Walk With Confidence

May 25, 2022 ~ Sandi Staton

PROVERBS 22:6
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Facebook post by Nicci Staton, my granddaughter-in-law

This morning at school drop off I gave Gideon his daily affirmation:

“Gideon, you are a man of God, you are strong, you are brave, you are mighty. You are loving and kind, generous, and a truth seeker. You are a mighty man of valor. You are holy, and you are a giver of God’s love.”

Gideon: “yup! I concur with that.”

If only we could all walk in the confidence of an eight-year-old!

@niccistaton · Blogger

Be Still and Know

August 25, 2021September 20, 2021 ~ Sandi Staton

Psalm 46:10
Be still and know that I am God, I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

I’ve been a child of God all my life. He’s never let me down. He’s never been mean and cruel to me even when I deserved it. He is my hero, my Light in the dark, my everything. I talk to Him. He talks to me. I ask questions. He gives me answers. I can always depend on Him to be there for me when everyone else runs away.

But, over the past several months, my faith has been shaken to the core. The nation that I once knew is falling apart. The world is suffering. Women and children are being raped and murdered. We the people have been exchanged for lust, power and greed. We the people no longer feel safe in the arms of our government.

And like many others, I’ve cried out to God, “Why don’t you stop this horror? Why do you allow innocent children to suffer? Why? Why? Why?”

Complete silence! Not one logical answer. No answer at all.

Now, I don’t even know how to pray . . .

Stubbornly I continued reading my Bible and trying to find answers. I know what Revelation says about the end of the world. And today, it’s never felt closer. I know that terrible things are going to happen before the last trumpet sounds. And I know that what God sets into motion cannot be stopped.

But my heart was terrified! And my brain was on overload with all the why’s and why not’s. But God’s silence was more than I could bear. And worst of all, I began seeing him as an angry tyrant rather than a loving, gracious God.

Faith and hope were uprooted and the seeds of doubt were planted and growing like weeds. How can I continue to trust a God that allows sin and corruption to take over? I needed answers. I needed to know what the heck God is doing.

Finally, God tells my troubled, pondering heart to calm down and that I don’t need to know the answers; I just need to trust that He is in complete control of the world and everything in it. He reminded me that He didn’t put me on this earth to fix it; that’s His job. All I have to do is concentrate on fixing myself, repenting of my own sins, and being the best warrior for God I can be.

Our fight as Christians is with Satan and his demons, the rulers of this dark world. They feast on our fear and doubt and confusion. They twist and distort our vision of God and anything else that will drag us from our faith. Satan is sneaky. He is vile. He is a liar. He is a thief. He is the king of evil. The apostle Paul paints a vivid picture of Satan’s nasty deeds in Ephesians 6: 8-10 and the weapons we need to fight against him.

God makes it crystal clear in His Word that we must be obedient to Him. We must not lose heart. We must trust Him even when the things He does or doesn’t do make sense. My job is not to figure God out. My job is to trust and keep moving forward. In the midst of the storm and the raging waves around me, I must step out of the boat and walk on the water of faith.

I’ll be seventy-five tomorrow, August 26. I am retired. My nest is empty. My grandkids are grown, two of which are married with kids of their own. Sometimes I feel that I have nothing more to contribute to the family. But I can pray. Our young mom’s and dad’s today are faced with challenges like never before. I pray that God gives them wisdom and strength as they stand firm in their Christian faith. To guard their hearts against lust and greed and all the temptations of sin.

As each generation moves farther and farther from God, the harder it is for them to see Him let alone trust Him. Sin has been so watered down that it doesn’t even seem wrong anymore. Christians are accused of looking for and seeing demons in every nook and cranny. That we’re a bunch of religious fanatics and need to lighten up. Nothing is all that bad.

But it is. It’s that bad and worse. As for me, I choose God and everything good He has in store for my life. I pray that whatever I am faced with He’ll give me strength to endure to the end no matter what.

What God taught me over the past few weeks is to keep my eyes on Him. To walk closely by His side. To trust Him even when He doesn’t make sense to me. To step out of the boat and walk on the water of faith.

America is Crying

August 17, 2020August 18, 2020 ~ Sandi Staton

Before COVID-19, shopping and eating out used to be a fun thing. We didn’t have to rush around before the stores closed, or wonder how many empty shelves we would find once we got there. We weren’t afraid to cough or sneeze in public or even rub shoulders with our fellow humans.

Strange how swiftly things can change within a short period of time . . .

The once upon a time buzzing restaurant was a ghost town of empty tables spaced twenty miles apart and rows of empty, sad-looking booths. Even the music lacked its normal vim and vigor.

It was Friday, the day we set aside each week to spend with my husband’s uncle and aunt. We look forward to our time together and laughing at the darnedest things, like the jacked-up prices on the menu, the cold bowl of soup the waitress served, and coffee with a meaner kick than a raging bull. But the dirty plate the waitress put on the table? Not so funny.

The last time we ate there we had the privilege of drinking from real glasses and eating with real tableware, so I wasn’t expecting plastic cups, knives, and forks. Feeling slightly irritated, considering the cost of an arm and a leg to eat there, I was tempted to ask where the ants and checkered table cloth were.

But the thing that really got my blood boiling was walking into the restroom.

I cleaned toilets for a living, on my hands and knees, agonizing over every speck of dirt and grime in every nook and cranny, cleaning and scrubbing around the commodes and baseboards till every stinking germ was gone. Everyday. Five days a week. For fourteen long, agonizing years. I was the Queen of clean. When germs saw me coming, they dropped dead on the spot!

So, you can imagine my disgust when toilets in every stall hadn’t been flushed, one of which was totally clogged with who knows what. Toilet lids were splattered with pee, toilet bowls and baseboards were filthy black, and there was hardly any toilet paper anywhere. I’ve been in cleaner outhouses! But wait! There was a cleaning spray bottle hanging on the handicap door and a dirty cleaning rag laying on the nasty floor.

Feeling like I’d just waded through an underground sewer, I washed and dried my hands, hurried out the door, and headed straight toward the young masked man propped lazily against the desk. Not wanting to butt him too violently into the here and now, I pulled in my horns, and politely asked, “Did someone forget to clean the ladies room?”

With everyone so up in arms about COVID-19 and wearing masks for protection, you’d think restaurants would be more diligent about keeping their restrooms clean! It seems that, when the mask goes on, common sense gets smothered to death; like eating out for instance. No one can eat with a mask over their mouth, so what happens to the germs then? Are they frozen because you wore a mask to the table? Are they in suspended animation? Or do they just curl up and take a little nap somewhere?

In my little pea brain, this mask thing is as ludicrous as taking a bath in a cesspool. And the more I read and understand, the more I realize there is a whole lot more to this pandemic than meets the eye. It’s a political ploy to induce panic and fear in the American people and I refuse to play the game. I refuse to cave in to a government that no longer operates for the good of the American people. A government that has turned its back on God. A government that murders innocent lives, cheats, lies and steals for its own personal gain, and wallows in the lap of luxury at the expense of the American people. A government that protects criminals and punishes victims. A government that sits back and allows cities and homes and businesses to be vandalized and burned to the ground.

In all my 74 years, I never ever thought our nation could be brought down as low as it is today. I never imagined this mighty tower of freedom and justice disintegrating right before my eyes. I love my country and it rips my heart out seeing it ravaged by a greedy, power-hungry democracy gone mad. My only comfort is knowing that God is still in control and that one day, every knee will bow before Him and every tongue will confess that He is God!

If God doesn’t intervene and the American people don’t soon wake up, America as we once knew her will be gone forever. No more freedom. No more justice. No place to run.

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Family Isn’t All it’s Cracked Up to Be

August 9, 2020November 16, 2021 ~ Sandi Staton

Family is everything to me. But, the family I grew up in was just a tad screwed up. Okay, a lot.

My dad was a man of fewer than a few words. He rarely got involved in my life and preferred to be left alone. Completely. Don’t talk, don’t cause a ruckus, just sit and be quiet. In another room, or better yet, in another house.

My mom was stuck in the twilight zone of her abusive childhood and jerked me in there with her. She yelled a lot, picked her fingers till they bled, and consumed me with her fears and anxieties and worries and sorrow and pain. I was not the perpetrator of her abuse, yet I felt responsible and powerless to fix it. So I sacrificed my stubborn will on the altar of compliance to calm the raging beast within her. But, the inner, strong-willed child refused to die. Thus began a never-ending battle of the wills, a constant fight against her power and control over every corner of my life.

Two of my brothers escaped the madness through substance abuse, the youngest of which spent the majority of his life either in prison or homeless and living on the streets. He traded his wife and kids for the thrills and chills of crime. When his kids grew up, they walked down the same wayward path.

My older brother, whom I never met, suffered severe brain damage caused by encephalitis and was institutionalized when he was three. And my oldest brother drifted here and there, searching for his special place in this world. He was the oldest son of my mother’s first marriage. When my mom married my dad, he didn’t want a snotty-nosed five-year-old, so they left him crying under his grandmother’s bed and moved to another state nine-hundred miles away. Till the day he died, he was searching for love in all the wrong places.

My sister ran away from home when she was fifteen, got pregnant, then got married at the ripe old age of sixteen. When her husband died at the age of forty-one, she found solace in the bottle. After finally admitting she had a serious problem, she went to rehab, joined AA, and turned her life around. Sadly, she died of breast cancer at the age of fifty-seven.

I didn’t do drugs or alcohol. I was picky about whom I dated and was squeaky clean when I got married. I was nineteen. Still wet behind the ears. Naive as a kitten. I believed in God. Went to church, and tried to live a good, clean Christian life in spite of my short-lived, abusive marriage. In spite of being a single mom at the age of twenty-one and barely making ends meet. In spite of sickness and hospital stays. Even in spite of my X-husband’s constant slurs and put-downs and his lack of parenting skills and child support.

I was sugar and spice, and everything nice, a pillar of strength and unshakable faith, as happy as a circus clown. That’s what I pretended to be on the outside because that’s what everyone wanted me to be and heaven forbid I be anything less. And no one cared what I really felt anyway, so it was easier to live a lie than to let people see the ugly, naked truth.

And the ugly, naked truth is, on the inside, I was an erupting volcano of hurt and anger and boiling rage. A prisoner, bound in chains and living among the tombs of fear and hopelessness, striking out against God and the world and my parents and my siblings and everyone who should have been there for me but never were. On the inside, I was a river of knowledge of how I was supposed to live, but as dry as a desert about how to do it.

Then one day, I snapped, and I fell to my knees before God. That’s when I saw Him clearly for the first time; when I felt His love and mercy and forgiveness as He washed my sinful heart clean. He changed my wayward direction and put me on the heavenly path leading to my eternal home in heaven, where I will be completely free at last.

When you allow God into your life, He blesses and restores it. He makes it better than you can ever imagine. Although my immediate family relationships never improved, and all but one sibling is dead, God has blessed me through my second marriage and his family. And He continues blessing me through my son and his beautiful, growing family. We have each other’s backs. We love and encourage one another. We allow each other the freedom to be our crazy selves without judgment and ridicule. We don’t bicker and fight. We laugh and have fun. We talk and we listen. We are the family I always wanted growing up. The family I needed to help me grow strong and healthy and to be what God created me to be.

Family is important to God, too. That’s why Satan works so hard to rip it to shreds, beginning with Adam and Eve in the garden. Weaken the family and we weaken the world. Stir up anger and resentment in the family, and we stir up anger and resentment in the world. Someone has to stop the insanity, the deadly sinful disease, from spreading from generation to generation. Someone has to stand up and say, “Enough!”

The majority of the world has never had a healthy family life. But we can all create one by loving our kids and doing everything within our power to make them feel loved and protected and safe from a world gone mad. We can teach them to spread their wings and fly. We can encourage their dreams rather than crushing them in our hands. We can teach them about God the right way, rather than the twisted way we once perceived Him.

I loved my family. As messed up as it was, it wasn’t all bad. My parents were good people, they just didn’t know how to be good parents. They didn’t know how to teach their brood to fly, so they broke their wings instead. Hopefully, though, as we get older we can forgive and move on with our lives. None of us are perfect parents. We just have to keep moving past our own junk and be the best parents and grandparents and great-grandparents we can be.

I’m in this parenting thing for the long haul, learning and growing as I go.

Proverbs 22:6
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Colossians 3:21
Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.

Church is Wherever You Are

June 14, 2020June 15, 2020 ~ Sandi Staton

It’s Sunday

on the deck where the old pickup is temporarily parked

and held hands and prayed for renewed faith and trust in God during these dark and fearful times. And God was there . . .

Running Out of Toilet Paper?

March 25, 2020July 21, 2020 ~ Sandi Staton

Before the advent of modern toilet paper, many different materials were used for the same purposes. Different materials were used depending upon the country, weather conditions, social customs, and status. People used leaves, grass, ferns, corn cobs, maize, fruit skins, seashells, stone, sand, moss, snow, and water. http://www.toiletpaperhistory.net/toilet-paper-history/used-before-toilet-paper/

Hubby got up at five this morning and was sitting in the Walmart parking lot at five-thirty thinking it opened at six. It didn’t open till seven. But that’s okay. He got everything we need for the month except flour and you guessed it . . . toilet paper.

But, we’re still good. We have one roll left in the guest bathroom and two rolls left in the master bath plus two skimpy partial rolls.

Like you and everyone else, I don’t want to run out of toilet paper!

But, what if we do?

Because I’m self-sufficient and despise relying on anyone or anything for me to survive, I create my own resources as best I can. For instance, I went online and learned how to make hand sanitizer: (https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-make-hand-sanitizer). I haven’t made any yet, but I will because hubby is screaming for some. Too bad I can’t make my own toilet paper. Then again, maybe I can. I haven’t checked that one out, yet.

But, about this toilet paper thing. When my son was born, I always used cloth diapers until he was potty-trained. For three long years, I rinsed the poop and pee in the toilet then washed the diapers in the washing machine. Before I had a washing machine, though I used the washboard. Yeah. I’m actually that old.

No, I’m not going to wear diapers, I’m just saying there are other means of wiping our butts besides using toilet paper. Just use your imagination and do whatever works for you and your family.

Running out of toilet paper is not the worst thing that can happen during COVID-19

None of us are happy about this deadly virus and none of us were prepared for it. But it’s here and all we can do is the best we can till it passes like staying home, spending time doing the things we love that we don’t usually have time for, playing games, and talking to your kids and your spouse, and calling your friends.

We’ll all be glad when this is over and can get back to our normal lives. This sudden smack in the face has shown me what little control I have over things like COVID-19 and empty shelves at Walmart and people getting sick and dying.

As a believer, I know that God is bigger than COVID-19 and that He is willing and able to take care of me and my family. I know that when I’m afraid I can talk to Him and find peace. I’m thankful that God is bigger than the universe and has everything under control and that I don’t have to worry about silly things like running out of toilet paper because He promises to supply all my needs.

And my God will meet all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus (even toilet paper). Philippians 4:19

Take Up Your Mat and Walk Like a Boss

March 14, 2020October 27, 2021 ~ Sandi Staton

So, I’m paralyzed. Been this way since the car accident. I can’t walk. I can’t feed myself, bathe myself, even brush my own teeth. And this Man comes to me and asks, “Do you want to get well?”

And with a big, pearly white-toothed smile I say, “No. I’m good. I like people waiting on me hand and foot. I like using my handicap as a crutch. I like not having to do anything, prove anything, take responsibility for anything. I like people coddling me, making excuses for me, doing everything under the sun for me.

Of course, this ridiculous scenario is just fiction. I’m physically healthy. I can clean my own house, pull weeds from my flowerbeds, even walk around the block a few times.

But the man Jesus approached at the healing pool had been an invalid for thirty-eight years, and Jesus asked him, “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6)

Why would Jesus ask such a question? Why would He even think that the man wouldn’t want to be healed? He was at the healing pool, wasn’t he?

As a snotty-nosed kid, and seeing the world through my over-sized rose-tinted glasses, I often wondered about that scripture. Then, when I grew up and those glasses got punched off my face, I saw the world and the people in it differently. I even saw myself differently.

Reality stinks. It rattles our brain and makes us see things about ourselves and others that we’d rather not. Don’t open my eyes, and I won’t have to see how many people use their long-time physical and emotional handicaps to bully and control others. Stick in a pair of earplugs and I won’t have to hear their never-ending moans and groans.

It’s funny how conversations often become a contest of who had the most surgeries or take the most pills or has the worst ailments or suffers the most pain.

Why do people do that?

As kids growing up, my brother and I had rheumatic fever, but Kenny’s was more severe than mine. He was sickly all the time, in and out of the hospital and pumped full of penicillin at the least sign of a cold. He cried a lot. Was coddled and babied a lot. And I felt ignored a lot.

Then, when I was in the third grade, I got deathly sick every day after lunch and laid my head on my desk trying not to throw up all over the floor. Finally, mom and daddy took me to the doctor to discover I had walking pneumonia.

Finally! I was one up on my brother and rubbed it in his face, boasting that I was the sickest, now, and it’s my turn to get all the attention!

But, Kenny wasn’t having it and argued that he was still the sickest. After dragging mom into it, she finally ended the contest by calling it a tie. We were both equally sick.

For many years I expected people to treat me with kid gloves because of my out-of-whack emotional disorders. I relied on others to do things for me that I was afraid of doing myself. I relied on my loved ones to protect and defend me, to be there for me, to boost my confidence, to validate and make excuses for me. And the more I relied on others, the more dependent I became.

Then, hearing my desperate cries at the healing pool one day, Jesus knelt beside me and whispered, “Do you want to get well?”

When the prison doors swung open, I just stood there gazing wide-eyed into the vastness of freedom. It was scary out there without my crutches —- those emotional handicaps I so desperately clung to for so long. The smell of freedom was alluring and sweet, but stepping into it was like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

I still rely on the love and support of my family, but I don’t expect them to sit and hold my hand twenty-four hours a day, not that I ever did. I don’t expect them to make up for everything I lost throughout my life. I don’t expect them to coddle and pamper me and agree with every single thing I do or say.

Just as God has set me free, I set others free. I know what it’s like to be bullied by someone else’s handicaps, and I’d rather cry alone in the coldest, darkest cave than to ever do that to the ones I love.

Freedom always comes at a cost, especially if you’ve been enslaved for a long, long time. In order to gain one thing you have to let go of another and another and another, whatever tattered rag you’re clinging to because it feels reliable and safe.

And as crazy as it seems, many people would rather lie around sucking on their emotional pacifiers than get off their pity pot and walk.

I don’t want to be one of those people. I want to get well. I want to be what I was created to be. I want to take up my mat and walk like a boss!

When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, He asked him, “Do you want to get well?” John 5:6