covenants

Covenants guarantee the future behaviour of an individual.  Brother and sister Renlund

Listen to your covenants more than you listen to your feelings. Ask yourself,  "What are me covenants telling me to do right now?"

We are entering the Order of the Son of God or the Order of Melchizedek when we make covenants. 

Diane Clark

BYU Folk dancing 

Beauty for Ashes

I can be grateful for the ways the Lord has saved my life, and still grieve the life I lost.

I can praise Him for beauty

without pretending there were never ashes.

I can hold what He has given me with trembling, grateful hands and still sometimes ache for what those same hands once held.

Because healing does not always mean forgetting.

Sometimes healing looks like being able to walk through the garden God grew from your ruins

while still remembering exactly where the fire happened.

And I think we have made grief and gratitude enemies when they were never meant to be.

I can say, “Look what the Lord has done,”

with tears running down my face.

I can testify that He restored me

while still carrying scars from what nearly destroyed me.

I can love the person I have become

and still mourn the version of me who never got to come with me.

The one who existed before the phone call.

Before the goodbye.

Before the betrayal.

Before the diagnosis.

Before the empty room.

Before life divided itself so sharply into before and after.

there are things I know about God in this life that I could have never learned in that one.

I know what His presence feels like when everything else leaves.

I know what it is to have no strength left and somehow still be carried.

I know that the Shepherd does not abandon His sheep when the valley gets dark.

I know that God can take ashes so cold you are certain nothing could ever live there again

and make something beautiful rise from them.

The beauty does not mean the fire did not hurt.

The restoration does not mean the loss did not matter.

The morning does not make the night imaginary.

And the fact that God redeemed it does not mean I have to call what broke my heart good.

I call Him good.

That is different.

I do not have to praise the fire to praise the God who walked through it with me.

I do not have to pretend the ashes were beautiful.

The miracle is that He gave beauty for them.

“For” means there was an exchange.

There were ashes.

There was mourning.

There was heaviness.

Isaiah never denied that.

He simply declared that God would not leave His children there.

“…to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness…”

Isaiah 61:3

So yes,

I still grieve some things.

There are places in my story where my voice still shakes.

There are memories that still make me wonder who I would have been if they had never happened.

There are versions of life I sometimes imagine in quiet moments.

But I am not standing over the ashes anymore.

I am standing in what God grew from them.

And perhaps that is one of the holiest forms of gratitude: not pretending you never lost anything, but standing in the middle of what remains, with scars on your hands and praise in your mouth, and saying,

“I know what this cost me.

I know what I buried here.

I know who I was before this happened.

And I still believe God has been good to me.”

That is not denial.

That is faith with a history.

That is worship that has walked through fire.

That is praise that knows what ashes smell like.

So grieve what you lost.

You do not have to dishonor yesterday to be thankful for today.

You do not have to erase the graveyard to enjoy the garden.

You do not have to forget the ashes to marvel at the beauty.

Just do not mistake your grief for the end of your story.

Because the God who met you among the ashes is still writing.

You are allowed to miss the life you lost.

Just never forget to look around every now and then at the life the Lord, in His mercy,

has helped you survive long enough to see.

There is still beauty here.

And there is still more of the story to come.

Grief and A Donkey's Bell

The Donkey Wore A Bell Around His Neck For Eleven Years. Nobody Understood Who It Was For Until The Day He Stopped Ringing It.

The bell was the first thing visitors noticed at Hollow Creek Sanctuary.

A small brass bell.

Tied with a strip of blue leather around the neck of a gray donkey named Otis.

It rang with every step.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Nobody at the sanctuary ever explained it to newcomers.

They just said, "Watch."

Then they pointed to the far pasture.

An old chestnut mare stood there, twenty nine years old, her eyes clouded white.

Juniper had been blind since before she arrived.

She should have been afraid of everything.

Fences.

Gates.

Ditches she couldn't see.

Instead, she walked the pasture with her head high and her ears pointed forward.

Following the bell.

Wherever Otis went, she went, three steps behind, her nose almost touching his tail.

When he stopped at the water trough, she stopped.

When he turned toward the barn, she turned.

If the bell went quiet for too long, she called out, a low, anxious whinny.

And Otis, wherever he was, would come back.

Eleven years.

The staff joked that they were the sanctuary's oldest married couple.

Nobody joked in October.

That was when Juniper stopped eating.

The vet came twice.

The second time, she took the sanctuary's director aside.

"It's her heart," she said quietly. "And her age. There's nothing to fix."

They moved Juniper to the small stall beside the barn, deep in fresh straw.

Otis followed.

Nobody could get him to leave.

He stood in the doorway, shoulder against the frame, watching her breathe.

For nine nights, he did not lie down.

The night volunteers found him every morning in the same spot.

Head low.

Ears drooping.

Bell silent.

He had stopped moving so that it wouldn't ring.

They realized, slowly, that he was being careful.

Not to wake her.

Not to startle her.

On the tenth morning, a volunteer named Adaeze arrived before sunrise and found the stall door open.

Juniper lay on her side in the straw.

She had gone in the night.

Peacefully.

Otis stood over her, exactly where he'd been for nine days, his muzzle resting against her neck.

Adaeze knelt in the straw and cried.

She stayed until the director arrived.

They decided to let him stay with her until the afternoon.

It seemed like the only decent thing to do.

But when the time came to move Juniper's body, Otis wouldn't step aside.

He planted his feet.

He laid his ears flat.

He made a sound none of them had ever heard from a donkey.

Low.

Cracked.

Almost a moan.

The director stopped the tractor.

Nobody said anything.

They just stood in the cold, letting him say goodbye in his own time.

At dusk, he finally stepped back.

Then he walked slowly to the far pasture, alone.

The bell did not ring.

For weeks.

He stood at the fence line, staring at the empty field.

The staff tried apples.

Carrots.

A young goat for company.

Nothing worked.

Someone suggested taking the bell off.

The director shook her head.

"Leave it," she said. "It's his."

Winter deepened.

The sanctuary went quiet.

Then, one gray Friday in January, a horse trailer pulled through the gate.

Inside was a yearling gelding, thin and trembling, rescued from a neglected property two counties away.

His name was Fable.

He was blind.

Born that way.

He'd spent his whole life in a small, dark pen, and he came out of the trailer into open air for the first time, and panicked.

He bolted.

Hit the fence.

Bounced off.

Spun.

Bolted again.

The volunteers stood back, helpless.

If they approached, he ran harder.

If they stayed still, he kept crashing into every post he couldn't see.

"He's going to hurt himself," Adaeze whispered.

Then she heard it.

Faint.

Faltering.

A single, hesitant sound from the far pasture.

Clink.

The gelding froze.

His ears swung toward the sound.

Clink. Clink.

Otis was walking.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Straight across the pasture, his head shaking just enough to make the bell ring, exactly the way it had rung for eleven years.

Fable turned his whole body toward it.

Took one step.

Another.

Stopped.

The bell rang again, closer now.

He followed it, nose stretched forward, trembling, every muscle taut with disbelief.

Otis reached the fence and stood there, patient, unhurried, his bell swaying.

The gelding pressed his nose against the rails.

Found the donkey's shoulder.

And stopped shaking.

Nobody at the sanctuary spoke.

Adaeze put her hand over her mouth.

The director stared at the two animals for a long moment.

Then she quietly said what everyone was thinking.

"He never stopped keeping that bell ready."

Fable stayed in the pasture that afternoon.

By evening, he was walking three steps behind the donkey, his nose almost touching Otis's tail.

The staff still says it was the first time the old donkey had walked at that pace in weeks.

The bell rings all day now.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Every step.

Every morning.

The staff no longer explains it to visitors.

They just point to the pasture and say, "Watch."

Because grief does not always close a heart.

Sometimes it simply keeps a small brass bell ringing, quietly, patiently, until the next lost soul comes stumbling out of the dark, listening for something to follow home.

(Author unknown)

comfort in Isaiah

funny

My brother, Bill, who died in 2017, left me with lots of emails to laugh about. Here's one of them.

MURPHY'S REAL LAWS 

1.  Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film in the camera.

2.  He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

3.  Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

4.  I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.

5.  Seen it all, done it all. Can't remember most of it.

6.  You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.

7.  Honk if you love peace and quiet.

8.  It is hard to understand how a cemetery can raise its burial costs and blame it on the higher cost of living.

9.  The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.

10. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world population.

11. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.

12. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture.

13. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.

14. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Strength in our roots

For 100 days, I kept drawing—one small line at a time. On day 101, as I looked at this piece, a thought came to me: Perhaps inner strength is like a system of roots, quietly growing deeper long before a tree ever reaches upward.

For 100 days, I kept drawing—one small line at a time. On day 101, as I looked at this piece, a thought came to me: Perhaps inner strength is like a system of roots, quietly growing deeper long before a tree ever reaches upward.

This drawing began with one small line. From there, I simply focused on each line, allowing one to lead naturally into the next.

It wasn’t until I finished, put down my pen, and stepped back to look at the whole piece that I suddenly saw it: a large tree emerging before me.

A tree with strong roots reaching deep into the earth. From that foundation, the trunk rises, the branches spread, and new growth begins to appear.

The longer I looked at it, the more it reminded me of the way we grow as people.

We often pay attention to what is growing above the surface: what we have accomplished, how far we have come, or how much we have changed. But for a tree to keep growing upward, something equally important is happening beneath the ground, where no one can see it.

Perhaps our inner strength grows in much the same way.

We don’t suddenly develop it when a storm arrives. It is built during ordinary days, through the small things we choose to return to again and again: keeping a promise to ourselves, completing even a small task, spending ten minutes focusing on each Zentangle stroke, or simply returning to a habit after missing a day.

These things may not create a change big enough for others to notice right away. But each time we practice, we strengthen our foundation a little more.

Then, when the “storms” of life arrive, we may still bend and sway. What helps us stay rooted is not that we are stronger than the storm, but that our roots have been growing long before it came.

Perhaps that is what I value most about small daily practices.

I’m not only doing something for the result I can see today.

I’m quietly tending to my own roots.

#LoanRuby #doodle #zentanglepattern #mindfulness