Lets Give Them Something to Talk About

Sometimes God just works things out in your life.   Currently, I am following God’s direction on a big decision in my life.   It has been a very slow process that started way back in September and is just now coming to fruition.   During this time I have questioned this calling.   I have been presented with multiple opportunities to go away from the direction that God was leading me.   During this time of waiting, it has been hard for me to stay focused, instead I have been pursuing other avenues, I have been questioning my calling and going down different paths.   God is so good to me, He is so patient and He has no problems SLAMING the door in my face either, which I needed a couple of times. Recently, I was presented with 2 opportunities to go a different direction than what God is leading me both through friends of friends.   Both opportunities I investigated but felt no peace about and both opportunities ended up not being what I thought they were going to end up being.  

The past few days I have had a stuffy head, aching body and bad attitude.   At night I have been snoring so loudly I wake myself up and yell at my husband who laughs at me and is so patient whenever I have a cold.   This morning, I dragged myself out of bed to let our dogs out at 4:15, their chosen time to start waking up lately.   Shivering, cold and congested, I climbed back into bed and covered back up.   Lying on my left side sniffing, I felt the warm body of my husband next to me.   His arm reach over and slip around my waist to warm me up.   As my body changed temperatures I thought to myself, now this is love.   He didn’t even get in the house until well after 9:30 last night, then cleaned out our new chicken box, took care of the dogs, was kept up all night by my obnoxious snoring and he still cared enough about me to warm me up.   I can’t tell you how much I love my husband.   He is the one who I want to tell when something good or bad happens; he is the one that I wa

Have you ever felt like you just can’t do anything right?   Ever had a day like this… your kids misbehave; your dinner burns; the dessert undercooks and is nasty; you are late to school, meetings and anywhere else you might have to be that day; the house is a mess, and even if you have the majority of it clean, the person you least want to find the mess will, and get upset about it; the car wont start; the dogs/cats mess in the house; you realize you have nothing on your to-do-list accomplished for the day and you just feel defeated…   Although not all that happens everyday, a lot of it happens more often than I would like to admit.   There are days where I just feel defeated, my body hurts, the house is a mess, I didn’t get anything accomplished that meant anything and the things that I did accomplish got messed up, sigh…   Those days are usually the ones that didn’t start out quite right, I didn’t take time to give God my day and set my attitude straight.   Those are usually

More and more women, men and children are being expected to take on more and more responsibilities.   Due to worldly pressures, women think they have to have a spotless house, while working a full time job or being a stay at home mother, all while raising perfect children who they do activities with daily, and also have perfect homemade meals prepared and having meals stored in the freezer/ pantry etc…, while also volunteering at church, school, for girl/ boy scouts etc…    Men’s pressures are just as high, they have to be the ultra romantic man who works full time at a high paying joy, but still devotes his entire heart to children and finds time to take his wife out, when he is off he is expected to clean the house and bring breakfast in bed to her.   Children are to be in multiple activities (that their parents inevitably have to drive them to in addition to all their other chores), do their homework, have 1 hour structured play and 1 hour unstructured play, stay up on all the p

How often do we sit down for just a few minutes, and then an hour later realize that nothing that we wanted to accomplish that day is done?   I struggle with that, with being lazy and not managing my time very well.   I am not a lazy person, I just get distracted easily…   oh look, a plane….   I have always seemed to get a lot more accomplished when I have a goal in mind.   When I have a list made out and my priorities set for the day or the week.   I never thought that I would be a list maker!   Don’t get me wrong, many days, my list is ignored, or adjusted, but making myself a list seems to work better.   I talked about how I made my list for myself and for my kids the other day.   It has worked wonders!   I can’t tell you how much more patient and loving I have been.   Here is my basic daily list: Daily activity with the kids Kitchen cleaned before lunch and after dinner Sweep and mop ONE floor Make the bed One completed load of laundry daily (stress on completed

I am terrible about keeping up with things.   I have great ideas, and self-motivation to get them started, but I have terrible follow through.   I would like to have a clean house all the time, and I know what it takes to do it, I just don’t always have the follow through needed.   I know that I shouldn’t loose my temper with my children, but on some days, I just do…   My kids are the same way.   They will be very excited about an idea, but then lack the follow through.   My oldest daughter is in a 4-year-old kindergarten.   In this class, they get a prize every time they fill up a chart for being well behaved.   So what did I decide to do?   Why I made charts for home.   Only instead of doing just basic good behavior, I pin-pointed the types of behaviors that I wanted my children to do:   make the bed, clean the toy room, put their clothes away, wake up and get dressed without complaining…   When they fill up one column they will get a prize and when the whole sheet is filled up,

The Lenten Season is upon us.   I feel so sorry for the people that decided to give up chocolate and then Valentines Day be the very next day!   YIKES!   This year for lent I was thinking about what to give up.   What is something that will bring me closer to God?   What is something that takes me away from His presence that instead of focusing on it, I can focus on God.   God spoke to me though my red-headed four-year-old yesterday.   It is amazing how often times, He speaks through children. A few weeks ago, I scored some major deals at an amazing sale, while there, I bought gifts that I could give to our girls as valentines.   My youngest daughter has been asking for a tea set and my oldest for a drum set.   YES, a DRUM SET for a 4 year old.   Finding both of them at the sale, I purchased them and waited with anticipation for Valentines day to arrive.   What I expected was to hear giggles and shrieks of joy, but instead I heard, but I wanted this kind instead…   Neither

Being cold to me is like being stuck in a horrible, endless torture.   Once my extremities get cold, I have the hardest time warming them up.   Fingers, a toe…   if they are cold, I am miserable for hours on end, my entire body begins to chill.   My husband laughs at me because I sleep in sweat pants, socks a t-shirt and then wrap myself in my snuggie (yes I have one!) and then put my sheet, blanket and comforter over me.   Meanwhile, my husband sleeps in shorts and a t-shirt and possibly the sheet, blanket and comforter and is perfectly comfortable all night long.   Usually, the snuggie will end up piled up next to my bed, but to get to sleep comfortably, it is imperative for me to be warm.   A dear friend to me was saying how immoral our world has become.   The world is materialistic and focused on the wrong things.   You only have to turn the television on for a few moments during “prime time” to see a commercial that will most likely offend you.   As I read that, I began to

There is no easy way around it, sometimes I take the hardest possible route to get anywhere.   During our re-make of our house, I purchase bar stools.   Our counter island is tall and so I measured t – it was 36 inches from the ground.   Therefore I purchased 29 inch bar stools thinking they would be perfect…   And they would have been had I measured from the ground to the trim that lines the bottom of the 36”.   In reality, I had 29” to play with and the stools that I purchased were tight against the lip under the island.   I put one together and realized my folly.   Looking on-line, I didn’t find any more that were comparable to the price I had paid and the style that I wanted but were only 24” tall.   When my husband came home, we decided to put the other three stools together and just deal with them.   On Sunday morning, before church, my husband took the bar stools outside and proceeded to cut 5” off each leg to make us 24” bar stools.   While he was doing this, I cut little p

This morning, I tentatively stepped on the scale as I do many mornings while the water warms up in my shower.   It may not be the best practice in the world, but it is something that I am in a terrible habit of doing.   Closing my eyes to not to see the numbers spinning out of control, I wait until the spinning stops.   It feels like an eternity hearing the springs working overtime, spinning…   in reality it is probably just a few seconds.   Looking down, I see a number that surprises me.   Lately, I have been watching what I eat and every once in a while, working out.   Ideally, I would like to get to the weight that I was when I got married, and my un-realistic goal is to loose weight even then.   The number this morning FINALLY broke the plateau I had been on for years.   I finally broke to the weight that I was before I got pregnant with my first child nearly 5 years ago!   I looked for a solid minute at the number that was looking back at me.   I guess home remodeling and

It is Sunday.   I roll over in my bed, grab my phone that inevitably woke me up last night begging to be charged, and turn off my alarm.   Stretching, I reach out and click on the 40-watt lamp that is next to my bed.   As I sit up, and stretch some more, working the kinks out of my back and neck I think to myself, what am I going to wear today?   Looking at my clock and seeing that it is 7:00, I remember that we are teaching one of our two daughter’s classes this week.   It is Sunday. Taking a breath, I will myself out of the bed, feet first, hoping that the momentum of swinging my feet out of the bed will give me some sort of energy.   I shuffle sleepily into the kitchen, start my coffee and go back towards my room.   Entering the room I hear the bed calling my name, begging me to get back into it for just 5 more minutes.   My body is thrown off from the extra 30 minutes it already got.   Heading into our bathroom, I turn on the shower faucet and wait for it to warm up.   Wait

Before I went to a second cart... my carts leaving the aisles.- notice the bottom of one is full too!    “That can’t be right…,”   I thought to myself as I looked at the prices of the toys in the sale isle.   “No way….”   I said out loud to no one in particular…   I picked up one of the toys and double checked the SKU number against the price shown.   Could I have JUST accidentally stumbled onto one of the greatest sales I have seen? This couldn’t have been advertised!   I went through grabbing toys.   Putting them into my cart, filling up one, and then a second cart both spilling over.   Sitting in the middle of the surprisingly low attended sale aisle I thought through who I was going to need presents for, I strategically scribbled a list onto the back of my prescription bag and marked them off as I sprawled toys across the aisles.   The manager and workers were smiling at me as I dragged my 2 overloaded carts away from the isle.   They informed me that they weren’t goin

Friendship- what a difficult word to explain. Yesterday, my friend posted on Facebook that she wanted a friendship and didn’t want just someone to small talk with and it got me thinking.   Friendships are hard.   You would think with all the social media and the constant access to communication, friendships would be easy.   It would be easy to say you have 300+ friends, because that is how many you follow or are friends with on Facebook.   In reality however, those aren’t the deep friendships that you cultivate and make-work.   A lot of times I will meet someone and think that I want to be friends with her.   We start off strong, hanging out, having our kids play, sharing and talking, but within a few months, we don’t get to hang out any more, we don’t see each other often, and we aren’t able to understand why we are no longer close friends with them because life has taken over.   Friendship requires effort.   A good friendship or relationship just doesn’t happen.   As a wo

Today, I want to share a story that is on my heart:   The room was filled to the brim with teens of every color, shape and size, about 300 in attendance.   A man, dressed in dark blue jeans with a hole on the knee stood up in front of the crowd.   He was a tall man, slender, tan skin with thinning blond hair and piercing green eyes.   He reached into his flannel shirt pocket and pulled out a shiny metallic pen.   “I want to tell you about my pen,” he began.   “This is an amazing pen, it can write in three different colors.   It writes smoothly and the ink flows well, even if you aren’t holding it up and down.   This pen is the pen astronauts’ use.   Do you want this pen?   It is a really great pen, and you can have it”.   No one in the crowded room rose.   They had been told to sit still and listen when someone was in front of you, not to approach them.   What would people think if they were to get up and move towards the stage to accept such a neat pen?   “No really,”

Lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, I was breathing, worried about what was actually wrong with my chest.   Was I having a heart attack for the past few days?   Was it actually heartburn?   I lied there and gave my pain to Jesus.   I asked Him to let me know if I should go to the hospital or stay at home.   As I lie there, I felt my rib cage and found a muscle that was inflamed.   About a year ago I had similar pain, not quite so intense, that was diagnosed as Pleurisy, a build up of fluid between the lungs and the rib cage.   I didn’t think it could be that again since I was unable to eat, but I took an anti-inflammatory (which usually chews up my stomach).   I fell asleep for as long as a mom actually gets to fall asleep when her kids are in “quiet time” that usually ends up being not-so-quiet.   I was woken up less than 10 minutes later.   After about an hour, I was in so much less pain it was amazing.   I was ready to eat again, and eat I did!   God really convicte

Have you ever given up food for a few days?   Have you ever lived on less than 1000 calories a day?   This is how a lot of the world lives.   They survive on the food they get, eat it slowly and treasure every bite.   It bugs me when I throw away good food, not that I could package it up and send it anywhere, but it still bugs me.   After giving up food unintentionally for a few days, I am realizing that less than 1000 calories a day is rough.   I can still function, but my brain isn’t quite working as well, my body gets tiered really fast and I am definitely more irritable than I should be.   Yesterday I talked about the water, everlasting water.   Today, looking at the same chapter, Jesus then talks to His disciples about how he has food even when nothing has been brought to Him to eat. John 4 31  Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32  But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” 33  Then his disciples said to each other