Leaving A Trail of Beauty

I've mentioned and featured this beautiful visitor a couple of times already. I am all about the tiny ways God chooses to bless me and try to find tangible, daily reminders of His care for me in the tiniest of ways.  I am always on the lookout for what I've termed "God winks". These are ways I feel like He  shows me how tenderly He seeks out ways to delight me with His goodness. On a couple of especially lonely days last week, He sent this beauty to hang around my front steps, clinging to the standing phlox my precious daughter planted there last summer. I spent at least 20 minutes with my phone poised and ready to capture the fluttering and dancing of my unexpected guest. I turned it on "live" mode and caught quite a few shots of her in action. I held the button down and sent "bursts" of her careening from petal to petal. She was in the midst of my amateurish photo shoot and had no clue.  She is pretty from all angles, but w...

Eighteen years. Yes, it takes 18 years for that newborn to officially be declared an "adult", but I'm referring to another group of years heavy on my heart today. For the past 18 years in a row I have joined the throngs of other mamas on the first day of school. My news feed today is loaded with smiling faces, new clothes, new backpacks, lunch boxes, and my absolute favorite -- a brand new box of crayons! School starts early here in my area, and though we are far, far away from a real seasonal "Fall"-- summer is effectively over for so many. Though it's been many, many more years since I participated in the back to school frenzy as a student, I cannot lie that I got butterflies in my stomach every single night before the first day of school for my three for the past 18 years. I sit here this morning in a very different place in almost two decades. I have no one starting school. I have no new backpack in front of my door waiting to be scooped u...

( a time to intentionally redirect my gaze and give testimony to the ways God blesses me) Good Morning! I'm not good at faking things. I have one of those faces and apparently even one of those texting styles that reveals my true thoughts in spite of the emojis I choose to tack on to the end of my full sentences. Yes, I am a " grammar girl " and text with case sensitivity and punctuation. ( You never know who might be watching, of course!) Back to my first comment . . . I'm not good at faking or pretending. I can't hide it if I'm not doing well or feel deflated. It's written all over my face and bleeds through into my writing. So, I am going to follow through with a commitment I made to myself in breathing life back into my blog.  I will intentionally take time at least once each week to give thanks for how God is filling my tank. He doesn't stop doing it just because I don't feel upbeat and grateful.  He doesn't...

SUFFICIENT ___________________________________________________ As with so many issues of the Christian life, I deal with the different way God and I tend to think. I find the verse above a comfort at first glance.  I like the part about "sufficient" but my finite mind and sometimes oftentimes stubborn heart wrestle with what God means by sufficient versus what I deem sufficient.  What if He doesn't think I need what I think I need? What if He thinks I can subsist and be content on a way different amount than I think I can? What if His determination of sufficient doesn't add up when it comes to the commitments I've already made? What if His numbers aren't the same as my numbers and those of the cumulative amount of my current bills? What then?  Again . . . what then? Does that mean He is not being sufficient? Does that mean He doesn't care about me?  Does that mean . . . He's forgotten me?  Let's read on...

Some days are just like that, aren't they? You know the ones. You wake up simultaneously whispering "Jesus" and "what in the world am I going to do?" in the same ragged breath. You long to spout faithful treatises and flowery expressions of God's sovereignty. Yet all that comes out is a puff of empty air. You don't know what to pray. You don't know what else to say. Your neck hurts from hunkering down and pushing on through. Your sleep is sporadic, because though you said you'd leave it in the capable hands of the Lord; you've conjured up a thousand ways you could try to fix it all by yourself in the inky blackness of the night. You balance the desire for the darkness to stay like a comfortable invisibility cloak and an eagerness for the dawn to break and relieve you from all those night time tangle of thoughts that send the morning racing ahead without rest for your soul. "What comes with this new day?" you hesitantl...

( a time to intentionally redirect my gaze and give testimony to the ways God blesses me) I spoke briefly last Thursday about the sacrifice of praise.  "Through him then let us continually  of fer up a  sacrifice of   praise  to God, that is, the fruit  of  lips that acknowledge his name." Hebrews 13:15 ESV I am keenly aware of the way I currently look on paper. How the numbers DO NOT add up. How my month is exceeding my wealth financially. I have gotten more "no's" than the one "yes" I have longed to hear. Yet in all this, I know that I know God is still Who He says He is. God can STILL do what He says He can do. I am still who He says I am. His Word is STILL alive and active in me, my life, and in that of those lives around me who believe in Him, too.  So, though at moments throughout ALL of the last few days, weeks, and yes, months now since I have been employed in a full time fashion, I have felt slayed, abandone...

REMEMBER We are called to remember. God considered the concept of remembering so important He referenced it no less than 150 times in the Old and New Testaments combined. The verse in question today turns the idea of "remembering" on its head and cautions us what NOT to remember. "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old." Isaiah 43:18 ESV I'm taking this one to mean don't dwell on the past. It's okay to remember it but don't stay there. Don't fixate on the things of old. Learn from it. Let it give you wisdom for your future self. The following quote struck me as I have been forcing myself to go back as far as I can remember, to get back to that little Pam who was unblemished by years of mistakes, missteps, and misremembering (I guess that really is a word!): "Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them." Richard L. Evans  I find...