Familial Bubblegum.....By Tanya Turner

Standing in the kitchen all newly renovated with granite and engineered flooring, we all stood waving our hands wildly lightening bolts traveling through strong arms and long fingers, one sister comments,' if you chopped off my hands I could not speak"Our passion could pass for the culture of Italians but instead we live out the lives from millienias of broken humanity. Heart broken humanity all clamoring for affirmation and peace. Four women.Three sisters and the one who gave them life....Spilling and spilling out sorrows onto the floor. Our collective voices became one voice from the beatings of life and the same story repeated with different dates and different characters to play the parts. Similar themes, elements and descriptions of dark holes we fell into and could not pull ourselves out of....Spirits and emotions fractured and splintered....under bright eyes and pretty faces our hearts sag...under our feet and bodies below the perfect engineered floors...... the rotten beams and work worn poverty footsteps,  hurt , disillusionment ,abuse and death . We are worn. We have seen too much to fill several lifetime containers of sorrow. We are done. We lack Marbles to cope....

I look around bleary eyed....my hands stop gesturing my voice stops joining the chorus and the quiet comes to me....the clarity comes to me...."this is not your inheritance...." The Creator speaks again....I look on with wonder...."this is not your inheritance".....then I remember where I am....who's I am....and who's they are....it is so easy to forget with family. The ones who walk with you those early days, who mold your spirit and heart...Encourage you, bless you, curse you,The ones who can get under your skin, next to your heart, push you out into hard places....hurt you , kiss your face, pray for you, sing you songs,  rob you if you allow it....abuse you .....this ....this is where the Kingdom meets the road.....getting it right in the family brings along with it the ability to speak to a dying world....speak life to a dying world....

oh but it is thick and sticky with family. Like wading through bubblegum you can try as much as you may to shake it off  but you get caught in it, you get bound up in it,  They know the darkness and the greatness of you, they know the secrets and the blemishes....everyone suffers the same trauma and gets broken in the same place but it all manifests a different way. One goes from one extreme of exercise and whole foods to bingeing on pop tarts to cope, one does not and starves, one cannot make it without prescription medication to deal with the physical pain and the depression, one eats and lives a life dependent on others to make it out the front door. The windows covered with the finest linens, soft feminine ruffles, the finest money could buy line dark windows that let in no light....

But there in the quiet against the roar....the stillness comes....the room swirls I am lost in the awakening of truth....it is not mine to heal....not mine to fix...we suffer the same brokeness ... this one thing that I know we were all meant to find wholeness. But it will come in different ways in varying measure. But all from the one who created us. We have no hope of ever knowing health unless we seek the only one who can truly recreate us from the internal out.....
I smile to myself thankful at least we are all aware we are fractured, and there is an underlying sense of love that will always connect us.

I remember to speak life. It is the only thing besides prayer that I have gift or courage to do. Life words. Life focus. I stop the waterfall of death words with my mouth....the focus on past and the crushing....I remember the threshing that brought me healing and how much chaff had already blown away and how far we had come....the sorrows were all part of the threshing....the sifting of what could be used from what was valueless ;  what could be ground and made into bread to feed the world and planted to reproduce fruit and life  through the next millennia of humanity.....

What do we take away from the threshing.....will we walk out with an arm full of chaff that neither fills us or brings life or will we hold double portions of grain that can be used to feed ourselves and placed in fertile soil to raise  green shoots of something eternal and living. If we can only remember what we have taken from the threshing and not what it has taken from us that will change the outcomes of so many of our choices....Change the way we speak to each other, the way we look at ourselves....we are not victims any longer, we are not captive or in prison....we are free, we are strong, and this bubblegum we get caught up in is Kingdom training of the purest kind....the hardest kind, and the most refining kind.The chaff blows away on the wind, thrown up into the air grain flying wildly, not wanting to separate from what it loves or keeps it covered in security.....but it comes down hard on the stone floor....pure, ready to be used ....then ...finally then....bread......seed.

Thanksgiving

Being Thankful creates abundance, being thankful precedes the miracle....these are words written from one of my most revered upcoming authors Ann Voskamp. 

Hard words worked out in one life, living in a very real physical body,  the toil of caring for the needs of children a husband and a home. Thanksgiving worked out in an environment of hard realities. 

 Somewhere between childhood and womanhood there was this misunderstanding with many of us, that the easy would come, the favor would come, life would be gently handed to us on a sparkling platter and then we would be thankful....that somehow we would not know the meaning of sorrow or disappointment. But then:
the easy did not come,
the favor was taken or lost
the sorrows came,
death visited our doors just like everyone else...
years of waiting for that person, that love or that thing that would magically take us to the new life of being thankful did not come. Illness came knocking and addictions
, and void and broken relationships....it all came.....
sometimes we could see a glimpse of light here and there where joy would rise to the surface but it was short lived and we forgot to sing.
We forgot to sing....anyway....when all the terrible winds shook us to the core and the storms raged we forgot to sing and be thankful.... 

Sometimes the storms take our voice. Sometimes it seems they will take the very heart out of us ....our screams our cries for mercy cannot be heard carried off by a violent wind. We are helpless. It all comes back around to this truth...we are helpless and totally dependent on the one who created us. It is on the   threshing floor that thankfulness is birthed. Humility comes to us on the threshing floor. The days that appear to be full of not enough's brings forth desperation of the spirit....I think that is why Jesus said blessed are those that are poor in spirit...for theirs is the kingdom of heaven....we are desperate for the filling...desperate for the Kingdom alive in us..

I have been changed  by learning to reverse the faulty belief system I had from childhood....thanksgiving coming when there are storms...thankful heart for every glimpse of light I see....until that light fills the room around me and fills that space in me and spills onto everyone I touch. The life truly does know abundance when our eyes are open our hearts expectant of miracles instead of the other shoe falling.
I am changed and I am being changed. The hard things still come but something imprisoned for a life time has been allowed to walk into the warmth of God's truth....the welcoming heart and spirit griping truth that a heart of thanksgiving changes everything....Everything.....