happy new year!

evaluation

Today is New Year’s Eve. It is the time for resolutions. Time to reflect on the past and to plan for the future. Usually, we think about things like our weight, or maybe our spending habits. How often do we think about our relationship with God? If, come next January one, I am in the same place with God that I am this year, that would not be a good thing. I don’t think my relationship with Him is static. I think it always changing…either moving closer to Him or moving further away. I don’t want to be further away. So, in the same way I need to monitor my food intake or my money output, I need to be intentional about my relationship with Jesus. I need to set time aside to be with Him. I need to be looking for Him throughout the day in the things and circumstances that make up ordinary life. I need to surrender my agenda, my wants, my desires to Him and wait expectantly to see how He will move.

Consider taking some time today or tomorrow reflecting on what you would like your relationship to be and what you might do to nurture it. I invite you to then write a letter to God letting Him know what those desires are and asking Him to reveal to you some new ways you might be with Him.

Grace and peace,
Deb

identity

“The stickers will only stick to you if they matter to you. The more you trust in my love, the less you care about the stickers…”

Eli

Several weeks ago, I heard the beautiful children’s story, You Are Special, by Max Lucado. It is a story about the Wemmicks, a village of wooden people. They each had a box of gold stars and a box of grey dots. They would place either a star or a dot on others as they judged them…their worthiness or lack there of. It is a beautiful story that parallels our lives and how we allow others to define us instead of allowing God to define us. If we find our identity in Jesus, we don’t allow what others think of us create our identity.

Consider picking up a copy of the book and allowing God to speak to you through its pages.

Grace and peace,
Deb

beauty

“Art can warm even a chilled and sunless soul to an exalted spiritual experience. Through art, we occasionally receive – indistinctly, briefly – revelations the likes of which cannot be achieved by rational thought.

It is like the small mirror of legend, you look into it but instead of yourself, you glimpse for a moment, the Inaccessible, a realm forever beyond reach. And your soul begins to ache.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Art can move us beyond what we can see, hear or touch with our normal human senses. It can truly give us a glimpse into beauty which is close to God’s heart.

Delight today in a piece of art and allow it to move you into a place of beauty.

Grace and peace,
Deb

trial

“To really surrender, then, we need to stop measuring our trials against our comforts, and instead measure our trials against their potential to draw us nearer to God and to make us more like Christ.”

Gary Thomas

The past two weeks have been filled with wonderful times with my family. They have also been filled with seeing friends go through some very hard times. Death, serious illness. The emotions of these situations seem to be heightened during the holidays. There seems to be an extra sting in them.

These kinds of trials are serious. And, it is times like these that we may question what God is doing, or maybe even ask “Where is He?”. It is easy to think that he has withdrawn from us. We desperately want to sense Him, hear from Him. And we just want to move away from the difficulty.

If this is a place where you find yourself, consider not asking, merely, “Where is God?” but “Where is God in the midst of this pain I am in?” There is much we can learn about ourselves and about God during times when nothing else makes much sense. He is there, holding us in the pain. He is closer to us than our breath.

Grace and peace,
Deb

love you...

This year, I did something a little different for Christmas. A few weeks ago I went to an Advent Silent Retreat. It was a wonderful start to the season. While I was there I sensed God encouraging me to let the people closest to me know how I feel about them. So, I wrote them a letter on Christmas Eve, to be opened when they were alone.

In our culture, we don’t often tell each other how we really feel. We may say a passing “I love you” but we often don’t talk about what we really appreciate in the other.

Consider sitting down and writing to those in your life, who may know you love them, but may not know what you really love about them.

Grace and peace,
Deb

Merry Christmas

Grace and peace,
Deb