What a Slacker! lol

I’m such a journal slacker lately! Sorry ya’ll! Lol I have really only read my sister’s journal too…so I’m slacking on reading journals – except I think I’m probably caught up on Queeny’s journal too maybe…see here at work, I relied on sister’s links and since she has changed her journal format…which is really cute….but her links are gone and my link to Princess Diary seems to be broken….grr…and I should fix it when I’m home but I’ve been a nesting mood at home lately and tweaking and rearranging furniture left and right…I’ll post pictures soon I promise!

But anyways blah blah blah here I am now…my boss has been on vacation so I’m totally out of a routine. She’s been gone for two weeks and we have one week left. I miss her! Not because she’s my boss but she’s also just a really nice lady and friend and I miss her! She has been emailing me. She is in Chile. Her and her sister and several others are hiking all over Chile….so not my idea of vacation…give me a beach or pool in a tropical locale and a fruity umbrella drink and a pool boy please!! Lol but so anyways work has been very un-routine-like….and I’ve actually been able to take a few days off here and there and haven’t done much but putter around my house and invent new ways to arrange my furniture lol!!! I’ve decided that as much as I love my little flea market, it has become a bit of an obsession and I need to not go so much…granted I have really found some gems there but enough already! Lol…

So what else have I been doing….last Saturday husband and I went to the Boat and RV Show. Now that may sound like a drag…lol…it surely didn’t sound exciting when husband pitched the idea of going there….he’s actually been trying to get me to go for a few years now and I have resisted him but this year I decided to go….and we had a lot of fun! We didn’t really look much at all at the boats…and we really only saw about half the rv’s….it was cool to be able to go inside all of them. I’m telling you what, I could totally see me and husband rambling around in one of those things! They also had two gi-normous house boats that you can like rent on Lake Cumberland….oh my heavens…we so have to do that sometime!! Those things were the bomb man! I was joking with husband that if we went out on one those things, he’d be funny because he would wear his life jacket the entire time. For some reason, husband is scared of boats…lol…he’s afraid he’ll sink or something…

So this was at the Fair and Expo Center and there just happened to also be a flea market set up in another building so we walked through some of that too…it was a fun date with hubby! But we were so exhausted when we got home…it was a lot of dang walking man!

So then on Sunday…Church was wonderful…the Sunday School lesson totally stepped on my toes…which is really actually a good thing because it’s good to be challenged to do things differently and better right?! And then it was a communion Sunday and I don’t think it was anything particular that Preacher P said or did…it was just, for me, in my heart, I truly had communion…does that make sense?

I had a really awful dream this past week. It was strange and bizarre and it scared the crap out of me. I think it had to do with a lot of my internal struggles but also late night snacking and some show I watched about Super Bowl commercials. They showed a clip of that MacIntosh commercial from the 80’s…you know the really weird one where it’s all like futuristic and industrial and there are all these people watching some man on a huge screen and some lady runner comes in and throws a big ball or something at the screen….that commercial is based on the book call 1984 by George Orwell and I actually read the book and commented here a little bit about it last year.

But anyways so my dream was sort of set in that type of setting…real futuristic and industrial. It was almost like it was in some sort of very tall very concrete parking garage. It was announced that the time for the rapture had come. Only instead of Christ coming to earth, there was like this bank of elevators that everyone was to line up at to be taken to their destiny. There were a lot of people from my life all in this line…family and old church family etc. and husband and I were standing in line with all these people who ment something to us. Well all of a sudden off in the distance I saw my best friend from high school, Kristi, and she and some little boy were running somewhere – I’m not exactly sure where they were running…I called out to her and she didn’t hear me so I grabbed husband’s hand and he and I ran to Kristi and this little boy and I told her what happened and what we needed to do….so the four of us ran back to the bank of elevators and the elevator on the end, which no one was in line for, opened and the four of us hopped on and before anyone else could get on the elevator, the doors shut. So the four of us were in the elevator, I was holding husband’s hand. After a little while, the doors open - Kristi and the little boy had vanished at some point- so it was just husband and I holding hands….the doors opened and we were still in the parking garage or whatever only there wasn’t a soul in sight. It was totally quiet…we stepped off the elevator. To our right, there was some sort of corridor that was seemingly endless to our left there was a corner. I noticed a little restroom and after you turned the corner there were several sets of escalators all leading down into a tunnel. We got on the escalators and as we went down a little further into the tunnels there were these men with devil horns on their head. AGH! I panicked and (I think I left Jimmie behind) I ran back to the elevators. The elevator door opened again and a very sinister looking man got off the elevator and told me I was going the wrong way. I said ok, let me just use the restroom first. No, he said, no time to use the restroom, let’s go…and he led me back to the escalators and I was once again holding Jimmie’s hand and we saw the guys with the horns on their head…I then I woke up….VERY CREEPY DREAM!! It was one of those dreams where you wake up and just feel creepy and afraid….

But as I’m typing this, I’m sort of analyzing some of the things in the dream. The whole tunnel thing was sort of in that book I just read about the Alaskan Indian lore. The industrial feel of the surroundings was from that commercial and the book 1984. I often have dream scenerios about having to go to the bathroom and then I wake up and it turns out I have to go to the bathroom! Lol

But seriously, I was sharing with Jimmie over the weekend, that the hardest part of Christianity to me sometimes is just accepting God’s love and forgiveness. Nothing that we do can save us. There is ONE WAY and that is by accepting Christ as your savior and accepting His gift of forgiveness and salvation. How in the world could such a stinky sinner like me possibly be worthy of His love?? Guess what? I’m NOT worthy and you are NOT worthy, but He’s willing to extend that offer to us anyway – NO STRINGS ATTACHED. That is so awesome. And seemingly so easy. And yet, I so often can’t get my mind around the fact that it’s unconditional and Satan continually knows that and continually uses that to get me to doubt my salvation.

Like, I know that I’m a child of God and I can totally feel the Holy Spirit working on me and revealing yucky stuff in me to me –stuff I need to work on and I didn’t even realize were sins. Does anyone else go through this? Am I a bad Christian because of this? It’s not something I dwell upon, but every once in a while I am just overcome with this fear that I’m not living “Christian enough” to get to heaven. What is “Christian enough”?

The Bible says, salvation comes not by works, lest any man should boast. But it also talks about faith without works is dead. So does one actually affect the other? How can little wretched me stand before the Creator of the Universe and hold up the measliest little portion of work and say is this enough to get into heaven? Just the mere image of that makes me so nervous! And then it hit me as I was having these thoughts and meditations the other day. It hit me like the Holy Spirit almost audibly whispered the answer into my ear. Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord. It’s humbling to be struck with the realization that I am a yucky wretched sinner. To recognize sin in my life in even the smallest areas…and then to know that God loves me anyway…that Jesus died for my stupid ugly little sins too and He paid the ultimate price so I don’t have to – Jesus is my ticket to heaven! Humbling, baffling, beautiful…hard to wrap my mind around that fact so much so that I sometimes am incredulous and because I can’t forget my yuckiness…am surrounded by my sinfulness…that I actually come to listen to that other still small voice that says you aren’t a Christian… God can’t love you… That sin CAN’T be forgiven…you aren’t doing enough to call yourself a Christian…you aren’t doing enough to make it to heaven…you can’t make a difference….you are nobody unimportant…. And before long, I’m believing that crap and having fears and doubts about my own ability to get me into heaven.

Two scriptures just came to mind as I was typing all that….

“For by grace are ye saved through faith, not of works lest any man should boast.” Ephesians 2:8 & 9 and

“For God so loved [Jodi – or insert your name here] that He gave His only begotten Son. That whosoever [Jodi – or insert your name here] believes in Him should not parish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16

so anyways…I’m typing this at work and have gotten side tracked a few times…I hope all this rambling has made sense. I almost erased it a few times because it seems like I’ve gotten off on a never ending tangent…but I’m publishing this cuz it’s my journal and also, in case it might help someone else because I’m sure I’m not the only one who struggles with accepting God’s grace and forgiveness because I just don’t feel worthy. And if I am the only one struggling with this…well now ya’ll now how to pray for me!! Lol

Umm so now ya see what I meant when I said that at church last Sunday I had COMMUNION! God is just really so good isn’t He? I mean, He’s just so patient when we’re so dumb and we (and by we I totally mean me lol) have to go through the same old lessons over and over again before we finally get it and then we forget that we got it and have to have the lesson again…it’s kind of like we have loss of short term memory or something….lol Praise God!

So this has turned into sort of a long entry and I really need to go…husband and I have decided to make a spontaneous trip to Ohio tonight to go celebrate King’s birthday….I got an email about it and I called husband and told him that his favorite cousin-in-law is having a birthday today and he said let’s go! He loves King a lot! They are buddies…so anyway, we decided to go (sorry sister! But you will be having fun at Great Wolf!)…and I really should get a little work done before I go…so I’ll journal more later!

Love and prayers all around!