In 2015, I spent the least amount of time thinking about this area, but more time doing it. Today’s area is Mental or the things you plan, learn and visualize. It is usually one of my favorite areas until God takes over. At the beginning of each year, I create a plan and goals for the year. I determine the areas I want to learn more about and set out to do it.
I plan safe things, like trips to the museum or to take a class in lighting for still photography. God tosses me in the lake and says “Swim, I got you.” God takes me on trips I never imagined and many of them have to do with the things I fear. He makes me look the thing I fear right in the eye.
What I love about this area is I get to do new stuff. I am seldom bored or lack something to do. God teaches me to think outside the box I have drawn around myself. He is teaching me to see myself as more than a mother or daughter. More than a photographer or writer or filmmaker. As I look back over my life I see I am not staying stagnant. Life is truly an adventure.
Today’s adventure included a trip down culinary lane. For the first time, I cooked chicken fried steak. Yes, I have been a Texan all my life, but this was the first time I ever tried to cook the dish myself. I watched the Pioneer Woman do it this week. I thought it looked a little too complicated for my level of cooking. But at the grocery store today, the only thing I could find was the cubed steak…
As I work out the plan God has for my life, I enjoy watching it come clearly into focus. Make a plan. Set some goals. Yet don’t get upset if God interrupts your plans for His. After all I set off to the store to buy a brisket, but cube steak was in my future. I did a good job and there is a sense of accomplishment.
Be part of helping others grow, not only by being an example, but also by coaching. We should all continue to grow together because iron sharpens iron. If you are not helping someone become better, then you are getting in their way.
It is time to tell Fear goodbye. Walk in the adventure God has placed before you. Your future might seem uncertain, but God is in control. Dive in.
My habits are not true to form of the Seven Habits because over time I have tweeked them to match my needs. The next area is Spiritual. This is your soul, spirit and the things that make you you.
When I think of spiritual, I think of my relationship with God. He created us in His image and I believe our spirit is what connects us. The more time I spend with God, the better I understand me. The more time I spend with God, the more I love Him.
I mean when you move in with someone you like to get to know them. If you are going to spend an eternity with someone, you want to know something about them. So I spend my spiritual time getting to know God better through bible study and prayer.
I was not one of those kids raised in church so the process was foreign to me. I was in my late 20’s before I understood that God still communicates with his people. Once I discovered that, it was game on. I began to understand how He speaks to me and what He wants me to do. It all started with a wonderful bible study titled, Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby. Changed. My. Life.
The most important thing I learned was all I have to be is who He made me. Not everyone likes or agrees with who I am, but the One I have to answer to does. We get off center when we try to be other people or what other people want us to be. But if you are close to God, He will keep you centered. You ought to stay with Him just for that.
He has a plan for each of our lives. We have to trust His plan. When the children of Israel were in the desert, the Lord reminded them that they were His people. He reminded them that He was with them. As long as He is with us, there is no drought that can over take us or enemy that can over come us.
I praise Him because He taught me that He fights my battles for me. He runs my enemies out of business. He destroys them in ways I can’t imagine. As I learned in the study of Revelation this week, it is to bring them to repentance.
Spending time with God builds up your spiritual muscles, strengthens your faith and teaches you a praise dance.
I am a big fan of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. One of the main principles is to put first things first. For more than 20 years I have been putting into practice some form of the idea of figuring out what is most important to me. When I set goals, I think about how I want to be remembered and what purpose God has given me in this life.
One of those purposes is to live a healthy life.
As a form of habit, I set goals for my physical body, after all it is my physical tool. If it doesn’t work, I won’t do the other tasks He has assigned. Getting older is not easy. I mean, I can’t read without my readers (glasses) but I don’t always put them on. Like my Aunt Maude use to say, getting old is not for the weak. (She didn’t use that term, but that is what she meant).
For the past decade, I have fought the weight gain problem and lost. When I got older, I did not lose weight as easy as I did when I was young. I am not a crazy dieter. I wouldn’t do the boiled egg diet, soup diet or the don’t eat anything diet. I have this problem with fried chicken and pie and soda. I like all of these things very much. (My fear is there won’t be fried chicken in heaven – but I am going anyway.)
Although I was drastically opposed to working out in the beginning, my view changed. I have several people in my life who encourage others to work out and live healthy. It is the best way to live. Regular exercise can save your life and make healing quicker. For example, I used to work out with this crazy instructor who loved making us do burpees and jump rope day. I hated jump rope day. One day, that fool sat in a F-150 (truck) and convinced us to push it around the block as our workout. (and I call him the fool. LOL)
Yet a year and a half later when I had surgery, I healed much quicker because of the strong core I developed working out with him. He has taught good principles and healthy eating habits. (Although I am never giving up fried chicken.) He has helped me make good lifestyle changes.
With my wee little human brain, I thought, God had me get healthy because He knew I would need it to heal faster.(Whenever you think you have God figured out, sit down and shut up) In 2015, I got to see what I could really do. I had some of the most grueling positions I have ever had. They required physical movement for 10 hours or more. There are moments I wanted to die because every inch of me hurt. I had no idea that something I liked to do could cause so much pain. I felt like an old lady.
As a result, I lost over 20 pounds and was able to reduce my high blood pressure medications. It was all God. As I was focused on other things, He took care of something I thought was a problem. All of the strength I had been building up over the years, the Lord used in an unexpected way and it blessed me.
Set some goals. Work towards them. Watch God bless you.
God brings amazing people into your life to bless you. Receive it.
Every day I continue to grow and know more than I did before. Just this week, Bobby Flay taught me how to improve my grilled hamburgers and the Pioneer Woman gave me an alternate recipe for enchiladas. This week, I also got to smell frankincense after reading about Jesus being born in a stable with livestock, thanks Bill Hybels for Seeing the Christmas Scenery.
Life is a great journey where you take in information that will help you make good decisions about your life. This year I am going to do some different things with the blog section of this page.
I will write on certain themes and present them as a series. Not every blog will be tied to a series, but some will. The first series is going to focus on how to be a better you. I am going to share some principles that I have been using for over 20 years. I didn’t create it, I just took it and made it my own. I will invite you to do the same thing. Stealing from the inventor of the system, we are going to put first things first.
This year, I will invite guest bloggers to share valuable information with you. I have learned that we work so much better in community and can learn wonderful things from each other. I know lots of talented people who enjoy what they do. You will enjoy them.
I will also continue with the music. I will use some popular music, but I am an old school girl. So there will be O’Jays and Earth Wind and Fire. Yet, there will also be Third Day and Kari Jobe.
God is working out good things in my life. It is going to be a fantastic year
I am sad to see Christmas go. Love Christmas. I love the songs and movies. I love everyone being nice to each other. I love the stories of hope. This evening I am spending it with Call of the Midwife‘s Christmas Special.
I hope your Christmas was amazing like mine. I love my family, even the crazy ones. It was great to spend time with them throughout the holiday season. Of course, we were rowdy and loud.
These gloves are some of the fun things that came with Christmas. My favorite was an electric tea pot. All are handy and warm gifts.
Yet aside from the gifts, the best gifts have been what the Lord has taught me all year. Next week I will share 10 things the Lord taught me in 2015. In spite of all of our circumstances, He is still good and faithful. Here is one:
Sometimes we wait because the Lord has to take the teeth out of the serpent that is waiting to bite us.
So those of you in a hurry. Wait.
Until then, lets have some Christmas music. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Movies and books are some of the things I love. When I was a kid, I used to catch the bus and go to Seminary South to the General Cinema theater to watch movies. It was the coolest thing to me and these movies had an impact on how I saw the world. Most of the movies I saw had men leads, and most of which were Anglo.
When the first Star Wars movie debuted in 1977, I was too young to ride the bus by myself. But I fell in love with the Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and was excited that Billy Dee Williams was one of the cast. As an actor is was good to see someone who looked like me in a popular film that was good to boot. It gave hope that African American actors would not be typecast as the bad guys, the stupid guys or “you don’t have a purpose” guys.
I don’t have adequate words to explain my feelings as I watched the recent installment of the Star Wars franchise. I was like, “Wow!”
As I sat in the movie theater 38 years after the first movie, I can see a difference in who we are as story tellers. As a country we have grown some and it is nice to see it reflected in a major franchise movie. It is nice to see actors who look like me get roles that might have been cast other ways.
I love that one of the main characters was African American and another was female. The story-line had nothing to do with their race or gender, it allowed two actors to do what they do best. ACT. Yet their presence spoke volumes. It takes Star Wars to whole new level with me. It was a great movie experience. We have truly come a long way.
This week I got to languish in God’s grace. Sometimes we mistake God’s grace as a nuisance because it doesn’t look like what we think it should look like. While I was getting a good picture of the High Holy God I serve during this week’s bible lessons, I experienced His grace in several settings.
My favorite experience was that worship comes from your heart. Many days we feel like Peter with a sword in his hand promising to follow the Lord to death. Yet when it comes to worship in any place at any time, we are more like Peter running from the crowd denying we know Jesus. I mean there are some places you just can’t worship Jesus. (wink)
God sends people into our lives to teach us about His grace. It seldom looks the way we expect it. It is never the people we expect. It always teaches us about His character. His goal is to make us look more like Christ and less like us.
When things don’t look the way we plan it, we figure everything is wrong instead of God had other plans. We tend to ignore the souls God has placed in our path and try to do things on our own. We miss the blessing.
I mean if anyone could have worked on his own, Christ could. But He chose 12 guys to work with Him. He knew what would happen if those men allowed God to work through them.
What is God calling you to do that is outside of your plan? Are you willing to miss His grace to work your plan?
This year I have watched His grace do incredible things in my life. It is purifying me.
One of the things I love about my life is Netflix. I get to watch episodes of entire series consecutively. I get a good sense of what the production was about and what they are saying. I am very fond of European television series because it gives me insight into how people in other parts of the world think, see themselves and view the world.
The sad thing is that some people don’t think that television reflect the society it caters to. I believe it does. The shows that are at the top of the ratings ladder speak to our values as a society. Some times I cringe at what the rest of the world thinks of us North Americans. But we are what we are.
I am currently into the British series, Inspector George Gently, which is set in the 1960s in Northern England dealing with crime. Yet it spends a fair amount of time dealing with 1960s society and its norms. But I think what the story does well is deal with the culture. It shows the old guard and the new guard. Of course it has the gift of history. As I watch it, I think this was the culture I was born into, this tug of war between good and better. Not so much the English part, but this changing of the guard.
An Ah ha moment came to me as I watched a scene where the two war veterans (WWII) looked at the young hippie protesters and then at each other. One asked “Was the sacrifice worth it?”
They were asking if the sacrifice of fighting a war so they could continue to live free was worth the cost of having to listen to the young people disrespect everything they fought for. After all, they could only protest freely because the Allies won the war. (right) The young people shouting out disrespectful words didn’t understand they were standing on the shoulders of people who died to give them the right. I was born during a time when people hated each other. They segregated themselves from each other to continue to facilitate that hate.
50 years later, here we are again. We tell our younger generation that they do not appreciate what was sacrificed to give them the rights they have today. They stand on the shoulders of dead civil rights workers and disrespect the process. They do not understand.
It gives me a giggle to think that we are repeating a cycle that happened when I was born.
The problem is that we did not teach the next generation from when they were babies, that it is a right that someone died for so that you can go to school and receive an education for free, you can own property and not BE property. We have depended on someone else to teach the next generation our family and ethnic heritage and those folks have not done a good job.
As Joel Barker said, when a paradigm shifts, we all go back to 0. Some people just don’t realize they are at 0. As I was watching this TV series, it reminded me we are back at 0. Racism is getting worse. Violence is getting worse. Hatred is like a coke commercial. You see it everywhere.
Our history is going to be the thing that saves us. We will have to remember the love that overcomes this type of hate. We will have to remember what it looks like, what it acts like. It wasn’t Malcolm’s militancy, it was Martin’s love. Love overcomes all kinds of hate.
In the Bible God told Israel to teach their children all of the things He had done for them. He wanted them to know the stories. He wanted the children to know the type of obstacles their people had overcome through His mighty power. The stories showed His faithfulness and His love.
If you retrace our history, you will see the lives of men and women who sacrificed for the good of others. I thank all the men and women who have gone to war to preserve our freedom. It is one of the greatest gifts on this planet. I want to live a life worthy of their sacrifice. Not just the white ones, or the black ones or the brown ones. All of them. They gave up something they cannot get back.
This year my wall calendar has been Nelson Mandela. All year I have been reminded that 27 years in prison shaped his life. When he got out, he could have done anything he wanted. He served his people.
God calls us use whatever gift we have received to serve others. (1 Peter 4:10) He says it won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Every time you turn on the TV to watch, let it remind you of our culture. Once you are reminded of it, go and do your part to change it. We need to wake up before it gets too late.
This has been a very low key week for me. I have not been able to do many outside activities. I have spent the week writing and editing. Even though it is a creative process, I am methodical in my approach. Each project reveals to me a little more about who I am and what I believe.
I am working on two new books and one old one. I like the possibilities of the new ones, and the perspective the old ones give me. I decided that if I am going to pray over things, I am going to work on things.
God gave me the gift of storytelling and over the years has allowed me to do it in various forms. Each project has its own story to tell. I pray that each story will impact the lives of the people who read them. I pray the stories will point them to God.
I try never to take this gift for granted. I know I can only do it through the one who gave it to me. God.
I did, of course, make time for bible study. The Book of Revelation is nothing like I thought it would be. It has been fun and revealing God in a new way.
It reminded me that God is not dead, He is surely alive. Living on the inside, roaring like a lion.
I got so wrapped up in the tasks for the past week, I forgot to blog. I am working on three books right now and preparing for the Queens photo shoot. Some times you can be so busy in God’s work, you miss the moments.
This week I got to join with thousands of people around the world starting the study of Revelation. In Bible Study Fellowship classes are packed with people wanting to know what God is doing through prophecy. I love it when people pursue God because that is when great things happen. From my Facebook page, I watched as groups around the country posted photos of their packed sanctuaries. Praise God!
In addition to studying the book of Revelation, I believe the study will be revealing in many ways. Not only will I get more book knowledge, but I know the experience will reveal the Lord in a way I have not met Him before. It is kinda like watching a new TV series, as you meet all the characters and get into their situations.
Last Monday evening I got a glimpse of what heaven will be like. I ran into many old, good friends who I have studied God’s word with in the past. There will be an eternity for people and their stories to be revealed and how we impacted each other’s lives. There are women who prayed for me and I can’t wait to hug and thank them.
Monday, I am sure I only got to see a few people. Because there were more than 800 women there, I know each week is going to reveal more and more. I am excited to see what He does next.
This is the first year for the study of Revelation in BSF, so I was not sure what to expect. The questions have been very enlightening. I have studied prophecy before, but this study really is making it much more clear. 2 Peter 1:19-21 helped me understand that prophecy shines a light in a dark place. That passage walked a long way with me this week.
My pastor, who is also teaching on prophecy, said Revelation is about praise and worship. Walking into these chapters with this in mind will definitely change my perspective. I am a praise and worship girl.
Like all new studies, I expect the Lord to reveal Himself to me in a new way. I know it will be life changing. Lord give me a revelation.
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