Author: Jane Foard Thompson

Jane Foard Thompson is an inspirational speaker and award winning author and poet. A former Montessori teacher in Texas and Utah, for eight years Jane and her husband were missionaries in Honduras, Central America. After working for the American Red Cross in Idaho, they now live in Florida, where she writes, leads music and women's Bible studies at their church, and enjoys nine grandchildren and her Golden Retriever, Lily.

Cut it out!

I love to see things grow, and pruning plants has been a struggle. When we moved from the Idaho desert to lush, semi-tropical Florida, I relished all the greenery and the 12-month growing season. When something unknown popped up that looked promising I allowed it to grow. In addition, as I walked my dogs, I couldn’t leave a living plant waiting for the garbage truck. Home it went, and into my garden. My slogan: Let it grow!

Too late, I found I’d welcomed weeds and invasive exotics (imported as potted plants). The only way to rid my garden of the pests would be to kill everything and start fresh.

I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, kill all my little darlings, so I spent days in the hot Florida sun and humidity, pulling weeds, trying to stay ahead of them before they took over and smothered my desirable plants.

When we moved to a house with over an acre of land, I encountered sandy soil that dries out quickly and areas that won’t support anything but weeds. This fostered my unfortunate “let it grow” bent.

After years of random growth in what my husband calls “Jane’s Jungle” and flagging energy, I’m daydreaming about a fire hose filled with weed killer. Wipe out everything. My new slogan: When in doubt, cut it out!

You may be wondering if you’ve wandered into the wrong website, or if I’ve suddenly shifted to a gardening blog.

Not really. All of my life I’ve felt God speak through nature. More than just the grandeur of a sunset or the power of boiling thunderclouds, even small things can whisper glimpses of truth. God weaves the power of his reality in us, and all around us.

It’s all a matter of having the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

After a year of struggling with my health, and my reluctance to cut things back, we had a lot of shaggy, pitiful looking plants. One cool spring morning several months ago I felt well enough to try out my new clippers. I managed to trim a few porterweed bushes before my arms turned to mush. Several weeks later, I was shocked to discover the difference between the trimmed ones and the ones which had grown uncontrolled for two years.

unpruned
unpruned

two weeks after being pruned
two weeks after being pruned

Then came the still, small voice.

Pruning came make you stronger, more attractive, more fruitful.

I thought of Jesus saying we’d do better to cut off a hand that gets us in trouble. That always sounded a little over the top. (Though I have to admit, there was an abusive person I’d have been happy to apply that one to. But not myself!)

Pruning – correcting — is an area where I’ve tended to get in a muddle. My version was working to get it right, please everyone.

That left me with stunted growth.

A few times I’ve gone to the other extreme, thrown off constraint and ‘lived it my way.’ That was like an untended garden covered with weeds, the good getting blanketed by the undesirable. And the littlest ones getting hurt the most.

Now I understand my part — Controlling those thoughts that drive so much undesirable emotion, action, or inaction.

I am learning to take every thought captive.

You may have heard that a lot. I figured it meant to think “nice things.” Yes, we are encouraged to put our focus on good things.

But for me, right now, it means recognizing the lies I’ve listened to far too long, and giving them the boot, with the help of God’s Spirit.

The voice that says I can’t make that phone call,
can’t face that person,
can’t handle the traffic or the crowds,
can’t say something another doesn’t want to hear,
can’t disturb the water,
can’t make that person mad,
the voice that pesters me for days over something I said, or didn’t say,
worrying me about what “they” think.

I thought it was just who I was, the way I think and feel, the results of my nature and my childhood.

But I see now that I can chose to cut those thoughts out of my life, one lie at a time.

It’s hard.

Sometimes it hurts.

But I’m liking the results. And that encourages me to go for even bigger ones.

What about you? Do you struggle with any of this?
Are there lies you’ve believed you’d like to be free from?

Is the world spinning crazy?

My heart is aching. It feels like the world is spinning crazy, how it must have for European and Russian Jews during WWII. Too many broken lives, hearts, homes, even whole villages.

Yet the parking lot at the new upscale mall is full. The most expensive homes move quickly on the market. Plates piled with food go back to the kitchen, to the garbage, while bored diners toy with their cocktails and the dessert menu. Landfills are loaded with the now upgraded gadgets — phones, tablets, computers, T.Vs, appliances … Storage units are a thriving business, for all the overflow of large homes, growing larger.

But are our souls growing larger?

Don’t we shrink every time we turn away from the pain across the ocean,

or across the street?

We watch headline news, men of the Cross, kneeling, their hands tied behind their backs. Blades shine in the hands of their captors, standing behind, ready to show the world how powerful they are. What they will not tolerate in the “new world” they are intent on creating. The price of being other.

After heads roll, and we flinch and turn away, the blades march on, raping, destroying, killing, crushing, stomping out any life they judge unworthy.

Hitler was a schoolboy compared to these.

When news of Nazi persecution of Jews leaked out, it fell on deaf ears. The first pictures of the death camps were deemed fakes, flukes. No one could do something so inhuman. Jews who fled the approaching German machine found little refuge in a comfortable world who couldn’t be bothered with the refuse of that little strutting man.

Until he threatened too close to home.

How close to home does it need to get for us to care about those being crushed now?

ISIS, ISIL

I admit, I haven’t know what I could do about a threat so large. I pray for the persecuted and displaced, for those who have lost their loved ones, but what is that among so many?

Ann Voskamp asked herself, and went to see. Please click on the links below to read her postings. Find out what is really happening beyond the sensational news.

And see how you can make a difference, without a trip to Iraq.

Be the difference. The hands and feet of Jesus to love a broken heart, body, people.

Ann goes to Iraq.
What we can do.

How heavy is that stone?

We’ve all been in the crowd at some time, or will be. Fingering the rough edges of the stone, anticipating the moment to throw, perhaps even calculating how hard, and where. As time goes on, the weight of it can grow until it takes all our strength and focus to simply hold on. Even if we may know, though we will not always admit it to ourselves, we could be the one on the ground.

Weeping in the dust.

Guilty.

When teachers of religious law and the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus into saying something they could convict him for, they dragged in a women caught in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband, an act punishable by death by stoning.

(They only brought the woman to be judged by Jesus. Where was the man? Was he paid to seduce her, to entrap her?)

The religious leaders presented their case against her and waited, most likely sharing smug smiles. They’d get him on this one, trick him up with all his love talk.

The crowd grew, more ready stones.

Nothing like a righteous stoning to make one feel superior.

The Pharisees struck a pose and probed, pushed for an answer.

But Jesus stooped and wrote in the sand, like a kid at the beach.

Did he reveal secrets? Simply bide his time? Take that time for prayer?

Everyone waited.

Especially the partially clad, totally disgraced, obviously guilty woman sobbing at his feet.

Then Jesus stood. Who did he make eye contact with? The ringleader from the Temple who’d voiced the question? The man in the crowd with the biggest stone? The gray-bearded one who’d seen it all, perhaps done it all?

“Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Silence.

Even the sobbing hushed, waiting for the first thud against her defiled body. The beginning of the painful end.

Nothing.

One by one, eldest to the youngest, hands unclenched.

Stones dropped to the sand, an irregular rhythm of acknowledgement, if not repentance, of sin, of falling short of who they were created to be, how they were created to love.

When they were alone, I imagine he raised her chin as he asked, “Where are your accusers? Doesn’t even one condemn you?”

She croaked, “No, Lord.”

And he released her, admonishing her to go and sin no more.

He gave her another chance. A new start. A new life.

What about the others?

Did the man who’d hated his brother for cheating him out of his inheritance go and re-establish a relationship?

Did the young man who’d been secretly cheating on his wife vow to concentrate on honoring and caring for the one he had pledged to love?

For the son whose father had always been away, or distant, was his heart softened, enabling him to reach that now empty hand to his father’s aging one?

What about the man whose wife had left him for another, then found that greener pasture not what she had expected? Did he let the stone fall from his heart and embrace her after all this time?

And you?

Right now, where are you in this scene?

Do you find yourself weeping in the dust?

Ps 51 1 3 6 on Cloud Forest-Ecuador

Ps 51 10_12 sail

Ps 51 16_17 Bahama beach

Or are you carrying a heavy stone? You are right, but is the weight sapping your strength, every day calling your heart to more hardness, your ears rarely hearing his voice?

Eph 2 7-8 Lighthouse, Bahamas

I Cor 13 3-8 MSG