On Sunday morning, April 29th, at 12:02 we welcomed in to this world our sweet new granddaughter! She is absolutely amazing.

Caroline Gray joins her brother, Ware, who is starting to get used to this new addition to his world!

Today I feel the undeniable joy of seeing the miracle of God's design in Caroline Gray. How can anyone not believe in God?

When Ware was born I told everyone I had fallen in love with a short, fat, bald guy! Well, I've fallen in love again...this time with a dark haired little angel. Thank you to all that have prayed for her.

I have exhausted my blogging abilities trying to fix the "comment" area of my blog. Other than signing up for a Google account (which is free and doesn't mean you have to start a blog), I cannot figure out how to fix the problem. Evidently I'm not the only one experiencing this since there are many others who are as frustrated as me.

So, now it's time to improvise! Since I want to hear your thoughts and read about your journey's I have set up an email account for that sole purpose. You can email me at: woozisuds73 at hotmail dot com

Now you have no excuse!

Several of you have said you have tried to leave comments after a post and have been unable to do so. After doing some searching, the problem might be a glitch in the system. I have tweaked one thing which might allow you to leave comments. If after leaving one you don't get confirmation regarding that, then try again, this time checking the "anonymous" option. You can always leave your name in the body of your comment. I think things get hung up if you don't have a Google account... but I also think I can diagnosis medical conditions!

I never saw it coming...I am now an addicted blogger. That means I spend way too much time flitting from one blog to another, investigating new links I can add to my blog, thinking about what I can write about next. Great...one more thing to add to my ever growing list of things I need to be disciplined about. Who knew that the phrase "view blog" would give me such a thrill?

On April 5th, a young woman from our church, named Christie, was thrown from a horse and suffered trauma to the brain. She has been in a coma since the accident. Her family is keeping everyone updated on a daily basis so we can be praying for this wonderful girl. Christie is the only child of Paul and Taffney...the apple of their eye. Please pray for this family as they ride the rollercoaster of news and emotion.

As we have shared this request with anyone and everyone, we were notified that through a series of people, the underground church in Wuhan, China is praying for Christie. This means that thousands, yes I said thousands, of Christians in China are bringing Christie's needs before our Heavenly Father. The number of people praying is not as significant as the fact that others in the Body care enough to pray for a stranger. Wow!

We are of course, praying for her healing, but we also want God to be glorified through this. Her parents are faithful followers of Christ. They sent an update yesterday asking us to be praying for several families who have children in the same hospital, in the same brain trauma unit. Can you imagine being in the middle of such difficult circumstances and being sensitive to the needs of others? I must confess a deep sense of conviction over the selfishness that is present in my life more than I care to admit.

God is teaching us all through this.

He is risen just as
He said!

Good Friday. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him will not die but have life everlasting."

Still on the same road...still pressing on toward the goal of knowing Christ more fully.

Due to boredom with my previous blog format, I have made the switch to "dots"! The good news with this new format is that somehow the links that had disappeared have mysteriously reappeared! "Eliot's" blog continues to stir me. I urge you to read it and view the short movie they produced about baby Eliot.

Following directions has never been my strong suit so trying to make a fancier blog hasn't gone well. Evidently there are certain things that have to be done in a specific order and...well...I just don't follow directions!

Somehow I know there is a direct correlation with my being directionally challenged and my struggle with following the mandates God has laid out in His Word. I would like to tell you that I am a good follower of Christ, but I have this sin nature that keeps popping up...so very annoying. The irony is "my way" doesn't even begin to compare to His. "My way" doesn't satisfy. So, you would think I would get it. I suppose I am in good company. The disciples, who lived with Jesus, often were clueless. However, Jesus chose those 12 uneducated, normal guys to turn the world upside down. I suspect He will use me to do the same when I follow His way and not "my way".

The most incredible thing is that in spite of my fumbling and faltering ways He pours out His compassion on me daily. And even though, more times than I care to admit, I give Him the cold shoulder He promises that He will never leave me or forsake me. I can barely comprehend that kind of grace.

It's amazing! It seems that more than just my immediate family is taking a gander at my blog! So to all of you...all two of you...thanks! I have found this to be quite cathartic, writing my inner thoughts. Therefore, I want to encourage you to write a blog even if you never have before. The site might be hard to navigate...it has been for this old girl...but it is a wonderful way to express yourself. Much better than dying your hair black or having a tattoo of a dove inked on your abdomen(it will start looking like a hawk in a few years!).

Keep in mind that the chances of you winning a Pulitzer Prize are slim. So, write with abandon!

One of the wonderful by-products of being a blogger is that you get to read the blogs of other folks. And, if you are lucky, you might find some common ground with an incredible person.

One of my incredible persons is a new friend, Lacey. I mentioned her several weeks ago. She had been on my heart for several days so I sent her a message to see how she was. Lacey is in that terrible place where the reality of her sweet sister's death has come crashing down on her. These endless waves of grief have left her exhausted, profoundly sad and full of questions.

So dear readers, I am going to ask you to pray for this sister in Christ. I realize that you don't know her but I feel compelled to ask you to join me in bringing her to the Father. Who knows...maybe some day I will be able to share with you how God answered our prayers for Lacey.

Thank you...

What an emotion filled week this has been. I am having a very hard time trying to keep up with the onslaught of news that is either wonderful or terrible.

We have a daughter, pregnant with her second baby (good news), but that baby is trying to make a premature arrival (bad news). My father has made it to 92 with relatively few major health concerns (good news) but has been on a steady decline in the past few weeks (bad news). A very special woman that I have been in Bible Study with for several years bravely fought breast cancer two years ago (good news), however, she has just gotten word that her cancer is back, this time in her lungs (bad news). A group of excited seniors from a Christian school in town went on a long anticipated ski trip (good news) and on their second day there, one of the students died tragically in a skiing accident (bad news).

It is times like these when I wonder if perhaps God has taken a little vacation. It is times like these when I feel the joy sucked right out of me. And I am having the hardest time figuring out what "the joy of the Lord" really is. So, for anyone who is reading this I am asking you to answer these questions...what does "the joy of the Lord" mean? Can you tell me when you have experienced pure joy in the middle of junk?

I've added a new link...the thoughts of a young woman named Lacey who is experiencing fresh grief and fresh grace. Another Christ-follower who is in the thick of it and still able to say that God is good.

I have discovered that I am an extremely slow processor, which doesn’t fit with my seemingly spontaneous personality! However, in recent years I have come to understand this about myself and have quit feeling shameful about it. So, as I think about scripture and God's principles for living, I find myself continuing to chew them over and over. (I should have been a cow!) Please forgive me if my train of thought jumps off the track periodically. I blame it on A.D.D. and getting old!

In a conversation with a good friend, I wondered aloud if I were anywhere near being who God had intended me to be when I was in his mind before the foundations of the earth. My friend challenged me to pray and think about that. I have been and this is where I have landed thus far.

As I have reviewed my journey with Christ, I have pondered how one grows and deepens their walk with the Lord. When I first came to Christ my spiritual depth measured no more than a raindrop. Over the years, as I have given myself to Christ, prayed, read and studied His Word, a deepening has occurred. From raindrop to small puddle. Hopefully, each day my puddle expands as I “struggle well with life.” Each time I worship the Trinity, each time I am moved by faith, I am being deepened. This deepening, however, is not without much mystery and trepidation.

Its funny how we actually do believe that we can find life on our own. But the irony is we end up going to someone or something to find it because we know it isn't found in ourselves. The problem with that is whatever we think we have found ends up only temporarily satisfying us. So, we have to keep searching. Some look their whole lives only to come to the end of life with the realization they were looking in all the wrong places.

My story would begin as so many do. Crazy home life...abusive parent...surrounded by sadness and tension. But that's not the meat of my story. Life began for me a second time when I accepted Christ, August 7, 1967. Since then my life has been peppered with blessings and burdens, just like every other woman. However, were it not for grace I can only imagine where I'd be.

God has a sense of humor and chose a wonderful husband for me 31 years ago, who I thought was going to play professional baseball but felt the call of ministry and became a pastor instead! A shocking turn of events for an avid baseball fan. And this man I married is no ordinary garden variety husband. He's a man with vision, patience and loyalty which is why he has pastored the same church for almost 30 years. Did I mention that we were both six when he started!

Thirty years in one place means that we have seen every type of hurt there is. And we have also experienced hurt ourselves... kids struggling with painful issues, a diagnosis of breast cancer, the death of loved ones and the list could go on. Again, those situations are not the meat of my story. Jesus Christ is! I believe that if a private investigator were to examine my life he would see the fingerprints of Jesus everywhere!

I floundered for many years wondering what God's plan was for me. "Flounder" is a wonderfully descriptive word isn't it? Can you envision a fish flipping around on dry land trying to figure out how to breathe in a world he wasn't designed for? That was me.

Back to evading God...I was a really polite, well-behaved, conscientious evader. I did this little two-step with God, where I was leading, or at least I thought I was. Arrogantly, I sincerely thought that if God would just listen to me I could set my world right. All I needed was his cooperation. I mean, after all, it was my life for crying out loud...wasn't it?

Lo, and behold, while I was playing "Let's Make a Deal" with God, he surreptitiously sent a few brave people into my world who gently began to tell me the truth about me and how my game-show mentality would not satisfy my soul. They told me the truth about how much God loved me and showed me that love by parting with his one and only Son.

I sort of knew who Jesus was and that he died on my behalf - to pay the penalty for my sins against God, I was told - but I had a doozy of a time seeing myself as a sinner. Sure, I had lied a few times, sassed my parents, stolen a few items from a department store...but those were just small indiscretions, nothing to get all upset about. Surely not bad enough to be called "sins".

Fortunately for me, those same folks who came into my life were patient enough to lead me to the water but not try and force me to drink it. In other words, they gave me the whole story of how the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) had the entire created world at their disposal, except one little 'ole tree that God told them not to eat from. And then how they chose to believe a liar who encouraged them to open their mind to the possiblity that God was holding back from them. So, they listened to the lie and thought they could find life a part from the giver of life. Hence the beginning of sin. They brought me to the water and asked me if I was thirsty. Turns out I was.

When I finally saw myself in that story, I knew that I had also believed I could find life somewhere other than God. At that point I had to make a decision to either believe that God wanted relationship with me and provided that through his Son, or to keep on looking and hope that I would stumble on the secrets of the universe and find life on my own.

In my first entry (that sounds like I've made many...this is only my third!), I mentioned that I had been following a blog that had greatly impacted me. I have just added the link for that blog to my page and encourage you to read it. It's entitled "Eliot". Take the time to start at the beginning of this incredible story. Your heart will be stirred and challenged beyond measure.

I have never met the authors of the blog (Matt and Ginny), and probably never will. But not knowing them will not diminish the power of their story one bit. Share it with your friends. It is worth reading.

Where did I start and where am I going? Questions I hope I can eventually answer...My journey began over thirty-seven years ago. Sadly, that is not when I was born! Rather it was thirty-seven years ago that I experienced a major paradigm shift. Let me explain.

I was raised in a family where believing in God was never a question. My parents were fairly regular in their church attendance, although inclement weather or not having one's hair washed was a quick excuse not to go. However, there was never a time in my life that I wondered if God existed. While I was no brainiac, it wasn't much of a leap of faith for me to believe that the universe was complex and came to be by a being far more intelligent than me. Believing that the earth just evolved was a far greater leap and one that asked me to believe in nothing but man's own musings/theories about how the world began.

None of that is really important to my journey except to say that believing in the existence of God was an acknowledgement of truth I never did, or have since, grappled with. But the real story comes with, what I referred to earlier, a paradigm shift.

At a stategic point in my life, I was challenged to think about God and the Bible in ways I had never before. I had to reevaluate everything I believed about God and what the Bible promised. Because even though I believed in God and thought I was living a pretty moral and decent life - which means I was a good person, did kind things, was generous, loving and compassionate - I had never realized that I was living a life in direct contrast to who God was and what he promised. My hope had been that if I followed the rules (I have no idea what rules I was actually following) God would be pleased with me.

I was like all the millions of people who think their personal goodness is what God gives a "thumbs up" to. The problem for me was, I was a pretty good person. I went through all the normal rebellions as a teenager but never went to extremes even in that. But even in all my self-perceived goodness there was an emptiness as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon.

There certainly were many things that contributed to my emptiness. You know the "if my life were different and I had..." "if...were out of my life I could be happy". But even on the very best of days the emptiness gnawed at me. However, instead of acknowledging the ache, I ran away from it as fast as I could filling my world with things I thought would give me life. The funny thing about "running away" was I couldn't get rid of me. Nor could I evade God, and believe me I tried.

It has taken me awhile to figure out exactly what blogging is. Actually, I'm still not sure if writing one's thoughts for strangers to read makes much sense.

I have been journaling for many years, stashing my journals away so no one will accidentally pick one up and read the things I have written in private. However, I have been encouraged to join the world of blogging by someone who is very important to me. Also, I have been following several blogs that have been extremely impactful as well as thought provoking and hope the same may be true of this one.

As my title states, I have been traveling in the same direction for a very long time now. In spite of that, I still tend to get off track and even terribly lost at times. In fact, there have been many moments over the years when I just quit traveling altogether. My journey has not made the headlines, at least not yet, although if I shave my head like Britney I might make a bit of a splash in my pond yet!