Have you ever felt that way?  I sure have.  There have been times where I just wonder why I have to go through yet another “thing.”  Why things have to be so hard.

I know my life is very blessed.  Yet there have always been certain areas of it that have never come easy. In fact, there have been areas where I’ve wondered what the gain was in them at all!  They just seem cursed.

The thought crossed my mind recently of feeling tired of having to be brave all of the time.  I didn’t want to be a brave warrior.  I just wanted to be protected, spared, and chosen to be sheltered.  The thing is, as soon as this thought crossed my mind, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and immediately convicted me.   He whispered the immediate thought with… “What if Jesus had grown tired of being brave?  What if He had saved Himself from all that pain and gotten down from the cross?  What then?”

Oh Lord – there is nothing like feeling immediately convicted, is there?  My thoughts are so shallow – so whiney sometimes!

I knew in that moment that I HAD been protected, spared, chosen and sheltered. God did all of this for me the very moment He laid His life down for mine on the cross.  He protected me from death.  He spared me from the price of my sin, and He chose me to die for.  There is no greater love than that.  No greater bravery.

“I can be brave again, Lord,” I thought.  I can do it.  I can do it because of my great love for you.  I can access that strength that you give to me and I can get through this because you’ve asked me to.  And I will try to remember that I have been protected at a far greater cost than what this particular trial asks for.

Fighting on His behalf is the very least I can do.

~ By Dionna Sanchez {Beauty In The Storm}

http://www.incourage.me/2011/01/tired-of-being-brave.html

"I had worked for many years with rickety logic: religious busyness is the same thing as spiritual maturity. The more you do, the more you love Jesus. I'd never have put it that tactlessly. But it was the air I breathed, the water I drank. It was an undisclosed and unexamined conviction that drove and colored everything I did.

"But I started to notice that religious busyness tends to make those of us caught up in it not deeper, wiser, kinder, but more shrill, more opinionated, more judgmental. I could find -you could too- counterexamples to this. But I noticed enough 'committed' people who we......re also cranky people that my unspoken theory- busyness equals maturity- grew increasingly flimsy.

"...If doing many things is not true Christlikeness, what is? Obviously fruit. 'By your fruit you shall know them,' Jesus said.

"...I knew this from way back. But I had simply joined my rickety logic to it. Busy people, 'committed' people, are fruitful people. Right?

"But the flaws in this equation began to show. I noticed that busyness bruises, stunts, rots fruit as much as grows it. And then I saw it, hidden in plain sight: if we are to bear much fruit- if that's the goal of the Christian life- then the best model for spiritual maturity is seasons. Fruit grows in seasons, and all seasons are necessary for growing it. And seasons are as much about what is not happening as what is. It has as much to do with inactivity as with activity, waiting as with working, barrenness as with abundance, dormancy as with vitality."  (italics mine)

~Mark Buchanan, Spiritual Rhythm http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Rhythm-Being-Jesus-Season/dp/0310293650

eat lots of food...
count your blessings.
hope that you laugh a lot. <3

http://busibeth.xanga.com/613930252/a-turkey-for-thanksgiving----a-true-story/

I am making time.

"God gives us time and then we say we don’t have time for God." ~ Ann Voskamp

Psalm 29:3-4
The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD, over many waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is full of majesty.

The voice of God is frightening. What if he tells us to do something we are not prepared for?
What if the very thing God wishes of us is the thing that frightens us most?
What if it requires supernatural power to accomplish?

This is precisely what happened to Elizabeth Elliot when God told her to go back to Ecuador and witness to the very tribesmen who had murdered her husband.

What is God speaking to you?
Is he asking you to get out of the boat in the middle of a storm?
Has he asked you to do something in which there is an impossible barrier in your way?
Do you fear the river will not part?
Is he asking you to face a Sanhedrin or the silversmith guild?
Do you hear His voice and tremble?
Is it God you fear, or everything else?

Dr. Daniel Thomas, OSA, D.Phil

The Smallest Child in Class might be small... but he sure makes up for it in other ways.

ha.

He felt extra manly when he casually, coolly, with a completely straight face told the other kids who were clamoring for craft supplies,

"Just GROW UP, guys."

bahahaha.

I am grateful that He is patient with me as I 'grow up' one day at a time.

I love how little ones
so often
find words for the things that I cannot seem to say.
Perhaps they voice the fears I have hidden deep inside.
Or they discover perhaps some deep truth that I have long known but forgotten.

I often whisper to myself what the Most Difficult Child announced to me last year, during review:

"God is LIGHT... and HE makes the DARKNESS go AWAY."

Well, what do you know -- the Child was really listening. ha.