November 15, 2015

Greetings My Friend, Junior has decided to sign up for Facebook and I am challenged by his upfront, blunt statements. I know him, that his heart is right with God and his goal is to get people thinking and talking. I also know that some people can get aggressive when they are challenged which makes me want to soften my approach when I speak about what I believe. This is not Junior's way at all, so my desire to "fix"him is met with irritation. I learned many years ago to be thankful for your spouse, I decided to write Junior letters before work for many years. In the letters I only wrote what I admired about him, mainly for myself for the times when I got irritated with him. The letter writing imprinted on my mind all his good points and drew my thoughts from a constant nit picking I am more in tuned to. After we moved to Virginia I was dealing with changes not happening very quickly in the renovation process and no clue to how hard it is to work with a broken body. The time frame in my mind was not nearly enough time for him, I tried to understand and not having a broken body at the time I was unable to fully understand his struggle to get things done. One day I found myself irritated again so I took my struggle to God. God laid on my heart to ask Him to open my eyes and heart to Junior, that opened my understanding so much. I started to watch Junior work and I saw a labor of love. He is renovating this place as a huge gift to me, to us. He wants it just right and will tear things out many times until it looks just right and done correctly. God also keeps bringing another picture to my mind, it is a mission trip we went on to Wales. We were learning street evangelizing, each day we went in a group, a person took out a huge pad of paper set it up on a tripod and began talking and drawing. While the talking and drawing was going on we started conversations with the people that came by to watch. Junior is not able to stand for long periods so he went to the bench nearby, ate his lunch and began conversing with people that sat near him. One time the group finished up and there was Junior in a crowd of people talking about his faith journey. These people were not the well dressed office workers that stopped to see the picture being drawn, they were rather rough looking and speaking, Junior had their attention, there was a back and forth going on in the conversation. As a woman I want to fix my man, God reminds me that He will do the fixing, it is my job to respect Junior. Junior read something he wrote to me, I cringed and God convicted me to accept what he wrote. Junior writes like he talks and his grammar is less than perfect, I cringe at that too. Again God reminded me Junior is not "me", he has his own way of reaching out to others. Then I understood that Junior will attract those that he can relate to on his Facebook account, they will understand his grammar, his strange way of spelling words and know that his heart is right with God. I am learning to just say "sometimes you challenge me" to Junior, this gives me the opportunity to let him be himself, allows me to be challenged but to let him be him. I always find that genuine heart of caring and concern for others in Junior, that is what I fell in love with and I am still deeply in love with him. I am grateful God keeps convicting me to leave Junior alone because the work he does for the Lord is uniquely beautiful and wonderful. God gets the glory even if Junior's words are rough, his grammar is less than stellar and at the end of the day Junior has given Good New's to some of the undesirables just as Jesus did when He was here in the flesh. After all, isn't that the whole goal, to offer hope to all people, the sick, the lost, the lonely and the hurting? May God bless you and keep you make His face shine on you. Love Janet