Author: Shirleyjdietz

I'm still finding out what I'm about but I think it has something to do with writing and connecting with people and serving God. I don't believe I have to understand it all in order to do it and am pretty content with what comes my way, day by day. I believe there is a God who created all of us, the world we live in, the science we think disproves Him, well, everything. I know my natural tendency is to think I don't need God and I need to be saved from that. I know I need a savior and I'm thankful I have one. The small glimpses I get from the here and now of what my real home is going to be like when God restores it all - that's what fuels me, stirs my sense of adventure, and keeps me going. Until then, I write about what is.

Well, Imagine That!

February 7, 2016 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

It is cold chilly here in Florida today. We get a few days like this every year and although I like to be able to go outside without breaking into a sweat, I often use the temperature drop as an excuse to stay inside more. But as I’ve written, I’ve been riding my bike lately and have actually been knitting a hat to keep my ears warm during my morning adventures. I’m going out, cold weather or not. I am encouraged and inspired by a blogger I’ve started following at www.bikelikecrazy.com. My five miles in the sunshine doesn’t measure up to her daily 10 mile commute to work in snow and ice (yes, she does that).

I’m also thinking a lot about my imagination, which needs exercise as much as my body does. It is a good thing to be totally present in the here and now, which is where I feel I have been for quite a long time. Doing life, dealing with its circumstances and spending time with the people accessible to me, has been my focus. Writing about life takes time and imagination, and has not been my focus. I haven’t been writing. The few things I’ve cranked out have been a struggle and I’ve not gotten much satisfaction from them. I’ve told myself that this is probably a stage to be expected. I should not be upset with it, but I should expect it to pass.

So, in my imagination I am writing a book, a very satisfying book. It begins with people living ordinary lives, but with a sense of calling or higher purpose. This sense carries them through difficulties of all kinds, and grief unspeakable at times. This sense frames their everyday activities in a meaningful way. It makes them examine every relationship with others with a keen eye as to what might be happening. The enduring quality of this “sense” means it is picked up by their children, and their children’s children.

Some of this I do not have to imagine because it is contained in the diaries and personal letters of my ancestors. I am thankful for their attention to recording what they experienced. The things they have written have made a difference to me – one person, many generations later. The thought that one person in the future might be encouraged by something I write is reason enough for me to be diligent. My imaginative effort does not have to include fame, book deals and sequels in order for me to want to do the work. However, it also doesn’t hurt to imagine those things since they are pretty safe there and it gives me practice not fearing them.

Someone in times past was inspired to write “now to the one who can do infinitely more than all we can ask or imagine according to the power that is working among us”. I think that inspiration came from a God who wanted us to imagine not just mediocre, impoverished imaginings, but big, creative and challenging ones. Practice in doing that is what I need, and a good time to do it is while I’m on my bike.

I’m putting on my hat and getting to it. WIN_20160207_120517

On Riding a Bike

February 1, 2016February 1, 2016 Shirleyjdietz4 Comments

When do I really get serious about taking care of my body? I’m asking the question because I really don’t know. So many years have gone by when other things came first on my list. There was only so much time and other things were urgent. And didn’t I get enough activity in the course of daily living? I wasn’t a couch potato. I lifted, pushed and pulled, walked and ran and stood up most of the time. I had a young body and it took care of itself (because it had to).

Time has changed a few things. Specifically, my blood pressure is higher and I think it’s having effects on other systems, like my vision. I don’t want to start medication and deal with all those side effects, and of course, there’s the problem of my hating to swallow pills which I avoid by never remembering to take them. But I can exercise. Walking would have been my first choice but after feeling a few twinges of pain in my right knee, I’ve switched to riding my cheapo bike.

Because I am on the way to being more serious about exercise (I’m not totally there yet…) I give the bike ride a priority place in my “somewhat retired” daily schedule. Morning, right after the gate to the nearby mobile home park opens for the day, I strap on my fanny pack, turn on the health app on my phone and get going. It’s a fairly safe place to bike a large loop and not surprisingly, I am one of the fastest things moving on the road.

Biking in the mobile home park reinforces my desire to take care of myself seriously. There are lots of people there who are trying to be active. Many of them have been “not serious” longer than I have judging by the fact that their exercise consists of riding to get coffee and donuts at the clubhouse in their golf carts. The other bikers I see are usually stationary, talking to their neighbors. Lots of people are walking but it’s the kind of walking where you can hold hands with your walking partner and take long looks at scenery. And today I saw an elderly woman, probably the most serious exerciser I’ve seen there in a long time, who could barely stand upright and had a decided list to the right. But she was moving as best she could. Every time I think, “get serious now or this is the next version of you”.

I’ve had people (the husband) say “well, you’re not getting much exercise riding a bike here in Florida where it’s flat”. But they are wrong. First of all, it’s not flat. I know there must be some kind of incline when I ride east. I imagine there might be one riding north as well (because north is “up” on the map). And then there is wind resistance. Pushing air is exercise and don’t let anyone tell you differently. It’s true that wheels make moving easier but they don’t move by themselves – as evidenced by the husband’s bike which has not moved an inch in months. I push hard and go fast and I feel the burn.

Which brings me to the part where I challenge myself, to keep it interesting. My health app SHealth, Shea for short, is my co-conspirator in getting serious about my health. In fact, she nags me to the point of irritation. I’m always being asked if I want to record my sleep, or add a meal. And she gets downright bossy when it comes to exercise.

WIN_20160201_121039 — Yeah, just be more active yourself!

Shea gets on the job when I’m biking and talks me through the whole painful process, starting with a little five second countdown. At each mile she announces my progress and tells me how long I have to keep going to reach my goal, which is five miles, at my present speed. Behind the scenes she is mapping where I’ve gone and the places where I’ve gone the fastest. And in a world where I will take any little bit of encouragement I can get, I love hearing her sweet voice at the start of the last half mile “Almost there – you can do it.”

Today I broke a speed record with my fastest ever average of 10.6 mph. I found out that several of my gears actually work and I really booked it (going west, remember the incline) which brought it up, along with the fact that I didn’t have to wait 5 minutes to cross the highway before getting to the gate. If I get much faster I’ll have to leave the park where the limit is 15 mph.

I sweat when I bike so don’t tell me it’s not a workout, and do encourage me to keep it up. It only takes half an hour and I’m breathing hard the whole time. It’s better than a pill for my blood pressure – certainly doesn’t have as long a list of adverse effects – and it does make me feel a little more serious about taking care of myself. (But it doesn’t mean I’m not looking for a used golf cart. Those things are handy.)

The Silence Cure (or Go to Your Room!)

January 25, 2016January 25, 2016 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

I ~~like~~ love silence, but especially certain forms of it. I love it at night, with maybe a few normal background sounds. I love it outside, with just enough bird sounds and leaves rustling to let me know the natural world is intact. I even like being silent and spending much of the day without talking, or having the TV or radio on. But I couldn’t really put words to why I love silence until this morning when someone did it for me.

My present reading project, which I would highly recommend to anyone, has been reading through Dallas Willard’s “Divine Conspiracy”. I think some who read my blog probably are not having an active interest in pursuing Christianity themselves but maybe would like to be more educated on what’s out there. And who doesn’t like the thought of a conspiracy to be investigated?

This morning’s reading was about silence and solitude. If a person were truly interested in being a follower of Jesus, silence and solitude would have to be a part of life, because it was a part of his. That’s what following means – to do what he did. But why did he do it, and what can it do for me? The first thing I think of is having to shut myself up, “get thee to a nunnery” style and take some pledge of wordlessness – not going to happen. But here was an interesting thought on the quantity of silence.

By solitude we mean being out of human contact, being alone, and being so for lengthy periods of time. To get out of human contact is not something that can be done in a short while, for that contact lingers long after it is, in one sense, over.

It lingers. I think I know how he means that. And this,

Silence is a natural part of solitude and is its essential completion. Silence means to escape from sounds, noises, other than the gentle ones of nature. But it also means not talking, and the effects of not talking on our soul are different from those of simple quietness. Both dimensions of silence are crucial for the breaking of old habits and the formation of Christ’s character in us.

Ok, I’m to be silent because it helps me break bad habits. How does that work?

“to break the power of our ready responses to do the opposite of what Jesus teaches: for example, scorn, anger, verbal manipulation, payback, silent collusion in the wrongdoing of others around us, and so forth.

Oh yeah, those ready responses. I get it.

There is more but I will give two more of my many highlighted passages about silence.

The cure for too-much-to-do is solitude and silence, for there you find you are safely more than what you do. And the cure of loneliness is solitude and silence, for there you discover in how many ways you are never alone.

And yes to this one! Hopefully someday it will be this simple….

One of the greatest of spiritual attainments is the capacity to do nothing. Thus the Christian philosopher Pascal insightfully remarks, “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.”

This Is Where I Start

January 23, 2016January 23, 2016 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

“And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.”

From “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth

This is where I start to find a God I can love with my heart, my soul, my mind. A good place to start…

A Striking Story

January 17, 2016January 17, 2016 Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

There are many things I don’t care pretend to understand, one of them being how messages travel through the air to our various devices. One of my irrational fears is that the air around us will one day be as crowded with planes, drones, internet chatter and streaming movies as our highways have become crowded with cars and trucks. The changes in my lifetime are highlighted by this story that my mom told me this week.

It started with a discussion about the holes that the husband is always cutting in our doors and walls to balance the air flows in the house. Mom remembered a door in the farmhouse I grew up in. She had to stuff paper, cloth, whatever she could find, in the cracks around it to keep the breeze out. Dad eventually paneled over the door which was the best solution to the problem. The door was in the corner of our living room and that corner was where our first TV sat. It rested on a square table, designed for it, with a cut out to keep the bottom of the TV from overheating.

As mom recalls, we were among the first in our rural neighborhood to even have a TV. We would not have had it except for Uncle Bob and Aunt Irene from the “big city”. Uncle Bob was an artist working for Western Printing illustrating children’s books. They were not rich but it seemed so to us. They took real vacations and brought their speedboat up to the lake near our farm where we all learned to water ski. Uncle Bob liked new cars and traded up frequently. They had a dog of recognizable breed and a house in the suburbs.

They were also generous and passed things along to our family (Dad was Aunt Irene’s little brother). In the early 1950’s one of the hand me downs was a used TV. They got a new model and in those days no one would have thought they needed two so they brought us the old one. It was such a miracle, that pictures could come from hundreds of miles away into our living room. We gave no thought to them looking like they had been filmed outdoors on a snowy day. To make out anything at all on the screen was fascinating to us.

We did have one neighboring farmer who had television and he showed my Dad how to get a better signal from the one broadcasting network 240 miles away in Minneapolis. As I pictured it from Mom’s description, it was a uni-directional array of poles and wires in the field behind our house, designed to “suck in” Ed Sullivan and Lawrence Welk from the sky. Other factors frequently interfered and kept picture quality down but that didn’t keep our family from hosting others to come and experience the wonders of television.

My hands on memories of TV watching came later. A new station originating only 90 miles away in Duluth gave us options, but that also meant upgrading our so called “antenna” in the field. We graduated to a tall pole mounted on the side of the house with a grid of rods that could be rotated in any direction. One of us kids would station ourselves to watch the TV while another would go outside and turn the antenna and a third would relay messages back and forth.

“Stop!”

“No, go back, it was better before!”

“Are you still turning?”

“We’re getting nothing now, turn some more!”

“Wait, I saw something!”

The flat, plastic coated, double wire, had to be stripped and the exposed copper threads were twisted around two screws in the back of the tv. That, the on/off switch and a dial with no more than 10 positions for channels, was as complicated as it got.

As exciting as it was to watch shows like “Sky King”, “Roy Rogers”, “Rin Tin Tin” and “Robin Hood”, our real excitement came one day out of a clear blue sky. Our antenna towered above our house which sat in a clearing surrounded by forest and fields. I suppose because it bore a remarkable resemblance to a lightning rod, nature mistook it for one and sent a bolt of lightning its way. Electrical conduction being what it is the lightning zoomed down the wires and into the house, where it burned a hole in the bottom of our TV and scared us half to death. We could have been electrocuted.

But it was the start of the television era for us and we were hooked. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the lightning strike making a bit of difference in our TV watching habits. After the TV was repaired, we just sat a little further away.

Anniversary Thoughts

January 14, 2016January 14, 2016 Shirleyjdietz6 Comments

January 14, 2016, 43 years since I married the husband. What have I learned in all this time?

There are always new things to discover in a relationship, new ways to look at old things.

It is better to work on familiar problems with a person you know and trust, than to start over from zero with someone you don’t know.

The husband and I are both persons before God first, then we are a couple.

Praying for my husband gives me a whole new reason to be interested in his growth.

Praying with my husband, before God, is the safest way to be vulnerable.

Letting the culture tell me what to expect from marriage is a big mistake. Every couple I’ve known is unique.

If I have to have things done my way, just do them and be glad.

If I want help I must be willing to let him help in his way and be glad.

We were not brought together because of the things we have in common but because of our complementary differences.

Bad feelings change over time.

Good feelings change over time.

Being in trouble together brings us closer, thankfully.

Nothing makes it easier to forgive than needing to be forgiven, but don’t keep score.

It is okay to take care of myself and avoid the martyr complex. I am more fun when I’m having fun.

Asking kindly for things works really well.

I say I have learned these things, but actually, I’m still working on many of them and seeing progress. God has given me marriage and family as a school. There are “treasures” of learning as a result of keeping covenant over time – I am humbled and blessed to be in a safe and loving relationship that allows me to learn and grow spiritually. Thank you, Dennis, for being a faithful man who has never held me back, never “lorded” it over me, never intentionally been unkind. I would marry you all over again.

Love, the wife.

ourwedding — Once upon a time, a long time ago…

Shoveling the Drive

January 9, 2016 Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

My drive is lined not with snowbanks, but flowerbanks. Rough, huh?

While some are bundled up and shoveling the white stuff, I am in my shirtsleeves and shorts shoveling the red stuff. I’m not complaining.

Every day, the heavy, wet blossoms fall out of the kapok tree. They are sticky as they decompose and notorious for embedding themselves in the soles of our shoes and tires of our vehicles. Capable of denting a car, or a head…

If you’d like to check out Just Jot January, the rules are here.

JJJ 2016

A Season of Crying

January 9, 2016January 9, 2016 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

I felt it coming as I was reading that morning, and it did several times. The words on the page set the tone for the whole day. The tears came again as I gave Mom a good morning hug, and again in church, and again as I talked with my friend, and oddly, again when I stopped to “air up” my tires at the WaWa station.

I’m brought into these seasons of crying not by hormone imbalance – that I recognize and this isn’t it. It happens when I realize that I’m on to something important, maybe life changing, certainly life enriching. It happens when I become aware that I’m learning something, not by my own doing, by through God’s hand, his methods, his inspiration. It’s so cool, it makes me cry.

Suddenly, I feel kind of raw, hyper-aware of people and circumstances around me. There is possible meaning, potential meaning in EVERYTHING because I feel God in action and I have no idea what he’s going to do next.

I guess, to start with, I’m just so impressed that he’s dealing with me, on a personal level, giving me something I didn’t have before. That happened, with the aforementioned book. Later, the same subject came up with a little more to think about as I listened to the sermon. And the friend thing… I think it’s pretty common to lose it when a friend who knows you well notices that something is going on. All it took was a sympathetic word and I was crying again. Sorry Christine (haha, and thanks).

The hyper-awareness part comes when I realize that I’m being taken care of by someone in high places who is listening in on every conversation, every thought and is literally everywhere around me, even as close as the air I breathe. Small favors are no longer coincidences, they are blessings and assurances.

How does the gas station work it’s way in there, you might wonder. Lately I seem to be searching for air pumps at gas stations all the time. I felt pretty lucky when I started finding that they accepted credit cards and I didn’t have to hunt for change. But last Sunday when I pulled into the WaWa, I found an air pump labeled FREE AIR! What unexpected generosity… It was a sweet machine with good instructions. It gave me a digital reading for each tire before it pumped it up to the amount I punched in. And I was crying again because it was cold and raining and I was grateful for something that worked, worked well.

Today, to match this season I’m in, the sky is also crying and I feel somehow aligned with it. We were made to have seasons, the sky and I, and I’m glad for that. Just sayin’…

Grass

January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

Consider grass, the perfectly rounded tips of new blades, the translucent greenness as the light shines through. Consider the unseen numbers of tiny cellular factories actively converting the sun’s energy into growth. This far surpasses any technology we call “awesome”. Whoever is behind the idea of grass is the real “awesome”. Just sayin’…