I Think I'll Go Eat My Feelings Now...

Have you ever seen a picture of yourself someone tagged of you on facebook and cringed at the "angle" of the photo, which in Big Guhl Wuld means you are actually cringing and the number of chins you have, which happens to have a strong correlation to the number of oats Quaker has?


Not that I'm any expert or anything.


Or have you ever stayed up late watching The Golden Girls only to be swayed by yet another infomercial, this time revolving around the Neckline Slimmer?

Don't even tell me you weren't tempted the last time you went into Walgreens and saw that contraption beckoning: "Come to me all of you who are faux dieting and wearing heavy chins, and I will give you a slimmer neckline for your wedding photos."

What I'm trying to say is that I feel as if I've fallen off the self-control wagon, and the wagon went up about five inches once I fell off, adding much insult to my (albeit slightly cushioned) injury.


I'm not making excuses.

Actually, I am going to make a few. I was talking to my dad last night (he has lost a couple hundred pounds in the last two years) and lamenting to him about how expensive healthy food is sometimes.
SERIOUSLY PEOPLE, have you BEEN in the produce aisle lately? It's like highway robbery only I like to think of it as outside aisle robbery because they tell you that's the safest place for us to shop-less preservatives and sodium and such.


Also, there's the little fact that I pretty much spend more time in my car than I do anywhere else. This has furthered my ridiculously sedentary lifestyle and my dinner from a bag kind of life.


But at the end of the day, there really is no excuse. People have lost weight under much more difficult circumstances and have demonstrated self-control in much busier lifestyles than me.



boo.


That makes me feel guilty.

But guilt doesn't really change anything. Guilt is our human reaction to our sin. Conviction is our spiritual reaction to it.


Don't worry, I am also feeling convicted. I need to make some changes.

My God, my future husband and my future children deserve my efforts to live healthy, even with the opposition my crazy life offers. With this conversation still ringing in my head, and my life about to change in a totally ginormous way, it's time for me to quit talking (blogging) and start getting serious about it.




But not so serious that I drop a hundred pounds before the wedding. The dress is lace up and there's no way to take it in. And if it didn't fit anymore, that would make me totally have to eat my feelings.


How do you struggle with self-control?

Snuggie War.

As I have previously mentioned, Seth hates Snuggies. He thinks they are ridiculous.


Here's how much I care. Remember this? I got one anyway because when I visit him at his house I get very cold and Angie the dog wants me to pet her but it's nearly impossible to pet her or change the channels with a regualr blanket covering my arms.


Okay, that last one was wishful thinking. I don't really have need for the Snuggie due to the Tivo remote. Seth likes to have it in his hand, sort of like a scepter for the King. He does so graciously share much Tivo space for things he doesn't give a rip about, such as SYTYCD. He really is precious.

(My friend Kasey just told me, by the way, that she loves to turn hers around and wear it as a cape. That would be cool if she was three. But she's 22. Even That Girl draws the line someplace.)


One evening Seth and I were working on Save the Date cards (mostly Seth was working and I was just pretending to look busy) and I tweeted that I wished I had my Snuggie. Seth, sitting right next to me, got out his laptop and checked his facebook. He looked at me and said, "Seriously?" Then he proceeded to diss the Snuggie with a comment.

This got our whole church buzzing. Who was for, who was against, who thought they were practical, and who thought they were a glorified bathrobe (that wounded me, Nicole). It was the Snuggie discussion heard round the world.
For the record, I'd like to go ahead and say that I have yet to actually don the Snuggie at Seth's house, so in his defense he has yet to see the real practicality of the thing. But that doesn't mean that this war of words has stopped. So last night, my SIL pulled out the big guns.

The piece de resistance, if you will.




This photo went up on facebook last night with the caption, "Look Uncle Sethy. Mini snugglette Lovers."



Like he can keep hating on the Snuggie when these three look so dang cute.




Are you on Team Snuggie or a Snuggie Hater?

either, way, those three little Snugglettes are adorable, wouldn't you agree?

His Eye is On The Sparrow

I was having a not-so-good start this morning. You ever have one of those days?
God's word began speaking to me, gently convicting me as it well should.


My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Psalm 73:26


The Lord gave me that word because I was feeling discouraged, and I was emailing to a friend who was also feeling discouraged. In my head rang loudly with the words all my friends DREAD:

"That reminds me of a song!"

They don't call me the Human Jukebox for nothing, peoples.




Here's the song:

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home?
When Jesus is my portion
My constant friend is He:
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.


Then I started thinking about what God says about those little birds....

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"

and

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young—
a place near your altar, O LORD Almighty, my King and my God.


These little birds, some of the most forgotten and underestimated creatures in the land matter to God.



You matter to God.

I matter to God.




It doesn't matter if
you are unorganized
you are addicted
you are exhausted
you feel unloved
you are overweight
you are grieving
you feel ugly
if you can't seem to control your emotions
you had an abortion
you didn't finish high school
you don't know how you are going to pay the bills
you are paralyzed by fear
& finally
even if He doesn't matter to you...



You matter to God.



I was reading about sparrows and come to find out, some of the nesting colonies may have many hundreds of thousands of birds. With that many in a group, it might be hard for a scientist to tell two of them apart or especially to know if one was sick.


It's not too hard for God. Because we matter to Him. He wants to be our portion-meaning, He wants to be our inheritance...what we find most valuable in this life so brief. He wants a relationship with Him to be the One Thing that sustains us through anything.

If He cares when this little bird, relatively useless to man except to entertain with song, falls to the ground and takes notice when one dies, HOW MUCH MORE does our Heavenly Father care for us?



I pray that because of this simple truth, our song will be sung to Jesus
because He is our portion,
because we take joy in His love,
because His sacrifice has won us our freedom.

We don't sing because our lives are perfect. We sing because we know that He notices that they aren't. We don't sing because He has made every problem go away. We sing because He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. We sing not always because we are happy, but because He is with us in our moments of trouble.




I sing because His eye is on the sparrow
&
I know He watches me.






In light of that, I challenge you to notice someone around you who needs encouragment and look for ways to share love with them today.

Sponsoring Hope.

A couple of years ago, BFF Jami and I found ourselves staring at a table full of faces. We were working summer camp at Crossroads, who had a strong relationship with an organization called New Missions. I had approached Jami to consider sponsorship with me and for a week we prayed about it separately.

Isn't it funny that we had to pray about it? I mean, after all as Francis Chan says, "Did God tell you to watch TV last night?"


ahem.



So the Table. The Table full of little faces. Some smiling, some looking cute, some royally ticked off because they had to get a picture made. Some whose eyes felt like they were boring a hole through my soul.

As we scanned the Table, it became clear to me in a hurry which little one would be ours. It was a little girl with about fifty baby barrettes in her hair, and they were all neon colored. She had dark brown eyes and she was not smiling. In fact, maybe it was my imagination but she looked like she had a little attitude.


Come to mama!



Without saying a word, a moment later Jami picked up the photo of the little girl with the massive amounts of barrettes. She scanned her profile and said, "Her name is SARAH."

Jami knew that I love the name Sarah because it means Princess. I always call my nieces Princess and I had always wanted to name a daughter that, but it's so popular in the US that I didn't want her to be one of forty Sarahs in her school or something. So the fact that this little one's name was Sarah was complete confirmation!

Her full name is Sarah Prosper. She was four years old when we picked up that photo.


I have never once regretted that decision.

We started corresponding with Sarah and sending her pictures and other things. Our lives have never been the same.


About a year after we started sponsoring Sarah, I had the privilege of going to New Missions to see the ministry firsthand and to spend a week with the Haitian people. I was scheduled to meet Sarah and her mom on Thursday, but God had other plans. People had been fasting and praying for me daily on the trip, and the biggest blessing would come on Wednesday of that week.

My journal:

We came back and had an opportunity to purchase good from the local Haitians. This was partly frustrating because we could not give everyone business and some of them were pretty aggressive.
But then, the coolest part of the whole trip came. I walked toward one of the shops and almost ran into someone as I was looking down and walking (not a good plan) around to find Seth a nativity. I looked up at the man with whom I had collided and immediately began to apologize in the most broken form of Creole ever heard.
He looked at me for a minute.
Then he said, "You have child?"

People, I am a slightly rotund individual, but even I had not had that many bowls of beans and rice.

Trying not to become offended, I was thinking in my head, "Was that a Haitian fat joke?"
Finally I shook my head no. He then said,

"No. You have Haitian child. Sarah."

It took me a second for it all to come together.

"Yes!" I said. "How did you know?"


He responded, "Sarah is my sister. There she is, right over there."

Perched on the wall separating New Missions from the Village of Bord Mer was my little princess, wearing a bathing suit and nothing else. Her brother's name was Charles, and he had recognized me from the picture we sent. What are the odds?

But then again, why am I surprised?


I promised to take Sarah to the clinic later that day due to a skin problem she had (NM covers all healthcare procedures) and I kissed her and told her I would see her then.

So I thought!
We went to a church service and Scott (team leader) tapped me on the shoulder. "Is that Sarah?" He asked.

Sure enough, it was. So I got her and took her to sit with me. As we stood and sang Trading My Sorrows, and as Sarah clung to me like a koala and would not let me put her down, tears of joy rained down my face at God's amazing blessings and His extra grace to give me the chance to meet Sarah and spend extra time with her.

****************

Through my experiences with Sarah, I have learned how amazing it is to sponsor a child. So when my friend Nicole decided to go on the World Race for a year, I wanted to contribute to her mission trip. We were discussing how I could do that, and then I remembered Jose.


Nicole has been sponsoring a little boy from Nicaragua named Jose through Compassion International for a few years now. In our apartment, his picture hung and we spent time praying for our sponsored kids (although not nearly enough!). I saw his sweet face daily and I knew that as Nicole was working hard to raise funds so that she could meet the needs of people all over the world who are just like Jose, someone had to be this little boy's sponsor for a year to free up Nicole's finances. Just for this year, i get the honor of meeting Jose's needs.

Now Nicole is heading to Nicaragua tomorrow on a 17-hour bus ride. She will be spending a month there Would you join me in prayer that Nicole will have the same experience as I did? Please pray that somehow, God would work a miracle and she would get to meet Jose!



Also, I would like to ask you to consider getting involved with child sponsorship. For just a few dollars a day, you can have the blessing of reaching a child with the love of Jesus Christ. With a little sarificial giving, you can sponsor HOPE in a child's life. If you have children, it's a great project to help the understand God's love for the nations and to teach them about giving.

One more thing, some Compassion Bloggers are set to hit El Salvador in the next few days. They will be blogging their experiences and I encourage you to take time to read their stories.



For your comment consideration:
How are you reaching out?
If you're not, how are you going to?



What if we?

730 days.

I'm sitting at my desk today hoping I have received every single ounce of refining that the last two years and a gracious God have offered me. Every moment with every lesson that came with every hardship and every day that I wanted to pull the covers over my head and hide but didn't--I hope that none of them were wasted.

As I stood by my dying mother's bedside two years ago today, I remember thinking:
"If you are everything you say you are, you better do some good out of this. Because THIS is not good."

I was begging God to prove that He was the faithful, loving, enduring, trustworthy God I had always said He was. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't questioned everything that I have believed in the past two years. I'd also be lying if I said there are no questions that remain unanswered. The thing that I've learned in the past 730 days is this:

I serve a God who doesn't mind me asking them.


I have always thought it presumptuous to assume that God doesn't like our questions and doesn't deal with us in our doubt. After all, we are told to be like little children-for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.


....Oh, to be like the little hearts who ask a million questions every day. "Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why are you singing so loud in the car, Aunt Wah?"

(ok, maybe I am the only one having to field that last question.)

We are told in Hebrews that we don't have a Great High Priest who can't sympathize with our weaknesses. I have demonstrated that one of my own weaknesses is the fact that I like to understand exactly why things happen the way I do. I believe with all my heart that God understands why I ask the questions. He may choose not to answer them in the way that I expect, but that my doubt is faith seeking some understanding.

It's frustrating when people act as if they have a corner on the mind of God, whether it be in approaching the grief-stricken such as:
"God needed another angel."
"He must've had work for her to do up there."
and my personal favorite
"She's one of those stars shining back at us at night."

Okay, your Lion King meets angelic being meets works in Heaven theology might be a little off.

or about life in general:

"Here's how the end of time is going to play out, step-by-step."
"We know when Jesus is coming back."
"God didn't heal you because you didn't have enough faith."

It take some serious, errr, intestinal fortitude, to assume the mind of God. Now I don't know about you, but I am not really interested in serving a God that I completely and fully understand with my finite mind.


But we can't be angry with humanity for searching for the answers to the questions out of a mostly pure desire to understand. The reason that people say things like that is because their faith is seeking understanding--but they are looking for understanding in places other than in God's Word.

Another thing that I've learned is that God doesn't need me to explain why He allows certain things to happen. He doesn't need my commentary to make people still love Him even in the midst of suffering.

What He needs from me is to be His PRESENCE around people in the face of it. What He desires is for me to love those who are suffering, not get them to avoid blaming God for it. It's not my responsibility to explain God--it's my honor to let them know that they can ask Him directly about it. It's also my honor to help them feel His love so that when they ask, "Where is God in the midst of this?"


Their answer will look like mine:
God was in the room 730 days ago when I kissed my mama goodbye for the last time.
How do I know?
His people were there.


730 days ago I began a journey of asking the God of the Universe if He really is who He says He is. For the first time in my life I found myself in the Dark Night of the Soul. The crossroads of faith. 730 days ago I began the journey of realizing that He is everything He says He is and that there is coming a day when, as Steven Curtis Chapman says:

But in my mind’s eye
I can see a place
Where Your glory fills every empty space
All the cancer's gone
Every mouth is fed
and there’s no one left in the orphans’ bed
Every lonely heart finds their one true love
And there’s no more goodbye
And no more not enough
And there’s no more enemy
no more

It's not enough to just believe in that day, though. it's our joy and responsibility to see that the Kingdom comes here and now. It's our job to point people in the direction of the Kingdom to come by seeing it enacted now.


I'm glad to know a God who is willing to go to great lengths to prove His love for us. The last 730 days have been some of the hardest of my life so far, but His promise is true. He is who He says He is, and I am thankful I have had the chance to discover it firsthand.

Get Down

What is your favorite song to dance to at a wedding reception?

And for Erin S, Seth knew that if he wanted to marry me he would have to endure the DJ at the reception and one slow dance.



he's willing to put up with it for yours truly. He's a good man!

Do you Tweet?

I am trying to get better at Twitter. Be patient! I am hoping to follow some of my blog readers, so leave a comment if you are a Twitter Girl!


Love you all more that this here Dell computer!