I would encourage you to watch a sunrise sometime. Or, better yet, make it a daily habit. I know its early, and staying in your cozy, warm bed is what you would rather do, but, if you have time (like, maybe on the weekend) it is so worth getting up early for.
Brew yourself up some hot coffee and find a comfy place to watch it rise. It will inspire you. It will bless your day.
When I lived in Ca, I used to watch the sunrise on the beach sometimes. It was certainly chilly, but the colors, the peace, the grandeur or watching God paint the skies in such vibrancy!

This morning, I watched the sunrise from our east window, in the comfort of my cozy bed. I know, that’s sort of cheating, I guess But, it was what I needed to see this morning. My husband and I are working through a lot of things. Good things to work through. Every day, we are discovering more and more about eachother. You are always finding out more and more in this marriage thing. Its such a blessing too.
I consider all the blessings in my life while seeing the sunrise, I pray, I read my Bible, I take in the quiet. This is my quiet time before the baby wakes up for the day. Moms out there, you need some ‘you’ time; take advantage of every moment you have while your kids sleep. Yes, sleep yourself, but also refresh.

Ooop, baby is starting to wake up. More on this later. In the meantime, have you watched a sunrise lately?

I hate to admit this, but, if I didn’t I would be even more of a hypocrite.

Backsliding.

Well, what is it anyway? Picture yourself at the top of that trepidous mountain you just climbed. It took so long to get up there, but you stuck to it, patient to the finish, knowing that what you would accomplish when you got there would be . . . AMAZING. You get there. You delight in the glories all around you and then you rest a while. You go down – you aren’t paying attention, so you start to slip your way down again. You carelessly let go.

Spiritual negligence, for sure. I hit the high and then I tried to coast. *Coasting* is never enough, never good enough. Any of our efforts aren’t ever good enough for God when they are puffed with ourselves. We need some God filling in them.

I have been out of habit – prayer life, reading the Bible, trusting God, and the like have been taking back seat. And I easily blame it on the new situation of being a mom and not ‘having the time’. The problem is, I HAVE the time but I have been FAILING to use it. As a result, I am empty and broken and in full knowledge that I have put myself in this position.

So, back to square one. Help me up, Lord, for I have fallen into that miry pit. But, you have the power and the mercy to pull this pitiful soul out of the trash heap, and put a new song in her mouth. Amen. May I backslide no more.

I was going to post something about contentment, because that has been the current characteristic that I have been praying the most God would work in my impatient little heart. But, another thought popped into my brain and I wanted to start with that – loneliness.

Not that I am lonely right now, but I always seem to face mister lonely at some point in whatever place God has put me. When I was in college, I battled loneliness like it was my worst enemy. In fact, several times, I tried to beat it down in my own ways. Wrong ways, lets just say that much. When I did get married, my husband had to travel a lot with his job. Oh man, being a newlywed and being apart was a hard thing indeed. Loneliness hit yet again, and I tried to drown out that sad and familiar tune with writing and reading and a whole lot of moping.

It dawned on me, this past week, that I have been looking at and approaching loneliness in the wrong way, the world’s way. The world sees loneliness like its a horrible disease. It is something that one must get rid of, and you can do that in thus and such ways – online dating, hook-ups, alcohol, etc. Every one of these only acts as a crutch in the long-run, however, and a lonely people only ends up all the lonelier. The remedy is always Christ. The problem is always us, and how we look at things through our dirty lenses. Loneliness started in the garden of Eden. God created a man who needed a woman. He solved the ‘problem’ he created. And then man created a problem. A really big problem that would need perfect blood to fix.
When we feel lonely, we need to see this as just another way pointing to Christ. We seek relationships to fill the gap inside we feel. It is only natural to feel incomplete – we are on our own without God filling every crack and hole we have. Once we are filled with Him, we need to see ourselves as complete. This human ‘complete’ will still need, still struggle, still have pangs of loneliness. That is where we go back to the garden, where God blessed man with the gift of human relationship.
So, loneliness is not a mortal enemy. Let loneliness do what it is supposed to do, by letting the Holy Spirit draw you to Himself. Let Him then have every thought in your heart, every emotion that you feel, let it belong to Him. Let Him have your desires – the ones you have for relationships, for marriage, for fulfillment. Let Him deal completely with these things. He has the answers to the problems. Let the forlorn tune of loneliness fade to the joyous melody of Christ.

I recently took a weekend trip to Dallas with my mom for a conference. Before I left, I decided to put a picture of me in a frame for my husband’s bedside table. The only one that I could find was a picture someone snapped from our wedding in 2005.
As I slipped it into the iridescent stained glass frame my grandmother had made, I was struck by something. Seeing myself all in white, looking more radiant than I could ever remember. It struck me. The purity of that day, that moment, when I walked down the aisle to my love, in the arm of my step-father.
This is the purity I desire every day of my life. Its 3 + years from that special day now, and I am ashamed that I have too often let my thoughts and actions go to filthy sin. But the beauty of this is the transforming power of Jesus to cleanse us from sin, and to make us white again. We, as His people, are seen as His holy bride. We fail Him, but He never fails us. We run away, but He hounds us down. This is the most beautiful picture of redemption we can ever see. And its not just a picture, its a reality.

Fear plagues me. What is it about being able to believe something that you can touch, taste, hear or feel? Do these things all point to having a greater assurance of something over just believing, period? (Did that make sense?) Basically put – Belief by sight versus belief by faith.

So here’s my most recent fear. And, as I sit here typing this, it seems quite ironic and ungrounded. But when you cultivate unhealthy levels of fear, this is only to be expected.

Pregnancy hasn’t been a piece of cake so far. I mean, I am so thankful that everything has gone well and its been a healthy one so far. But I have had a lot of fear of the unknown, of all the things that could go wrong. These concerns are ungrounded though. The baby (and its a ’she’) is growing just fine, and she is now strong enough to kick her mommy so that her mommy can feel it. And while I believe that I should never take a little kick for granted, I have been foolishly hanging on to these ‘felt assurances’ as the only way I can tell that this little life inside of me is still alive.
There is nothing wrong with me counting her kicks or getting worried if she’s been quiet. Its all part of being aware in the pregnancy, and as I become more and more aware of my body and the baby, the more easily I will be able to tell if something is wrong.
As I type this, Phyra Grace is kicking, and I am reminded that God is completely sovereign and in control of everything I love and hold most dear to me. My fretting is not going to help anything. Why should I need to worry about the miracle of life that GOD put inside, that GOD is knitting together, in His perfect design and according to His perfect plan? I NEED NOT WORRY! We have to take life one day at a time. That is all we can handle. If something comes up, God will give us the strength to deal with it, but I am trying to remember to focus on the ‘today’, and thank Him for it.

Whatever the circumstance you face in this life, pray that God will take away the worry or the anxiety you may have. To quote that oh so familiar song, “He’s Got the Whole World, in His Hands”. He really does. Lay down all the things that plague your conscience – maybe its not feeling like you are good enough, or fear of being left or abandoned. Or maybe its a past sin that still haunts you. Lay it down. Put it in His hands. There is no better place to rest your worries or concerns. He is the Creator and Giver of Life – He is the Sustainer. Not a thing creeps or crawls without His knowledge. There is not a thought in your head that He doesn’t know (wow, now that is convicting, huh! )
So, in this little circumstance that I have been facing, I remind myself as well, that I need to give Him Phryra Grace every day and trust that HE is sovereign and He is her Creator

So much has happened since June. So much to recap, so much to relate. If I pressed ‘rewind’, I could go back to where I left off and recount all the things that happened, in great detail. But, let’s just skip it.

For one, the job that was a blessing, became somewhat of a curse. The curse seemed to be more than difficult to escape. But God has always been our shelter in hardships, hasn’t He? I didn’t need to doubt. The months June to September seemed to drag on. We made it through another sweltering Texas summer – a feat that I always doubt we’ll be able to handle.
Haven and I made it to our 3rd anniversary. Marriage truly gets better and better with time, folks. And, after some contemplation and tough decision-making, I quietly quit my job. This came about perfectly. The day after our anniversary, I found out that I was pregnant. I saw something that I had been longing forever to see – two pink lines on a pregnancy test. And the nausea to prove it!
5 months have already progressed, same to say about my growing belly , and we are bounding into 2009 full force. Baby Bean is due June 1st, thankfully, before the hot summer spreads its thick heat.

There are still many longings we have, like moving back to the Northwest, but, this one, is certainly one of the biggest we have ever had.

When the Lord meets a longing of yours, remember to praise Him. He gave it to you, and you only should give it back to Him in thankfulness – all that we have been given belongs to Him. With what you have been given, then pray for a content heart, for it is not long before you are yearning for something again. A heart that yearns isn’t a bad thing. But yearn after Him. Pray that your heart longs after Him – first and foremost. And, pray that your soul that does not dwell in pools of anxious thought. Pray for a peaceful spirit. And remember to thank Him.

*You will have to excuse my writing style tonight – it is course and mediocre – my excitement has made it difficult to express more eloquently. And you must also excuse this little ‘break’ from a more ’sermonette’ post. . . this is just a little piece of my life tonight

Life is SUCH an adventure. This is the understatement of the YEAR, of the CENTURY. . .
I sit here amazed and can’t quite take in the fact that life changed again, in the course of 24 little hours. One moment, I was sitting on my sorry butt, poking around the internet posting my resume in a hopeful attempt to get a job, and then, ‘plop!’ God dropped a job right in my lap, and all I had to do was send a positive email and get a flooding yes in return. WOW – God works amazing!

It was out of the blue, unexpected and just downright COOL to see how this came about, after a period of 2 months waiting for something to transpire.

I am still holding my breath, but don’t we always before something begins? Its like the moments after you just get engaged. You glow from your inside out with the love of your future spouse. A diamond is now wrapped around your finger and glitters every time you move your hand. You breathe in deep and wonder, ‘can this actually be real? Is this happening to me?’ It is, it is. Breath in deep and believe.

God is such a good God. I know that life is so hard to understand sometimes, but He brings us good things. My husband and I are in a trial of waiting for children, but He is bringing us blessing after blessing while we wait on Him. This wait would be futile if we did not trust that He is faithful. He always keeps His promises. His will is perfect and we trust it and hold to it. We do not know where this road is going, but we believe by faith, not by sight.

Are you a believer? The Monkees wrote lyrics that playfully touched on a faith by sight kind of believing – ‘then I saw her face, now I’m a believer’. . . . But this begs the question, a believer in what? Love, we find out, in the next lines. So they didn’t believe that love existed without that sight?

This hardly follows in the mindset of what we as Christians are to believe. And we know this, God is Love (1 John 4:8). We do not have the liberty to say that love does not exist or that we do not believe in it. Love exists regardless of whether or not we believe it or not. The same follows of God. Those who say that they do not believe that God exists are tripping on their own argument, for their acknowledgment of God points to their knowledge of Him and their denial.
Peter, disciple of Jesus Christ, had a hard time believing. He loved God, but that same love got in the way of following Him. When he was asked three times if He was allied with Jesus in the same period of time prior to Jesus’ crucifixion, He denied it. Why did he do so? Well, Jesus had told him that he would, and yet, this too, Peter rebuked Jesus about. But in the end, he did turn away from God and embraced unbelief. God was gracious to him, and Peter experienced great remorse and repented for his actions. And God gave him another chance to redeem himself. He was able to profess his love for Jesus three times after His resurrection. This is sort of a bunny trail, but what I want to look at here is the character of Peter. He was loyal, but suffered from doubt. While the disciples had a hard time believing that Jesus had risen from the dead after the women went to them in excitement, the leaders had professed their fear in the fulfillment of the prophecies that had been told over and over that He would die but rise from the grave. Could it be that our knowledge of God could stumble our belief? I remember one time, when I was in a group of others and we were doing some evangelism in southern Ca. We happened upon a couple of Mormons who proceeded to turn our efforts around and we felt backed into a corner as they argued against us, and it felt like they were using our weapon. All of the sudden, they seemed to know the Bible better than we did. And believe me, it was humbling.

A childlike faith is what the Lord desires. He knows our weaknesses, and He knows that we are as blind as bats and feel the need for proof often. But the thing is, we HAVE proof – His Word is here for us, plain and simple. We see the universal Church and it should assure us that the Body of Christ is alive and kicking. We need to believe. It is a commitment. It is like when we marry. We say vows to one another, knowing that we are unable to keep them apart from the strength and the power of God. We commit to love one another – we commit to be faithful to one another. We do not know what lies ahead of us, the trials, the hardships – but we have committed to one another for both the good and the bad. It is by faith that we walk, not by sight.

I will write more of this later – these were just some thoughts that were tumbling in my head. . .

Longing. You know the feeling. You desire something so much that you can almost taste it, feel it, experience it. Perhaps the longing invades your dreams, your thoughts, and even peppers your conversations. It drives you berserk. . .

I do not, by any means, equate longing with craving – to me, craving is more of a carnal, earthly and bodily need. For instance, I crave chocolate, sex, sleep, coffee, etc., etc. These needs are able to be satisfied, for a certain time until we crave them again.

Longing covers an area of things hoped for, of things long desired. There is an element of not being able to have it that makes us weak in the knees. When we are children, we long for adulthood. When we are single, we long to be in a relationship. When we are in a relationship, we long for the culmination – marriage. When we are married, we naturally want to have children. And so on, and so on. . .
All of these things require an extraordinary amount of patience and perseverance. We cannot get them right away. We must wait for time to tick by to grow up. We must wait for the right person to come along to get a relationship and we must endure through an engagement before we get married. And sometimes, babies are made over long periods of silence and time. We absolutely must wait.

We live in a ‘hurry-up’ world. This is not a new thought, and I do not presume to say so. I am merely pointing out that longing does not fit into this spectrum that the world has created. We are told that waiting is a bad thing, and so we are given short-cuts to try to cut corners.
Microwave meals, fast food, the diamond lane on freeways, etc. On a more intricate and personal level, we try to speed up or, sometimes pause or reverse ourselves. We have pills to stop our menstrual cycles completely, pills to prevent pregnancy, anti-wrinkle cream, anti-cellulite cream, lipo-suction for fast fat removal, hair dye for the gray, and the list goes on and on. The ones that I have covered, you may have noticed, are geared toward the feminine audience. And, if you have done so much as stepped foot in the beauty aisle, you have seen what I am talking about. The world does not believe in aging and yet, they are a walking contradiction – we want everything to speed up and then stop.
The order of life never goes this way. No amount of wrinkle cream and makeup can erase the years.

The fulfillment of something longed for is a beautiful thing. Have you ever seen a couple who have tried and tried to have a baby for years and years, only to meet disappointment after disappointment? Your heart aches for them. Imagine the joy that they feel when they are finally able to conceive a child!
Or the lonely single, who aches for a relationship. Perhaps this individual was rejected and abandoned by someone that had professed to love him or her. This isolated walk has left that person hurt, scarred and depressed. The longing for a relationship, for companionship never goes away. When God finally brings a good person along, there is joy and there is renewal.

These are just a couple of examples. Longing was never meant to be easy. Remember how Abraham and Sarai longed for a child and had gotten to the point when they had pretty much given up hope that they would ever have children. But God saw their longing and answered them more than they could ever ask for or think. Every time you look up into the night sky, remember God’s promise to Abraham, that His descendants would be as the stars in the sky. . . wow.

One of the sweetest satisfactions is in a fulfilled longing. But the road is sometimes long and hard. The Christian life is like this. We long to someday be with our God in heaven. It is the ultimate joy and hope of a believer. But we are given these days on earth and we must endure them, live them productively, and joyfully unto God until He comes again.

Psalm 21:2
You have given him his heart’s desire,And have not withheld the request of his lips. Selah

I am taking a little break from the stream of thought that I was going down. But first, let me let some light in by opening these window blinds. . . there – now, through my windows, I can see the top branches of the green tree that reaches to the second story window. The milky clouds cap the pale blue sky and the heat is rising already, in the early hour of the afternoon. But here I am, inside a cool house.

While we are speaking of windows, that old adage, ‘when God closes a door, He opens a window’ has come to my mind several times today. Perhaps its because today I did close a door – a door that God had confirmed that a should close. It was hard to let something go that I have been doing for the past two years. I quietly closed the doors to the job I have had. It was the time to do it.
Sometimes, the rug will get pulled out from under you. I find a little ironic comfort in the way that my past two jobs have petered out on me and have ended with quiet and peaceable layoff situations, both due to financial cut-backs.
Its a ‘been there, done that’, sort of situation – but that still doesn’t mean that I am a pro at this. I find myself at a crossroads of some sort, wondering what God has next for me. Strangely, I look out this big window and feel free like the finches gliding from tree to tree, without a care in the world, it seems.
I could worry, but I see this a time of quietly listening to God’s direction. He is in control of all things, down to the very last detail of our lives. I know that right now, He already has something prepared for me to do. I am going to have to try to find it, but I know that He is going to lead me there.

All through your life, God will open and close doors for you. You may not understand why He opens a certain door for you and not another, but that is not for you to worry about. Once you walk inside, He may turn you around and close that door that He just opened. He does not work in human ways, but in divine ways for the good of His creation. It may sometimes feel frustrating to have no idea what to do next, or to have a disappointed hope or dream. And, you may wonder what kind of good He could possibly bring out of this? But He will. Through these past two years, the Lord has given me an excellent atmosphere to work in, in a small company. I was always paid well, treated well, and had flexible hours, to my delight. God carried me through working more hours after a company crisis, He lifted me from anxiety, from discouragement, and from feeling too tired to make it through yet another week.

Perhaps you too, have felt His arms around you during a hard time. It is comforting, isn’t it? So many wander from those loving arms, because they want their way. But they only find a cold and unloving world, those who walk outside of the will of God. Those doors that God closes are closed for a reason. To enter them would not be His will for you. Do you trust God? Do you trust that He knows your heart, soul, and mind? That He knows your desires? He knows it all! He is a good God, and He is always faithful to us.

When He closes a door, will you trust that He will open another one for you?