Undivided Mom – E-Book Review!

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I am excited to share a new book with you today from my friend Kayse. Kayse is a wife and a mother and God has been working in her heart recently and she has written a 14 day devotional Undivided Mom to help mothers “find Christ in the midst of the chaos of motherhood”!

As a wife, mother and a woman that works full time outside of the home I struggle with balance. It can be difficult to carve out time for me, time for studying God’s Word, time for my kids and my husband.

I know that I don’t handle the balance well – but I am seeking ways to do this better. One of the things I do in the mornings is spend some quiet time reading the Bible and other devotionals. It helps me begin my day right and usually encourages a better attitude for the day.

I was given an advanced copy of this new e-book devotional and started including it in my morning routine. What I like about this book is that it is a quick and easy read – but challenging and encouraging.

Kayse is in the “thick” of motherhood and knows how challenging it can be. But she uses stories from the Bible and her own life experiences to help encourage other mamas to spend their time wisely and have the right focus on and for our kids.

In her own words she challenges us to see where our heart is at….

“Are we anxious and worried about everything that we “need to do”, so distracted by serving that we forget to consider those we serve? Or are we concerned with the “one thing” that trumps all others?

Jesus has called us to be wives and mothers, yes. But first and foremost, He has called us to Himself! He desires our hearts more than our service. If we’ve got our hearts in the right place, everything else is secondary.”

And this gem of wisdom….

“Let’s be sure to communicate to our children that they are the ones we value before all else. That they are deserving of our time and attention. That they are loved, not only by us, but by the God who is never distracted and always available.”

I can’t give away all the goodness though! You need to read it for yourself! And as a part of her launch party she is offering 20% off both of her e-books with code UMLAUNCH20! Coupon code will expire on October 13th.

And to add to the fun please check out Kayse’s launch post that has a Huge giveaway included!!

Do you struggle with finding balance?

God Works in Mysterious Ways – A Guest Post from my Grandpa!

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I am so excited about sharing this post here. Below is a letter that my grandpa wrote and sent to several members of our family. He has such a beautiful way on integrating family history with God’s truth. I have asked for permission before sharing this but out of respect for him, will not be posting this on Facebook. I know you will be blessed by the wisdom he has to share!

September 22, 2013

Dear Family,

I am writing this to demonstrate that sometimes something one would consider to be a very unfortunate situation at the time later turns out to be a blessing. Without what happened to my Father, things would be very different today for all of us.

You see, my Dad was born in 1889 with a deformed left hip. The ball and socket in his left hip were only partially formed. It was basically bone on bone. Doctors who have seen X-rays of his hip have wondered how he could walk at all. This was, of course, long before hip replacement surgery. As a result his left leg was shorter than his right leg. When he purchased a new pair of shoes, he would take them to our local shoemaker to have the left heel and sole built up so he could walk better. He always used a cane when walking long distances, and in later years he seldom walked without some pain. One could say: “How unfortunate that God would allow him to be born that way!” But there is more to the story.

Because Dad had this physical problem, he was unable to work in his father’s fields and follow in his father’s footsteps as a farmer in Sweden. Instead, he left home at age 15 and began working in various machine shops, the last being a watch factory in Sweden. (I still have the watch he purchased at that factory.) He learned great mechanical skills in these shops and factories that he would later put to use here in America.

Thus this so-called unfortunate situation led to Dad’s emigration to America in 1909, his eventually starting an automobile garage and sales agency in Chisago City, MN in 1916, marrying and raising a family. Now we are his descendants and also Americans, with all the blessings we have in this great country. Who knows what the outcome might have been if he had remained in Sweden as a farmer there.

I see the hand of God in all of this. We can never fully understand His plans for us or for our lives. Instead we must trust that He will always be with us, even during times that give us cause to question.

Love,

Dad, Grandpa, & Great-Grandpa

Five Minute Friday – Write

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Linking up with Lisa Jo again this week to participate in Five Minute Friday.

Today’s word is WRITE– ready, set go –

I don’t come here to this place often enough. To write and share my heart.

I want to, I have some of the best blog posts written in my head in the shower every morning. But I struggle with getting them down.

Struggle with finding the time in my busy schedule to do what I love.

I don’t know when it happened, this love of writing.

It started slowly at first, as a way of healing after our miscarriage. I was having such a hard time with getting through it and decided to start writing. Being able to bear my soul was therapeutic.

Writing can heal.

Then it moved into a way to document my pregnancies and children’s birthdays. Just the other day I went through some of old posts on my family blog and smiled at how much my family has changed since 2008.

Writing can leave a legacy.

Today I have this space, a place that I hope can build community and offer encouragement. When I write I can share my weaknesses and His strength. God has done so much in my life and when I write I hopefully glorify Him.

Writing can encourage.

Whatever the reason, I believe that this love of writing is a God given gift. I may not always have the perfect sentence structure, grammar or fancy words that impress. But when it comes from the heart, our words can have so much impact.

And that is why I write!

Five Minute Friday – True

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Linking up with Lisa Jo again this week to participate in Five Minute Friday.

Today’s word is TRUE– ready, set go –

Lisa asked us to write a true story, to share the truth of where we are right now….

Truth is I am worn out and weary most days.

Truth is I do it to myself. I have high expectations of myself and others and I get frustrated when they aren’t met.

Truth is I spend too much time worrying about what other people think about me and not enough about being a true light of Christ in my day.

Truth is I get jealous when I see friends in this online community that seem more successful than I am.

Truth is I don’t make the time to write as much as I would like so I only have myself to blame! 🙂

Truth is I have met some amazing women through blogging. Women that I can email and share all my ugly truth’s with and they still love me.They still accept me and encourage me.

Truth is THAT is what this is all about for me. Community building. I know that I am not the best at it. I know that I don’t have the email subscribers or twitter followers that others have but the truth is it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that there are people available to me because of this community and the truth is I am so so grateful.

In 4 weeks I will meet many of these women and the truth is I am terrified they won’t like the “real” me in person as much as they seem to like the me behind the computer screen. But I am stepping out and trusting it will be ok.

The truth is, this probably took longer than 5 minutes but I am blessed by the opportunity to write and share and thankful for each of you that stop here and encourage me.

Five Minute Friday – She

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Linking up with Lisa Jo again this week to participate in Five Minute Friday.

Today’s word is SHE– ready, set go –

She is my only girl, a sweet surprise after 3 boys and difficult times trying to conceive. I always knew that if she was added to our family that we would give her my dear friends name.

When the letters G I R L were typed across the ultrasound screen I couldn’t believe it! She would finally be ours. Sharing the news of her coming was something I will never forget.

She is independent and adorable and sassy all wrapped up in one.

Some days I wonder what she will grow up to be like. She loves her brothers fiercely. She wants to spend all of her time doing what they are doing. She likes to collect “cada’s” and pet them and then she rips their wings off….

She isn’t quite the princess that I imagined she might be – but she is perfect in every way. She is ours and I count my blessings every day that she is a part of our lives.

For When You Don’t Have it All Together

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I shared some of these thoughts with the “Simply Devoted” group that I am leading in the mornings. Thoughts from the verses in Ephesians we are studying in Hello Mornings.

I don’t know about you but this life can be hard at times.

I do get up early every morning and do a little reading, trying to get to know God more. It is more Bible reading and reflection than I have ever done. I feel like I pray throughout the day a lot and remember to thank God for the little things.

But even though I am going through the “christian motions” – I am human, and I still struggle. I get angry with my kids, I don’t respect my husband and I am sensitive and tend to overreact.

Part of me feels like if I were doing this christian walk “right” that maybe I wouldn’t struggle like this. But I believe strongly that I won’t ever attain “perfection” in this life time…no matter how much devotional time I have, or studies I try and lead.

Plain and simple – I don’t have it all together, I don’t have all the answers, I still sin in some way every day….

But God, in His infinite grace, knew this ahead of time, still chose to create me and provided a way “out”.

This week’s HM study of Ephesians hits home – these verses specifically…”4 But God, with the unfathomable richness of His love and mercy focused on us, 5 united us with the Anointed One and infused our lifeless souls with life—even though we were buried under mountains of sin—and saved us by His grace. 6 He raised us up with Him and seated us in the heavenly realms with our beloved Jesus the Anointed, the Liberating King. 7 He did this for a reason: so that for all eternity we will stand as a living testimony to the incredible riches of His grace and kindness that He freely gives to us by uniting us with Jesus the Anointed. 8-9 For it’s by God’s grace that you have been saved. You receive it through faith. It was not our plan or our effort. It is God’s gift, pure and simple. You didn’t earn it, not one of us did, so don’t go around bragging that you must have done something amazing. 10 For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago.”

He has a plan for each of us. Some of us WILL struggle with trying to get this life “right”. May I let you off the hook a little. You aren’t expected to have it all together. You don’t have to earn it – God’s grace saves us from ourselves each and every day. Don’t ever forget that!!

I am so very grateful for this gift of grace. So glad that I have the opportunity each day to start over and try again. Some days I do pretty good. Some days I might actually be a light. Other days I struggle and fail and am not the “example” of Christ that I would like to be.

But that is exactly why He came in the first place. For sinners like me.

This morning when I got up I just felt a weight on me. The reality that I am a constant hypocrite and mess up more than I would like to admit hurts my heart and can feel overwhelming.

And I read through Ephesians 2: 1-10 again, looking for ways to apply it to me. And I was struck again of the reality that I DON’T need to have it all figured out. And that is my testimony friends. That this God of mine loves me so so much that He chose me and lavishes His love on me, His riches even when I don’t deserve it.

I could feel the weight lifting….it isn’t a burden I should be carrying because God already did the work for us!!

This grace is the legacy He is leaving with me. It is my hearts cry to share this grace with you. It is more amazing to me every time I think about how much He loves us. In spite of us.

Maybe you are trying really hard to be perfect too, maybe you lead a Bible study or participate in the HM challenge but feel like a fraud because when “life” hits your reactions would tell a different story.

I get it. I really do and I am there most days with you!

But God.

Don’t ever forget that friends – if that is the most you can utter out as you put your head down to sleep at night – But God. It is enough. He is enough.

Encouragement to my Childhood Self

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This post is inspired by Compassion International. To spread the word about Compassion and what they do for children all over the world, bloggers are getting together for Blog Month with the hopes to sponsor 3,160 children this month! If you are interested in sponsoring a child please click here and find a child for your family to support!

I was very fortunate to grow up in a stable Christian home. We had family meals together every night and participated in church activities. Privileged, compared to most of the world, would describe my upbringing.

But regardless of all that we had – I struggled with a couple of basic “lies” that I believed and shaped how I saw myself and how I experienced my childhood. As a mother now myself I want to dispel those lies for my future and my children’s as well.

One of those lies was that I didn’t “belong”.

I wasn’t ever one of the “popular” girls. I didn’t “go with” any boys in elementary school like many girls did. I was awkward and a little nerdy and desperate to fit in.

In 6th grade one of the popular girls was having a boy-girl party. And I wanted to go SO BAD!! Some of my friends even tried to help me dress in a cool outfit to wear to an upcoming football game so this girl would see how awesome I was and invite me.

It didn’t work and I tell you I was crushed.

This now seemingly small event shaped many years to come. Shaped how I saw myself, my value and my worth. I believed that I was never going to be good enough, never valuable like the “popular crowd” was. And I always felt like I needed to try and prove that I could measure up.

That is a lot of pressure to put on yourself isn’t it?

Today I would tell myself that this event doesn’t have to shape my future. That an invitation to a party, or not, doesn’t define who I am. That God loves me just the way He made me and I didn’t need to try so hard to change to fit the worlds view of a “perfect person.

Would I have listened??

I don’t know. Those are words that I think I can only offer because of my experiences. I think, unfortunately, that we sometimes have to walk through the valleys to experience the joys of the mountaintops.

So maybe my advice would be simply to trust God. While you can’t see the future and what’s to come…He can and He is working it all out for His good!

And as a parent I can use my experiences as examples for my kids. My situation may not be exactly the same…but it would be a start for sharing how those things affected me, what my reaction was (or lie that I believed) and how I have seen God use the hurts I experienced for good.

I think that is the best we can do – live and learn from our experiences and trust God through all of it. The times that I have put my trust in God I have found a sense of peace and comfort that I don’t feel when I take the reins and try to control things myself!

I hope to always remain teachable!

How about you? What is something that you would tell your childhood self??

Five Minute Friday – Worship

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Linking up with Lisa Jo again this week to participate in Five Minute Friday.

Today’s word is WORSHIP– ready, set go –

Music has always been in my soul – the one way that I connect best to God.

Singing in my car, music cranked up and praising God for all He has done in our lives.

When everything around me was falling apart and I felt like God wasn’t there – I sang anyways because it was all I knew how to do.

When I lost my best friend and wanted to honor her….singing was way that I best knew how to do that.

But singing, music isn’t the only way we can worship. My son Gabriel who is 9 just doesn’t sing. AT.ALL.

But man can that boy pray! He learned the ACTS prayer and he has such spirit when he gets into it…eyes closed, worshipping God.

One day I asked him why he didn’t sing in church on Sundays. He told me that singing wasn’t the way that he was going to talk to God – prayer was.

Very well then! 😉

But he reminded me that worship is a unique experience for each of us and I am just so grateful that he has found a way to connect with God too – even if it isn’t the way that I do!

What form of worship best connects you to God??

Abundantly Free!

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I have spent a large majority of my life in chains.

Bound by fear and doubt, concerns about how people saw me, plagued by the belief that I was never going to be good enough, that I would never measure up.

It is a miserable place to be and I know that God doesn’t want us to live this way. Recently I started the Fall Hello Mornings challenge. We are studying the book of Ephesians. This week we have been reading Ephesians 1: 1-14.

Specifically we are looking each day at what truths, promises and commands we find in these verses.

Verses 7-10 stood out for me and I wanted to share it here with you! (The Message translation)

7-10 “Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people—free of penalties and punishments chalked up by all our misdeeds. And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything, provided for everything we could possibly need, letting us in on the plans he took such delight in making. He set it all out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.”

Did you see that?? God doesn’t want us to live barely free He wants us to live Abundantly free!

And to do so we have to start letting go of the lies and start claiming the promises!!

LIE: “I will never measure up…never be good enough”

TRUTH: “Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love.”

LIE: “I don’t belong”

TRUTH: “Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ.”

LIE: “I don’t have a purpose, I am not valuable”

TRUTH: “It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.”

Friends when the lies come, and believe me they will because the enemy wants nothing more than to bury you with them….start claiming the promises instead. Say them out loud if you have to! Praise God for the truths He set for us in His Word and live free!

Abundantly free!

What lie have you been believing and what truth are you going to claim today instead??

He Calls the Broken

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I LOVE to sing.

Worship music has long been the one thing that can lift my mood and bring me to the feet of Jesus. I LOVE singing praise songs. I haven’t honestly even heard a secular station in years. Doesn’t do anything for me….so I listen instead to songs that have an uplifting message…good in, good out right?

I wish I had taken voice lessons when I was younger and had learned how to use my voice better. I sing well, I think God has given me a good voice but it is no Natalie Grant! Within the last year I have become involved with our church’s worship team.

I love singing, love the practices, love seeing the people in the church praising God. It terrifies me every week I am on stage, but I do it because I love it. I don’t believe for a second that I am “better” than anyone else when I am up there…I am just using the gift God gave me to help lead worship.

But I have struggled with this a little.

I used to believe that I needed to have my life all together before I had the “right” to be up there singing. I wanted to be involved but I knew that I was a failure, a hypocrite and a sinner and God calls the perfect right?

At least that is what the enemy likes to whisper to me….and for a long time I believed it.

And one day someone (so sorry I can’t remember who…) said the following and it stuck with me.

God doesn’t call the perfect – He perfects the called.

Oh such sweet music to this broken girl’s heart.

I don’t have to have it all together. I probably never will. And I can guarantee that I have a LOT of growing and refining to do. But knowing that God has called me to a specific purpose, and knowing that He will equip me along the way is enough for me right now.

It gives me the courage to say “yes” to being a part of something that is for His glory and not my own.

Today in our fall Hello Mornings challenge we were introduced to Paul – or at the time Saul.

Acts 9: 1-9 “But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest ²and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. ³Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. ⁴And falling to the ground he heard a voice saying to him,“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” ⁵And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ⁶But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” ⁷The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. ⁸Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.⁹And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.”

It was another reminder that God calls the broken, the angry, the sinner….

He called Saul – called Him by name. A man who was set on murdering the disciples. He used a man like that! Why in the world wouldn’t He use you and I?

I don’t know what your past looks like. What demons may be hiding in the shadows trying to tell you that you will never be enough.

You know what…maybe you won’t be “enough” but you don’t have to be!! God is enough for each of us and it is through Him and by Him that we are redeemed. God uses the redeemed. And that is you!

Don’t ever forget how valuable you are to God….how He has called you by name, broken and beautiful you!