This is my story...

Tonight our church service was a special one. It was a service especially dedicated to preparing our hearts for communion. I love these services, my family happily informs me this is because I'm 'introspective'. I'm not sure how this can be true but they assure me that it is. Whatever the case may be, I love to sit and soak in the messages given in these special times. I love the connection with my ministry, the closeness of knowing that the hearts of my brothers and sisters around me are also turned to God and seeking His face in their lives. Tonight's service was especially special for me. It was one of those times when you feel God reach down and hold your heart and say "Its ok, just keep following Me". 

The thing that was imprinted most deeply on my heart tonight was the song "Blessed Assurance". Think about these words for a bit. 

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh what a fore-tase of glory divine! 

Heir of salvation, PURCHASE of God, 

Born of His Spirit, WASHED in His blood. 

THIS is my story! THIS is my song.

Praising my Savior, all the day long. 

Perfect submission, ALL is at rest, 

I in my Savior, am happy and blessed! 

Watching and waiting, looking above,

FILLED WITH HIS GOODNESS, LOST IN HIS LOVE! 

THIS is my story, THIS is my song,

Praising my Savior, all the day long. 

Sometimes I forget the simple truth in this song. I forget that my past, my hurts, my mistakes, my struggles, my family, my house, my car, my job, my grades, my looks, my style... None of that is what I have to share with the world. None of that actually matters all that much unless it shows Jesus to the world. You know how sometimes there are things that you think that if someone knew that about you then they just wouldn't want anything to do with you? Well, what if that is really not even a factor? What if feeling that way, letting that hinder relationships, is really a tool of satan to try and destroy those relationships? What if, really, we are defined solely by the blood of Jesus Christ and His healing redeeming work in our lives? If we are truly filled with HIS goodness and lost in HIS love, won't that shine for Him in ways that nothing else can? Perhaps it is a choice after all. A choice to BE who we think we are, to let our hurts and heartaches and failures control us, or to BE His. Simply His. If He is our life, and THIS FACT is our story... We are PURCHASED by God at a very high cost. Which means that we have value. He paid the same price for each of us, so none of us has the right to say we are less valuable than anyone else. Period. Doing so is doubting God's justice and wisdom. We are WASHED in His blood. Each of us. Regardless where we have been, what we have done, or what we'v been through, if we are washed in His blood then we have absolutely no right to believe ourselves unclean. Regardless how we may feel. To do so is to doubt the power of the blood of Christ to cleanse us from our own sins, or from the sins of others. God touched my heart through this song tonight. He knows how to take care of my heart :) 

Our bucket list day...

You see, I have this really awesome house mate. She's the bomb! We have great great fun together!! But in just 2 months she is moving off to Poland and our time of getting to hang out and do fun stuff and cook cool food and share this great little house... Well, sadly you cant share a house with someone who lives half way across the world! So today, (Saturday) we took the day off and did some of the things that have been on our bucket list of cool things to do someday! 

First stop was the garden expo at the Horse Park in Starksville. It was so awesome! I think that for both of us the best part was the time we spent talking to this great wood carver, his wife and their son. I wish like everything we had gotten a picture with him! He was a wonderful old man! He was a Colonel in the Army and wow... He was full of stories. I bought a nativity scene from him and he took the time to explain each of the different woods out of which the different sets were made! I also bought a teeny tiny little rat. Bella was delighted :) Its even smaller than a chocolate truffle! 

A few of the things I/we fell in love with the rest of show were:

This BEAUTIFUL swing!! I just loved it! It has cup holders in the middle arm and is just so awesome! Someday when I'm rich and famous I'm going to find someone to make one of these for me :) 

This GORGEOUS piece of furniture caught my eye immediately!! I had a fit! Literally! The guy said "Well mam, it is for sale!" :) I would have loved to bring it home with me! All of his furniture was really awesome actually. 

These totally cool tin signs :) I would love to hang them in my kitchen :) 

All yr long Jewel has talked about these awesome creations. Today she was so happy that they were there again and was all excited to show me! So, while she was distracted, I snuck back and bought her favorite one for her. She was absolutely thrilled. You can kinda see that from the picture :) 

These blown glass wind chimes are some of the prettiest things I'v ever seen in my life I think. I love wind chimes of all shapes, sizes, and colors. These however are just incredible!

From the garden expo we headed back into town to go shopping. There is this totally awesome Piggly Wiggly there that we both love! They have all kinds of cool stuff and we are both suckers for grocery stores that have a large international section or a great selection of cheeses. A store with both... Well, thats just awesome! But, on our way we got side tracked by... BBQ!!

This is where the bucket list idea really kicked in. This is a place we have always wanted to stop but never did. Well today we did it! 

Ok, let me just be brutal here. Jewel loved it and thought it was amazing. I on the other hand was rather underwhelmed. I understand though that my trip to Texas in January completely ruined me for anything less than really awesome BBQ.

Jewel, silly girl, forgot to take a jacket and we were sitting outside to eat, so, she got a beach towel out of her car and wrapped up in it :) Our conclusion was that if you need to wrap up in a beach towel in the dead of winter you just have to act confident and pretend nothing is odd about it and noone will notice. :) 

 After lunch it was on to our beloved Piggly Wiggly and one of my personal favorite things... Their olive bar...

And cheeses...

We got some great soft cheeses that we'r both pretty excited about trying :) 

From their we went to yet another grocery store. This one though was an awesome little Asian market. Ok, one thing you should know. Jewel and I both love weird foods! Well, what a lot of ppl consider weird. So Asian markets, Mexican tienda's, the international section of any grocery store... Right down our alley. Although we didn't get any, we both loved the whole fish option. 

 We wanted to try something we had never had, so we picked black sesame candy and these great little yogurt flavored soft drinks. They were interesting to say the least! 

I think it was at this point that we went thrift store shopping and I found these really awesome shoes that I'v wanted for MONTHS but was determined not to buy new :) :) I was/am, super pumped about that! 

When we were satisfied that we had thoroughly searched the store for all and any great deals that we wanted badly enough to over ride our lack of need for them, we exited the premises and went to whack something else off our bucket list. Concretes! :) 

There is this rinky dink little place called Bop's that advertises these things called concretes "because they have so much stuff in them they are stiff as concrete!" Ok, if you don't already know this, let me just tell you, frozen custard is AMAZING!!! Its better than ice cream! The one we got was this delightful concoction made of a vanilla base, pineapple, strawberries, and the best part, roasted pecans. Totally incredible!  

We ate our amazing concretes while we drove aimlessly around town looking for a health food store :) After we found that we headed to A Strange Brew. Its this great little coffee shop that we'v been wanting to go to. It was truly amazing! 

They had these AWESOME blue lights! You can kinda see the one chandelier way in the back. I loved that thing! I tried for pictures of it but they didn't work. I did get one of the wall light though :) 

We hung out there, did homework, laughed at the people, and did our level best to get good and hungry! Then we went to find us some sushi :) 

And amazing sushi it was too! Wow! For those of you who know/like sushi, the one roll was a salmon mango kiwi celery roll. We'd never had anything close to that combo before so we wanted to try it. It was yummy, but not one we would buy again. It was however, as sushi always is, amazing! But then the best part of the evening happened. It rained :) :) And we had a long way back to the car. I got to do something I'v always wanted to do, dance in the rain in a parking lot at night. I think the few other people around there thought I'd lost my mind! Jewel thought maybe I had too. It was amazing! By the time the adult in me finally took over and made me get in the car I was totally drenched, but totally happy! 

We ended the evening with another concrete. Have you figured out yet that our bucket list consisted almost entirely of food? We laughed at ourselves about it but thats us... Needless to say, between the 2 of us we only got about half the last concrete down. The rest got saved for my sister, who is now a devout concretes fan :) Over all the day was totally amazing, very relaxing, and incredibly expensive :) Oh and by the way, if you come to visit us in our 2 remaining months, I promise we'l make sure to treat you to a Bop's concrete! :) 

He knows how to take care of my heart...

*Disclaimer! This post is being written for ladies. Guys, if you care to listen in thats fine. But NO information disclosed herein may be used against any female in your life! Amen. 

"He knows how to take care of my heart." These words came from a very dear friend of mine one day shortly after she agreed (very readily I believe) to marry a guy who, just a few short years earlier, she had declared she would NEVER date, much less marry. She went on to tell me how he had gone to her dad and asked for advice on how to love her. She is close to her dad and this guy needed all the help he could get to woo her. He worked hard to win her heart. He learned about her, took time to ask, and time to listen to the answer. He won her, slowly and completely. How many of you ladies can honestly tell me thats not what you want out of life? Zero. That is the exact number. If your alive and breathing and female, you want that. I want that. We all want that. But it doesn't seem to be the reality in most cases does it? A lot of married women are 'content' at best. Many are silently hurting and still more are not even bothering to be silent about it. Maybe, just maybe, that is because we expect this kind of heart caring to come from the wrong source? 

Let me go back to my friend for a moment. I'm not going to idealize her. She is not perfect by any means. But she has this incredible quality that I admire greatly. She doesn't think its anything special, and maybe she is right. The truth is that its something we all need in our lives. My friend knows Jesus. She knew Jesus long before the would-be-love-of-her-life began pursuing her. She knew the heart of Jesus Christ in an intimate way. She allowed Him to woo her, to fill her, to overflow her life and pool around her. Her world was, is, a place where people congregate for refreshment and peace. She exudes life and grace because she is filled with Life and Grace. She married a wonderful guy. A truly wonderful guy. But he's also a normal human. He knows the tremendous gift that he has in this girl and he knows she is worth pursuing with all his heart. His love for her, and his care of her heart, is largely due to who she is, not who he is. So, here is my proposition. Perhaps having that kind of love in our lives is actually entirely dependent on our relationship with Jesus Christ and not on 'finding Mr. Right'? I think yes. 

A few months ago I did a crazy thing. I started praying for something. It started as a suggestion from a friend which I threw off as silly and irrational. But it kept niggling at the back of my mind. God kept saying "Just ask Me" and I kept saying "Are You crazy? I'm NOT asking You for that!" But God is more stubborn than me and eventually I gave in. He has not granted my request, and I am very grateful for that, but we have had a TREMENDOUS ride the last few months!! Wow! The scenery has been beautiful, my heart has broken a few times, my world has turned upside down, the life plan I so carefully constructed got shattered, He led me through dealing with old deep ragged wounds, and I learned that truly, He knows how to take care of my heart. My very grudging willingness to open my heart to Him in that new way completely changed my world... Forever. The most recent installment on this trek to knowing Him better came when my two best friends started dating... Each other. I was delighted! Well, I wanted to be. The unselfish side of me was/is, completely thrilled with this new arrangement! The selfish side? Well, she really misses them. I went from many many texts from both of them every day to often not hearing from them at all. When the two people you communicate with most in the world start communicating with each other and not with you, it leaves a tremendous vacuum. But guess what? He knows how to take care of my heart!!! He, Him, Life, Grace, Comfort, Wind, Rain, Love, comes and fills my life in ways I never knew my friends were filling. Suddenly, since my phone is so quiet, I engage with the people around me a whole lot more. I'v made new friendships that I value very highly and some of my old friendships have deepened. I'v learned about myself, and more importantly about God. Don't get me wrong, I still love my best friends and they still love me. I know that in the future this is going to be a great deal of fun, but for now, its a daily adjustment to being needed a lot less by them and to needing other people more than I do them. 

God does lonely. He is there in the lonely. His hands are gentle and His heart is huge. I have been so incredibly AmAzEd at what He has done to show me his caring. I'v learned to ask Him to teach me how He loves me. I know that I need Him to show me the ways that He cares because honestly I'm not good at picking up on it on my own. He gently and faithfully does that. He'l do that for you too. He WANTS to do that for you!! His finger prints are all over your life. His blood was spilt to woo you. Honey, there are some really sweet men out there, but there is no man out there who is going to do that. And there is no man out there who is going to KNOW all the right ways to love us and care for our hearts. And quite honestly, there is no man out there who has the capacity to completely fill all we want him to UNLESS we first allow Jesus Christ to take care of our hearts. 

I don't always feel Him. I don't always remember to run to Him when I'm lonely or sad or scared. I forget sometimes and I cry and stress out and eat chocolate. Eventually He does always get my attention but sometimes He has to go to some extreme measures. But I'v learned this fact over the last several months. Even when I forget it, even when I don't feel it, even when my whole world is just rotten bad and awful, HE KNOWS HOW TO TAKE CARE OF MY HEART!!! I just have to learn to let Him. 

If I could choose...

Lately I'v been thinkin about somethin... With me that is seldom a good thing! Well, I guess that depends on your perspective. Let me tell you what I'v been thinkin this time.  

If I could obliterate just one major disease, or just one major sin, thousands and thousands of people would be helped right? So if I were to obliterate just one, what would I choose? One sin... Just one. How about murder? That would certainly save lives! Or maybe any form of child abuse. The world would be a much much better place if no child was ever mistreated in any malicious way. But then what about the damage that is done by lying? How many lives are ripped apart every day by lies and deceit? Looking at diseases the first thing that comes to my mind is cancer. But I wouldn't choose cancer. If I had that power in my hands my selfishness would take over and I would choose to stop the disease that affects me and my family the most. I would root out and destroy the thing that is tearing down piece by piece one of the people I love most in the world. I would stop the THING that is slowly stealing from us one of the greatest men that I know. I would choose that disease because I am selfish and naturally bad and because I love my family passionately and because I want more than anything in the world for each of my neicews to be happy and healthy and well adjusted.  If I were good though, if I were not selfish and if I had the capacity to honestly love other children as much as my own sweet littles, I would choose cancer, or kwashiorkor (essentially childhood starvation). I would pick the disease who's end would save the most lives. Truly I would. But I'm not good. I'm human and therefore I do not (ThankFully!!) have that choice. But I have Jesus. 

See, here is the thing. If I had the power to take away all rape in the world, or all hunger, or all cancer, or even... yes even all Parkinson's, I would take with it the work that Christ can do through it. To take away any sin would be to take away the incredible gift of healing that can be found through Jesus Christ. To take away any disease would be to take away the beauty of His presence through our darkest days. I would love to save my family the heart break of loss. I would love to give back to my friend the sweet mama she lost to cancer. I would love to erase the horror deep in the eyes and heart of my friend as she pours out her story of childhood abuse. I cant. But I know One who can. I know One who provides amply and in ways that an earthly father never can. I know One who comforts with a presence sweeter even than that of a mother. I know One who can restore purity and wholeness to a heart that has been ravaged by another person's sin. 

The reality is that we each make our choices. We choose our pain, our sorrow, our suffering... Or, we choose Christ. None of us can make the bad things that we, or anyone else, faces go away. But we can listen, love, support, care, and share Jesus Christ with each hurting person (and that is absolutely everyone) that we meet. 

This is the time and place where maybe I should say that we must choose Christ and endure to the end because heaven will be worth it all. That would be a true statement. But it would cheapen life here and life there SO so SO much! I don't like to watch someone I love loose physical capacity. I don't like to see pieces of him change and crumble. I don't like to know that a week and a half ago I sat in church and tried hard not to giggle at a sweet little girl who was giggling at me... And that a few short days later her life here ended. I don't like the reality that a woman so strong and graceful and full of life lost her battle with cancer and left her children and grandchildren to muddle through the hurt and brokenness and horror of loss. I don't like that evil men can do evil things and bring such shame and heartbreak to innocent lives. I don't like it. Everything within me rebels and cries against it. But if Jesus is there, if He is with the hurting, if His hand is over me, guiding you, feeding the hungry, loving the sick, is that not heaven? Is heaven not His presence here as much as His presence on the other side of death? JESUS is worth choosing. JESUS is worth laying down our rights for. JESUS is worth the hurt and risk it takes to let Him heal us. Yes, a new heaven and a new earth will be wonderful! Every moment immersed in a world where there is no need of the sun because there is the Son... Nothing could possibly be more incredible!! But what makes us think we will experience His presence there if we do not choose to experience it here? 

I can not choose a sin to destroy. I can not choose a disease to obliterate. But let me tell you what I can choose. I can choose one heart to give to Jesus. I can choose one life to sink completely into Him. I can choose one day at a time to let my face show forth the crazy amazing love of Him who holds my moments, the good and the bad, in His hands. I can choose Jesus.