The Butterfly

Tuesday’s are my day to focus on marketing at work. Today, I was going through some files on the shared drive to help stir up some marketing ideas when I came across a neat little story of a man trying to help a butterfly…

“A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no further. The man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.What the man, in his kindness and haste, did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to go through our lives without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. We could never fly!

I asked for strength; And God provided difficulties to make me strong.

I asked for wisdom; And God provided problems for me to solve.

I asked for prosperity; And God provided me with brain and brawn to work.

I asked for courage; And God provided danger to overcome.

I asked for love; And God provided troubled people for me to help.

I asked for favors;  And God provided opportunities.

I received nothing I wanted; I received everything I needed!

May your path be bright and full of light everywhere you go. And, I pray your feet will never stumble out of God’s plan.

May the desires of your heart come true, and may you experience peace in everything you do.

May goodness, kindness, and mercy come your way and may you gain Wisdom and grow in the Lord everyday.”

This story reminds me of James 1:2-4, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

Like the butterfly and his cocoon, we need trials in order to persevere. What is there to persevere through if there are no trials? When trials do come, we should be thankful God cares enough about us to want us to grow mature and complete in our faith.

Find you on my knees

It has been too long since I have posted. To list everything that has happened and what God has done in my life and in my heart would take longer than I have to write right now. Originally, when we started this blog, Wednesday was my day to post. I have long since missed my Wednesday post. However, I find myself unable to sleep tonight until I write down these words…

To make a long story short, I have gone from making some huge mistakes to finding myself on a mission trip in Guatemala since my last post. I would like to say that I am a completely different person… God has forgiven me for my mistakes, and has moved mountains in my life and in my heart. I went to a concert by myself, looking for Jesus. I have found myself at the bar way too late on too many nights, trying to fill a hole that I knew only God could fill but still I ran to something I knew could not help my hurting heart. Then, months afterwards, I have also found myself in a foreign country playing with kids that I couldn’t speak a word to (due to my lack of Spanish speaking abilities) but felt more love and hurt for those people more than I could have ever imagined. It was in that place, in Guatemala, where I was changed more than I can even begin to describe in words.

Before I left, standing on the roof top of the mission house we were staying in, I prayed what started out as a thankful prayer, but turned into so much more. It turned into an intimate moment between our Heavenly Father and I, where I admitted to every sin I had committed, but also prayed that I would try everything to stay away from that when I got back, and to recommit myself to following Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:18-20, to make disciples, along with His greatest commandment to love God and to love others. It was one of those moments that will always be a very vivid, “God and me” moment in my memory.

When I got back, something came up with a close friend of mine that is continually breaking my heart and almost shaking my faith. It has been the cause of a few sleepless nights, and many times of getting on my knees and face down on the floor praying. There is no doubt in my mind that God had me go on that mission trip to rekindle a faith that was small before using my passport, prior to this heart breaking faith shaking situation came up in my life. In the middle of this, I have found that Jesus is still there, no matter what, and by some wise words from a few wise people in my life, God is in control and He has a plan.

I guess what I have learned from this so far is that in those moments when we cannot do anything but fall to our knees and cannot help the tears fall, God is right there ready to meet us where we are. We can find Him on our knees, and as Psalm 34:18 says, He is near to the broken hearted and crushed in spirit. And when we get up from shedding countless tears and off our knees, if the heart ache is still there, know that He is still there and knows what we are feeling, and is still working.

Find you on my knees – Kari Jobe

Loan From God

I’m back!

Baby Garrek arrived mid-September & I’m finally at a point where I’m caught up on sleep enough to be productive while he naps! (Seriously…People always tell you to cherish your sleep before you have kids…I severely underestimated the truth of that statement! Phew!!)

Little did I know that becoming a Mom would change my life so much. I don’t mean in the physical sense, like the loss of precious hours of the sleep I used to enjoy, or the spit up that always seems to decorate every shirt I put on. It’s the huge responsibility of raising a kid in this crazy, sinful world we all live in. That’s a lot of pressure!
Will he grow up to know how much God loves him? Will he make his relationship with Jesus a personal choice? Will he resist the over-sexualized society around him? Be a shining light of God’s love to his friends? Praise God in the bad and good times?
As easy as it is to worry about his future, and what we can do to help him make the right decisions, it all comes down to one thing: God is in control.
As our pastor said at Garrek’s child dedication a few weeks ago, “Children are on loan from God.” It’s our responsibility to create the right environment in our homes to help our kids thrive and know God while we have them, but they really are God’s. And for that I’m thankful, I don’t have to do everything correctly, we will make mistakes, and learn the hard way sometimes. That’s alright because God’s got a great plan already laid out for Garrek, and I just have to remember to keep praying and follow God’s leading.

And with that, I’ve gotta run & change a dirty diaper!

 

Val

Not what I originally intended (part 2)

So here is part two of my continuing blog posting. It was going to be a great happy one with a mixture of emotions about the future and possible changes but things have changed within the past 20 minutes that I feel like I need a perspective about so I am blogging. Whether this is a good idea or not is probably up for debate.

So within the past hour I have been notified that I am basically a negative person and cut down my family every chance I get and cannot have a conversation where I don’t cut this person down. Now the person that said this to me was someone whom I have had problems with before, ( they say because we are too much alike, I say because we are too different). Thinking back on the past few weeks I do not see what this person is talking about. However I must be doing something for this person to say something in front of the family and then stop eating and dramatically drive away.

I have always tried to be a person who is the same with everyone, friends and family alike. I try to hold my irritation in when this person does something that they know irritates me to no end, and still does it. However every once in awhile I try to bring it up to them and they dramatically make it more obvious. Now tonight I admit I could have been more nice about it, but once I’ve said something for the 300th time, I’m not as nice as the first time I’ve mentioned it. I try to be myself and not someone who puts on a front that say that they are perfect all the time, if you have perceived this from me, I am sorry. I am most definitely not perfect and have a lot of opinions and get irritated and angry like most people. However, I do try to go with the flow and try to see things from other peoples perspective. Although in this case I don’t see it. We have definitely had conversations this week that weren’t cutting down or even today I hadn’t said one bad word, except “can you wait til you are done chewing”, and I don’t know why that was a problem because I had told this person many times before.

Family.

sorry this was a depressing post. Maybe once the situation gets settled I will have a clearer perspective on it and maybe it wasn’t me at all. Here’s to hoping!

Life Plans ( part 1)

Hello!

Sorry I have been away on holiday for a few weeks and haven’t written a post in awhile. Many things have been happening and I would like to share them with you. They are not significant changes, but just subtle changes that have changed my way of thinking in the past few weeks that I cannot get over. Please bear with me as this post may jump from one topic from another, I will try to have some good segways. 😉

1. Tattoos. This is a totally unrelated topic to myself as I do not have any tattoos on my skin, and don’t know if I would ever get one, not because I don’t like them, just because i would be too indecisive and like them too much and would probably end up with a sleeve or two 🙂 However I do realize that many people in this generation have tattoos and either get them in remembrance of something or someone, to remind themselves of something, or because they like the way that they look. Many people in the generation before us are cautious about tattoos because they come with a stigma.This wont be a post bashing or defending tattoos, just a post thinking outloud what i have heard and learned and wonder what others’ opinions are.

I happened to be listening to a song this morning while cleaning and the song stated something about the artist advising her kids against getting tattoos because spring break should last forever. This happened to make me chuckle because that is our generation. We sometimes get permanent things because its a trend. However tattoos are a permanent trend, unless you want to get them surgically removed. I was listening to the talk radio the other day and there was a tattooed pastor and a un-tattooed pastor talking about this same topic and it caught my interest. The UTP ( untatted pastor) was saying that you have to think about when you are a child of God your body is not your own anymore, It is God’s. the question was brought up saying that when we get tattoos are we in this mindset, or are we in the mind set of this is my body and I’ll do what I want with it. He was explaining how unless you prayed about getting this permanent mark on your body and if you felt God’s peace about getting it, that then it was okay. He also said that are piercings the same way as tattoos? This then brought about the question whether how permanent tattoos are if they are going to mark our spiritual bodies when we are called up on judgment day.  This then brought up the topic of Cain and his mark that God placed on him. Was this is tattoo? We don’t know, but it did have some of the effect that some stigmas are felt today about tattoos.  The other pastor them spoke about how our tattoos can be used a witnessing tools and can either help you tell your life story or help relate to unbelievers. I wish i could remember more about the tatted pastors explanation but there was a caller as well who’s story I only can remember.

So what are your thoughts on tattoos? If you have one, why did you get it and do you think that it is just a trend that will fade out or do you think that it will grow in the generations to come? Also does it really matter concerning our faith?

Again, I have no issues with tattoos and think they are pretty sweet sometimes, but these songs and the radio program got me thinking 🙂

Sorry I decided to make this a 3 part post because I got a little chatty 🙂

Thanks for reading, and love to hear from you!

~M

Book Review! What Your Heart Needs for the Hard Days: 52 Encouraging Truths to Hold On To

I love to read. From actual paper books to free books on kindle to blog posts and links from Twitter, I love to read. However, I rarely ever read a fictional work or a book that I do not think is going to help me grow in some way. This month, I signed up to review one of the books that I have read that just poured out encouragement… I was not expecting it to have such an impact on my thoughts, my heart, my life, but it did!

I read a 52 day devotional called, What Your Heart Needs for the Hard Days by Holly Gerth (click to go to Amazon for more info on the book). Gerth has written a few books before this one, but this is the first book of hers I have had the chance to read. I do get her blog posts delivered to my email everyday though! She is an incredibly encouraging author, showing a raw real heart in her writing. Gerth does not sugar coat what the hard days might look like or feel like, she acknowledges the struggle but the encourages the reader to just keep going forward, one day at a time, in the Lord’s strength.

This is a book that I will keep handy for myself on my coffee table, or keep handy to give out to a friend who might be facing some hard days.

Restoration

While visiting with a friend last week, I shared a few stories of my life from over the past few years. As I sat there at a table in BiggBy chatting with this friend, it occurred to me how much God has been working in my life and in the lives of those around me all of the time.

One of the most common themes among all of the stories that I shared is restoration. Restoration in relationships, specifically.

Since we are all human, we all make mistakes and fail others at some point in our lives. Myself included in that! We say things and do things, or don’t do things, that hurt others. We will experience hurt from others as well. Relationships suffer.

However, I have seen first hand in my own life and in the lives of those around me the power of God in restoring those relationships. Restoration between a child and their parents, restoration between friends, restoration with other family members, restoration with our own selves…

We see restoration in the bible by reading the Old Testament book of Job. He lost everything… But he never cursed God while he waited on God to act. At the end of Job’s story, God restored him with twice as much as he had in the beginning of the story!

In my own life, not every broken relationship has been restored the same way it was before they were broken, but God restored my own feelings of brokenness towards those relationships and now I can look back on those memories and smile. I can pray for those people whom I am no longer in contact and be genuinely happy for them when I see snapshots of their lives on Facebook.

I’m completely blown away by the amount of restoration God has done in my own life. He has made family relationships stronger, friendships deeper, and my heart softer towards the relationships that were not restored to their original ways.

The most important relationship that God has restored is my relationship with Jesus… We all have a broken relationship with Him until we believe in Him. I am so thankful for those events that occurred in my life that brought me closer to Him. I know that God can restore broken things. He makes all things new (Revelation 21:5)! And He never is not working, He never is not moving, He never is not with us.

Without Jesus, we will catch nothing.

I have not posted in a while due partly to technical difficulties and partly to a lack of words to share… For my first post to get back into things, I want to share something from a book that I have been reading called Overwhelmed: Winning the Way Against Worry by Perry Noble. I think we all struggle to some extent with worry and stress and anxiety, but for me this is a major issue. This book has challenged my thinking and the Lord has been speaking to me through it! I hope that someone else can find some encouragement as I attempt to paraphrase a little of what I’ve been learning…

In Overwhelmed, Noble brings up something very interesting from John 21. This is after Jesus was crucified. The disciples were at a loss as to what to do with themselves after their long awaited messiah and savior was brutally killed on the cross. They had thought that their messiah and God had failed them… Talk about disappointment. So their lives continued after the crucifixion, and they ended up going back to what they used to do… They went fishing (see John 21:3). There is nothing bad with fishing, but what is interesting in this story in John 21 is that, “they caught nothing.” Remember, a couple years before this when Jesus first called them to follow Him they had caught enough fish to break their nets! They had come to know Jesus, but failed to continue to believe in Him after He was crucified, and then they caught nothing.

What is the point here? Without Jesus, we will catch nothing. We can chase as many career goals as we wish, we can collect as many toys as we can, we can build the biggest house on the block, and we can win all of the trophies. However, without Jesus we will never have anything worth while. The disciples were so upset when Jesus was crucified because He was their friend, but also because He was supposed to deliver them from Roman rule and save them… But they were looking to Jesus to do it on their terms.

“Without Jesus, we will catch nothing. The world can only provide us with false hope and temporary satisfaction. True joy comes through an active, ongoing walk with Christ.” – Overwhelmed, Perry Noble

Music again

Hey guys,
I know I write about music a lot and I hope you won’t mind one more post from a musician that really inspired me about today’s future of music. tylers story
Sorry that u hafta go to the page I cannot figure out how to copy and paste in my phone hah

Love

I feel like we talk a lot about love in the average American culture. We love this movie, we love this type of food, we love this type of nail polish color. However, I think we really overuse the word so it really doesn’t mean what it is supposed to anymore.
Personally, I do admit to saying ” oh I love this actor, musician or material thing” a lot. However, when it comes to people I have a harder time saying ” I love you” possibly because either I don’t really know what the true feeling of love is supposed to be and categorize it into the same category as food or maybe because it holds a bigger meaning to me subconsciously, or maybe both.
Everyone wants to feel wanted, cherished and loved. How are we showing Christ’s love to others? Not the ” I love Big Macs ” kind of love but the ” I want the best for you ” type of love.

-Mel