But — the Day After the High

 

 I could hardly wait for Hugh to get up that morning so I could tell him the exciting news. My “feel good” serotonin levels were dancing around on a crazy high, and I was walking in a cloud. (while my poor porridge burnt on the stove)

The goal had seemed almost impossible, unachievable by any realistic standard, and yet we had made it. Yes, I did know it was God: His timing, His direction, His leading in all of it. But I was experiencing the euphoria.

Our book, The HughNeelands Story, had reached #1 in two categories on Amazon's “Hot New Releases.” Sales had been doubling every day for the last three or four days, and now it was rated below #4ooo in Amazon’s over all book rating out of millions of books.

A couple of years earlier, my book The Path He Chose for Me had made it to #14 on one of the same Hot New Releases categories on Amazon, and it had given me a high. I had hoped to see Hugh’s book get an even better rating, but to rise to #1 was barely even a dream. Now it was a reality.

But the real reality stepped in the next day. My serotonin was demanding more excitement. I checked the Amazon stats. It was already down a bit in one of the Hot New Releases categories, and it had gone over 8000 in overall book ratings. Of cource, that was still amazing, but not as good as the day before. And not good enough to create the high my emotions craved. The book fluctuated between #1 and #20 or more for several days and so did my serotonin levels before dropping almost out of sight.

Meanwhile plans for Hugh's birthday party/book launch were well under way. Some had bought the book on Amazon and were bringing it to be signed. Others were picking one or more up at the party. We were building to another high. 

After an afternoon of signing books and meeting people enthusiastic about the book, we were both soring. It had been another high for us. But now that is over and again reality has set in, and with it the craving for another high. It always happens. 

In The Hugh Neelands Story, Hugh shares his battle with his alcoholic addiction. But there are so many different kinds of serotonin related addictions that most of us have in our lives, whether it is the need for the lift of a chocolate bar, or the buzz that comes with the applause after a good performance. We can easily allow our lives to be ruled by our cravings for "highs."

Whether we are writers, preachers, entertainers, or just ordinary people interacting on Amazon, we need to be aware of what is driving us. God gave us serotonin, and He gives us mountain top experiences to go with it. But He also gave us the cool quiet valleys to explore and go deeper into Him.

Let Jesus be your “high” as He helps you to bring joy to others, but let Him walk with you through all the valleys as well.

Valleys can be beautiful!

For the last post see: Do we need to look back on the sad parts of our Journey?

Do we need to look back on the sad parts of our Journey?

 

Why was it that every time I flipped through my pictures, I purposefully skipped all the breathtaking shots of our temporary home on the reserve where so much good had happened? Why didn't I want to browse through my memories of the children I had loved or the place where I had nurtured them?

It even hurts to write about that time in my life now. I made up my mind, several days ago, to look back on that time, and to write an honest blog, but but then I set it aside. It may be just too hard. Is it even worth the effort if I can't give you an upbeat ending? If I knew for sure that at least one of the children that I led to the Lord and mentored, was still walking in victory, it would seem worth it. But the problem is, I do not know.

It was pure joy at the time as we led them, one by one, into a walk with God. The classroom atmosphere in the Christian school started changing, and working with these children was just one blessing after another. I will admit that there were setbacks along the way, but the thrill of seeing our students growing in the Lord day by day made it all worth while.

I have memories of sitting at the lunch table with them, discussing their new found joy, and praying together for others who needed Christ. There were memories of finishing reading “Susie's Story” to them and then having two different students come to me privately and confess having told me a lie. Their new found consciences had been awakened, and I was thrilled to know that they had been listening and had responded.

There was the memory of a pair of sixteen year olds who already had a baby but were not allowed by their parents to marry. They had come to us for council, Bruce with the boy, and I with the girl. On the second or third session, I led the girl to the Lord, and at the same time, Bruce in another part of the house was leading the boy in the same direction. They were both thrilled that they had made the decisions independent of each other. I was walking on air as I watched all this happening.

I had a ladies Bible study, and I began to see results there as well. Their husbands were seeing a change in their wives and their marriages were mending. One man started coming back to church. It was all like a beautiful dream.

I should be dwelling a whole lot more on those precious times, but I can't, because with the happy memories, comes the sad ones. We needed to leave the reserve for a short while, and when we came back we discovered that Satan had been working overtime. He had gained a foothold in the school. We were devastated. Some of our most ardent new converts had been turned against us while we were gone, and once again, had become problems in the class. We were stunned.

A parent, the one that was largely responsible for the mess, demanded our resignation. The school board didn't want us to leave, but we only had a day or two before the ice roads closed. After that there would be no way to get any of our stuff out. We felt defeated, but at the same time, we felt the Lord was telling us it was time to go and he would send others to continue the work.

The school hired a brave young man to drive our car back over the melting ice roads, and we took the plane to Red Lake where we retrieved our car and headed, in defeat, back to Owen Sound. The Lord did provide us with one amazing miracle on the way home, (I write about it in my book, “The Path He Chose for Me”) and that helped us to ease the feeling of failure somewhat, but it was still hard.

What happened to the students? I don't know about most of them. I have heard from three. One sounded hungry for the Lord, but was not ready to commit himself. One was struggling after a murder happened in his family. He is still floundering after the Church family handled the situation badly; but the hardest to think about was a message I received on Facebook one day. It was filled with foul language and unbelievable hate. It was from the son of the mom who had demanded our resignation, a boy who had turned his life around while we were there. Now he seemed even worse than before.

I wrote back that I loved him, and I prayed for him and the others. That's all I could do. But then gradually I began to block it all from my mind. It just hurt too much.

I guess the problem with how I handled my hurt is that for the last few years I haven't been praying for those kids much at all, even though I thought I loved them so passionately. Lord forgive me for that! Is my love fickle? Is it right for me to retreat into my comfort zone, to escape the hurting memories?

Lord, help me pray through for those kids.

The Hugh Neelands Story (coming out in a few days) has had the same effect on Hugh. There are some segments of the story that he had a hard time telling, and he didn't enjoy hearing those parts of his life over and over as we went through the first, second and third drafts. It would have been much easier for both of us to entirely ignore the mistakes in his journey, and yet, in the end, he felt that the whole writing process had been a tremendous blessing to him.

I would love for you, the reader, to help me by weighing in on this question: Is it a good or a bad thing to block out scenes in your life that involve sad situations? I really don't know. Please tell me what you think?

His Direction through my lack of Direction

 

I can’t remember addresses. I have always wondered why God made me that way, but now I am beginning to understand.

Hugh can give directions to where anyone has lived in the surrounding district in the past seventy years. It’s easy for him even though he is as dyslexic as I am. But I can’t even retain the addresses of any of my four children.

When I was a child my parents wanted us to hide God’s word in our hearts, so they encouraged us to learn scripture. Like Paul’s young friend, Timothy, I spent many, many hours at my mothers knee, learning the word of God. Mom would actually pay us a penny a verse to memorize scripture, and I worked hard at it.

There was just one catch, and for me it was a big one. We had to be able to say where it was found in the Bible. In other words, we had to remember it’s address, and although I was good at memorization, I just couldn’t remember the reference. I still only know the addresses of a few verses such as John 3:16 and Romans 3:23 and 1John 4: 7 and 8 even though most of the Bible is very familiar to me.

And yet, I just realized today lately that God had a definite purpose in creating me this way. As strange as this may seem, this trial has been my blessing.

The Lord has various ways of speaking to His children. Each of us are different. Each of us learn to hear His voice in a way that He chooses for us. This is how it usually happens with me:

There may be a question on my heart, or something may have happened that is bothering me. I hunger to hear from my Savior. I randomly open my Bible, and He speaks to me through the verses I read. It may be a passage of scripture that is very familiar to me, but I would not have remembered it, or if I had, I would not have known where to find it. Every time this happens, and it happens often, I am awed by how clearly He has spoken to me, and how He has done it without my ability to know where to look.

Many times I am in the wrong, and He uses this means of communication with me to correct me. Other times, He assures me through the scripture that what I am feeling is Him and He is leading me. And through it all He has been teaching me to listen and obey His voice.

Lately God has put a special burden on my heart to be able to minister in some way to the body of Christ. But when God gives you a gift, it isn’t always easy to follow through with how He wants you to use it. It’s one thing when the Holy spirit uses the gift to speak a word of correction to me. That is actually much easier than what I was asked to do which was to pass on a word to someone else.

Thank you God for even the hard tasks!

For the previous post see: Failure

For the next post see Do we need to Look Back on the Sad part of our Journey

Past Failure

 As I sat staring at the unfinished canvas in front of me, my shoulders slumped, and the $90.00 brush dropped from my limp hand. I was a failure! It was time I took off my blinders and faced that fact. If you have ever gotten to that place in your life where you just want to crawl into a dark hole and shut out the world, you will possibly understand how I was feeling.

I had barged my way into the world of art rather suddenly just a couple of years before this. I had always believed I was an artist, even though I had never had any formal training. I knew I was creative. There were so many things that my dyslexia made difficult for me, but drawing and painting was something I excelled at, and I loved to prove that to myself.

I wanted to prove it to the world, too, so when I was handed a check for $1000.00 for one of my first oil paintings, I was soaring. Everything else, including my writing, was either completely set aside, or specifically used to propel my new career in art forward.

My husband was as eager as I was to see me succeed, and so we opened our new business, Grey Bruce Art World. We showcased other artists, gave lessons, sold art supplies and of course, prominently displayed my work. I did everything I could to promote myself. I wrote a monthly opinion column in an Art Magazine, I featured an artist from our gallery regularly in a weekly regional magazine, and I had a monthly segment in a local TV show. On top of that, we spent thousands on advertising.

But there was something important in all of this promoting that I had failed to take into account; or more accurately, some-One important. God had a different plan for our lives, and we had been ignoring it. God had called my husband to the ministry many years before, but we had been postponing it. Now the Lord was saying it was time, but I was too wrapped up in my plans to be able to hear, and my husband, even though he had heard the call, wanted to please me, and therefore said nothing to discourage me.

Moving forward without God's blessing was a huge mistake. Before the year was up, I had to acknowledge my inability to make it on my own. We had lost everything. The hard part was knowing that all my promotional efforts had been useless. I couldn't bring in the customers no matter how hard I tried.

The final spike to the coffin of my pride came when the group I had formed to organize an art tour made a decision about my gallery. I was expected to continue to be the biggest promoter of the tour, but my gallery was not to be included in the tour. I knew that I would never be part of the elite artists of the community. I just did not fit the mold, and I was mortified. It was a slap in the face, and I reeled under the sting of the blow.

But God was there, and I was ready to listen. Have you ever noticed that it's when you are at the end of yourself, the still small Voice becomes clearer? It happened that way for me. It was a pivotal point for both of us. We started following the leading of the Holy Spirit and our lives became blessed. We gave up the business and my husband followed the call on his life.

The struggles of our art business seemed a thing of the past. I still painted occasionally but had stopped trying to promote myself. God was always there and provided for us financially in miraculous ways, so when the thought came that I should go back to writing my mom's story, I pushed it aside as a temptation to try to make a name for myself again.

When I had started writing “Susie's Story”, my dreams of writer fame had been high. My night school teacher was highly impressed and tremendously encouraging. I had been buoyed up by the prospect of being a published author. But after the first four chapters and a few rejections, I was ready to switch to the new art field where I had already made my first $1000.

But now, when I thought of going back to writing, the memory of my failure, with its allure of fame, made me cautious. My niece, a published author, was telling me that the publishing company that she was writing for was creating a new series. They were looking for exactly the type of book I was writing. Was this another temptation to put myself forward? I couldn't let that happen.

I talked to my husband. “Think of it this way,” he said. “Your paintings never actually led anyone to Christ that I know of. Your story could.”

I asked the Lord what I should do. He answered me with a passage of scripture. It said to tell your children and your children's children what the Lord has done, and to do it in parables (stories). Susie's Story was about my mother's eventful life growing up in Russia during the revolution and I knew the Lord was saying he wanted me to write it. But because of my experience at Art World, I knew that everything I did would have to be directed by Him and that He would get all the glory. My dreams of self-importance were gone.

When I finished the book I queried the publisher. The reply was not what I had expected. It said they liked my book, but they had discontinued that series and couldn't use it. What had happened?

Had I made a mistake? Had I wasted my time? But no. I could be a failure, but God was not. This was His book. I had listened to Him, and He had confirmed to me that it was part of His plan for me.

I decided to self publish, and amazingly, doing publicity God's way, with a whole new mental approach, it sold. But of far more importance, it did lead people to Christ. It made a lasting impression on lives, something of far more importance than fame or any best seller list in the whole wide world!

Years later, we did start another, different kind of business which the Lord directed us to, but that's a whole other exiting story for another time.

For the previous post see: Goodbyes.

Goodbyes

 Goodbye Grandma, I'm going to miss you. She sounded sincere, and her lips formed into a compassionate shovel, but at the same time I could tell that my four year old granddaughter was looking forward to the new adventure that lay just around the corner.

I had gone through this before. The day her mother left us to join the love of her life across the border, it had hurt almost as bad, but at least I could be there to watch her glow with joy as she headed up the isle.

We could travel to see her any time, and when their son was born, I was there to help. And when they came back to Canada, I was able to home school him and his younger sister. God had been so good to give me that privilege. I was blessed.

But now, this littlest, the late arrival, was ready to start school. I was going to miss out on that special bonding that happens between a teacher and her student. I had already had a taste. She had been coming over a couple of times a week to “have school” with me, and I loved it. I believed I could make a difference in her life, but now she is gone. I can't even expect to cross the border to see her any time soon. The border is closed. Why Lord?

And then He speaks to me. “Trust me! I have a plan!” His words bring comfort, as I realize that God has it all under control. He still expects me to do my part. My biggest job has always been to fight the battles through prayer, and that hasn't changed.

My littlest granddaughter is having a wonderful time in her new environment. She has fallen in love with a very special auntie who is showering her with lots of personal attention, and the grandma that was left behind is almost forgotten.

But I don't mind. You see, I love her and her family, and I want, above all, to know that they are in the place God has designed for them to be. That's what a mother's, (and a grandmother's) love is all about.

For the previous post see: I Can and I Will if it is God's Will

For the next post see: Past Failure.

I Can and I Will if it is God's Will

 “I can't do this!” I muttered. I wanted to shout it out, but my upbringing had given me a strong aversion to use that negative phrase. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” must have been my parents favorite verse of scripture. Still, I couldn't help thinking “I can't!” out loud.

A few days earlier I had won second prize in a competition, a consultation to have my Website revamped, but all I had was a blog, not a proper website. I had tried once or twice before but had never been able to set up a website for myself.

Now was a good time to try once more, but before long I was ready to shut my laptop and walk away from Word Press for good, even though I had paid for a year's subscription. It was way different from Blogger. I couldn't get anywhere. I kept getting lost in the different settings.

Before long, I was ready to give up not only setting up a web page, but also doing anything that required any kind of brain power. Was I out of my mind to think that I could write another book? I really wanted to write Hugh's story, and he certainly was looking forward to it, but I am nearly 73 years old. My brain is obviously not as young as it used to be, and I have noticed that nasty brain fog frequently threatening to creep in and steal my clarity of thought.

But “no!!” I will not listen to that negativism, even if it is just in my mind. I CAN do all things through Christ who strengthens me! As long as it is His will, He will give me the grace and wisdom to do it. It will not be me, it has never been me. If He wants me to write Hugh's story, it will happen His way and in His timing. If He wants me to have an author website it will happen, otherwise there is no point in trying to set it up.

I will not fret about it. I will not beat myself up over my inability to do something that was never really one of my God-given gifts.

My consultation got postponed today because I had trouble getting on Zoom for the call. I will wait and see what the Lord wants for me in the mean time.

For the previous post see: Blew it again

Blew it Again!

 

“Oh no!” I thought desperately, “I can't believe I am doing this!”

Just that afternoon I had been smugly reflecting on how well I was handling myself. I was maturing. I was certain of it. I felt I had finally started handling situations with a lot more wisdom, and at almost seventy three years old, I figured it was about time.

But here I was, only hours after that reflection, seeing myself as that same very flawed creature I had always been.

I had wanted Hugh to come with me to town that day. I had known it would feel terribly lonely being in the town where I used to be able to stop in and see any one of my three girls, and some of my wonderful grandchildren, but now Owen Sound felt empty. True, one family had only move less than an hours drive away from us, but it seemed far because I almost never saw them, and then my oldest daughter left and went way up north, and now my youngest had taken my littlest granddaughter and had moved way down south.

While I was in town, I made the mistake of driving by their old house. Already, I could see signs of the change of ownership. The deck that used to be cluttered with the toys of a four-year-old, was now graced with beautiful cushy furniture, and in the front garden, a pair of solar lights flanked the steps. Two cars lined the driveway. I could picture the incoming family, tired from the move, but excited to make this new house their home.

I came home from town that day tired, and sad. I was glad it was raining. It would mean that Hugh probably wouldn't have been able to take a walk the short distance to see his brother or his son. He would be home to give me the hug I desperately needed.

The rain had turned to drizzle by the time I pulled in the driveway. As I entered the house, I heard Hugh on the phone to his son in Sudbury. Good! He was home! He quickly ended the conversation and I rushed to him for my hug. But then I stopped short. He had been out. He had gone out in the drizzle to have a coffee with his son.

Normally, we do our visiting with his son outside. Denis is a smoker, and because his house bears evidence of that fact, and because I am bothered by the smell of smoke, we don't usually spend time in his home.

But while I was out, Hugh had been in that home, and his clothes, hair and skin bore the evidence. The comfort I sought was shattered by the odor that infiltrated my nostrils. I broke. My self-pity habit returned in full fury, and I lashed out at my dear husband. I was ready to throw something at him. It was a totally unreasonable reaction, but I had spun out of control.

As he walked away from me and went to have a shower, I knew in my heart, that I had reacted foolishly. I thought of my little granddaughter and her words of wisdom. (see Wisdom of a Child) It took only a few short moments of talking with my Lord to calm down and to see how my lack of self control had just hurt my husband.

I reached Hugh before he entered the shower and hugged him and apologized. That day we had a good talk. Quarrels are never good, but talking and admitting our failures can be immensely healthy. God says in His word to confess you faults one to another, and as always, following the path God has set out in His word, brought healing and blessing.

That incident, yesterday, reminded me of how far I still am from the place where I know God wants me to be, but it will never make me say that It's pointless to try.  The New Testament is full of admonition to “be perfect just as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” so I continue to "press toward the mark" just as Paul did even though I can say with Paul that I am definitely not there, and even though I keep seeing how far away that mark is. I am His child, and I know He loves me, but just like any normal child, I want to be just like my Father.

And as I allow Him, He will continue to work on me, to change me into His image.

For the Previous post see: Wisdom of a Child

For the Next post see: I Can and I Will if it is God's Will