Are you up for chasing rabbits today?

Well we missed a few days here on the Journey. 

Thursday we woke in the wee hours of the morning to realize the power was off. With an early morning start up north for the day, Lola got ready with neither a curling iron nor a cup of coffee. 

Some things we just need to put in the past and move onward…it’s all I can say. Except it should be added, I married a saint because he made sure we stopped at the nearest Casey’s and even offered to go in for me to spare my dignity. 

Friday was just a hurry up and go morning, too and I let it get away from me so no post that day either…sigh.

I DID have something I wanted to share with you, so better late than never. 

Maybe I shared with you about the Graceland Quarterly offered by Ruth Chou Simons. I think annual subscriptions are no longer available this year, but you might be able to order individual quarters now. 

This is a perfect size both physically and material-wise for a weekly addition to my journaling time. The spring edition is called “Sow” and fittingly with the season we associate with planting seeds, it has been a Vitamin C to my anemic devotional time after finishing the Elijah study. 

Last week, she talked about abiding and had me look up the word in a dictionary. 

Have you ever thought you knew the meaning of a word and glossed over it or used it in your writing or speaking and not really understood it?

Me too.

I would love to just ask each of you to define “abide” in your own words and see what we come up with. 

I have to say for me, I tended to associate the word “abide” with what it is for me to live in our home. 

So anytime I read how I should abide with Jesus as He abides with God, I kind of pictured my daily existence within this brick and mortar and siding and decorated house. Moving about, maintaining, doing what needs to be done, living out daily life…abiding. 

Not so. 

Using our well-loved and much-used Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary published in 1973, I found these definitions:

Archaic: to wait for. 

Current: Await, endure without yielding, withstand. To bear patiently. To accept without objection. To remain stable or fixed in a state, to continue in place. To sojourn (to stay as a temporary resident).

Synonyms: stay, continue, bear

The basic idea is a patient waiting, a temporary stay where one remains in a stable and fixed state…

This led me to a further search for meaning and understanding. Sometimes I find that discovering the antonyms helps me better comprehend what the meaning of a word. By seeing what the opposite would be, I can lock in the essence of the word I am studying. 

Antonyms: abandon, avoid, depart, forfeit, forfend, journey (uh-oh), migrate, move, proceed, reject, resist, shun. 

So to abide, it would seem at first glance, is to stay, remain, sojourn, for the amount of time designated. To live, dwell and yes to make a home in the temporary nature of the place where you are for whatever season. 

I will have to do some more pondering it would seem…and I have to say that part of the journey…is the sojourning…so there is that. 

On we will head today to the concordance and a few commentaries and see what we find…I love a good rabbit trail. I hope you will join the fun and ponder a bit for yourself what it means to abide in Him and have Him abide in you <3