Making My Home A Haven is important to me. Sharing homemaking skills. Recipes and food. Bible Studies. This is a treasure chest of goodies. So take a seat. Have a glass of tea and enjoy. You will learn all about who I am.
for all the forgetful, messy, broken people out there – an Advent promise
Jesus is Your Forever YES
Friend, if you’re feeling messy this season, you are in a pretty elite club, and it is chaired by the Son of God who entered into your mess on purpose.
Advent is this:
Jesus, saying the unflinching, remarkable YES for you — no matter what has you hurting or distracted. Like Kris wrote, “Salvation is coming–and has come.”
Jesus is your forever YES. Even when we break communion. Even when we get distracted. Even when it’s messy. Even when we forget.
That day at the store, I ran back to the detergent aisle while the clerk waited patiently for me — along with a long line of people who were standing behind me.
In the end, I got what I needed that day. We even wore clean clothes to church.
Like that patient clerk, God is waiting for us. But unlike that clerk, He doesn’t expect us to pay the bill. He covered it for us.
I’m so grateful for our Jesus, who entered into this mess down here. He went out on a pretty big limb for us, you know? Sometimes, I forget that. Even when I forget, He won’t. It’s His promise:
“But even if mothers forget, I’d never forget you — never.” {Isaiah 49:15,
The Stubbornness of Intentional Gratitude By Jennifer Dukes Lee,
{From Sarah:This was a post Jennifer wrote for Thanksgiving. I thought it was also appropriate for any day…Like Christmas Day.
Merry Christmas to those of you who are alone today. Or Lonely.
Love Sarah}
The days when I don’t feel like singing at all, are the days when I need to sing most of all.
I know I’m not alone. Because I’ve read the emails you’ve sent me. I’ve prayed over the requests you’ve delivered on Facebook. I know that many of you don’t feel like singing at all this Thanksgiving. Being grateful feels hard because of what you’re going through.
Friend, maybe this is when we need to sing the most. Maybe this is when we need to be loudest in our praise. We can’t wait for perfect conditions to be grateful. Gratitude is more than a nice gesture acknowledging the gifts in our lives. It is the stubborn refusal to be held hostage by fear and despair. It’s saying to the world — and to ourselves — that despite everything, this old world is still a beautiful place. No matter how hopeless it all seems, there’s always, always something to be thankful for.
This year, I’ve come to believe that gratitude is letting go of what you think your life is supposed to look like … and celebrating it for what it already is.
And I’m inviting you to join me.
How Gratitude Makes You Happier
When we look for things that make us grateful, we start seeing them. And when we start noticing them, we are making actual investments in the thoughts of our future selves. We are building neural pathways, all the while becoming more resourced on the inside. When we are more resourced with happiness, we have a kind of happiness bank that we can draw from on our hardest days.
We can begin accumulating resources in our happiness banks by taking five minutes every day to consider our blessings. It’s a good practice to write them down, but you don’t have to. Merely thinking of your blessings has a profound effect on your outlook. We can devote five minutes a day, dwelling on the good things and thanking the one who gave them to us. I understand that you may not be one of those unstoppably positive people whom you know—the kind of person who wakes up singing songs, the kind of person who relentlessly posts cuddly puppy pictures on Facebook. I understand how you might be inclined to forgo counting your blessings on your hardest days. And I totally get how it feels selfish to make a list of what’s right in your little world when you know there’s a girl in a developing country who can see the ribs under her skin.
Thank God anyway. We must.
There are so many good gifts here in this world. Clean sheets and Frisbee golf and kites and reruns of Friends. A cool breeze through a cracked window. A Charlie Brown Christmas on a cold December night. An overdue date with your husband, and his arm over your shoulder at the movies. A new bottle of bubble bath, a fresh haircut, leggings-and-boots weather, the smell of a bookstore, a long rope of licorice.
Thank God for what you have been given and then use your gratefulness as a way to share the gospel with a world in need of a reason to praise.
If you were to peek into my office during one of my most frustrated moments, you might see this: A blinking cursor on a blank Microsoft Word document. A frustrated stack of scribbled notes. A woman, with her head in her hands, uttering, “Help me, God. Help me, God. Help me, God.” Sometimes, …
5 Questions You Need To Ask : For Weary Souls
It doesn’t take long for KNICK KNACKS To Take Over A Room.
The Five Questions We All Need to Ask Ourselves
Both the Nester and Shelly are causing me to look at all of my rooms in a new way – the rooms in my house, and the rooms in my heart.
These are the questions I’m asking myself, and maybe you can ask them of yourself too.
1 – What do I love?
2 – What is essential?
3 – What am I willing to give up?
4 – What deeply inspires me?
5 – What old way of doing things can I let go of?
Only when I answer those questions, with intentionality,
only when I can start saying no,
only when I can stop having to do it all,
will I be able to live a life quiet enough to hear the voice of God.
