, bosses, colleagues and team.

    I thank you for your promise in Acts 16:31 that everyone in my household is saved. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, you and your household.

    I ask for your hedge of protection around, over, and under me and my family. I pray that we won’t break any bones or have any accidents and I thank you that everyone in my household is cancer, disease, condition and addiction free. Cancer and diseases cannot take root in us and they cannot prosper in us. in any way, shape, form or fashion.

    I pray Psalm 91 over and I plead the blood of Jesus over (all family names).

    We who dwell in the secret place of the most high, shall abide under the shadow of the almighty. We will say of you Lord, you are our refuge and our strength. Out God in whom we can trust…Under your wings we shall take refuge. You will be with us in trouble. With long life you will satisfy us and show us your salvation.

    Psalm 91

    I lift up everyone on my teams, and (teammates’) teams. I pray that we make good decisions and act like good leaders, that we find success in all we do, and for our physical and mental health.

    I pray in accordance with your word, and in agreement with many other people, for complete and total healing for (names of little cancer fighters). I thank you for their complete and total healing, for their long life and salvation, and that they do not have any short, long or late term side effects of their treatment course.

    And finally, I lift up all these folks. You know the needs in their lives. I pray above all for their relationship with you, but also for their healing – spiritually, mentally, physically and in every area of their lives. (Names on my phone list, on the church prayer list, friends and family and neighbors, church leaders.)

  • Freedom Documentation

    Freedom Documentation

    One of my greatest treasures is dozens of little pieces of paper from my Dad. Cartoons he cut out from the newspaper. Thoughts he wrote down and stuck in my purse or laptop bag. Notes from sermons that he wanted to focus on and that he tucked into the bibles he eventually gave us. Little messages from him that I saved over the years and recently went back through as I mentally prepared for Father’s Day.

    A three-time Vietnam Vet’s commentary on my date’s attire: “Last time I saw someone wearing something like this I bushwhacked him in the jungle.”

    Some were funnies or just hearts expressing love and some were reminders that I could always, always come home. But most are lessons – lessons that are fundamental and yet have different meanings at each life stage and event. Lessons that grow with you, as you grow. I’ve started thinking about them as his constitution. The Constitution of Dad.

    Pray every day. Eeeeeeeevery day, he’d say, making sure I knew that the frequency is important. Pray Psalms 91. Pray the prayers in Ephesians. If you don’t know what to pray, just say the name of Jesus over and over. Praying allows God to work. And praying doesn’t change God’s mind, it changes ours.

    The longer you wait before making a u-turn, the more costly it is in every way. Sometimes we get on the wrong path. We’re certain it’s right until we know it’s not. It happens to literally everyone. And most importantly, it’s not a disaster. Even if it costs you money or you lose a little time to go back or hop over onto another path, this is money and time well spent.

    Let everyone be wrong. About you, about situations, about anything. Your peace is what’s most important and it’s your job to hold on to it. Good humans will admit when they are wrong and reach out to you. You need to admit when you’re wrong and reach out to people.

    Be honest, with everyone but most importantly with yourself. See things as they are and not as you want them to be or as you wish others would see them. If you cheat on that test, you did not earn an A or finish first – you behaved in a way to gain something. If you do something halfway, you deserve the C. Cheating and short-cutting will always hurt you more than anyone else.

    What you refuse to surrender, you will eventually surrender to. Anger. Addiction. Unforgiveness. Fear. Insecurity. Expecting anything other than what God has promised.

    You gotta clean out your mind regularly. Think about what you are thinking about. Just like you tell your hand what to do, you tell your brain what to do. You choose what thoughts to keep and what thoughts to toss. About yourself and about others. If you allow your mind to focus on negative thoughts, you will feel and speak that way. And if you fill your mind with thoughts only about yourself, you won’t be of any use to anyone for anything – especially God.

    Do not limit God. With your words, your deeds or your thoughts. And our words have power, so always be mindful of what words come out of your mouth.

    Looking at his notes that most spoke to me, all spread out on my living room floor, I realized the common theme is they are paths to or instructions for living freely. There’s even a note on the inside cover of one of his bibles that says Get On With Life.

    Like Thomas Jefferson’s reference to our country’s living and breathing document to help guide a nation to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” the Constitution of Dad is my guide to living in freedom.

    My Dad and baby Ella. A girl Dad and a girl Papa.

  • Forward

    Forward

    If you remember anything about Robert Frost from your high school CliffsNotes, it’s likely some version of “the best way out is always through.” Maybe that’s true sometimes, but other times I think the way out may be to go back or even to be still. What I’ve come to believe is more true, particularly in navigating grief, is that the way through is forward.

    Forward.

    One step at a time. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.

    The morning after my Dad died, I received a very clear message that the timing was on purpose. Tough days were ahead for my girls, and how I behaved would be what they looked to and what they remembered later. I needed to show them how to live and how to grieve – specifically how to do both at the same time.

    In the last 10 weeks, my girls have lost both their grandpas and their Dad. They’ve watched me cry and they’ve watched me laugh. They’ve watched me watch the same old episodes of Criminal Minds repeatedly, they’ve watched me do the crappy paperwork that comes with notifying companies that someone has passed away, and they’ve watched me excitedly buy all the shirts we even remotely liked at the VCU bookstore. They’ve watched me in funeral homes, shopping malls, church, the hospital, prom dress boutiques, long car rides late at night, and even doing my own yard work which they know I hate. They’ve watched me very purposely put time into projects where we could all see the progress and then the completion, and they’ve watched me take steps to plan things we can look forward to later in the summer and year. They have heard me pray for healing, peace, and knowledge of God’s presence in their lives and in the lives of people that I didn’t pray for for a very long time. And I am just not sure it was enough. Or that I showed them good balance in terms of moments of sadness and Easter basket hunting.

    I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few weeks about the word forward and how it relates to grief. What propels us forward, what stops us from moving forward, how best to move forward. Especially when life is unfair, or things are unfinished or unresolved. How will I help the girls move forward? What can I say? What can I do? How can I show them the way?

    I think maybe the key to forward is found in 3 other f words. (None of which is that f word.)

    Forgiveness. Forgive that they left, and believe they didn’t want to. Forgive yourself for relief they are not in pain anymore. Forgive them for old wounds you’ve been hanging on to. Forgive yourself for having mixed feelings about these people you grieve and love. Forgive that they weren’t perfect and forgive that you aren’t perfect.

    When at first I will not listen, God will send a message through Words With Friends. Because I am stubborn.

    Freedom. We must give each other and ourselves freedom to grieve anywhere, freedom to grieve differently, and freedom from any timeline. We must also acknowledge that someone’s death brings them and us freedom, and that’s not something to feel badly about. They are free of all the yuck that comes with living in this realm and we are free to live without them here. The people who really love us, our people, delight in seeing us thrive – whether they exist here on earth or in our great cloud of witnesses.

    Faith. Holding on to your faith can be especially hard in this time but is especially important in this time. People will say things like God needed another angel. They mean well, but they are just wrong. (And if I find out this happened, the fourth F is Fite and I will make it stop.) God does not make people sick and God does not need more angels. You know who God is. It is deeply ingrained in you. HE is deeply ingrained in you. He grieves with you. And He promises in Matthew that those who mourn are blessed and will be comforted. Whenever you question this, and you will, it’s remembering His faithfulness at other times in your lives and in other areas of your lives that will give you peace.

    He knew death here is not forever…He wept because knowing the end of the story doesn’t mean you can’t cry at the sad parts.

    I guess the simple truth – without steps and f words – is that the way forward is on a path of grace. Grace for ourselves, grace for those around us, grace for those who are gone.

  • Freedom Thoughts

    Freedom Thoughts

    Today began before the sun fully came up, with loud noises and flashing lights. An ambulance at a neighbor’s house immediately had me praying, and also immediately transported me to the night my Dad died and how the world looked as I arrived at my parents’ house.

    Red flashes. Red is the color of stop. Red is the color of danger. My eyes filled with tears as my heart filled with heaviness.

    And just as quickly as the heaviness came, the urge to choose a direction filled my mind. A deeply ingrained habit, a gift my Dad gave me, to be mindful of the direction of my thoughts and emotions.

    My Dad’s gift came in the form of a book – for me, a life-changing book. I first read Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer as a young adult, when I desperately needed freedom from fear. And although its pages have countless lessons, the most important one for me is this: I am in control of all my thoughts and I choose which thoughts to dwell on and which ones to discard.

    This morning I had a choice to focus on praying for someone else or on sadness, grief, and fear. I chose praying for someone else. But as I’m human and all up in my feelings right now, an hour later and for the rest of the day I was focused on and looking back over my scribblings about fear and progress and the year of freedom.

    When I think back on all the times in my life where fear had the most power, I had at some point made a choice to walk with or in forces that did not embrace light in the same way I did or needed to. For me, freedom is in the light. I am the strongest when I use my free will, my freedom, to choose light. I am the strongest when I surround myself with other people who choose light.

    Are light and love interchangeable here? As in Light and Love? That brings me full circle to Mat Kearney’s Closer to Love, a song that can transport me back to the smells and sounds of CHKD halls just as fast as those lights this morning transported me back to 3 weeks ago.

    She got the call today
    One out of the gray
    And when the smoke cleared
    It took her breath away
    She said she didn’t believe
    It could happen to me
    I guess we’re all one phone call
    From our knees

    But that song and those memories all have a happy ending now. A light associated with them. A love associated with them. A freedom associated with them.

    I’ve been looking for my eagle, a symbol of freedom, and still haven’t seen her since my Dad went to heaven. I think she holds some sort of secret I am supposed to unlock. A behavior I am supposed to learn from. But until I see her, I’m stuck with Google and bird websites to try and figure it out. What I know with certainty so far is this: in order to fly, birds or planes must have a balance of forces. NASA has really complicated ways of explaining this but Toni Morrison says it so simply: You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

  • Counting Every Blessing

    Counting Every Blessing

    Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know or we don’t know what we’ve been missing, until we experience a thing and realize that’s what we’ve needed.

    For the first time in over a year, I went to church to worship in person this morning. I’ve been watching the service online each week and that’s been a beacon of light and hope amidst all the darkness and chaos. Online church offers many things in-person church doesn’t – you get to choose the time you want to listen, you can sit in your jammies and pause if needed, and you have privacy to have a moment or be moved without anyone noticing. But what it doesn’t offer, and that I’d forgotten and perhaps taken for granted, is things like hugs from people who feel like family, prayer in unison with others, and conversation with people with whom you have the most important thing in common.

    I was nervous about going into a place with so many people, even though I knew we’d all be wearing masks and social distancing. We’re all vaccinated, but still the thought of being physically close to people again seemed strange and a little scary. I resolved to arrive at the last minute, keep my distance, and leave promptly – and I broke every single one of my own rules.

    We arrived early because Audrey and I were excited to go and ready early and trying to decide if it used to take 25 minutes or 35 minutes to get there. We walked into an entry filled with familiar faces, and within two minutes I had hugged someone – not because he hugged me, but because I found myself saying “we’re vaccinated so you’re getting a hug!” And then when the service was over, we stayed around to chat and were among the last to walk out and say our goodbyes on the stairs.

    I didn’t want it to end, I was so happy.

    It was in the middle of the service that I looked at the pew in front of me and noticed the emoji face etched into the wood. Two eyes and a mouth in a straight line. The emoji that’s not happy or sad. The emoji that’s blah. It’s the one called Neutral Face, and it’s how I didn’t know I’ve been feeling because of the absence of worship with people.

    As we sang and talked about counting every blessing, these are the ones that filled my heart and the things I want to remember about this day.

    • When I mentioned the possibility of going to church to Audrey, I thought she would be hesitant because it’s different than what she was used to. But without any hesitation she eagerly asked “Will Mrs. Reesee be there?” I’m thankful for every Sunday School teacher I and my girls have ever had – from Mrs. Nunn and Momma Gloria in my day to Mrs. Wendy and Mrs. Edie and Mrs. Reesee of more recent days. I’m sure they’ve all had moments where they wondered if any of the kids around them were listening, but the impact they have on lives is so great and just beyond measure.
    • I sat next to my Mom and together we prayed The Lord’s Prayer.
    • Pre-COVID I attended the service that had the progressive people – the one with the band instead of a choir. Right now we’re hosting just one service in person, so that service has a mixture of music types to have a little something for everyone. I had forgotten in my years of always singing along with a band what it’s like to hear voices of all different ages and strengths sing together – from the traditional hymn to the modern song, it was just beautiful to hear the voices of the young and the old and everyone in the middle all mixed up together.
    • Audrey wore wedges today – her first “big girl” shoes. Her triumphant and naughty smile when she raised up on tip toes as my Mom leaned down and said “you are not allowed to get taller than me!” was the absolute best.
    • And finally, I want this visual reminder to stick with me. The further I get from spending time with God in the company of His people, the more my face goes from happy to neutral.