Search My Heart

"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts." -Psalm 139:23

This is my mother and me on my first birthday.  Forty-two years later I would be taking care of her in my home.  For several years she'd been struggling with asthma that put her in the hospital from time to time.  I became alarmed when on one of my calls to her in the hospital I was told she could not talk to me.  They had her so doped up on morphine that I immediately flew down to Florida to see what was going on.  I made the decision to have her flown by air ambulance to where I lived.  Every step of the way I felt God's presence and help in my decision to care for her in my home even though I had three children ages 5, 11 and 14.  So, when after six months I was completely worn down by the responsibility I could not understand why.  It was only then I realized once she'd settled in I'd told God, by my actions, that I could take it from here.  It had never been a conscious decision, but one of the taletelling signs was that I'd quit journaling because I didn't want a record of the difficult time I was having dealing with her illness, her eventual death, and all the difficult years of my childhood relationship with my mother that were surfacing.  I realized the only way I was going to have what I needed to face this challenge was to "live one day at a time" and the way to do that was to consciously call on God all day long.  What had been revealed to me was that I only called on God when I felt I could no longer do it on my own.  I had to be "made weak" in order to see this.  All of my life I'd "saved God" for those times and the rest of the time I carried on by myself.

This is not the kind of relationship God wants with us.  He sent his Son, Jesus, to show us that he wants a moment-by-moment relationship with us.  He wants us to share in our hard times but also in our joyous times.  He doesn't want to be left out of anything!

I am grateful that I have a friend in Jesus who is there for me all the time.