Happy New Year!
Thought I would just share a little posting I wrote in a Fibromyalgia Christian support group on Facebook the other day regarding the New Year and resolutions:
I don’t normally do New Year resolutions. I figure if I need to do something then I should just do it. Don’t have to wait for the New Year time. But last January I returned to God and last year was one where in the midst of the massive messiness of life I was given more blessings than I ever thought to have. God is good! And so it is my desire for this next year and all the years to come to continue to grow steadfastly in Him wherever He may lead me, wherever I may go. Though fibro is a challenging pain to deal with in life it has taught me how to never know what to expect next and how to focus on one step at a time. I think I used to be overwhelmed by New Years. Have to plan the next year out, have to fulfill that resolution all at once. And so I didn’t like the New Year resolution idea and ignored it. Now I know that I don’t know what the next minute will bring and that’s ok. I know that everything in life is a step upon step. So I’m going to keep walking step by step in Him and can’t wait to see what He has in store for me minute by minute.
May Peace be with you in 2013! Blessings!
Belinda
Chasing the Wind
Do you know what the problem with chasing the wind is?
While you are chasing it you can be caught up in the exhilaration of it.
You feel the wind swirling all around or past you as you follow it.
You get caught up in its currents of promise.
This will lead to where I want, what I want, who I want to be.
And it’s torrents seem fulfilling at the time.
The sound of the wind, those who are cheering you on because they long to catch the same wind they see you riding on, can be deafening in unaware self validation and unnoticed pride in their misguided adoration in desiring to chase the same wind as you. Hoping that you will have found in your wind that which they could not find in theirs.
Then the wind dies down.
Quiet sets in.
Nothing you chased after lasted for more than the breeze it rode in on.
Perhaps you will find disappointment. Or anger. Bitterness. Betrayal. Confusion. Or any number of other ways to describe falling out of the wind each time. But the end result is you are left with nothingness.
And maybe that is the greatest hurt of all. After all the effort and different kinds of self investment you put into chasing that wind.
Sure, you may have more experience now. More wisdom if you choose to open your eyes. But your hands cannot hold on to the wind. Neither can your heart.
You become restless.
Either you seek a new wind or another wind comes along and sweeps you up.
The same cycle to repeat again.
How many cycles of chasing the wind do you wish to go through before you stop? Or before you are spent mentally, physically, emotionally?
At what point do you choose to stop chasing the wind and choose life?
Belinda J. Neal
Best Advice?
What’s the best advice anyone has ever given you?
Advice can come from so many places. Family, friends, a stranger we bump into doing errands and chat with for a few moments, quotes, proverbs, Scripture, sayings, books, sermons, stories, parables, movies, etc. All can be sources of advice, inspiration, or something unrelated that just happens to turn the lightbulb on in our head about an issue (like the TV Dr. House). For me one of the best pieces of advice came from one of my all time favorite movies.
This year marks the 25Th. anniversary of The Princess Bride. It is a movie that I cannot pick any one character that I like the best nor can I pick any one scene that I love above others. And perhaps one day soon I will write an entry on all the things one can glean from this humorous story. It’s got it all. Love, adventure, tragedy, overcoming, revenge, and of course pirates!
I was thinking one day while getting ready to move back to California and a scene from The Princess Bride popped into my head. It’s not one of the scenes most commonly quoted but it is one that had always intrigued me. I have always found this scene interesting because it goes against what we generally do and hear. We are always ‘ever forward’, ‘don’t look back’, ‘the past is gone’, ‘never go backwards’. I feel like I have been bombarded by those messages through conversations, seminars, self help books, and seemingly 50 posts a day on Facebook saying some facsimile of that line of thinking with a cute picture to go with.
The scene that popped into my head was the scene where Inego Montoya is sitting sprawled and drunk in the town after being separated from his cohorts in crime. His friend finds him, after being separated by adventures, sitting there and asks Inego what he is doing there. Inego responds with a drunken slur that Vicini (their crime boss) had given him instructions that if things went wrong that he was to go back to the beginning. This is where things began and so this is where I will stay, I am waiting on Vicini!
I began to think if there was a point where things went wrong in my life what was it? When was it? And could I go back to the beginning and take the right road this time? I am not talking about living in the past, that’s not constructive. But consider the saying ‘two roads diverged in the woods, and I took the one less traveled’. Well, what if there were 5 roads all traveled more or less than the other one. So you pick one and go down it for awhile and realize this is not the road you are meant to be on or wanted to be on. Would you continue on it ‘ever forward’? Or would you go back to the beginning to where they diverged and go forth on the correct one?
For me it was an answer that took me back to 20 years ago. I became a Christian 22 years ago and I remembered it being the best time in my life. It wasn’t easy but it was the best. About 2 years after that I got busy with work, I got married to a person who believed in God but was non-practicing, I started compromising little beliefs here and there, I began thinking in very relativistic terms about my faith, and essentially step by step walked the opposite direction of God. It didn’t happen overnight but over a long period of time, little piece by little piece. My belief in Jesus never wavered but my relationship with Him was eventually non-existent and I became for all intents and purposes a Christian in name only.
We can’t turn back time and I’m not sure I would want to because then I wouldn’t know the things I do, I wouldn’t have gone through the things I have, and I believe that my life wandering in the wilderness for 20 years will be used for Gods purpose and for His glory. I don’t know how but I know He works all things for His good.
But I did go back to the beginning. Back to the place within myself before I veered off onto the wrong path. I went back to where those roads diverged in my life and chose the one my Lord was waiting for me on.
Is my life easier now? Depends on how you look at it I guess. My joy is back even though my life is still in disarray and I’m working, with God this time, to put it back together again. That’s not an easy thing. My heart is finally healing even though there are friends shaking their heads wondering what in the world am I doing. That’s not always an easy thing. My life is full of blessings but blessings come through the form of both comfort and pain. But as I understand it, God never said it would be easy, just worth it.
Has it been worth it? Oh Yeah!!! Wouldn’t change it for the world! I am now reunited with the best part of my life once again, moving forward from where I’m at, and its been amazing. Our God is an Awesome God!
Happiness/Joy
To look outside of ones self for happiness/joy is an illusion that fleetingly dissolves before your heart over and over.
To look inside of ones self for happiness/joy is a farce that satisfies our independent natures for a while only to lead to the realization that time after time we will fail to attain it for any long term length of our lives.
To look to God for happiness/joy is a miracle that can last a lifetime and consistently sustains us through His perfect love in spite of others, in spite of ourselves, in spite of what is happening around us.
Belinda Neal
7/6/2012
What do you miss?
Can you see the bullseye?
It took me awhile. I’ll admit I’m not very good at these. If your not familiar….you can’t be too close or too far away from the picture and then you just sort of stare at it and relax your eyes and let them go out of focus until the picture jumps out at you in 3D. Pretty cool when you finally see it but as I said I’m not very good at it. It’s hard for me to know if I’m too close or too far away from it. Then, how am I supposed to stare and let it go out of focus so that I can see it when IT IS what I’m trying to see! Drove me crazy when these things first came out and were all over the malls because I just HAD to see it but often I couldn’t. So yeh, the person in the mall standing in front of one of these all day who just couldn’t see that sailboat but kept trying (Mall Rats!)…yeh, that was me.
So, I’m scheduled to go to Reno this weekend and I sat down to make my hotel reservation. I’ve made this same reservation through the same website many times. I’m on their rewards program and all that good stuff. I get through all the questions for the reservation, everything is going fine and then….it either won’t let me select the room because I’m not signed into my rewards account or I sign in and it won’t let me finalize it because I don’t have enough points for a free room. What? Never ran into that before. I didn’t want to reserve the free room option in the first place as I knew I didn’t have enough points saved right now. I hadn’t selected this option and had no idea why it was coming up.
Now as far as I can tell nothing has changed on their website…everything looks exactly like it always does. So I’m trying all sorts of things, including trying the same things over and over even though I know I’m going to get the same result, then turning off and on my apps, off and on my iPad, this went on for about an hour and I was starting to get REALLY frustrated. I was about to call the company for help, and for those that don’t know I have a general dislike of phones if that’s any indication of how bent I was getting about this.
Then I scroll down the page looking for their contact number only to find that they had added another reservation box. The new one I had been trying to use was for rewards members who had a free night a comin’. The one under that was for regular reservations. They look identical. I had my room reserved in under a minute and had a good chuckle at myself.
But it got me thinking. How many things, people, situations, problems, perceptions, beliefs, and on and on are simply a matter of not SEEING that bulls-eye? It’s not that one is not trying to see it, or that the person doesn’t know how to see it. But to relax and be willing to lose that sense of control and/or focus, or not be too close or too far away, so that we can see the bullseye, make our reservation, understand someone else’s viewpoint, etc. can be really elusive sometimes.
One cannot see the design of a tile if they are standing right on top of it. -Belinda Neal 1986
You can’t see it if your in the wrong room either. – Belinda Neal 2012 ( I think I’ve been standing on the carpet in the study with a penlight for a long time….)
Binkydinks 