Good morning all my bloggy friends! I hope you are having a great Monday! God has given you this day and has a great plan in mind for you. Are you ready to accept His plan for today irregardless of how you feel or how others treat you?
Thank you for praying for my speaking on Sunday. It was a blessing to be able to share God's Word. It humbles me to think that He gives me so many opportunities to share what He has accomplished in my heart and in my life. I pray that I can bring glory to Him.
Christie
Monday, June 30, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
I wanted to share a really great conversation I had with my 12 year old daughter. She loves kids and helps alot over the summer months with my daycare children.
Daughter: Mom, these kids are driving me crazy today!
Me: Why?
Daughter: I have played and played with them but they always whine and cry for more! We have already played 3 board games and when I told them that we weren't playing any more, they whine and cry. Their whining is driving me crazy!
Me: I'm so glad!
Daughter: (puzzled and disgusted look) What?!
Me: Now you know exactly how I feel when you are given so much and still want more and then when you don't get your own way, the whining begins.
Maybe God is trying to teach you how I feel when you act like these children
Daughter: (stomps off in a huff)
God is so good! He is always available to teach us what He wants us to learn. I can't say that I shouldn't have learned the same lesson. I struggle with wanting what I want and wanting it right now. I have even went to God with my whinings over what I want or think I need. My first step in trying to overcome this obstacle is to think often about all the wonderful things God has blessed me with. By having a thankful attitude, I am less likely to focus on what I don't have. This does help, but I continue to struggle with my selfishness. What tips do you have on how to be more content?
Have a great day
Christie
Daughter: Mom, these kids are driving me crazy today!
Me: Why?
Daughter: I have played and played with them but they always whine and cry for more! We have already played 3 board games and when I told them that we weren't playing any more, they whine and cry. Their whining is driving me crazy!
Me: I'm so glad!
Daughter: (puzzled and disgusted look) What?!
Me: Now you know exactly how I feel when you are given so much and still want more and then when you don't get your own way, the whining begins.
Maybe God is trying to teach you how I feel when you act like these children
Daughter: (stomps off in a huff)
God is so good! He is always available to teach us what He wants us to learn. I can't say that I shouldn't have learned the same lesson. I struggle with wanting what I want and wanting it right now. I have even went to God with my whinings over what I want or think I need. My first step in trying to overcome this obstacle is to think often about all the wonderful things God has blessed me with. By having a thankful attitude, I am less likely to focus on what I don't have. This does help, but I continue to struggle with my selfishness. What tips do you have on how to be more content?
Have a great day
Christie
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Here's a powerful devotion written by my friend LuAnn Prater. For responses to her devotion check out her blog at www.beesweet.com/blog
I Have a Headache
Luann Prater
“The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.” 1 Corinthians 7:3 (NIV)
Devotion:
A study done by Dr. Lew Losoncy revealed why women listen to advice from their hairstylists more readily than from their shrinks – because hairstylists have license to touch them. We all long for closeness, for someone we trust to reach out and touch us.
In the 1980s I owned a busy hair salon with six stylists. On late nights and Saturdays the place would be swarming with people anxious to tell someone about their day. We would hear stories that could curl your hair without a perm!
Our shop had both male and female clients, so we often heard both sides of the story. Unfortunately, we witnessed the decline and destruction of many marriages. Many times all three involved in love triangles were our customers; the feeling unappreciated wife; the husband wondering what happened to his princess; and the other woman looking for solace in someone else’s prince charming.
Divorce claims about half of all marriages, even in our churches. The number one thing couples fight about is finances, followed closely by sex. Yes, I said the 3-letter word. When we fall in love, our passion burns for our spouse. But over time, children, bills and routine can get in the way of true intimacy with our mate. That intimacy is essential for a couple, and if it is not found at home, Satan often takes the opportunity to show us other places to find it.
Wives in our salon admitted that they used sex as a tool or as a weapon in their marriages. Husbands would lament to us that the wind had to be blowing in just the right direction before their wives were “in the mood.” We saw lonely women, longing to have a man in their lives, making it their mission to find out and provide what pleased these unhappy, married men. An affair might start from a single deep conversation, or maybe a tender touch, or a gentle hug that lingered.
In Genesis 2:24 God tells us, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” When we make the commitment to become one, we no longer have sole ownership of our bodies. In 1 Corinthians 7:4 it says, “The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.”
God tells us this for a reason. He longs for us to enjoy our spouse through physical intimacy. When we put stipulations on intimacy, or neglect this area of our marriage, we prime ourselves for trouble. Closeness with our spouse is essential for a healthy, happy marriage – and physical intimacy is a large part of that.
If your marriage or martial intimacy is on the rocks, God can help you restore it. If He can calm the waves and raise the dead, He can bring life back to a loveless or sexless marriage.
Dear Lord, give me the desire to love my husband sexually and the ability to enjoy him. Teach us both how to be more loving and intimate with one another. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Related Resources:
The Man You’ve Always Wanted is the One You Already Have by Paula Friedrichsen
Do You Know Him?
Confessions of an Adulterous Woman: Lies that Got me There, Truths that Brought Me Back by Lydell Hetrick Holtz
Visit Luann Prater’s blog
Application Steps:
Begin to pray intentionally for your mate each day. Ask God to shine his light on your soul and reveal the things in you that cause strife in your marriage. Ask for forgiveness, and for intimacy to be restored between you.
Ask if your husband if he is willing to pray out loud together for your marriage.
Write love notes to your spouse and mean them.
Seek counseling if need be.
Reflections:
What did I love about my husband when we met?
When will I make time for him today?
How can I show him that I love him?
Power Verses:
1 Corinthians 13:4-5, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. (NIV)
Ephesians 5:33 “However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband." (NIV)
1 Corinthians 13:6-8, “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (NIV)
I Have a Headache
Luann Prater
“The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.” 1 Corinthians 7:3 (NIV)
Devotion:
A study done by Dr. Lew Losoncy revealed why women listen to advice from their hairstylists more readily than from their shrinks – because hairstylists have license to touch them. We all long for closeness, for someone we trust to reach out and touch us.
In the 1980s I owned a busy hair salon with six stylists. On late nights and Saturdays the place would be swarming with people anxious to tell someone about their day. We would hear stories that could curl your hair without a perm!
Our shop had both male and female clients, so we often heard both sides of the story. Unfortunately, we witnessed the decline and destruction of many marriages. Many times all three involved in love triangles were our customers; the feeling unappreciated wife; the husband wondering what happened to his princess; and the other woman looking for solace in someone else’s prince charming.
Divorce claims about half of all marriages, even in our churches. The number one thing couples fight about is finances, followed closely by sex. Yes, I said the 3-letter word. When we fall in love, our passion burns for our spouse. But over time, children, bills and routine can get in the way of true intimacy with our mate. That intimacy is essential for a couple, and if it is not found at home, Satan often takes the opportunity to show us other places to find it.
Wives in our salon admitted that they used sex as a tool or as a weapon in their marriages. Husbands would lament to us that the wind had to be blowing in just the right direction before their wives were “in the mood.” We saw lonely women, longing to have a man in their lives, making it their mission to find out and provide what pleased these unhappy, married men. An affair might start from a single deep conversation, or maybe a tender touch, or a gentle hug that lingered.
In Genesis 2:24 God tells us, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” When we make the commitment to become one, we no longer have sole ownership of our bodies. In 1 Corinthians 7:4 it says, “The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.”
God tells us this for a reason. He longs for us to enjoy our spouse through physical intimacy. When we put stipulations on intimacy, or neglect this area of our marriage, we prime ourselves for trouble. Closeness with our spouse is essential for a healthy, happy marriage – and physical intimacy is a large part of that.
If your marriage or martial intimacy is on the rocks, God can help you restore it. If He can calm the waves and raise the dead, He can bring life back to a loveless or sexless marriage.
Dear Lord, give me the desire to love my husband sexually and the ability to enjoy him. Teach us both how to be more loving and intimate with one another. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Related Resources:
The Man You’ve Always Wanted is the One You Already Have by Paula Friedrichsen
Do You Know Him?
Confessions of an Adulterous Woman: Lies that Got me There, Truths that Brought Me Back by Lydell Hetrick Holtz
Visit Luann Prater’s blog
Application Steps:
Begin to pray intentionally for your mate each day. Ask God to shine his light on your soul and reveal the things in you that cause strife in your marriage. Ask for forgiveness, and for intimacy to be restored between you.
Ask if your husband if he is willing to pray out loud together for your marriage.
Write love notes to your spouse and mean them.
Seek counseling if need be.
Reflections:
What did I love about my husband when we met?
When will I make time for him today?
How can I show him that I love him?
Power Verses:
1 Corinthians 13:4-5, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. (NIV)
Ephesians 5:33 “However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband." (NIV)
1 Corinthians 13:6-8, “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (NIV)
I have been working with a marketing firm on making my messages more impactful and I have been working on rewriting my "Is that You God?" message which is about the different ways that God speaks to us and how to determine when it is God speaking. I will be speaking on it on Sunday morning at Colfax Christian Church so I'd appreciate your prayers for God's words to slip from my mouth.
Anyway, as I read the book of Jonah this morning, in chapter 2 verse 10 it said that the Lord spoke to the fish and it spit Jonah out onto the shore. I thought about how I spent many years of my Christian life without hearing God. It wasn't that He wasn't speaking, but that I wasn't intentionally listening. If God spoke to a fish, how much more willing would He be to speak to His children.
I want to encourage you to be intentional about looking and listening for God, today. He is always speaking, the question is - are you listening?
Have a great day hearing our God
Christie
Anyway, as I read the book of Jonah this morning, in chapter 2 verse 10 it said that the Lord spoke to the fish and it spit Jonah out onto the shore. I thought about how I spent many years of my Christian life without hearing God. It wasn't that He wasn't speaking, but that I wasn't intentionally listening. If God spoke to a fish, how much more willing would He be to speak to His children.
I want to encourage you to be intentional about looking and listening for God, today. He is always speaking, the question is - are you listening?
Have a great day hearing our God
Christie
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
I popped over to Lysa Terkeurst's (President of Proverbs 31 Ministries) blog today and wanted to share one of her God experiences at She Speaks
She Sees
The gals at P31 often joke that one of the main reasons we do She Speaks isn't for a "she" at all. There is a man that works for the hotel that we've all grown to love. He used to be employed by another hotel where She Speaks was held. Then when he moved, we moved.We'll call him Tom.Tom keeps up with us all year and will often ask us to pray for him.So, it was no surprise this year that when our staff started experiencing spiritual attack before the conference, so did Tom. The day before She Speaks, Tom went to the dentist for a routine cleaning. While there, the dentist informed him that he had a hole in one of his teeth which would require an emergency root canal ASAP.Tom called LeAnn, our executive director, and told her about the situation. He would schedule his root canal around our conference. Hello customer service. Hello caring about us in ways that most companies can't even fathom these days.LeAnn told him to go ahead and get his root canal done right away even if it meant he'd miss the first day of She Speaks. He came back to the hotel to take care of a few things and ran into a bunch of us P31 gals before heading to the dentist. He told us about having to leave for the root canal and how he knew it was what us Christian women would call "attack."Well, Luann, our prayer room coordinator, would not let Tom leave until we prayed over him. She laid hands on that man and called on God to heal him. I mean she flat out called out for HEALING! Of a tooth! With a hole. That the dentist had just stuck an instrument in and confirmed the existence of with X-Rays.I was nervous.I knew God could heal Tom's tooth. But what if He didn't? Would this somehow negate all the spiritual investments we'd been making in Tom's life? The next day, Tom walked into She Speaks beaming. He'd gone to the dentist, gotten prepped for the root canal, and then when the procedure was about to begin the dentist started apologizing profusely.He couldn't find the hole. He couldn't find anything wrong with Tom's tooth at all. NOTHING!!!Tom shared his story of answered prayer with the hotel staff.The rest of the She Speaks weekend, our prayer room was not just filled with women from the conference. It was also filled with hotel employees as well.Do we do She Speaks for women?Absolutely.But can God take any situation and use it in the most unlikely ways to draw people to himself? You bet.Today, I'm going to challenge myself to stop looking at employees of the businesses I frequent as fixtures of the store. Rather I want to see them as people... real people...with real needs... who my REAL God dearly loves. God, help us all see more clearly.
She Sees
The gals at P31 often joke that one of the main reasons we do She Speaks isn't for a "she" at all. There is a man that works for the hotel that we've all grown to love. He used to be employed by another hotel where She Speaks was held. Then when he moved, we moved.We'll call him Tom.Tom keeps up with us all year and will often ask us to pray for him.So, it was no surprise this year that when our staff started experiencing spiritual attack before the conference, so did Tom. The day before She Speaks, Tom went to the dentist for a routine cleaning. While there, the dentist informed him that he had a hole in one of his teeth which would require an emergency root canal ASAP.Tom called LeAnn, our executive director, and told her about the situation. He would schedule his root canal around our conference. Hello customer service. Hello caring about us in ways that most companies can't even fathom these days.LeAnn told him to go ahead and get his root canal done right away even if it meant he'd miss the first day of She Speaks. He came back to the hotel to take care of a few things and ran into a bunch of us P31 gals before heading to the dentist. He told us about having to leave for the root canal and how he knew it was what us Christian women would call "attack."Well, Luann, our prayer room coordinator, would not let Tom leave until we prayed over him. She laid hands on that man and called on God to heal him. I mean she flat out called out for HEALING! Of a tooth! With a hole. That the dentist had just stuck an instrument in and confirmed the existence of with X-Rays.I was nervous.I knew God could heal Tom's tooth. But what if He didn't? Would this somehow negate all the spiritual investments we'd been making in Tom's life? The next day, Tom walked into She Speaks beaming. He'd gone to the dentist, gotten prepped for the root canal, and then when the procedure was about to begin the dentist started apologizing profusely.He couldn't find the hole. He couldn't find anything wrong with Tom's tooth at all. NOTHING!!!Tom shared his story of answered prayer with the hotel staff.The rest of the She Speaks weekend, our prayer room was not just filled with women from the conference. It was also filled with hotel employees as well.Do we do She Speaks for women?Absolutely.But can God take any situation and use it in the most unlikely ways to draw people to himself? You bet.Today, I'm going to challenge myself to stop looking at employees of the businesses I frequent as fixtures of the store. Rather I want to see them as people... real people...with real needs... who my REAL God dearly loves. God, help us all see more clearly.
I read about Peter being put in prison by King Herod for being a part of the church in Acts 12 today. As he was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with chains, an angel of the Lord awoke him and told him to get dressed and follow him. The chains fell off and he was able to walk out of the prison without harm or interference. This gave me such encouragement to know that no matter how dismal a situation may be, nothing is impossible with God.
I recently was talking with a friend who is experiencing some really tough times. I could empathize as she felt like climbing into a hole and never coming back out. I could only pray and assure her that through God, we can overcome anything. I could assure her because I have seen it in my own life. I realize that sometimes that is much easier said than done, but just as in Acts 12, our God is always faithful - even and especially when you are in the midst of suffering.
Believe in your heart, today, that God will carry you through the circumstances you face. Trust in the One who is trustworthy.
Christie
I recently was talking with a friend who is experiencing some really tough times. I could empathize as she felt like climbing into a hole and never coming back out. I could only pray and assure her that through God, we can overcome anything. I could assure her because I have seen it in my own life. I realize that sometimes that is much easier said than done, but just as in Acts 12, our God is always faithful - even and especially when you are in the midst of suffering.
Believe in your heart, today, that God will carry you through the circumstances you face. Trust in the One who is trustworthy.
Christie
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Good morning all my bloggy friends! I'm back home and on my normal schedule - whatever "normal" is. O.K., the whole flying experience was not what I'd hoped it would be. I thought since I didn't have motion sickness in the car, I wouldn't on the plane - not so much. But my sweet faithful Lord, got me where I needed to be and then back again. He is so trustworthy! The conference was good and I found myself in a different role than last year. God put many women in my path that were new to the conference and very nervous about their speaking and writing presentations. He gave me the opportunity to encourage and inspire these women to step out in faith and say yes to Him even when they were afraid. God is so good!
I heard someone say, courage is not never being afraid - but being afraid and doing it anyway! I pray that you will have great courage today.
Have a great day experiencing God
Christie
I heard someone say, courage is not never being afraid - but being afraid and doing it anyway! I pray that you will have great courage today.
Have a great day experiencing God
Christie
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