So yesterday, I wrote a loooooong post - took an hour and a half to write. I usually get RM to check them out before I publish them for input, comments, etc. In the meantime, the little people woke up. I left the room to do something else - the post, still unpublished, but saved, was on the screen. The 3 year old decided to be the one to give the input. Apparently he hated the post and decided it needed to be entirely deleted. How he did this still boggles my mind, but he did it! I came back into the room where I saw the blank page, except for his row of random characters running across the top of the screen, and thought to myself, no. No, he didn't just do what I think he did. Yup. He did. Needless to say, I ever so sweetly (ha) reminded him to PLEASE not touch Mommy's computer again.
I will try to recap yesterday's post and include another story along the same lines of fasting for today. I want to remind ya'll, I have never gone to seminary and studied fasting on that theological level. I am simply sharing my experience to encourage you, to take your faith to a deeper level, to experience freedom in your life where, perhaps, there has been bondage in some form.
I do not want it to appear like fasting "gets what you want". It doesn't always. Sometimes the Lord answers exactly how I've prayed, other times, not, but I persevere in my faith as I wait for his leading in my life.
Here we go....
When Renaissance Man and I were first married, he got a job working in downtown Toronto. It was a fabulous job and he succeeded very well there and learned a lot. As the children started to come along, the hour+ commute (sometimes twice as long during the winter) started to take its toll on him. Sometimes whole days would go by without him seeing the kids because they were in bed when he left and in bed when he got home - very awful. He was experiencing a low level depression, I feel, because he started to add up all the wasted hours spent in the car.
Meanwhile, I had started homeschooling the children and could see how he was feeling, so the kids and I, even though the oldest was only 5, started to pray. Those little prayers back then were so priceless. I wish I could have saved them, "Please bring Daddy home, Lord." That's what we began to pray. We longed to have some kind of home business of our own, we just didn't know what. We also considered, though it wasn't our ideal, to perhaps simply find a job closer to home.
Being pregnant or nursing a lot at this time, made it rather difficult to fast. It occurred to me, it didn't have to be food! How about something else? Like sleep? So that's what I fasted! I was already not sleeping much as kids were often up through the night, so this was a fairly major sacrifice, but as often as I could, I got up early, to read and pray. I would write and write in my journals my prayers for my husband, for our family, asking God to do something to help my husband. I mentioned the idea of fasting and explained what this meant to my kids. The thought of giving up food was nearly impossible for them and probably not that great an idea as they were so busy growing, but could they give up something else? Sometimes, instead of a whole meal, it was a morning snack or a dessert. This was hard for them to do, but I believe it was the beginning of modeling the spiritual discipline of fasting.
One day at work (he'd been there nearly 8 years by this point), a colleague of his made some nonchalant comment about a website where you could bid on certain projects as a private business. This immediately piqued his interest and sure enough, as he perused the site, he discovered a lot of the contracts that were up for bid were things he could do. He started to write up proposals and bid on contract after contract. One day, one of his bids got accepted.
I'll never forget that day as he said, "If you hear the fax machine ring, that means the purchase order is coming through." The fax rang. Down the stairs he ran to his basement office. The kids and I were upstairs on pins and needles - was this what we were waiting for? Suddenly I heard a scream. A jumping up and down kind of scream. He came running up the stairs with the P.O. in his hand, "I got it!" We were thrilled. It was a big enough order that we knew he could quit the next day. And he did.
Looking back, it seemed we prayed for years for this request, and it was! But the whole time he was at this other job he was acquiring skills he was going to need to go out on his own, right up until the last day. One of his contracts early on in his new business required one of these exact skills that he learned in his very last week of work at his downtown job - so God kept him there for those 8 years for a purpose. He was growing us, growing our faith, our young children's faith and he was even allowing RM to acquire the necessary skills he would need later on which, of course, we could have never foreseen, but God knew. It was also nice to have a steady income while the kids were little. Going out on your own has its ups and downs financially as we've learned, so God knew that, too.
Having his own engineering business has been the greatest gift. We just celebrated 10 years of him being on his own. They have been the greatest and most fulfilling years of his whole professional life, but definitely the most challenging. It is not for everyone to have their own business, but RM had shown signs of being an entrepreneur even as a young boy - it was in his blood.
The verse that sums up this experience the best has to be Malachi 4:6,
" And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers..."
As our children were growing up, we saw the need to be near them, to disciple them more hands-on. RM was turning his heart to his children. He longed to be near them. This was much more of a challenge with RM away. Now that he is around more, he has been able to bring them alongside him on a daily basis, discipling at every turn. I believe the fact he is home now has played a significant role in the children turning their hearts to their father. By way of pure bonus, they've also been able to be a part of his business, learning so many skills from web design, marketing, proposal writing, manufacturing, you name it, they've been a part of it. I'm so grateful.
All along, during this time, the whole family had also been praying for my younger brother. Though we'd all grown up in a Christian home, he had really struggled with simply accepting the faith of his parents. His experience at university made him struggle even more as he'd come up against the intellectual arguments against Christianity that made him throw it all away for a series of years. This was a scary time for all of us - we weren't sure where he stood in the eternal picture and as my children grew and started to learn about heaven and hell, they started to wonder, "Will we see Uncle B in heaven?" "I don't know," was all I could say. We prayed and prayed.
Then, once in awhile, when we were homeschooling in the mornings, I would call the kids for a snack, or for lunch - this blew me away - and I would hear this, particularly from my two oldest boys, "No thanks, Mom. I'm fasting for Uncle B." I would immediately get choked up. They knew, much like the disciples, that certain forms of bondage require fasting. This happened more than once, on their own volition.
God started to work in my brother. He began with a girl (yeah!). Then her church. Then their pastor. Then a series of events over the last two years that snowballed into my brother falling on his knees before the throne of grace asking Christ to be his Lord and Saviour once and for all. He has since then married this wonderful woman this past fall and his wedding was a testimony to all there of the power of prayer and fasting. Certainly we were not the only ones praying or even fasting for that matter, but one day it'll be interesting to find out if that played a role in breaking the bonds that were barriers in my brother's life that kept him from Christ. It was not overnight - we prayed for years, but God had his timing.
These are just a few stories I could share on fasting. It is a remarkable experience to see God breakdown bonds that Satan longs to keep in place, to keep people in prison - it is a fight! We are taking on the kingdom of darkness when we pray like this and Satan will not go down without a battle. But God always gets the victory and all the glory. Amen!
Good news on the weight loss front with Mr. RM - he's down 17 pounds now, with only ten more or so to lose. I'm amazed. I'm almost where I want to be. What we are both seeing, even in our weight loss, is the Biblical principal of little by little. Everyone wants to win the lottery and pay off their house in one day, but that just isn't how it works. Everyone also wants to lose 20 lbs. with little effort, but that also doesn't happen. We've been seriously at it now for 2 whole months and it has been a slow, but deliberate effort - a few ounces here and there, each snack and meal carefully prepared...a plateau....then a little more weight off...then more.....then another plateau...no changes for days....gain even!.....then suddenly a few pounds all at once. So, just like with the financial discipline of watching our pennies, we are watching our food intake and it is really starting to pay off, pardon the pun.
On a funnier note, now we own two Porsches. Don't worry, he's only planning on buying one more! The prices go up with the Spring weather (that's when everyone wants their sports cars), so he's acting now. I just say, "Show me the money" and raise my eyebrows suspiciously. My boys are in heaven. Car parts are starting to lie around the house. They're being washed in my kitchen sink and painted in my other family room. Hmmmm.....I didn't plan on that.
Well, it's taken three days to write this one with all the interruptions. If this post doesn't make it to the screen, I'll scream, so here's hoping that I get this one published!
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