Newest Writing Adventure

On this blog I have been doing a series of writings devoted to "I think I'm having stress" and "Funny Dees." Recently I was blessed to be accepted into a bloggers group and the theme of my blog at AnnieJennings.com is about stress and cancer.

These are the two topics I have had to deal with in my adult life through the diseases I have, and in some cases, continue to face. Fresh out of college the first was my epilepsy that had me disabled for 12 years and the challenge I was given to get rid of the stress seizures that prevented me from being totally cured.

Twenty years after the Lord blessed me with a healing from my epilepsy I was diagnosed with breast and bone cancer. This is one disease that .will not be "cured" but just the same it can be conquered in my attitude, actions, and ability to stay strong in Jesus.

Therefore, because I'm writing about stress on AnnieJennings.com I probably won't continue with the series here that I named "I think I'm having stress." I might be able to come up with something for both spots, we'll have to see.

If you don't see any more "I think I'm having stress" posts here that is the reason why. I'll find something to replace it with. I told Annie Jennings when I spoke with her that I will not copy and paste from this site on to hers. After all I told her the more I write the more I have, so be on the lookout and visit me at:

http://anniejenningspr.com/jenningswire/author/karen-gillett/

In love W.I.T.H. Jesus,

Karen J. Gillett

Think I'm Having Stress~~~~~~~Let go and Let God

Life was getting rough, several times I heard people tell me to just let go and let God. I had heard it so much that I vowed if I heard it again I was going to scream. Let go and let God! It was like they thought I loved holding on to the pain I was experiencing and unwilling to let it go and trust in God. I trusted God or so I thought.

 

One day as I was reading my Bible and praying God stopped me in my tracks long enough to show me the handprints on the situations I was holding on to were mine. Displayed in front of me were my knuckles shining in white from clenching on so tightly. “God, did I really not trust you to take care of things? Lord, was I that afraid to let go thinking it would be the final move in my life that sent me drowning in a bottomless pit of despair, pain and anguish?”

 

All He needed to say was, “Karen…” and I knew instantly the answers to my questions. My fear was greater than my faith. My friends who told me to “let go and let God” were trying to keep me from drowning by my own actions not cause to me to be submerged.

 

The next person telling me to “let go and let God” was I and indeed I wanted to scream. Not because someone was aggravating me but because I had taken so long to wake up to the fact that I was doing the opposite of what I needed to do.

 

Truly we hold too tightly on to things and not tight enough to Jesus. We get into bad situations, have horrible experiences and we hold on to these times as if they were some kind of life preserver instead of the thing that tends to drown us. How crazy is that? We need to let go of that and hang on to Jesus. It is Him we need to lean on instead of clutching tightly to the bad times. We need to have a yard sale or heart sale and get rid of all the old things we think we can’t let go of.

 

When you prepare for a yard sale you gather all that needs to go, the things that have no value, and things that are just cluttering up your life. Believe it or not I’ve never had a yard sale but labeled by my family a “pack rat” my daughter thinks we’d be rich if I did. That was just counting the things I had stored in our attic!

Our spiritual life is no different. If we would just get rid of the things that need to go, the things of no value to us that are just cluttering up our lives we’d be rich. Eternally rich in God, rich in His love, mercy, grace, and blessings that never end.

 

Don’t scream but instead, let go and let God. Let Him do all He is able to do by giving up our right to hold on to the junk that needs to go. Letting go doesn’t mean abandoning people or some things it means allowing God the control needed to operate without us slowing down the process of trying to hold on and do it ourselves.

 

© 2013 Karen J. Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes Publishing for COCWF

 

DEES funny~~~~~~~There's a Train Coming!

One day as my husband and I were on our way home I was feeling a little tired from our journey. Sitting there quietly in my seat giving up my position as the “back seat driver” I drifted in and out of sleep. Once when I was half awake I noticed my husband acting like a train was coming that he failed to see before starting across the multiple tracks crisscrossing the road. At the sign of his nervousness I began to be a little fearful myself out of fear of being hurt. Next thing I knew I heard the sound of the tracks below us rattle. Sure enough we weren’t the only ones on the tracks and we were about to be hit. However, the impact didn’t happen. Instead what happened was a car full of impatient teenagers passing us on the tracks using the shoulder of the road. I was relieved it wasn’t a train but wow did that scare me!

 

 LESSON: Often in life’s journey we feel like the light at the end of the tunnel just has to be a train. Fearful of what we anticipate happening we feel like at any time we expect to be hit and sent flying into orbit. We become scared as our imagination soars. However, what we think is a train coming could be just someone else crossing the tracks we are on in the journey of life. Something that causes a chain reaction that rattles the tracks below us momentarily. We need to remember that we are not the only ones on the road and we need to rely on God and His driving to see us through our journeys. Later after our railroad incident I found out my husband wasn’t acting “nervous” as he knew there wasn’t a train coming. No, what he was doing was paying attention to the herd of deer in the nearby field. I needed to trust his driving skills and go back to sleep and get some rest.

 

Same thing in our spiritual life, we need sit back and get some rest as we put our trust in God’s driving skills. No matter the length of the journey, the rattling of the tracks, the delays we encounter we can have confidence in our chauffeur, Jesus Christ. Our part is to make sure we allow Him to be the one in charge of driving us to where we need to be. He sees the trains, He’s not afraid of the tracks, and He knows where He’s going. You can’t get any better than that.

 

Suddenly it’s no longer “There’s a train coming!” but its “Jesus is driving, I am safe.”

 

© 2013 Karen J. Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes Publishing         Funny DEES

Think I'm Having Stress~~~~~Breaking out in Praise

Instead of breaking out in a sweat over situations we need to break out in praise to the Lord. “Praise? You expect me to praise God at a time like this, I don’t feel like it!” We are not to do it simply because we “feel” like it but because it’s the right thing to do.

 

Praise moves us from the clouds to sunshine from doubt to faith. Once when I was feeling down an elder at our church saw me and told me, “Chin up Karen and praise the Lord.” Praise the Lord? What in the world was he talking about he must not understand my current situation and what I’m dealing with. I knew better, I knew he was well aware of what I was dealing with in life. And most importantly I knew in my heart he was right about praising God.

 

Years ago I had already learned the lesson that it’s not for the situation itself we are praising the Lord but praising God for who He is and what He can help us with and for the little things in life. In every situation we find ourselves in if we take the time to look we can find something there we can praise the Lord for. If all we can do is praise the Lord for toilet paper, colorful paint, door handles, crawling ants or anything it gets our mind going in the right direction.

 

When sucked into depression it’s very difficult to find things to praise God for and that’s when we need to start looking at all we see and think about and praise God. It’s a process that un-sticks our praise searcher button that is temporarily blocked from working properly. It’s a way of getting it going again and to beat the stress that has moved in on us.

 

To help out any whose praise searcher button is currently stuck, I will start by praising God naming the things I current see around me, things directly in front of my face. As I go around the room I will leave out on purpose the things that remind me of the bad in life like my cancer, issues with other people, headaches, and worries about my parents wellbeing.

 

Here we go: Praise the Lord for electricity, for lamps it lights up, the computer it keeps running, the TV it makes come alive. Praise you Lord for our black lab sleeping at my feet, the sound of the rooster crowing outside, and the cow bawling for her breakfast to be served. Praise you Lord for warm socks on my feet, pictures of love ones to remind me of the good times in life. Praise you for calendars and the pictures they display. Praise you Lord for the carpet that is soft on my feet and the hardwood floor that still have the skid marks on it from my grandson making a game out of sliding on it. Praise you Lord for the artwork you created just outside my window for me to see as the wind blows the branches on the trees. Praise you for comfortable furniture to sit upon and curtains draping from the windows. Praise you for the sound of a clock chiming, the coffee pot brewing, and the heater running. Praise you Lord that in spite of what I have to deal with in life I have blessings to count and the number one blessing on the list is You, Lord God. Praise you Lord for today and the use of it. Praise you Lord I’m alive to live it, it didn’t have to be me. Praise you that I can live my life to Your glory no matter what. Praise you for loving me.

 

There you go, I went first now it’s your turn to get your praise searcher button unstuck. Bypass the bad and start to praise the Lord anyway no matter what. As you can see there are plenty of things we can praise the Lord for whether we “feel” like it or not. Making the choice to wait until we feel like it is bad for us and good for our enemy so start today for tomorrow will be too late.

 

© 2013 Karen J. Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes Publishing for COCWF

Funny DEES

My spirit was struggling, I had a hunch what it may be but what I was going to do about it was a whole different problem. My self-esteem was on the low side and it needed some kind of boost. The only thing I could think of was to go to the local Christian book store looking for a book on the subject. Intimidated by my task I was reluctant to be so bold as to let the store clerk know I was searching for a book on low self-worth. Truth of the matter is I probably didn’t need to ask, for it had to have been written all over my face.
 

As I sat out in the car gaining what strength I could to go humiliate myself I finally went into the store. It felt like every eye was on me and every ear was tuned in to what I asked the lady at the front counter. Try as I might to say it in the lowest voice I could finally she understood what I was trying to say. Boldly and loudly the clerk answered me in what seemed like a shout as she told me the aisle where I could find all the books on low self-esteem.

 

 

As I went back to the area every once in a while I looked over my shoulder to see who may be watching me. It was like that feeling a teenage girl gets when she buys feminine products for the first time and they sneak out hoping no one saw what they just purchased.

 

 

LESSON: It’s a surprise they can even sell low self-esteem books because how in the whole can people suffering from this disease be able to ask for them and purchase them. If you think about what we have in God, because of God, through God we don’t need to have a low self-worth. Too often where the low view we take comes from is listening to the lies of Satan and his workers around us.

 

 

Someone tells us we are worthless or ugly or no good we instantly listen and take it to heart. We cling to the lies of Satan and ignore the encouragement of our King, Jesus Christ. What does it take to get us to realize just how valuable we are to God?

 

 

It takes having faith in ourselves as well as God to know that He does love us and we are worthy of that love. No matter what we do, how much we mess up the Lord is there for us ready to take us into His arms once again. Our worth comes from His love and confidence in us. Worth that comes from accomplishing something like a State championship, a published book, a million dollar bank account are temporary and will never get us where we need to be.

 

 

The biggest thing is that we find a balance in the area of self-worth between being too proud of ourselves and beating ourselves down into the ground with a destructive attitude toward us. God is the answer; His book is the best place to find our worth. Our job is to read it, believe it and better yet live it out in our lives. Our worth comes from Him not what others think of us or what we may think of ourselves.

© 2013 Karen J. Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes Publishing         Funny DEES

I think I'm Having Stress~~~~~ Time to Apply

Along with all the other difficulties stress creates another hard part of it is dealing with it when it’s caused or created by someone else’s behavior. For example, the spouse of an alcoholic, gambler, drug addict, or controller daily their lives can be filled with all sorts of stress. We can either use those situations as excuses to engage in our own bad behavior or stepping stones to a better behavior on our part.

Just because the spouse is sleeping off their beer on the couch or down gambling the family’s money away doesn’t give the spouse the right to do wrong themselves. In these situations this is exactly what it can make you feel like. “Well if they can do it, I might as well too.” As much as that makes sense in our minds it’s not the way it works in God’s eyes.

These moments are thorns in our flesh that like to dig in deeper and deeper but we need to use these times as a classroom for ourselves to learn what we need to learn. God uses our thorns to teach us what we need to learn, to humble us, to show us what faith, trust, and patience is all about.

Therefore we need to get rid of our desire for revenge or our want for pity and pay attention to our teacher Jesus Christ and what He has to say to us. Not all lessons have to be learnt in the school of hard-knocks, many can come straight from God’s word if we would only take the time to study it and apply it to our daily living. Indeed a good technique and great preparation for future thorns and lessons that may be taught in a much harsher way.

Blast from the Past

Going thru my scrapbook recently I came across a poem I wrote to the Women at the Round Lake Women's retreat as it was called back then. It was a poem that made it to my scrapbook because of what the act behind it meant to me. From 1978 to 1990 I was disabled with epilespy. I had uncontrolled seizures daily that prevented me from doing things while at the same time made other things difficult to do. The women of the church would take me to the Women's Retreat and watch over me in case I had a seizure. Which in my case was frequently throughout the day.

In 1986 at this particular retreat I evidently had several seizures in a row. Each time I did I would wet my pants. After a certain amount of seizures I ran out of spare clothes to wear. After the last seizures I had when I noticed the clothes I was wearing I asked the ladies what happened. This was something I always had to do in order to find out what I did during my seizures. They told me I had wet my pants again so they had to hand wash my other clothes and blow them dry with one of the ladies hair blow dryers as quick as they could.

This act of kindness has never left me till this day as I type these words thru flowing tears. Back when I had epilepsy I wrote poems to keep my mind focused on things other than seizures. They may not have been great poems or drawings I did with them but they were terrific for the purpose they served. This is the poem I wrote in gratitude to the ladies for what they did in 1986.

Truly an act of kindness the women of the church continue to do today and I'm proud to be a part of them. Being cured from my epilepsy now for over 20 years I can now give to others what was given to me. It may be slowed down a little bit by my recent onset of Breast and Bone cancer but I still have the ability to give. We all have that ability to give, it doesn't take someone healthy, rich, or wise. All it takes is a caring giving heart.


MY POEM (I will not correct any grammar, I'm leaving it as I wrote it) Christian love has a value, a value all its own. Something worth the treasuring a thing that is worthy to loan. And I was honored to get this loan from my sisters at Women's Retreat The day I had a seizure and was as embarassed as all could be. For thru my seizure I wet my pants and felt so like a fool. I couldn't stop the tears from flowing, try as I did to be cool. My sisters showed their love for me when they took my dirty wet pants And blowed them with a hair blow dryer which made my heart just dance. So thank you sisters for this loan, I pray I'll pay it all back, Giving all I can to you till nothing between us lacks. Thank you friends, I love you. Karen