Salty Zebra

  In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words;   Romans 8:26 NASB  On Friday nights, I get to hang out with my family, including my little nephews. They are 3 and 5, full of energy and spunk. The littlest has a thing for cookies. He always wants cookies. Before dinner. After dinner. While he is actively eating another cookie, this guy wants a cookie! If we gave him a cookie every time he asked for one, he’d never eat anything else, and as you can imagine, that wouldn’t go well for the growth and strength of his little body. But it’s awfully hard to say, “No” to that sweet little ask. As adults, we know that it is not best for him to eat cookies all day long every day, but he doesn’t understand that. Cookies taste good and they are fun to eat! That’s all he sees. If we say, “No,” he is deeply disappointed. He doesn’t get what he wants. We seem m...

 Radiation is a big deal. My husband keeps reminding me of that. Everything I've read on the subject tells me that I will be wiped out. My brain will not function. I will not be able to maintain the complicated systems that I've put in place for our life and finances. So, today I simplify.  For the last year, I've really enjoyed using the Door Dash and Instacart benefits on several of the credit cards I've opened. In fact, I've gotten up to $40 in free groceries from DoorDash and $60 in free groceries from Instacart every month! This is really handy, and fun if I'm being honest, but it takes time, effort, and a lot of thought. I have to pick my moment, ordering from Door Dash when DashMart has a good sale, ordering $12 here and $22 there from Instacart. You see, in order to receive these benefits, each card has to be used on a different order. This came out to as many as nine different orders per month. And these orders had to be carefully curated to come in as ...

  We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)   Romans 8:24-25 NLT  Hope. We delved into it yesterday, but today it becomes more real, more palpable. Let’s dig in! Today’s verse says that we were given “this” hope when we were saved. What hope is that? Well, it came in the previous verse: And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.   Romans 8:23   When we were saved, God gave us the future hope of realizing our full rights as His adopted children, including our heavenly bodies. These bodies will not know pain or suffering, decay...

  For I consider that our present sufferings cannot even be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us.   Romans 8:18  Suffering is real and difficult. Living in the midst of it can be overwhelming. How do we make it through? How do we hold on in the hardship and persevere in the challenges? Hope. Hope is the only thing that can outshine the darkness, that can make things worth it, even when they don’t make sense in the moment. So, what do we put our hope in? Getting better? Our situation improving? What if those things don’t come to pass in this life? Was our hope in vain? I think it is so important that we are careful about what we place our hope in.   The Bible has a lot to say about hope. Here are a few verses that stand out to me this morning: Isaiah 40:31  - But those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. Micah 7:7  - But as...

   Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  After my first radiation treatment, I was excited to come home and write this post and tell you about all the wonderful and crazy things that had taken place, but there's so much more life going on right now than I have bandwidth for, and writing a post fell to the bottom of the list. That worked out well, though, because each day added on a little more insight as well as intrigue, and I think this post will have benefitted from waiting until the end of the week to be written. Come along with me and find out about what I learned in my first five days of radiation therapy!  As expected, my husband had us up before the crack of dawn on the first day of treatment. He actually set his ala...

  Bring us back to yourself, O LORD, so that we may return to you; renew our life as in days before. Lamentations 5:21  Do you ever think back to the “Good Old Days?” Times when things were easier, happier? When your children lived at home, or when they were little? Before some major health or job crisis? Do you ever long for that joy to be restored? Jeremiah did. This book I’ve read through over the last week, Lamentations, catalogs the hurt and degradation of his people. This was all well-deserved, as he often mentions, because of how the people had turned away from God, but that doesn’t make it good. Jeremiah knew what life could be like, and he wanted it back.   The title of this book, Lamentations, means, “Expression of sorrow; cries of grief; the act of bewailing.”* This is not sadness. It is not a mild depression or feeling down. This is a desperate, gut-wrenching expression of distress. Jeremiah’s whole world had been turned upside-down, as indeed it had for h...