Just Be Still....

It has been a super crazy week since I last posted. We have started back to class at work and my Graduate classes have started back. So it is back to this crazy lifestyle that I have grown to expect over the last 4 years as I have journeyed back to school to get my Master's Degree. I am proud to say that I will graduate in May. I am ashamed to say that I already have been looking into a Doctoral program to begin in 2012. What is it with me?

To check back in on my last post, I have purchased and fallen in love with Lysa Terkeurst's book "Made to Crave." God is speaking to me through Lysa's candidness on life and healthy eating in ways I never thought possible.  

I feel that I need to give you a little background as to the things that God has been speaking to me about.

First: John and I have been trying to sell our house for over a year now. There is nothing wrong with our house. It is a very nice house, but we want to be in the neighborhood with my mom, or a neighborhood like my mom's. We also, in a very green-behind-the-ears kind of way, chose a financing option that would lower our monthly payments, but do us absolutely NO good in the future. And something that I have just recently been able to admit....I followed Ashley's plan to buy this house.... I cannot say that the Lord led us or that I followed His plan for us in buying our house.

Secondly: We want another baby. I have shared with you our struggles with infertility and then our recent miscarriage back in November. My heart, and John's, still long for more children.

These areas of desire, if I am not careful, can consume my day. We have had a lady who is interested in our house come and look at it several times in the last week or so. In my mind, she was going to call and make us an offer today. So I spent all day obsessed with checking my phone. All the while, praying and telling God that it was in His hands, but it wasn't HIS hands that kept checking the phone today. One of the things that "Made to Crave" is teaching me is that the same way that I crave chocolate, should be the same way I feel about God. That God did give me that ability to crave something, but He didn't intend on me feeling that way about a cupcake and not about Him. So today, as I stressed and worried about, was the lady going to call or not, would this be the month that we get pregnant or not, my aunt, who is a very wise Godly woman and mom, told me that I needed to just be quiet and listen to God. Wow! It hit me.... I have spent so much time and energy asking Him "Is this your will, God?" "Are we ever going to have another baby, God?" "Are you in this situation, God?" that I haven't just stopped and listened.

As a mom of a very active almost-3-year-old, I can totally relate to what God must be thinking and feeling about my obsessions right now. You know those days when your children seem to be bouncing off the walls and you think, if I hear "Mom....." one more time, I might cut my ears off. You know in those times how you just want to grab them by the hands and say "Just be still...Be still and sit at my feet and let me love on you and tell you all that you want to know" I think that is what God is trying to say to me. I need to crave those times, just sitting at His feet, in total silence and completely still, soaking up His glory and wisdom. I want to crave that precious time with my Heavenly Father. I know that if I had the chance to sit at my Daddy's feet just one more time, I would hang on to every second. It shouldn't be any different for Jesus. I need to Just Be Still...................

Can you find the crazy toddler? Love that girl!

Thoughts for Tuesday

It has been a while since I posted my last blog, so I thought I would post a short one and share some of my thoughts on this Tuesday.

We got A LOT of snow here last week and Allie had a blast. I have to admit, I was more than ready to get back to work once the roads were finally clear. I have a new found respect and admiration for you stay-at-home-moms! I love Allie and enjoy spending time with her, but she is a social butterfly and is used to be entertained by 5 other children at her babysitters and I was not meeting her entertainment needs when it was just she and I. Another fun and interesting arrival, other than the snow, was a new and never-before-experienced level of the Terrible Two's. I really thought that I had this "thing" handled.... I was mistaken, turns out, she was just waiting for the snow days with Momma to turn it on! I found myself telling her that if she was going to scream "No!" at me while throwing something in my general direction, the least she could do was say "No Ma'am!" Don't get me wrong, I try very hard to discipline her and raise her to be respectful, but there are times when her strong-will has me crying "Uncle!"

On another note, God has been speaking and moving in my life, a lot lately, and I want to share what He is calling me to do. Not because, I think you necessarily need to know, but because there is something powerful in sharing what God speaks to you with others, it's as if, once I share it with someone else, I can not pretend it didn't happen. And I have no doubt that someone will read this and then ask me about it, so there is a level of accountability in it as well.

One of the things that I have always struggled with is my weight. There, I said it, it bothers me! I have never been one of those skinny girls who could eat the broad side of a barn and lose weight. I meerly have to glance at a chocolate bar and I gain 10 pounds. But until a couple of years ago, I was able to lose weight fairly easily. I gained weight after John and I got married. Mostly, because I had someone who I knew loved me no matter what size I wore and it was a relief from all those years of dieting so that someone would want, or love me. Then I gained more weight when I got pregnant with Allie. However, I lost every bit of that weight while I was breast feeding. Then my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer when Allie was just 2 months old. He was given 6 months to live and for the next 6 months, I watched my world come crashing down around me. And what do people do in the South when they don't know what else to do for you? THEY COOK! I watched my dad, my hero, turn into a living skeleton before my very eyes, and the fact that I was gaining weight quicker than I had ever gained weight before, didn't seem all that important to me. Dad went home to be with the Lord 2 years ago. Since then I have been diagnosed with a Pituitary Tumor that has caused me to experience hormone irregularity only matched my menopause. I now find myself, over weight, out of shape, and completely embarrassed by the way that I have treated this body, this living sanctuary, that God has trusted me with. So, I am going to journey down the road that is very familiar to me. But this time, I am not going to lead the race. I am looking to God for the leadership, for the will-power, for the endurance that it is going to take to get me where He wants me. This is not about me, my inabilities, my desired.... This is about HIM, His abilities, and what He deserves from me. I want everything in my life to be a picture of who He is. This time I am not doing this so that I will be loved, but because I AM LOVED. Because God loves me and deserves it, because John loves me and deserves it, and because Allie loves me and deserves to have a role model in the area of taking care of yourself.

And lastly, God has called me to start an American Heritage Girl troop in Arkansas. I have been praying about it and researching it for awhile, and I know that this is what I am supposed to do.

This started out as a short post and I got a little windy, so I will post more about my journey with American Heritage Girls later. But please check them out and read about their mission. And if you are in Central Arkansas and are interested, email me and I would love to share more about this journey.

Trusting Him

A Faith Like That.....

We have a family friend who loaded up on a plane yesterday for the first time to leave the comforts of home and travel to some of the most desolate placed in the world to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. As I prayed for his safety and for the souls that he will come into contact with during his 11 MONTH journey, I couldn't help but think, I wish I had faith like that! Our friend is in his early 20's and unlike most of the people his age, he is laying everything at the foot of the cross and is following God's will for his life in a way that should inspire us all. I can't say that I have ever felt called to travel abroad as a Missionary, but I want to live my life with the kind of faith that if I ever did feel called, I would not hesitate at obeying the call. I have also started thinking about the difference that I make in the lives of the people that I come into contact with on a daily basis. Chris is traveling around the world to make a difference in the lives of people that he has never met, surely I can do something to share God's love with the people who I see and talk to everyday.

On the radio this morning (a morning without K-LOVE is a bad morning for me!) there was a lady speaking about the spiritual journey her family had been on when they offered Jesus a gift that would eventually change their lives forever. They each promised to do something everyday for an entire year for someone out of God's love. They began to pray and God began to show them people who needed to be loved on, and that's just what they did. WOW! That is so inspiring to me!

Please pray for our friend Chris as he follows God into parts of the world that we cannot even imagine their way of life.