DEMONS ON HERALD STREET

No one could make heads nor tails of what bred the demon that hatched out in me between fourth and fifth grades. The fourth grade was as fine as cat's hair. I was in Mrs. Betty Fletcherton's room, and since I was her cousin, she let me the classroom dentist and pull teeth, so I had a year in the limelight. (She never let me bring in a reclining chair or drill or put in fillings or attach braces, even though I could have handled the braces because once in church I had managed with two paperclips to build myself a whole set, and by the time Reverend Holder had finished his sermon, I had them fastened on so tight, we had to use a pair of pliers to get them off.)

But now just a few months later, it was like some invisible cowboy had pulled open a chute and turned this twisting, stomping, dirt-kicking she-devil loose on Azalea Heights. By then Daddy had lost his fervor for the movie camera, so we didn't have any spools of film that we could slow down or stop and rewind for another look to learn the answer from some telling darkening of my countenance. Later on people would speculate that I had just finally breathed my fill of the toxins that were being manufactured by my parents' escalating melee in vast quantities within the walls of 212 Herald Street.

This was their second round of matrimony to each other, and the sewn-up sheets seemed doomed to unravel once again. I guess their repentance wore off, and whatever dastardly behaviors both of them had agreed to wash down the drain weren't chased with a strong enough dose of healing waters, and so they came bubbling back up. Angry words of accusation spurred by long-simmering jealousies darted dangerously through the air late at night penetrating the walls of Julie's bedroom. There we huddled under a pile of quilts and afghans in search of warmth from the constant arctic blast being cranked out by her Curtis Mathis window unit. The fact that the air conditioner bellowed boisterously and the quilts stayed piled up twelve months out of the year tells you that the noise we manufactured and the quilts we used as bivouacs were defenses against more than the frigid air in our bedroom.

Occasionally more than words would fly. Once there was a plate, and another memorable morning we awoke to find one of the green padded aluminum dinette chairs poised precariously in the wall above the deep freeze with all four of its legs a foot deep into sheetrock. Mother refused to take it down because she wanted Daddy to see it when he got up and feel the foolishness of trying to explain it. Daddy, of course, wouldn't give her the satisfaction, so it just stayed there like some perverted art exhibit. Our friends who came over regularly finally just got so used to that green kitchen chair poking our of the yellow sheetrock, they'd just saunter on by it like it was as normal a sight as white clouds swimming through a blue sky.

But I don't know. If my hurtling into hoodlumism was some kind of a message I was sending, I sure didn't know it. I just thought I was having fun.


(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke © Jan Doke, 2009)

OUT OF THE CHUTE IN AZALEA HEIGHTS

As soon as I finished writing and publishing Broken Jar, I discovered I was hankering to write something a little different. I had always feared jumping into fiction because I just couldn't come up with any new ideas for stories; I am much better at poetic-type composing, even it doesn't go down on paper in poetic form. Then one day it hit me that the truth of my fifth-grade year was possibly even more interesting than fiction, and since probably nobody would believe it was the truth, it technically could qualify as fiction. And by calling the truth "fiction," I could exaggerate and fabricate my head off without it ever truly being lying.

Three weeks later it was done, but a year-and-a-half later it is still unpublished. Maybe I'm not finished, maybe I'm hoping I can get a "real" publisher to pick it up, maybe I'm too broke to publish it myself, maybe I'm just procrastinating.

But blogging is publishing, so I decided that I'd try it out on you. My plan is to publish it here for you to peruse maybe a chapter at a time, at least for a while. We'll see if works out that way. But you need to promise me you will go into this with the proper mindset: you will be journeying into something akin--in pattern, if not in quality-- to To Kill A Mockingbird or Cold, Sassy Tree in that it is from the point of view of a kid, specifically a high-energy, fast-talking fifth grader enthusiastically dedicated to learning as little as possible within the confines of public education. This is not a daily devotional book, although hopefully when you finish, you will feel closer to the Great Listener, the One who deserves our dearest devotion. Prepare to enter the mind of a ten-year-old East Texas tomboy. The year is 1961.

CHAPTER ONE

WITH NO MALICE AFORETHOUGHT

There is a way of living that takes you meandering targetlessly until you show up somewhere. If you were older and wiser, you'd have enough sense to hope that God would be in the place you landed that day or month or year or childhood. If you were even older and even wiser, you'd arrest the development of such targetless meandering and find yourself a destination on some kind of a map before setting out on the road. But I wasn't old, and I wasn't wise. And though I went to Sunday school and church every Sunday, most other days I wasn't thinking much about who or where God was. What I was was young, wildly impulsive, and wholly sold out to goallessness.

I was Georgia Jen Crocker, fifth-grader at Azalea Heights Elementary School. The school was named after nothing and no one. It wasn't even really a name at all-- just a convenient descriptor for the people of our little East Texas town of Azalea Heights to know where to deposit their kids when it came time to start first grade. No one ever told me why we changed the name from"Azalea Heights Grammar School," but somebody did, and it seemed like most people felt kinda proud for giving up something old and traditional and latching onto something cutting edge. Other folks must have felt they had had some prophetic wisdom even in the backwoods of East Texas, though, because they never would acknowledge the school's new name anymore than they would acknowledge the existence of Daylights Savings Time. I didn't have enough sense then to admire their kind of tenacity to tradition or to roll my eyes at the weakness of jumping on every trendy bandwagon that rolled through town. I just swallowed-- hook, line, and sinker-- the new name, and let "Azalea Heights Elementary School" roll off my tongue as easy as too much spit.

As for my name, it was anything but a descriptor. I got my first name from my Aunt Georgia, who never lived anywhere near Georgia, and my second name from the "J" bank of my mother's imagination. It had to be a "J" name to sound good with my sister, Julie's, "J" name. I never could get a clear answer as to why it was just plain "Jen," which sounds more like an abbreviation than a real name, rather than "Jennifer" or "Virginia," which most people who end up with "Jen" start out with. I have often suspected that I got a chopped-off version of a name-- which by the way is the one they ended up calling me instead of my first one-- because I was almost three weeks late entering this word, and Mother thought starting me out with a quarter-note name would hinder any further inclination I might have toward dragging my feet and drawing things out unnecessarily.

If that was her thinking, it must have worked, for I was as slippery and hard to pin down as a tadpole in Tenaha Creek. I didn't set out to be wild, and the way I lived wasn't any kind of "acting out" or "desperate cry for attention" that I would hear about years later in the enlightened and sophisticated world outside the boundaries of Shelby County. I just got up every day of my life back then and took off living it with no spiteful scheming or malice aforethought whatsoever. But the way my days usually wound up in fifth grade, I couldn't have done a better job of wreaking hoodlum havoc if I had sat down and orchestrated some kind of a grand plan.

(from Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke-copyright Jan Doke,2009)

OUGHTERS AND WANTERS

God's Word reminds us over and over that we should love God, not only with all of our mind and strength, but also with all of our heart. There is a reason for that. When our heart gets behind us in something, we are sure to be victorious.

We do lots of things in a perfunctory way--and granted, for survival's sake, some things pretty much have to be done that way. If we stopped to throw everything we are into brushing our teeth and tying our shoes we would be out of energy before we got to the things that deserved that kind of energy and focus. Yes, we must dress and drive and make appointments and change the sheets, and to do these mindlessly is probably not only permissible but appropriate; hopefully we can multitask at least well enough to do these kinds of things with just a smidgen of our brain and just enough heart to make the task palatable enough to continue to do it on a routine basis. (People who decide not to do these things because they don't enjoy them are the kinds of people most of us would label ''slobs".... So today I am not promoting full-scale heart-throwing after every menial task, and I hope you are not considering throwing scriptures back at me about "doing everything heartily as unto the Lord." Okay, maybe we should find pleasure in doing the menial somehow simply because we are given the blessing of breathing another day to do another menial task, but personally being able to do some tasks mindlessly allows me some much needed time to think more about the things that do really matter.

But what I want to talk about today has more to do with praying to live out our lives' calling with something more than a perfunctory attitude-- praying to love what we are given to do in a way that influences the part of our mind we call "the heart." I know the importance of a heart that knows what it means to be thrilled, a heart-consciousness that realizes right in the middle of doing a thing I need to do that lo! I am having something very closely akin to ...FUN! And rightly so. Having fun is for so much more than having fun. Choosing deliberately to clothe ourselves in all those Christian characteristics that we read about in Colossians is crucial if we are to waylay the gravity of sloth and worldliness. (Sloth because without heart for a job, it soon grows so wearisome that we are tempted to do it halfheartedly and then finally not at all. And worldliness because when our hearts are not engaged in anything holy, they get restless to be engaged in just about anything that will produce a thrill.) There is no denying that we were not put here primarily for fun, or Jesus would not have used the picture of heading off to die when He told us to "take up our crosses and follow Him."

But there are many Christian duties that, even though our sighs might indicate differently, we know good and well don't require anything CLOSE to dying. They are the woof and warp , the everyday staples of productive Christian living. We do them all right, but often we do them as Shakespeare described the young boy: "creeping like snail unwillingly to school." * What if we could somehow learn to think of these tasks as fun? What if we could learn to throw our hearts behind them and not just our wills? What if what we ought to do become the very things we want to do? It can happen. Our "oughters" can be one and the same with our "wanters." For a long time I watched it happen in others, and finally, after much praying about it, I am beginning to see it happening in me. Take Psalm 37:4 as God's literal promise to you.

What I am suggesting today is this: As you go down your prayer list, rather than just praying for their health and safety or wisdom in making decisions, pray that God will give to those you love a heart for the tasks He would have them do. Pray that they will learn to love what God calls them to do rather than tolerate it with a sigh. I'm going to be praying this for all of you. Would you please do the same for me?

"DELIGHT YOURSELF IN THE LORD, AND HE WILL GIVE YOU THE DESIRES OF YOUR HEART." PSALM 37:4

*William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII)

THE LOVE OF OUR DREAMS

(I am in Midland this week up to my ears in cute grandkids, so I'm cheating today; I am using today's entry from my devotional book. It's one of my favorites. So for those of you who are being doubly loyal to my writing, you are hereby excused from class. It's a beautiful day, at least in Midland. Go outside to recess. I've got three little delightful faces waiting to be cradled.)

"The Lord your God is with you. He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing" (Zephaniah 3:17). Recently while working on a craft project, I watched the old, original version of The Parent Trap. When it got to the part where Maureen O'Hara stood face-to-face with the Hayley Mills she hadn't seen in years, I had to drop everything else I was doing and allow my longing eyes to latch fully onto the scene before me. For that one minute or playacting alone, Mrs. O'Hara deserved an Oscar. Her eyes widened a bit to focus in on and drink in every drop of the face of her child as one dying of thirst might swallow down the last drop of water in a canteen. The camera telescoped in on the mother's inimitable green eyes to show them filling with a kind of light that turned them even greener and radiated out to brighten her entire face. Then ever so tenderly, her hands cradled her daughter's face as though she were touching something rare and fragile that few others might ever get to touch. You knew that this mother was entirely in this place. She was completely undivided in her thoughts, so caught up in the moment that her heart knew no other love but this one that she gazed upon with no words and touched as fine china. She was swept away from any reality but this one B eauty before her by which she was totally enraptured. As I watched, I knew why I was so captured by this scene; it was my deepest longing. It was the epitome of delight. One of the frustrations I have with the English language is its lack of words to describe all the different flavors of love. Whereas Greek has several words to describe various kinds of love, English seems to be stuck with a one-size-fits-all word, and the longer I live and love, the more certain I am that the word "love" is far too general to evoke all the appropriate messages it is called upon to do. Thus, we use it to describe everything from how we feel about this taste of enchiladas to the thrill of riding a roller coaster to our deepest and most sacred familial feelings. Every time I am brought back to this scripture, I realize that there is another word that says what I want it to about some of those very rare and special feelings: delight. This scripture is one of my favorites and thus keeps popping up with regularity at the top of these pages. It's not that God's Word isn't replete with inspirational messages so that I would need to repeat any of them; it's just that this one speaks vociferously to what I cherish most in my memories and dream of most as encores in the future: feeling delight, both in and from another. Delighting is a very specialized kind of loving that means I am not just one-size-fits-all loved," but that someone finds me captivating. There are so many shortcomings that scream that I am unworthy and unlovely that to learn that God could feel this way about me is for sure the best news I could possibly hear. I suppose to want to feel such adoration could be interpreted as vain and idolatrous, but God Himself uses the same word to call us to Him. "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart" (Psalms 37:4). He knows what can come from pure delight. Fall into His arms today, feel His hands around your face, gaze upon the beauty of Christ, and delight in Him as He delights in you. (From Broken Jar: 365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, Jan Doke, Xulon Press, 2009).

WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?

Allison, 12, and Callie, 6- cousins who cut their teeth on the same scripture songs

I had just finished a good night of sleeping, was awake and in my right mind (well, as right as it ever gets), the terribly hot weather had abated, and the promise of a beautifully refreshing autumn day loomed bountifully all around me, but something was wrong. My insides were disturbed. All the external well-being of the day knocked fruitlessly at the door of my innerds. I was nervous. There was a new unknown about to enter my world whose shadow had me freaked. When I sat still and imagined myself taking on this new necessary challenge--chasing the rabbit wherever it could dare take me so that I could do what I usually do after that exercise, and shrug my shoulders and say, "There! See? No place this rabbit can go is too daunting when I am in the presence of my Deliverer!"-- the outcome surprised me: I was still filled with a thick, foreboding dread. I daresay I was afraid! I thought I had given over this apprehension into the hands of God, but here it was again, stalking me around my secure, well-lit house in the broad daylight. My body was betraying my heart's facade, too: my stomach was queasy, my breathing was shallow, my pulse was elevated, I was sighing audibly.

Then suddenly, there was another one of those announcements I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Again, it was from the Holy Spirit, and again, it was in the form of a song. Here's what I heard:

"Do not fear, for I am with you.
Do not fear, for I am with you.
Do not fear, for I am with you.
Do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you.
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I will strengthen you and help you.
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I will strengthen you and help you...
Isaiah 41:10."

It was not what most would call an out-and-out miracle, even though it had every bit as much power upon me at that moment. These are indeed the words of Isaiah 41:10, but neither the scripture nor the melody was any kind of a newsflash to me. You see, I had sung this song probably hundreds of times in the past seven or eight years. The Holy Spirit was doing for me exactly what Jesus promised He would: "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you... the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you" (John 14:18,24).

It was all I needed to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that He was near me. He was near enough to know intimately this disturbance of my peace. These words had been faithfully hidden in my heart years ago, and just when I needed Him most, God showed up to bring them back to the surface so that I could gain comfort not only from them, but from being assured that He was near. That song had not crossed my mind in weeks, but that didn't hinder God from honoring me with its hidden presence.

Today I want to encourage you to use every method you can find to hide God's Word in your heart. Mnemonic devices, songs, pictures, repetitive recitation... whatever it takes. Hide as much of God's Word in your heart as you can. Most of us who are older know that memorizing doesn't come as easily as it used to; I can still remember hundreds of lines of poems I learned in junior high the night before I had to recite them for a test grade, but it highly taxes my 59-year old brain to remember three scriptures I spent two weeks learning just two months ago...

unless I learned them in a song! I'll bet it's true for most of you, too. Can't you remember way more songs verbatim than you can remember stories or sermons verbatim?

A few years ago I stumbled upon a c.d. called "Seeds of Courage" by a producer called SEEDS (www.seedsmusic.com) that was pure scripture. I pounced on it and bought it for our granddaughter who was three or four at the time because she and her mother love singing together, especially in the car. In no time, Allison and her mom had learned all these songs, so I went hunting and found that there were four more in the set, ("Seeds of Purpose," "Seeds of Praise," "Seeds of Faith," and "The Power of Encouragement"), so this time I bought me a set, too. Since that time, Allison and her mom have shared these with her little brother, Bryson, and I have bought a set for our younger grandkids, Callie, Joel, and Eli. It is a fun way learn scripture and the only way I know of to keep up with their bright, flexible minds in this area.

For a while after finding them, I listened to them exclusively every time I got in my car, whether I was going to the grocery store or on a five-hour trip. I loved what happened as a result. Every time I woke up in the middle of the night, from having consumed my normal Volkswagen-sized watermelon or just to lie awake in a caffeine standoff after a guzzling a movie-sized Coke, invariably one of those scripture songs would be running through my mind. Clear as day I could hear the lyrics and the instrumentation just as I had done in my car dozens of time. What a comfort to know that the very words of God were dwelling there just beneath my consciousness ready to meet and greet me when I woke up! It reminded my of one of my favorite parts of Psalm 139: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you." And another of my favorites, Psalm 63, puts it like this : "On my bed I remember you: I think of you through the watches of the night."

And, oh yes, our minds DO dwell, while we are sleeping, on what we have bombarded it with in our waking hours. Haven't you had the experience of studying for hours and hours, maybe days and days for an exam only to have it run through your dreams in some form or another when you finally gave yourself permission to sleep? A few months after discovering the euphoria of waking in the night to all kinds of new scriptures running through my head, I went to babysit our two-year-old granddaughter, Callie, who was big into Dora the Explorer. She wanted to watch Dora for hours on end there for a while, and since her new baby brother, Joel, needed to have the upstairs quiet while he napped, she and I would stay downstairs most of the afternoons with the t.v. and Dora. After a couple of days there, I noticed that my wee-hour t-t trips were no longer accompanied by such wonderful inspiration as 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18: "Be thankful always. Praaay continually. Give thanks in all circumstances. Give thanks in all circumstances. For this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. This is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." No. Not at all. Now what I heard instead was a duo of a cute little big-eyed Hispanic girl and her boot-clad monkey crooning the strains of "Dora, Dora, Dora, the explorer... Say 'Back pack, back pack'... We did it, we did it, yeah, you know we did it, yeah we did it!" Needless to say, I had to go back into strict training!

"I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." -Psalm 119:11

THE HIGHER ROAD

"Father God, just for today
Help me walk the narrow way.
Help me stand when I might fall.
Give me your strength to hear your call.
May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to your name.
May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to your name."

You might be tired of looking at these lines, but I'm not quite thorough talking about this song. It does not issue as easily from my lips as it did a few weeks ago. I have been struck between the eyes lately concerning what I must have thought this song meant. I am ashamed to say this, but I think I must confess that I really wanted this song to mean something akin to this:

"Father God, again today,
Help me walk like yesterday;
Help me stand; don't let me fall
Where I can't see ahead at all.
May I keep on stepping
On this path I know;
May I march with eager, cheerful tread
Down this path familiar
With your hand in mine.
Satisfied with marching straight ahead."

First, it occurred to me that my road needed to narrow quite a bit. I was letting myself off too easy. Living in the same old well-behaved, behaviorally disciplined way was really not capturing the spirit of Jesus's words in Matthew 7: "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate, and narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." I have been glibly asking to be promoted from a pilot of a VW Jetta to a 747 in one fell swoop (or "one swell poop," as my friend Candy says!) rather than understanding that to seek the promotion means that I must take the training and even the tests that will prepare me for the job.

I hope all this doesn't sound like works-oriented salvation. Actually this has nothing to do with salvation at all; it has everything to do with what Jesus, in Matthew 7, called "life." (Sure, the first part of his statement did refer to destruction, but that was for those who are traveling a very broad highway and going through a cavernously wide gate. By the grace of God, I do not suffer from the delusion that life consists of seeing how big a swath of pavement I can cover before I fall off the shoulder of the highway and and then into the ditch. I KNOW that the Good Life can only be found within the Master's shadow, and I'll bet, if you're reading this, you do too.) This has to do with continuing to grow rather than resting in our laurels-- continuing education, if you will. Jesus seems to be inviting us to a narrower and narrow way because that is what will lead us to a higher and higher road. That is the only way we can achieve what Paul calls going "from one degree or glory to the next."

Pay close attention to what Jesus talked about most (go back and read the Beatitudes, for instance). It seems to me that the reason very few find that "life" He was talking about in Matthew 7 and in the Beatitudes and all those other places where He talks that crazy talk about down leading up and last being first, is that we have found a few things we do well, and so our goal quietly becomes just to maintain our status quo. Just don't rock the boat for these remaining twenty or thirty years I have left.

But a great new adventure begins when we come upon a narrowing of the road (attitudinal issues like righteous indignation and pride and going blindly, but cheerfully and faithfully, without a map) and decide, even at this late hour of our lives, to commit ourselves to some new training by grabbing firmly onto our Master's hand and walking bravely ahead into uncharted territory.

(Today's photo is Bryson and Larry on a steep section Appalachian Trail in Maine last month.)

THE NARROW WAY

"Father God, just for today,
Help me walk the narrow way.
Help me stand when I might fall.
Give me Your strength to hear your call.

May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to Your Name.
May my steps be worship;
May my thoughts be praise;
May my words bring honor to Your Name."

I love this song and find such strength and resolve from singing it that I sing it quite often. Many times throughout most of my days when I am not singing it, I catch myself humming its tune. It is a very specific prayer couched in a concise, economical package.

As I have sung the words "the narrow way" all these times, I don't really know what I have, until lately, pictured, but I'm pretty sure "narrow" in my mind was something more ethereal, less down-to-earth than Jesus was getting at when He spoke of the gate and the road in Matthew 7. I believe maybe I thought "the narrow way" meant behaving really well morally-- walking straight down the trail and never veering off it either to the left or to the right. Using this criteria, I was doing pretty well on this part of this song-prayer. I don't drink, do drugs, steal, commit adultery, cuss (very often), or skip church to go fishing (even less often).

But recently I have been given some opportunities to gain a whole new perspective on what "the narrow way" might really mean-- at least to me, right now-- and these opportunities have burdened me with the need to confess that I am lot less comfortable about the status of my check-marks now when I sing that song than I used to be.

Most of these "opportunities" have had to do with feeling taken advantage of or being made to feel obligated to do some unreasonable errand; I might go so far as to say I have even felt bullied because I have been trying to be a nice person and do what it takes to get along. Usually the one bullying me is someone I love and respect, so rather than putting my hands on my hips, putting my foot down, and asserting,"Absolutely NOT! This is RIDICULOUS!," I have gone ahead, huffing and puffing under my hot breath and done the ludicrous thing asked of me.

Once lately as I was driving through the late night hours on one of these errands of mercy, I found myself itching to call somebody and just complain-- just bend some sympathetic ear into helping me rationalize my feeling so needlessly and mercilessly put upon. (That phrase "put upon" had heretofore been pretty much foreign to me, just an archaism past its prime-- a couple of words that once accurately translated something to someone who had never heard of a garage door opener or a microwave but that had long since lost relevance in this postmodern world. But that night, when I wanted to make that pity call, those words came to me unbidden and translated perfectly what I was feeling... put upon. Somebody had just put something upon me without my permission or acceptance, and here I was carrying it down the highway in my car at this ungodly hour like some dumb beast of burden.)

But before I could even realize I had left my cell phone at home, that unmistakable Voice interrupted my seething with an announcement. The Voice was the Holy Spirit of God, and the announcement was in the form of a song: "Father God, just for today, help me walk the narrow way..." UGH! The "narrow way" was somehow connected with THIS? How could such a sweet, holy, reasonable request have anything to do with THIS ridiculous, unwieldy errand that was so obviously unreasonable? When I asked Him to chisel out my ears so that I could hear His message, I was humbled to learn that the narrow way right then was to bear patiently and quietly what my flesh was itching to flail out at with righteous indignation. I wanted justification and a sympathetic ear; God wanted to take me at my word and help me to do just what I had been asking Him to do all those hundreds of times I had so glibly lifted to Him that prayer request.

And since that night, I keep having the same kinds of opportunities almost daily to see just how narrow that way is that Jesus wishes I would choose to take. Learning to behave morally was yesterday's very narrow road, but today it's a fairly wide, flat, and easy expressway for me to mosey on down-- and moseying is neither going to accomplish growth in me nor testify to a powerful God of supernatural love in a vastly evil world. I see now that if I am to keep growing from one degree of glory to the next, I am going to have to go through the training. The degrees are not accomplished by just wishing for them. I would never expect, just because I can drive a car, that next week I could fly a 747 just by desiring to do so or even praying to do so. Neither would I expect to be able to perform successful brain surgery just because I had done a good job of pulling my grandson's tooth and now desire to do something greater. To accomplish these tasks, I would expect to go through lots of training. How much training I am willing to go through will be determined by my degree of desire to accomplish the tasks.

Giving up cussing was a pretty narrow road for me to travel on when I was thirteen, but I'm 59, and ... well, you get the picture.