Hummingbird Hope

"Hello, Hummer!"  Lately, seeing a hummingbird at our deck feeder brings me to tears and to lifting my heart to You, Lord.  Those little ones bless my heart and seem like a sent reminder of hope from You.  Just this morning, *just* as I walked into the kitchen and had barely passed the wall beside the refrigerator, a lovely female hummingbird came to the feeder.  She lingered there a bit, filling her little belly.  Coincidence?  Perhaps, but I think not.

I cried.

I am still crying.

Lord, I know You know what it is like to be falsely accused.  You know what it is like to be an outcast.  "Outcast."  This is the first time I have used that term, and it pierces.

I also know that I have examined my heart and my recollection of the event, and I cannot find anything malicious or illegal, at least as I understand the law.  The hearing on the 24th is a Show Cause hearing, which sounds awful and threatening.  

I also checked on my timesheet, which has an unknown DET code.  Thankfully, it is all with pay.  Curiously and forebodingly, I found it marked that way until after Labor Day.

Should I initiate retirement?

It hurts that my own husband, who is unfailingly cheerful and relatively basic in his thinking about life, issues, and words, fails to get the underlying messages in the words he chooses.  He said this week that when listening to a person describe a life event such as a divorce, one needs to assume (one of my least favorite words or concepts) that the speaker "always presents the other person as the guilty one."  He also takes a both-sides-ism in many situations, seeming to want to present himself as balanced but often, to my mind, presenting himself as unwilling to think critically and carefully about the underlying situation.  He declined to take my car to the WARM English classes this morning because "How will I explain that you are not at work?"  He forgot that earlier in his retirement, he took my car at least twice to the English classes while I was at work, leaving me to drive his car.  

I cannot find the logic.

On top of all this, the crisis in the United States breaks my heart, and its effect on the Christian church breaks my heart into even smaller pieces.  I would almost describe it as shattering.  I finished listening to Russell Moore's "Losing Our Religion" on Audibl,e and I want to revisit the book on Kindle, where I can mark it up and comment on it.  Interestingly, Russell Moore was also an outcast from his position with the Southern Baptist Convention due to ... well, political differences may be the best way to describe the explanation.  In many ways, I have also been caught in the politics of the "workplace discrimination and violence" initiative.  Me.  I have a hard time wrapping my head around the allegation.

Ah, next to me is Bailey, my faithful shadow these past days of being at home.  He badly wants to lounge on the sofa upstairs when I sit there!  Hence, coming to the futon to spend some obviously "quality time" with him while he naps.