Who am I?

I am so humbled th think God loves me so much because it is the truth - who am I? I am a sinner and I don't deserve all that God does for me. I am so grateful to God for His love, His provision, His protection, and most of all for His Salvation. Where would I be without God? I have loved this song from the first time I heard it so please worship the Lord with me.

Random Sayings to Encourage and Uplift You

"Whatever I have, Whatever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am." ~Philippians 4:13, The Message

"Pile your troubles on God's shoulders -- He'll carry your load, He'll help you out."
~Psalm 55:22, The Message

"Jesus said, 'Here's what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won't be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift for you to God, and you will begin to sense His grace." ~Matthew 6:6, The Message

Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember that amateurs built the ark.
Professionals built the Titanic.

"Faith sees the invisible, believes the impossible, and receives the impossible."
~Corrie Ten Boom

There were eleven people, ten men and one woman, hanging on a rope dangling from a helicopter.. The weight of eleven people was clearly too much for the rope, so the group decided that one person would have to get off. No one could decide who should go.
Finally, the woman volunteered. She gave a touching speech, saying that she would give up her life because women were used to giving up things for their husbands and children. When she finished speaking, all the men started clapping...

Never underestimate the power of a woman.

Break up Your Unplowed Ground

Hosea 10:12 Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the LORD, until he comes and showers righteousness on you. (NIV)

I love to plant a garden each Spring. In fact, I have the hardest time waiting until it is late enough to plant. We usually have a warm spell that makes me think it is OK to plant, but, inevitably it will get cold one last time before it is really Spring. This year I did go ahead and plant, and then we had a late frost. I had to go out and cover all the plants. It was hard work to keep them protected.

But not as much hard work as it takes just to get the garden ready. I used to have to dig up the dirt with a shovel. If you have never done that, let me tell you, it is a work out. My Dad blessed me by giving me his rotor-tiller when he moved. Now it is a joy, but it is still work. Well, why not just do a fast job and move on to the fun part - planting? Well, I'll tell you. If you do not plow the dirt deep enough the soil will remaining hard and compacted, and the roots of the newly forming plants just won't be able to break through. Once I have run the tiller, I have to rake all the weeds out of the garden. If I get lazy and skip this step, or if I just do it half-way, the weeds will be able to root themselves and continue to grow.

Isn't this just like our lives? We are soil and we get hard and compacted by selfishness and sin. This moves us farther and farther away from God. When we resist His work in our lives our soil will get harder and harder, choking out the good fruit bearing trees in our lives. The weeds of this life will come in and choke us off from God and we will wither and die. But tilling is such hard work! Yes, but the Master Gardener knows His stuff! He knows how to get the best and the most fruit from us if we will but yield to His loving hand. Tilling hurts, pruning hurts, but we will grow and flourish!

God's Goodness

Forgive me if today's writings are lengthy, I have a lot to share and work through. Writing helps me process things.

Last Wednesday night we were driving home in the '85 Cutlass Ciera that we just got back up and running. It started coughing more and more, the closer we got to our house. It cut off once or twice, then started making a loud scraping sort of noise. We barely made it home, but we did make it home. We have a mechanic right in our neighborhood, just one mile from our house so we used our other car to push it to the mechanic. Yesterday he declared it beyond repair as the problem seems to be the crankshaft, bearings and many other really bad sounding things.

The really neat thing is that yesterday morning when I was doing my devotional, it was so tailored to me and what is going on with my life that I knew God arranged for me to read that devotional for precisely that time.

I have been dealing with health problems for a few weeks now that leave me very tired and acting like I have PMS to the extreme. It literally has been hard to keep up with all I have to do on a day to day basis. I don't even think straight any more and feel like I'm not even good at grocery shopping. We live 30 minutes from town, so having one car is very challenging. I have to drive my hubby to work and pick him up after work if I am to have a car, which means two hours traveling in the car. We also have to get our homeschooling done as well. I have two appointments next week so right away I need to face that challenge head on. So needless to say, I needed encouragement yesterday, and God gave it to me BEFORE we got the final word to put the car to rest. Let me share what the devotional said in a nutshell:

TP from Heaven

"My God will liberally supply (fill to the full) your every need according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:19 AMP

The story in the devotional talked about a preacher's wife who was suffering severe health problems that left her weak, lethargic, and drained of all her strength. She was a nurse and her husband a preacher. Her husband felt it was time to leave the church he was pastoring during this time, so she had to work two nursing jobs to support them when she didn't even have the energy or strength to work one job. One Friday she needed toilet paper but didn't have the money to buy any so she asked God to stretch the half roll they had left. The next day she found a full roll of toilet paper in the mail box, sent as a sample. She asked everyone on her mail route if they also got a full roll of toilet paper and no one else did except one other preacher's wife. It really ministered to her that God not only had a sense of humor, but He cared about even the little things like toilet paper.

"Let Him have all your worries and cares, for He is always thinking about you and watching everything that concerns you." 1 Peter 5:7 TLB

So obviously God knew ahead of time the car was going to die, and he knew I would be concerned so He talked to me through this story. How cool is that!

Later on that day as we were driving home from shopping, I was looking out of the car window and someone in the car next to us was dressed as a disgusting, realistic-looking looking scary thing. He turned to look right at me to see if I would jump and scream, I guess, which I didn't. HA! Now I am an adult so I know I have to deal with Halloween and am big enough to ignore this stuff. But at night when I was trying to sleep I was attacked with all the worrying about how will I get the boys to basketball practices when they will be in two different places in the county, how will I.... how will I... (you get the picture). If that wasn't bad enough I had a bad dream that scared me. I can't remember the last time that happened. But here is the cool thing about it - first of all I was so scared, I almost asked my husband to go to the bathroom with me, but I didn't. I just sang Jesus name over and over until I was back in the bed. The dream kept wanting to reply in my head, and I wanted to stop it to enable me to go back to sleep. But then God made it clear to me that it wasn't a bad dream at all. The dream was of my family and I in a van with people that looked like my grandparents. The grandmother look alike person then pulled a gun on me and was then somehow chasing me. (Don't know how we got out of the van.) I ran to a house with familiar people who were right there by the sliding glass door so I was able to open the door and they could pull me in to safety. The grandmother person grabbed my heel as I was being puled but I was still pulled to safety. What was so scary was I awoke at that moment and thought I could feel my heel being grabbed. In the dream I was even more scared at what would happen to my family in the van. Well when God revealed what the dream really was I realized that the Grandmother person wasn't shooting at me. She tried but the bullets wouldn't come out so she was throwing them at me. Of course that couldn't hurt me. So try as he may, the enemy can't hurt me. He protects and provides and even the bullets couldn't hurt me.

God is so good and He is so personal. I know He understands my situation and has answers for every problem. Please help me pray for understanding, wisdom and the grace to trust God like never before. Thanks for your patience today!

Keep Your Fork - the Best is Yet to Come!

I read this story and wanted to share it with you:

There was a woman who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and had been given three months to live. As she was getting her things in order, she asked her pastor to come to her house so they could discuss certain aspects of her final wishes. When he arrived, she told him which songs she wanted sung at the service, which Scriptures she would like read, and which outfit she wanted to be buried in along with her favorite Bible.

Everything was in order, and the pastor was preparing to leave when the woman suddenly remembered something very important to her. "There's one more thing!" she said excitedly.

"What's that?" asked the pastor.
"This is very important," the woman said. "I want to be buried with a fork in my right hand."
The pastor stood looking at the woman, not knowing quite what to say.

"That surprises you, doesn't it?" the woman asked.
"Well, to be honest, I'm puzzled by the request," said the pastor.

The woman explained. "In all my years of attending church socials and potluck dinners, I remember that when the dishes of the main course were being cleared, someone would inevitable lean over and say, 'Keep your fork.' That was my favorite part because I knew that something better was coming, like velvety chocolate cake or deep-dish apple pie. So I just want people to see me in my casket with a fork in my hand, and I want them to wonder about it. And I want you to tell them: 'Keep your fork - the best is yet to come.'"

The pastor's eyes welled up with tears of joy as he hugged the woman. He knew this would be one of the last times he would see her before her death.

~Taken from "Espresso for a Woman's Spirit: Encouraging Stories of Hope and Humor" p. 205