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