Keep Walking

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters, He restores my soul. Psalm 23:1-3


I am cyclical in learning things. I don’t mind coming back around to things to get to the next step. When I think about my journeys in cooking and parenting, I can see how skills are built over time. As I was praying the other day, I realized that I was hesitating in taking the next step
in my spiritual walk, because I wasn’t sure I could commit to it. I wasn’t sure I was ready. In fact, I was allowing my own fear of failure stop me from stepping closer. Then, I realized that God was not asking me to take an impressive leap. He wanted me to keep taking steps, keep listening, keep looking toward Jesus. Would I rather stand still or keep walking? It’s okay to take small steps. It’s okay to find ourselves growing in an area that we’ve already covered. It’s okay for our discipleship path to by cyclical, building on the relationship that is most central to who we are and where we are going. Be patient with yourself as you do your best to stick by the Shepherd. Be there when that familiar voice calls your name and take a drink in the still water He’s offering you.

Prayer:

Jesus, You are generous in blessing. Please strengthen me for the next steps in my journey with You. Remove my fear and excuses and guide me to where You want me to be. You are my Shepherd and I am content in Your care. Amen

Top 10 Reasons I Share My Faith With My Child

10. I want my child to be as prepared as possible to handle the joys and challenges that life will bring her as she grows. “Train a child in the way he should go, and with he is old he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6

9. God has commanded me as a parent and adult to bring my child to Him. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Matthew 19:14

8. I want my child to know where to find comfort. Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in Me.” John 14:1

7. All of our gifts come from God, and I want my child to know who to thank for every one of their gifts and blessings. “Give thanks to the Lord, call on His name; make known among the nations what He has done.” 1 Chronicles 16:8

6. I want my child to understand and value the blessings given to us in God’s Word. “Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God, and obey it.” Luke 11:28

5. There is only one who loves my child more than I do, and I want my child to know all about Him. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that He lay down His life for His friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.” John 16:12-14

4. My husband and I vowed to each other when we were married that our house would serve the Lord. “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15

3. I want my child to be filled with pure spiritual food, not junk. “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.” 1 Peter 2:2

2. I want my child to know the truth. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32

1. I know just how much my Savior did for me, and that is just too good to not want to share every bit of it with my child. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16


Prayer: Thank you Heavenly Father for blessing me with the privilege of sharing my faith with my child and bringing her to you. Bless all parents who continue to share You with their children and bless our children and they continue to learn and grow in their faith in You. Amen.

Serve One Another In Love

Serve one another in love.  Galatians 5:13

We walk a delicate line in our house between encouraging our children to both serve and to let others serve them.  Each child wants to pour their own glass of milk, but one wants to pour for everyone.  Since there is really no wrong answer here, I am completely inconsistent, and the whole thing can be a little maddening.  I used to lean more toward independence, everyone doing for themselves, but I have recently shifted my focus on the issue to the words from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “Serve one another in love.” 

My kids don’t get to do that enough.  I don’t know that I get to do that enough.  Between teaching three grade levels and trying to manage the rest of the house, I feel pretty accomplished in the serving part most days; it’s the love part I think I may be missing out on.  I too often grump because I have to do this or that, instead of rejoicing in the fact that God has blessed my day with the chance to serve my children in every aspect of their lives.  What else could I possibly spend my day doing that is more meaningful? 

A willingness to serve is one of the things I want to instill in my children.  But if I want it to be a life long joy for them, I have to help them discover the everyday chances that they have to serve, and I have to model a servant’s heart myself.  I haven’t been very good at that lately.  Today, I start again today, knowing that I am forgiven for the mistakes of yesterday.  I start today, teaching my children that the opportunity to serve another child of God is a gift.  I start today showing them that serving one another in love is exactly what Jesus did for us, and in thankfulness to him, we will do it for one another.

Heavenly Father,

The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.  I often look upon serving others as a hardship or an inconvenience.  Forgive me.  Where I have opportunities to serve, help me do so in love.  In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Seek first

We have a special devotion today from Leanna!


Admittedly, the words below are not mine, but the Holy Spirit really spoke to me through them when I read them and I wanted to share them with you. Pastor Jeske is a man of great wisdom whom God speaks through in simple but mighty ways!

"Misplaced Priorities
One of my persistent weaknesses is that I want to author my own play, the play of my life, in which I am the star, for which I would like to write the script. I can pretty much do fine on my own for a while, and then when I encounter a problem too big for me, I holler for God to show up on "my" stage, on my cue. He generally does not oblige me at such times. Hmm. Wonder why.

In the middle of his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus helped his disciples to see how the universe really operates. The more you grasp for material things, the more in love you are with yourself and your agenda, the less you will achieve and the less satisfaction you will feel.

Here is a better way: "Seek first his [i.e., God's] kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well" (Matthew 6:33). Seeking God's kingdom means seeing yourself as God's creation, placed here on earth for a mission, his mission. You are in his play, and he will let you know the role he needs you to play for him.

Seeking God's righteousness means choosing to value your forgiveness of sins through the blood of Jesus as your most precious possession. When you have that, everything else that God thinks you need will come flowing into your life.


Heavenly Father, Thank you for the gift of your precious forgiveness.  Please help me to always Seek First your Righteousness as I go through each of my days.
Amen

God Loves A Cheerful Giver

Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, 

for God loves a cheerful giver.

2 Corinthians 9:7

Around Christmastime, I usually do a toy purge.  You know what I mean--going through all of the kids' toys, figuring out what they don't play with anymore, the broken, the Happy Meal toys, and giving them away to Goodwill or throwing them away.  I always try to do this when the kids are at school, because otherwise I hear the inevitable, "NO!  I NEED THAT!  THAT'S MY FAVORITE!", no matter if they've played with it lately or they haven't touched it for a year.  I always remind them that they're going to be blessed by Christmas, and by the time the day is over they won't remember the toys that were given away.

It's not always easy to teach our children good stewardship.  Think about when they get money for their Birthdays.  How many of us tell our children that they need to take 10% of that money, and put it in the church offering?  I know we haven't.  It would be so tough for them, that's for sure.

But like most other things, teaching our children good stewardship starts with us modeling good stewardship.  We need to remember that stewardship isn't all about money.  Stewardship, more specifically, is faith in action. It is giving of our time, our talents, our treasure.  When we have good stewardship, we are giving ourselves to the Lord, and making Jesus the focus of our lives.  Like our children giving their old toys to Goodwill or tithing from their birthday money, we are giving to the Lord as He has given to us.

The wonderful thing about good stewardship is the blessings that come from it.  Malachi 3:10 says, "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.  'Test me in this,' says the Lord Almighty, 'and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be enough room to store it.'"  The more we give, the more blessings we get out of it.  When our children see this happening in our own lives, they will be happy to follow our example.

We pray:  Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the gifts you give to us in our lives every day.  Help us to remember to be good stewards of those gifts, and help us to teach our children to be good stewards themselves.  We praise you for the blessings you shower upon us.  In Your name we pray, Amen.

The One Who Doesn't Change...

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." James 1:17


I find myself clinging to this verse on the eve of what would be Samantha's first birthday. A year. It's been a year. I can still see the joy and fear on Travis and Stephanie's faces. I can remember going back in the room and seeing her. Taking a video of Travis whispering to his precious little girl how much he loved her. I remember trying to capture moments to take and show Stephanie as she was in recovery and her sweet daughter was in the NICU. So many memeories. I remember the people in the waiting room that day, sitting there with my mom, I remember watching the clock, getting a coffee (I realize that for me this probably doesn't seem like a 'vivid' memory since I'm always getting coffee, but they had an old fashioned coffee vending machine where the cup drops down and fills - I remember that). She was so beautiful. So much hair. So alive!

I'm terrified to start this four month period this year. A four month period that last year started with such joy and then ended so wrong, so horrible, so....hard. The four months of Samanta's life here on earth was the hardest four months I have ever lived through. Her life journey alone could have made it such - but added to it our immediate family went through two major surgeries as well as many of other 'normal' difficult things (lice, tax audit, etc.). I think back, I look back, I don't know how we did it. I don't know how we are still alive, still breathing, still walking, still talking, still pretending like somehow things are 'normal'. There is no more normal, at least not like it used to be. We are changed. We are different. One day accepting, the next day angry. Sometimes all the 'stuff' of those four months overwhelms me to the point that I feel like I'm suffocating and can't breath or take another step. Then the next day I am rejoicing and praising God for all He has brought us through and the healing (both temporal and eternal) He has given. But wherever the emotions of the given day are, it is still true that we are changed, there is no going back.

Perhaps this is why I cling to the One who "doesn't change like shifting shadows." The same one who holds our past and holds us now also holds our furture. He will not change. He will not leave. He promises to take care of us and love us. Some things we can look back on with new understanding and appreication, other things still have me angry and wondering "why?" God doesn't promise that we will get to know the explanation. But He does promise that all He does and continues to do is for our good - and even though we may lose heart and struggle - He does not change. The one who holds our precious Samantha, also holds us here on earth and will continue to do so until we meet her again. That will not change. He does not change. She was a gift, that is now perfected in heaven with our Father, tomorrow we will celebrate that gift from above.

Seek First His Kingdom

"But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you."

(Matthew 6: 33)

 
For as much as we may not want to admit it, the truth is most of us are worriers.  As we grow older, and especially when we become mothers, our tendency to worry becomes stronger. We go to bed with those nagging concerns about what will happen tomorrow-- how we are going to get the bills paid, the laundry folded, the groceries bought, the house cleaned--and still have enough energy to help the kids with their homework, make dinner, and have a smile on our face when our husbands walk in the door.  We love our families and care deeply for their well-being.  Yet, we can easily become distracted with all the expectations placed upon us, instead of focusing on our family's real needs and who truly provides for those needs.  Quickly, we can make the simple things in life complicated, and lose our focus on what's truly important.   

The Gospel of Matthew stresses the truth that by God's grace we are made complete in Christ.  In chapter 6, we are told not to become distracted with the worries of life.  We are reminded that we cannot find the answers to our fears and doubts within ourselves.  Rather, Matthew admonishes us to stay focused on Christ: "Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you."  In His own time and in His own way, our Heavenly Father always provides for our needs of both body and soul.  

Matthew chapter six ends with this poignant reminder: "Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own." As Christian women, God has equipped us with special qualities to care for and nurture those we love. The beautiful thing is that despite our worrisome, sinful ways--He loves us.  And, He uses us to care for and bless our families. So, may we daily heed the advice of the apostle Matthew--give our worries to God, seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and trust in Christ alone to provide us with everything we could ever need.  

 Heavenly Father~

Thank you for providing for our families, and being everything we need.  Forgive us when we don't trust this truth.  Help us to daily seek Your kingdom first. 
In Christ's name~Amen.