Journal of Faith: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling Philippians 2:12

  The worst thing that can happen to a Christian in my eyes is for her/him to attempt to replace God.   With the constant pressure to fit in, achieve success, or feel loved, it become extremely easy to push God to the side for the promise of personal satisfaction and acclaim.  We get told that money, love, and popularity will make us happy, and who doesn't want to be happy?  I know I do.   What people don't tell you is that happiness is fleeting.  There are a whole spectrum of feelings and happiness is just one of them. It is unrealistic to think that we can stop other feelings from coming.   We let go of reality and try to chase happiness at any cost.  Morals become compromised and then we slip into a place where we no longer remember that we know someone who has everything that we ever wanted in the palm of his hand.   We essentially walk away from the truth to chase after shallow self gratification.  The worst part is that most times ...

  As I try to maintain my own manners in a world that insists on pushing me to my limits I have found that being polite can bring about miraculous changes in my life. Being polite for me requires that I take my attitude into my own hands. People bump you and don't say excuse me, they drop things and walk right by, and please has become a begging word instead of a magic word.   I see it all the time with my students, and I try to encourage them to be polite.  It is seriously an uphill battle to get student to even say I'm sorry.   My own son was born with company manners, but his toddler status has him leaving those manners behind for wining, crying, and fussing. So how do I manage to maintain composure?  I start off my my day saying thank you.   It really does make a difference! It doesn't always work like I expect, but God always gives me what I need to at least make it through.  I still lose my center sometimes, and in those moments I just ta...

People have had plans for my life since before they knew me.  I was the daughter of so and so, and that meant that I would be so and so and I would do so and so.  The list probably goes on forever.  I am that way too sometimes.  I plan all the way through my life.  I think about where I want to go and how I will get there.  I map my life out and then I go for it.  This is a wonderful way to be until something happens unexpectedly.  In those times when my plans start to get shifted I have a tendency to try to shove things back in order.  This resolve is also a good quality to have unless God is the one moving my life in a different direction.  Then my resolve becomes stubbornness which isn't helpful to me at all.   Of course there is the other extreme.  Sometimes when I just don't feel like fighting I sort of take whatever comes and just say "fine, whatever, I don't care."  This works great when God is driving your life, b...

Okay ladies (and maybe gentlemen if you are reading this).  I told you earlier this year that I was going to study the woman's role in the marriage relationship on the basis of the representation of the church in the church and Christ parallel.  I pretty much found out that Christ loves us the way he does because he wants us to love him that same way. Therefore men and women should ultimately represent Christ to each other in many respects.  He focuses on men loving and women respecting most likely because women sometimes have a hard time respecting their men when they see things that they believe are contrary to what they should be seeing while men sometimes lack in the area of showing their emotions properly.  However, with those things aside we are all suppose to try to out love each other.   This means forgive like crazy, think about the other person all the time, try to do everything and anything for that other person to remind them that you are a gift f...

On this Easter morning I really felt like it was important for me to share that Jesus our Lord and savior died and rose again for love.   It was God's love for us that sent God the son, Jesus the Christ, to this earth to show us how to love.  Jesus lived a life of love and compassion to show us how he wants us to live.   He said that people should knows us Christians by our love that we show each other. He suffered and died so that we wouldn't have to live separate from God showing us the greatest love that anyone can give.   Then he rose again victoriously just as he said he would. Because God is love and Jesus is God the son then that means Jesus is love just as God is love.   Love lived for us to show us how to live.  Love died for us that we might have life, and love rose again because love is more powerful than death.  Jesus is Alive and so love is alive. I am not talking about the human limited love, but I am talking of the Agape all encompassi...

In my college courses I heard pretty much two views about destiny,  Either destiny is already in place or we create it.    I believe that our destiny is already in place, and we create how we get there.   When I was talking to the Lord about what to write today he showed me a funny cartoon of this person being lead down a trail.  This person looked at the forest around them and decided to go off the path.  Unfortunately they forgot that they had a rope around them which was being pulled to their destination.  They then proceeded to bump, trip and scrape their way to the exact destination that the road would have led them if they had walked the path.  I think our destiny is like that.  God knows where he intends for us to go, but we still have free will to choose whether we will suffer self inflicted difficulty by wandering in other directions.  If we give our lives to God we are all going to get to our destiny, but going our own path wil...

I am taking a class at my church called grief recovery . It gives me tools to help me deal with how I feel about different relationships in my life. I am so grateful and I feel like as a single mother I've got a lot of work to do.  Grieving is totally normal, but it should NOT be putting my life on hold for years at a time.  Our lives shouldn't depend on anyone else being or doing certain things, and no one should be able to keep us from living our best life. If we live our life according to our expectations of others we will be disappointed almost constantly. If that is you, and it is definitely me,  I encourage you to get to a program that helps you move forward.  I thank God for the wisdom he has imparted to his people to learn how to deal with different emotional experiences.  I am full of emotions so I will be using my new tools all the time.  God's timing is perfect because I am planning to get married soon, and I don't want any of my past to hinder ...

This past week I was helping with a pretty big event where I was left alone to finish up some of the food and make sure that a few other things were done before attending to myself.  Time was short and my intellect wasn't cutting it.   I became so overwhelmed that I just sat down and cried for about a minute.  In that minute I prayed for God to take over because it was too much for me.  In that time period God changed everything.  I started talking out Loud to God asking him what to do and he showed me.   I was amazed that all of the food made it out and everyone was happy.  The cake that I thought was doomed was a sensation, and I was at home holding my two year old. My seemingly hopeless situation was received as a fabulous event. A similar story of Jesus saving an event was mentioned in my devotional book today.  It was the story of Jesus' first miracle where he turned water into wine at a wedding.  The Lord really is miraculous and can...

I am one of those people who has been saved since I was like two seconds old (this is of course an exaggeration).  In the years of my walk with the Lord I have felt at many times that all of what I was living was for nothing.  I worked hard to get good grades, I stayed away from the bad kids (most of the time), and I did so many extracurricular activities including church that my name was all over the place.  By the time I was ready to graduate high school I was upset because I thought that all of my work was going to soon mean nothing.  I cried and was totally devastated that I had spent so much time doing things that wouldn't matter after I was gone.  I began to doubt that doing good would yield any sort of favorable result, and I asked God what was the point.  My mother told me to hold on and wait because she believed that I would not be forgotten.  That next week I received three different scholarships from my school as well as several awards that...

I thought I had already written about this, but the Lord gave me a totally different view of what it means to be a witness and it sort of connects in with the whole illustration of the growing plant.  When the SUN shines down on flowers they blossom and bloom, showing the world the beauty that God nurtured.  Similarly as God's people witness the glory of the SON in their lives they are suppose to blossom to show the evidence of the work of God in their lives.  Many times people focus on evangelism like witnessing is only about telling people the gospel of Jesus Christ, but the gospel should show all over us like the flower that was kissed by the SON.  When we look for God to show his wonder in our lives we become witnesses to what he does.  We see him doing great things, and it forever changes us.  We should open ourselves up to receive nourishment from the SON and show the world the beauty of his workmanship.  We are his masterpieces delicately cu...

 At my job I try to teach the children the implications of the word integrity.  To me integrity equates to steadfastness. It is the ability to stand upright even when things or people are trying to pull you down.  It means taking a stance and holding it when people are looking after you and when they aren't.  It means making a plan and sticking to it.  It means taking on responsibility without losing a sense of self.  Integrity means making decisions based on what you know is right and wrong with the intent to do what is right.  It transcends culture or title, and it shows itself.  Integrity doesn't cower or hide.  Integrity stands tall, but not in an arrogant way as if to exalt itself.  Integrity can simply mean saying no to a night on the town before a big test or staying up to finish some dishes.  Integrity can mean going to the park with my son instead of staying on Facebook all day.  It could mean taking care of yourself b...