Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Before 9:00 AM
1) Sunrise
2) Quiet Time
3) Sleep
Showing posts with label 1000 Gifts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1000 Gifts. Show all posts
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Joy Challenge: 3 Gifts Tasted
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Tasted
1) Brunswick Stew!
2) Fresh-from-the-farm Spring Strawberries after a late Blackberry Winter frost!
3) "O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him." Psalm 34:8
Friday, April 26, 2013
Joy Challenge: 3 Gifts Moving
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Moving
1) The Spirit within me.
2) My family, my children.
3) My now working dryer. (Yay!)
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Joy Challenge: A Gift Cloth, Steel, Wood
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: A Gift Cloth, Steel, Wood
1) Clean clothes.
2) Our truck. It was a literal gift to us from my dad when we needed it most.
3) Pencils. I do love to write, and pencils are so forgiving.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Joy Challenge: 3 Gifts Fragile
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Fragile
1) Capodimonte flowers my grandmother gave me.
2) Another Capodimonte-like flower arrangement my husband got me one mother's day in Florida.
3) A glass trinket box, also from my grandmother.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Joy Challenge: 3 Gifts Reflecting
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Reflecting
1) Memories, both good and not-so-good, because they all made me who I am today.
2) My children, who's smiles reflect the purity and simplicity of life.
3) The Word of God, which reflects my deepest insecurities and my darkest flaws, yet reflects most the absolute and complete love of the Lord and His eternal gift to me on Calvary, a path that was laid before the foundations of the world that He willingly took upon Himself for my soul's sake.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Joy Challenge: 3 Gifts Close
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Close
1) A coffee mug that belonged to my mother.
2) Fuzzy pink yarn.
3) My camera.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Joy Challenge: 3 Gifts Found in Christ
Today's Joy Dare Challenge: 3 Gifts Found in Christ
1) Salvation for a wretched soul like me.
2) Forgiveness for a child who constantly fails and falls short.
2) Forgiveness for a child who constantly fails and falls short.
3) Grace for one like me who desperately needs it every hour, nay, every moment.
Joy Challenge: A Gift Stacked, Stashed, Stilled
Yesterday's Joy Challenge: A Gift Stacked, Stashed, Stilled
1) Stacked: Books, knowledge, overflowing bookshelves.
2) Stashed: My mother's belongings.
3) Stilled: Spring Photos.
Friday, April 19, 2013
First Grace
(An excerpt from Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts Devotional. Support the author and purchase it via her link here: ON AMAZON. It will be a continual blessing to you for years to come.)
"What initially spark's God's anger? What is the root of sin? It's not the sinfulness that you'd think it would be: It's thanklessness (Romans 1:18-28). It's thanklessness that first stirs the full wrath of God.
Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks. The pride of thanklessness always comes before a fall. A lack of doxology leads to depravity. The heart of wickedness and godlessness is that: a refusal to glorify God. It's the refusal to thank Him.
And there is this: If all the dismembering wickedness in the world begins with the act of forgetting, then the act of counting blessings re-members us to God. This is the making whole."
first
grace
"What initially spark's God's anger? What is the root of sin? It's not the sinfulness that you'd think it would be: It's thanklessness (Romans 1:18-28). It's thanklessness that first stirs the full wrath of God.
Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks. The pride of thanklessness always comes before a fall. A lack of doxology leads to depravity. The heart of wickedness and godlessness is that: a refusal to glorify God. It's the refusal to thank Him.
And there is this: If all the dismembering wickedness in the world begins with the act of forgetting, then the act of counting blessings re-members us to God. This is the making whole."
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Choosing Grace
(From Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts Devotional. Support the author and purchase it via her link here: ON AMAZON. It will be a continual blessing to you for years to come.)
They lay her gravestone flat into the earth, a black granite slab engraved with no dates, only the five letters of her name. Aimee. It means "loved one." How she was. We had loved her. And with the laying of my sister's gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives.
Closed to any notion of grace.
Really, when you bury a child - or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw - you murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away? Where hides the joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?
Is this the toxic air of the world, this atmosphere we inhale, burning into our lungs, this No, God, we wont take what You give. No, God, Your plans are a gutted, bleeding mess, and I didn't sign up for this and You really thought I'd go for this? No, God, this is ugly and this is a mess and can't You get anything right and just haul all this pain out of here and I'll take it from here, thanks. And God? Thanks for nothing. Isn't this the human inheritance, the legacy of the Garden?
Everywhere, a world pocked with scarcity.
I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.
But from that Garden beginning, God has had a different purpose for us. His intent, since He bent low and breathed His life into the dust of our lungs, since He kissed us into being, has never been to slyly orchestrate our ruin. And yet, I have found it: He does have surprising secret purposes.
I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It's hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts. He means to rename us - to return us to our true names, our truest selves.
He means to heal our soul holes.
From the very beginning, that Eden beginning, that has always been and always is, to this day, His secret purpose - to return to our full glory. Appalling - that He would! Us, unworthy. And yet since we took a bite out of the fruit and tore into our own souls, that drain hole where joy seeps away, God's had this wild secretive plan. He means to fill us with glory again. With glory and with grace.
Grace, it means "favor," from the Latin gratia. It connotes a free readiness. A free and ready favor. That's grace. It is one thing to choose to take the grace offered at the cross. But to choose to live as one filling with His grace? Choosing to fill with all that He freely gives and fully live - with glory and grace to God?
I know it but I don't want to: it is a choice.
Living with losses, I may choose to still say yes,
Choose to say yes to what He freely gives.
choosing grace
"But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory:" 1 Corinthians 2:7
They lay her gravestone flat into the earth, a black granite slab engraved with no dates, only the five letters of her name. Aimee. It means "loved one." How she was. We had loved her. And with the laying of my sister's gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives.
Closed to any notion of grace.
Really, when you bury a child - or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw - you murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away? Where hides the joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?
Is this the toxic air of the world, this atmosphere we inhale, burning into our lungs, this No, God, we wont take what You give. No, God, Your plans are a gutted, bleeding mess, and I didn't sign up for this and You really thought I'd go for this? No, God, this is ugly and this is a mess and can't You get anything right and just haul all this pain out of here and I'll take it from here, thanks. And God? Thanks for nothing. Isn't this the human inheritance, the legacy of the Garden?
Everywhere, a world pocked with scarcity.
I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.
But from that Garden beginning, God has had a different purpose for us. His intent, since He bent low and breathed His life into the dust of our lungs, since He kissed us into being, has never been to slyly orchestrate our ruin. And yet, I have found it: He does have surprising secret purposes.
I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It's hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts. He means to rename us - to return us to our true names, our truest selves.
He means to heal our soul holes.
From the very beginning, that Eden beginning, that has always been and always is, to this day, His secret purpose - to return to our full glory. Appalling - that He would! Us, unworthy. And yet since we took a bite out of the fruit and tore into our own souls, that drain hole where joy seeps away, God's had this wild secretive plan. He means to fill us with glory again. With glory and with grace.
Grace, it means "favor," from the Latin gratia. It connotes a free readiness. A free and ready favor. That's grace. It is one thing to choose to take the grace offered at the cross. But to choose to live as one filling with His grace? Choosing to fill with all that He freely gives and fully live - with glory and grace to God?
I know it but I don't want to: it is a choice.
Living with losses, I may choose to still say yes,
Choose to say yes to what He freely gives.
Surprising Grace
(From Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts Devotional. Support the author and purchase it via her link here: ON AMAZON. It will be a continual blessing to you for years to come.)
That field of beans west of the barn, it looked gaunt come October, bean pods all hanging like bony ribs.
Whenever the wind sighed, the whole field just rattled skinny.
That's how my dad always spoke of a railish man, that you could count his ribs. Nothing in me wanted to count those beans, know the yield, from that spare field.
When my husband, the Farmer, rolled the combine in and lowered the combined head to bring those beans in, I sat beside him, raised my voice to ask it above the combine's working engine: "Is it possible that something that doesn't look like anything - can still amount to something?"
The field, it was hard to even look at. I've known a face in a mirror much like that.
"Well - it isn't much to look at, is it?" The Farmer looks up from the combine's steering wheel, looks across the field to the north. "Weedy, and thin."
The white of the snow thistle seeds mingles with the dust. This field had no rain in July, and a man can't make a sky give. He can just make the knees bend and the hands raise. The harvest looked like a failure. I've known this, been this, am this.
The first time thanksgiving is ever mentioned in Scripture, this is what we read:
The first time thanksgiving is mentioned in Scripture, the thanksgiving offering was part of the peace offering. Could that be the thing?
Could it be - no one receives the peace of God without giving thanks to God? Is thankfulness really but the deep, contented breath of peacefulness? Is this why God asks us to give thanks even when things look like a failure? When there doesn't seem much to give thanks for?
The beans rattle through the combine, the auger filling the bin with golden beans like bread rising slow.
There were to be ten offerings of bread in every thank offering of the Israelites.
The first were like crackers. The second like wafers. These were known for their thinness. This was the order of thanks.
The thanks for the thin things, the wafer things that almost weren't, and the way the people of God give thanks is to first give thanks for even the meager and unlikely.
Then it came, thanks for the leavened bread. Why would leaven, yeast - that which is seen in Scripture as impure, unwanted - why would leaven be included as part of the thanks offering?
Authentic thanks is always for all things, because our God is a God kneading all things into a bread that sustains. Paul gave "glory in tribulations" ( Romans 5:3) and took "pleasures in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake" (2 Corinthians 12:10), and he knew that which didn't look like anything good might yield good, all in the hand of a good God.
To bring the sacrifice of thanksgiving means to sacrifice our understanding of what is beneficial and thank God for everything because He is benevolent. A sacrifice of thanks lays down our perspective and raises hands in praise anyways - always. A sacrifice is, by definition, not an easy thing - but it is a sacred thing.
There is this: We give thanks to God not because of how we feel but because of who He is.
"See it on the monitor?" The Farmer points to the screen to the right of the combine's steering wheel. "See the numbers, how many bushels and acre? If you didn't see the numbers, you'd never guess it, would you? It's yielding higher than it looks." He's shaking his head in happy wonder.
"Really? How can that be?" The numbers on the screen defy the seemingly sparse and stunted crop, and I'm laughing incredulous.
"I know! I know..." The Farmer smiles, glances down at the beans feeding into the combine head, one eye still watching number of bushels on the screen.
He who is grateful for little is given much laughter.... and it's counting the ways He loves, this is what multiplies joy.
The life that counts blessings discovers its yielding more than it seems.
Why don't I keep more of an eye on the number of His graces? Why don't I want to know that even though it doesn't seem like there's been enough rain, He reigns and He is enough and the bounty is greater than it appears?
The thin places might be the places closest to God and the skinny places might be fuller than they seem, and who isn't full when they have Christ?
"Look how many seeds were really hiding in this pod!"
Little Shalom, she calls to me walking back across the field. "Count them, Mama."
"Yes," I say. "Yes, let's count."
And there's this counting the ribs of the field, graces filling unexpectedly, thanksgiving always this walking toward peace, and I see it.
See it - how the farmer waves to me from the harvest seat, his hand turned willingly up to the sky.
Surprising grace
"Thus saith the Lord, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee: and I will preserve thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages;" Isaiah 49:8
That field of beans west of the barn, it looked gaunt come October, bean pods all hanging like bony ribs.
Whenever the wind sighed, the whole field just rattled skinny.
That's how my dad always spoke of a railish man, that you could count his ribs. Nothing in me wanted to count those beans, know the yield, from that spare field.
When my husband, the Farmer, rolled the combine in and lowered the combined head to bring those beans in, I sat beside him, raised my voice to ask it above the combine's working engine: "Is it possible that something that doesn't look like anything - can still amount to something?"
The field, it was hard to even look at. I've known a face in a mirror much like that.
"Well - it isn't much to look at, is it?" The Farmer looks up from the combine's steering wheel, looks across the field to the north. "Weedy, and thin."
The white of the snow thistle seeds mingles with the dust. This field had no rain in July, and a man can't make a sky give. He can just make the knees bend and the hands raise. The harvest looked like a failure. I've known this, been this, am this.
The first time thanksgiving is ever mentioned in Scripture, this is what we read:
"And this is the law of the sacrifice of peace offerings, which he shall offer unto the Lord. If he offer it for a thanksgiving, then he shall offer with the sacrifice of thanksgiving unleavened cakes mingled with oil, and unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and cakes mingled with oil, of fine flour, fried. Besides the cakes, he shall offer for his offering leavened bread with the sacrifice of thanksgiving of his peace offerings." Leviticus 7:11-13
The first time thanksgiving is mentioned in Scripture, the thanksgiving offering was part of the peace offering. Could that be the thing?
Could it be - no one receives the peace of God without giving thanks to God? Is thankfulness really but the deep, contented breath of peacefulness? Is this why God asks us to give thanks even when things look like a failure? When there doesn't seem much to give thanks for?
The beans rattle through the combine, the auger filling the bin with golden beans like bread rising slow.
There were to be ten offerings of bread in every thank offering of the Israelites.
The first were like crackers. The second like wafers. These were known for their thinness. This was the order of thanks.
The thanks for the thin things, the wafer things that almost weren't, and the way the people of God give thanks is to first give thanks for even the meager and unlikely.
Then it came, thanks for the leavened bread. Why would leaven, yeast - that which is seen in Scripture as impure, unwanted - why would leaven be included as part of the thanks offering?
Authentic thanks is always for all things, because our God is a God kneading all things into a bread that sustains. Paul gave "glory in tribulations" ( Romans 5:3) and took "pleasures in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake" (2 Corinthians 12:10), and he knew that which didn't look like anything good might yield good, all in the hand of a good God.
To bring the sacrifice of thanksgiving means to sacrifice our understanding of what is beneficial and thank God for everything because He is benevolent. A sacrifice of thanks lays down our perspective and raises hands in praise anyways - always. A sacrifice is, by definition, not an easy thing - but it is a sacred thing.
There is this: We give thanks to God not because of how we feel but because of who He is.
"See it on the monitor?" The Farmer points to the screen to the right of the combine's steering wheel. "See the numbers, how many bushels and acre? If you didn't see the numbers, you'd never guess it, would you? It's yielding higher than it looks." He's shaking his head in happy wonder.
"Really? How can that be?" The numbers on the screen defy the seemingly sparse and stunted crop, and I'm laughing incredulous.
"I know! I know..." The Farmer smiles, glances down at the beans feeding into the combine head, one eye still watching number of bushels on the screen.
He who is grateful for little is given much laughter.... and it's counting the ways He loves, this is what multiplies joy.
The life that counts blessings discovers its yielding more than it seems.
Why don't I keep more of an eye on the number of His graces? Why don't I want to know that even though it doesn't seem like there's been enough rain, He reigns and He is enough and the bounty is greater than it appears?
The thin places might be the places closest to God and the skinny places might be fuller than they seem, and who isn't full when they have Christ?
"Look how many seeds were really hiding in this pod!"
Little Shalom, she calls to me walking back across the field. "Count them, Mama."
"Yes," I say. "Yes, let's count."
And there's this counting the ribs of the field, graces filling unexpectedly, thanksgiving always this walking toward peace, and I see it.
See it - how the farmer waves to me from the harvest seat, his hand turned willingly up to the sky.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)