Don't click like, just send money...

This has been rolling around me head a while. I keep holding off on writing it because well, it's a tricky post to write. How do I say what I gotta say without offending and alienating folks? Those who know me would know that there is an element of blowing off steam and frustration in this post but those who don't might just think I am crazy. Plus, I am not all about airing the unmentionables so that all the neighbors can talk about the holes in my UnderRoos.

I am really grateful for the way that God has provided for me and my family...especially this year. I am grateful that He has used my husband, my friends, my family, my church, and several random strangers to bless me this year. I have everything I need today. I have a roof over my head, food in the cupboard, clothes on my back, transportation and a lil bit o extra cash to splurge on a Chic Fil A lunch today. What I am about to say is not at all about lack per se or any perceptions thereof. It is about fully recognizing that you gotta do what you can so that God can do what you can't. Well, at least, that is how I feel about it.

It has been a very interesting year for me personally, professionally, spiritually and in just about every other -ly you can think of. All the pieces of my life are splayed out like some sort of insanely complicated connect the dot puzzle. Some things feel like the end of the world but I know in my core that the stock market always goes up, the sun always rises, kitty cats always land on their feet and God is always on time.
As I have been on this leg of my journey, my disdain for systems has been reinforced. Legal system, welfare system, two-party system, System of a Down...disappointments at best. Ten thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean is a good start! I have now found a group of people who listen less to me and disrespect me more than my own children. I try not to be snarky or jaded or confrontational. I really do. BUT. Um. Yeah. I digress.

Like MC Hammer, I realize that we got to pray just to make it today, so I do. It's not a magic genie or a cash machine. So, I have prayed and I continue to pray and I will pray about this whole situation that some days makes me want to randomly text those who stand by me with "Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!"

I started the year makin' magic at Macy's. I pounded the pavement. I started a Master's degree program. I let go of a lot of things. I seriously considered panhandling. My health prohibited me from plasma. I sold just about every CD and DVD that belonged to me. Yes, even most of my beloved Tom Waits collection. I kept on keeping on. I kept on swimming. I am not at Macy's anymore. I have a new job with real potential. As quickly as my graduate career started, it ended due to a family emergency and in it's wake an administrative issue put a roadblock in re-enrollment. Oh, and that whole lawyer issue, ugh. Good year. Bad year. I don't know.

So, the culmination of all this stuff is that I find myself as if I am in a place where I need to go zero to sixty and I need to do it yesterday. It's part of what got me back into writing this again. When I don't write, it all stays in my brain and manifest in strange ways like thinking that maybe the Backstreet Boys are a good band. There is potential in my job but it's a sales job on a big ticket item that is not an impulse purchase so there is a whole pipeline to build up and patience to hone. There's little sides too like Celadon Road and Thrive and one more am contemplating. I like the Celadon products and heaven knows I need to keep busy so I took a leap there and opened shop at http://www.myceladonroad.com/MYGREENHEAVEN/ knowing that every little bit helps and that at the very least the discount on my personal purchases will help me out. I am not "Thrive"ing right now but I do recommend it the products and can vouch for the energy so if you are looking for something like that go explore at http://findyournew.le-vel.com/.

Then there is that whole sending money thing. I have at points in the last year considered writing compelling copy for a crowdfunding campaign. Ah, but there's my whole not wanting to give credence to some people, places and things in my life and a bit about privacy and yeah, to some degree if I told you everything you wouldn't believe me any way. It's been a Big Fish kinda year but The Great One says that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take so... if you want to just sent money follow this link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=47QQ2N97YGG48 
People, a lot lot lot of people, keep asking what they can do to help me. Pray is always my first answer but may be I don't have what I need because I have been too ashamed, too embarrassed, too prideful to ask. That being said, small bills, non-sequential, just slip them under the crack in the garage door or leave them in the mailbox.

...or does it explode...

I am not sure what has me thinking of the Langston Hughes poem "Harlem" this morning. Well, not entirely. I mean here we are December 16, 2014, the year is winding down and we are all like kittens ready to pounce on a new ball of yarn and hopeful that 2015 will bring less tangles and more unabashed fun and fortune. I am no different.

I'd like to put the last roughly 390 days of my life through a sifter and shake out all the ickiness, keeping the loveliness and working toward being a better version of me going forward. Not that the ickiness is entirely bad per se. I have grown this year in ways that I never thought imaginable and regret that God had to get my attention that way that He did.

I still believe. I believe that God has great things in store for me and my family. I believe that he has ever so much more than we could ask for or imagine right around the corner. I believe that he does in fact wish to prosper Ryan, Jordan, Wesley and myself and not to harm us. I believe that the best, the absolute best, is yet to come.

I heard a sermon recently about transition and I really liked what was said about the pain of transition. It's like you are a caterpillar. You know you can't crawl anymore but you are not quite ready to fly. That's a lot how I feel right now. Believing that breakthrough is right around the corner BUT not everything is in alignment so I wait, dragging myself along on my little caterpillar feet dreaming about the wings I am going to have when I finally bust out of this God-tight cocoon. And for anyone who just read that and said to themselves, Um, Jen, if you are in a cocoon, you can't be crawling around if you're in a cocoon...I am going to throw an extra prayer up for you. Stop getting in the way of your own blessing with limited thinking.

I have experienced shades of black in the last 390 days of my life that I didn't know existed...and I have taken college level art classes! But by the grace of God, I woke up this morning in my beautiful house with my two beautiful kids with breakfast to serve and coffee to drink and car to drive the boy to school in and ever so much more than other people have and I am blessed to have been so well provided for by God these past 390 days. Some day, I am going to write it all out to share. All the ways that God has taken these shades of black and filled them with vibrant, living color. Blessed and favored...but not without struggle, not without worry, not without some days of completely spastic angst and a steady stream of F-bombs in my internal (and sometimes external) monologue. I have chosen to believe that God can and will restore everything in my life that needs to be restored. I have chosen to believe that God will fight for me and that he will deliver me and my family. I have chosen to believe that there is nothing that is impossible with Him.

I don't know about you but I intend to spend the next 14 days getting myself into a super spring-loaded position so that I can explode out of the starting block into 2015 that makes every tear, every sorrow, every confusion, all the grief, all the loss, all the stupidity, all the anger, all the everything that seems like every imaginable plague has befallen me all at once, suddenly seem insignificant in the glow of what it all unfolded into.

Explosions are messy but it beats imploding and sinking and living in despair.

Winding down another day...

Got home from work at a tad before 9pm. I assumed that my husband and son were in bed because except for my daughter's light the house was completely dark. Within minutes, my daughter was in the kitchen with me talking my ear off and a few minutes later my son scooted in. Having such a good conversation with my daughter, I didn't even care my son was up past bedtime.

These last couple of post haven't really been as focused as I would like them to be. I get such plans for this blog thing and end up just doing whatever the hell I feel like. In general, a lot of things aren't how I would like them to be. Yesterday or the day before, I had posted something cryptic (surprise, surprise) about having a bad penny of an issue and not knowing what to do about it. Oddly enough, I have no issues know. I am learning to love the way life works itself out...without my input or say so or whatever other grandiose notion I have at the time.

So my blogs aren't focused and pretty and tied with a bow. People are reading. I am assuming people, maybe it is bots. I don't know. The point is that if I posted and posted and posted and never had hits, I would have quit. I really would have. But I post and post and post, sometimes very raw and very off the cuff and my hits will realistically reach 5 digits by the end of the year, so I must be doing something right.

I have entertained that I am a trainwreck and people can't help themselves. I don't think that is the case. Gruesome freak shows eventually get boring. Based on what I can see in my stats, I resonate with a few of you out there. I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to be relatable to you. I think of all the times that I have felt so lost, alone, out of control, crazy and think of what it would have meant to me to find something that I could hold onto and feel a little relief.

I have nothing against positivity and motivational slants BUT 24/7 happiness is not available without a prescription. I would rather be real and have people attach to me for my realness than to have a throng of adoring fans attached to a fabrication that I can not sustain. I am so Popeye in that I am what I am. And the phrase "I am" makes me think of a lesson I once heard a Unity minister deliver a lesson cautioning to be care what you attach your "I am" to. (Oh snap! I ended a sentence with a preposition.)

It makes a lot of sense really. Of all the things that I could say that I am...which ones REALLY matter? I am a job? Nope, not really in most cases. No fooling for a lot of a j-o-b is a means to an end, so why weigh yourself down with something like that? I am a social status. Sorry, wrong answer, take it from me and Frank Sinatra "riding high in April, shot down in May."

I am a wife and a mother...and a daughter and niece...a sister...a friend...a lover...God expressing at the point where I exist...love...those things seems worthwhile attachments to what I am because they are always and only dependent on one thing...me.

Nothing in my whole day mattered to me more than the time with my kids tonight when I got home. They never gave me time like that when I was home, so it makes me feel better about the cosmic scheme of how I ended up back in the work force in a job title I swore I would never hold.

I guess what I am saying is that you my friend should never cloud what you are with what you need to be because in the words of Loretta Lynn "God Makes No Mistakes."

Where ever you are, what ever you are doing, despite what you are feeling, it's all part of the ride. Trust me, hang on through that next dip, that next bend, sometimes even a couple of loop-de-loops, It's only the end of the world if you give up. I regret it took me nearly 37 years to figure that out.

How's that for a wind down? I am off to bed. I hope that whereever you are peace finds you and you are able to be a blessing to someone else.