Wednesdays Word.....Chaos

I've heard this following song numerous times over the years but up until yesterday the words hadn't hit me.

Now if you've been following along you'd have noticed I generally save the lyrics to a song to the end to help clarify what I'm blogging about but hopefully these lyrics to the song What Ever You're Doing by Sanctus Real will further justify my thoughts because they truly speak for themselves.

It's time for healing time to move on

It's time to fix what's been broken too long

Time make right what has been wrong

It's time to find my way to where I belong

There's a wave that's crashing over me

All I can do is surrender

Whatever you're doing inside of me

It feels like chaos somehow there's peace

It's hard to surrender to what I can't see

but I'm giving in to something heavenly

Time for a milestone

Time to begin again

Reevaluate who I really am

Am I doing everything to follow your will

or just climbing aimlessly over these hills

So show me what it is you want from me

I give everything I surrender...

Time to face up

Clean this old house

Time to breathe in and let everything out

That I've wanted to say for so many years

Time to to release all my held back tears

Whatever you're doing inside of me

It feels like chaos but I believe

You're up to something bigger than me

Larger than life something heavenly

Whatever you're doing inside of me

It feels like chaos but now I can see

This something bigger than me

Larger than life something heavenly

Something heavenly

It's time to face up

Clean this old house

Time breathe in and let everything out

How can you experience chaos and peace simultaneously?  Most of us struggle to find even a glimmer of peace in this chaotic and hectic world that we live in. So many things tend to weigh us down. From our crazy schedules, job duties, school pressures, spousal and parental responsibilities. Then you throw in some guilt and top it off with worries and you have a recipe for a meltdown.

If you have ever experienced this sort of turmoil going on inside of you then you know exactly what I'm talking about. It is a sure sign that the Holy Spirit and God are working something out within you. There could be so many different reasons for this happening but it is always something we need to let go of and to finally hand it over to God in order to truly find peace about your "it".

That 1st verse is probably more true for everyone than maybe some will admit but we all have some brokenness in our lives that we've allowed to linger for far too long that has come to eat away at our daily lives and has had a negative affect on our relationships with those around us but more importantly with God. So many times it takes us finding ourselves in that drowning moment before we finally reach out for saving. All it takes is for us to surrender that problem over to God so we can end the struggle and to start the healing process.

This is when that moment of chaos begins to stir in us. The Holy Spirit begins His attempt to remove the issue but it has become such a part of us that we are are scared to give it up because it has grown like a cancer and has reached into so many other aspects of our life. We know too that if we truly hand it all over to God we can no longer use it as our excuse for everything. Sadly sometimes we are afraid to give it up because it has consumed so much time and energy in our lives that we scared of not knowing what to do without it. But if we let the Holy Spirit have His way we begin to feel that push, that pull and that tugging at our hearts that we understand it is for our own good that we give in. We have the reassurance that what ever our struggle is that as soon as it is gone that a greater thing will take its place and that God's overwhelming love will fill that void and we will experience true peace through His grace. .

There are so many milestones we can keep track of in our Christian walk. That first one very well maybe when we take the time to reevaluate our life. Not just about who we are and what we've done but whose we are and where we go from here. Don't get me wrong it's not a simple process. It's not a straight and wide path that's easy to follow. It's narrow, winding and has many peaks and valleys you must travel through. You may have to go through this process several times but it's the 1st one, that first step, that 1st time you reach out for help because you understand you can't do it on your own will always be the hardest.

As you reconcile your past and clean up "your house" you'll feel that you're literally able to breathe again and you'll never forget that feeling. Once you release all the years of angst, bitterness, anger, hate, guilt and pain you can start to see the beginnings of something truly miraculous as you become the person you were always meant to be as you begin to see the bigger picture and purpose that God has always had planned for you.

If you've made it this far thank you for reading and sharing in some of my random thoughts...here's the song.

Gone Fishin

If you know me or have read the above tab "Just a Few Things" then you know that I enjoy fishing. But to be honest these days it's hard to find the time to enjoy wetting a line. Our summer seemed to come and go in a blur and now we are into our busy soccer season so today may have been the last time this year. But it was probably one of my favorite quick fishing trips ever. Generally 1 or more of the kids come with me. If my oldest is coming then we actually fish because he has the patience like me to fish all day and catch nothing and still call it a good day of fishing. The middle 2 boys are another story if they don't catching something in the first couple of casts they are a lost cause and are off doing something else. Elli has kind of been a wild card and I wasn't totally sure she was all in when it came to fishing but today I think I got my answer.

I took the day off and told her when she got out of school that I was going to take just her fishing with me and she was truly excited. Turns out she told her teacher and I may have gotten the biggest hug ever from her.

We grabbed her Disney Princess pole and my bag of 8 different rigs and a couple of tackle boxes and we started jamming to Stellar Kart's song Gone Fishin' just to set the mood. We didn't get 5 minutes away and she got a case of the are we there yets. Didn't help that we went by the river a few times and she was thinking that was where we were going. But soon enough we were there and she helped carry what she could while I looked like a pack mule. 

It was pretty funny that while I was getting her all set up she was amazed at how many different butterflies there were but then she went to catch something and I heard a shriek when the grasshopper she had caught jumped away and she had this confused look on her face. I told her it was just a grasshopper and she was like "oh" and then was OK. But it made me think of my sister and her love of grasshoppers so I had to laugh a little. 

We fished a bit but it was more like teasing and playing with all the frogs as they chased my frog lure around. Elli thought they just wanted to be friends with it and were playing. She didn't believe me when I said they were trying to eat it. She just thought that was pretty dumb of them because it wasn't real. 

We decided to move to the end of the pier to try our luck. Elli had just cast and I had my back turned when she said where did my bobber go? I told her she had a fish. She didn't exactly remember what to do so I told her to just real it in and as soon as she saw her catch she let out a squeal. After she posed for her pictures I told her it was time to give her fish a kiss and put it back and she gave me a pretty dirty look. 

Her very next cast netted the same results. But now she was getting cocky. She proclaimed she was going to be a professional fisherman. I explained to her she would have to touch the fish and she quickly changed her mind.

She didn't rub it in that she skunked me and she was just happy to spend time with me and I didn't care I didn't get a bite because I saw pure joy on her face and we got the chance to share that moment today.

So the final score was Disney Princesses - 2 Pflueger & Browning - 0. I used to work at Bass Pro so I have an obscene amount of gear. But I generally don't throw everything I own unless I'm fishing on my own and I can focus on my twitching and jerking (and no that has nothing to do with Miley Cyrus) and roll through all my color combinations of every lure to find what they're biting on that day. But more importantly when I'm fishing on my own it's my time to talk to God. I've had some great moments and some I've really struggled with during this time but regardless I always feel closer to God when I leave than when I arrived.

Every moment I can ever remember fishing has always been a great memory for me. From fishing with my grandma as a kid at the gravel pit (pictured above), catching Bertha (also in the above picture), taking Cole on the "guy" fishing trips with Michelle's grandpa, uncle and brother to not even picking up my own pole to fish just so I could teach my kids my tricks of the trade. Every moment fishing has had an impact on my life and my hope and prayer is that my kids will be able to say the same thing when they look back on our time spent together gone fishin.