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

*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.

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

It seems strange to start at ‘chapter one’. Should I begin this book of life with a prologue, a stepping stone to start the journey? Heavens, where am I going to go with this? Is this just a false start? Will the words come if I just keep writing? Am I too flooded in thought right now to do this? How do I organize myself? Where do I begin???

Well, where do beginnings begin? We all have to start somewhere. How else do we gain experience? Only through the experiencing of something. Something usually big. Dynamic. Altering. Mind-blowing. Jolting. An abrupt change in the everyday, normal that we have always known. Change always begins and ends something.
I think of birth. A woman conceives and her whole life changes. A new life is created inside of her, through one act of passion with someone. This creation is life-altering. The change is slow, but grows with a belly, and days ticking by. Finally, a child is born. From that second of conception on, life is. At first breath, the baby just birthed cries, and we realize this more fully. We always seem to ‘realize’ things when we can touch them, feel them, hear them. Until that point, we seem to dance around the reality, not quite believing it. We are sadly, a faith by sight people. We may know that the woman is pregnant from the way she looks, specifically, the way her belly grows, but we cannot see the child yet.
Where is the change in this picture? The end of being just a woman, and the beginning of being a mother.

Turning back to the beginning again. . . Look at your life squarely in the eye. Where do you see the change, that point at which things took a turn for the better, for the worse . . . ? How did you get to where you are now? Who have you become and how did it happen?