A Prayer

Through the intimacy of our relationship, you are being transformed from the inside out. As you keep your focus on Me, I form you into the one I desire you to be. Your part is to yield to my creative work in you, neither resisting it or trying to speed it up... Hold my hand in childlike trust, and the way before you will open up step by step.

-Sarah Young (emphasis added by me)

I love you Lord. I want to please you. Form me into the one You desire me to be so I can please you. I'm back to where I was when I first gave my life to you, when I had no idea how I was going to do that or what it would look like. So I prayed over and over, "Make me what You want me to be so that I can obey You."

Now again I find myself in way over my head, so once more I find myself praying "Make me what You want me to be so I can please You." I want to please You. I want to submit. I give up! I am Yours to do as You please, with my time, my thoughts, my writing, and my relationships. Help me submit.

I can trust You. This is nothing I cannot bear with your strength within me. You are good and You have good plans for me. You are ever so gentle with me, and I can wholly and completely trust You. Your will is perfect. You know just the perfect, most loving thing for me. So I submit to You. God, I am yours. Help me.

* * *

Years ago, when I was much younger, I gave my life to God. But I have been feeling frustrated lately. Everything seems to be going wrong, just one thing after another. I have been discouraged that my commitment to Him does not seem to be enough to enable me to face these challenges with the confidence and acceptance of God's will.

I'm fighting Him and struggling to make things work the way I think they should, and making myself miserable! But I realized that I really do want to please Him. I want to be at peace with His will, but I just can't get myself to do it! How do I accept God's will when I have a strong will of my own?

And then the answer hit me like a ton of brinks. All I have to do is ask!How simple! And yet so hard to remember sometimes. When I first asked God into my life, asking for help was always the first thing I would do. As I've grown older, though, it has fallen lower and lower on my list of "things to do".

I used to pray "Make Your will my heart's desire". I wanted not only to do His will, but to actually desire it for myself, as if it were my own will, and I wanted to even find joy and pleasure in doing His will. And He answered my prayers. Doing His will became easy, and pleasing! But I have stopped praying these prayers. And now, I realize I need to start again.

Lord, I want Your will to be my very heart's desire. Make me want what You want. Let Your will be my joy and delight.

Ouch Pouch

So, my friend Katie and I were exploring my RSS feed yesterday when we came across something absolutely spectacular...

I would like to introduce all of you to Quirky's Ouch Pouch

Introduced to me first by Ooh Shiny, I am THOROUGHLY pleased with this idea for a sling, and hope that this dream comes to a reality.

For those of you who don't know, I have spent a fair chunk of time (read:months) in a sling for a frequently dislocated sholder. I have tried to make the most of it, by decorating my slings with different designs... But, even with the colorful creations, it is still quite obvious that it is the $17 hospital sling...

(Thats me, with my Physics Phriends, on the last day of classes--2 months in the sling that time...)

I am loving this idea--pockets, sweet design, easy asseible drawstring for quick one-handed adjustions... If anyone is looking for a present idea for me, I will be pointing them towards this.

:D

My Heart, My Mouth

14 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Psalm 19


Two important thoughts in this verse. The Bible teaches us that our mouth and our thoughts are connected. What's on the inside is going to come out. The heart overflows out of the mouth. My mouth is like a waterfall of what is going on inside of me.


Our words are to be pleasing to God. Think about that. This thought is hard for my brain to wrap around because my mouth runs all day long and as a result there are many words flowing out of me. Are my words pleasing to God?


Think of all the words that come out of your mouth everyday. Are those words pleasing to God? Lots of the things I say aren't even pleasing to me, so I can't imagine how God feels about them... I think, if we truly considered this verse, much of our vocabulary would change.

...the meditation of my heart
What consumes my thoughts throughout the day? Do those thoughts please God? What do I think about others, those I hang out with with, live next door to, in my own home? Meditation is more than just a passing thought. Meditation is dwelling on a thought. Someone hurts my feelings or offends me and then that is all I think about. Then soon I have bitterness as a result of the meditation of my heart. That bitterness will eventually flow out of my mouth.


Why not think about those things that please God? Why not meditate on a scripture verse or on a Biblical principle that God is teaching me? What am I meditating on right now, today?


What a finish to a chapter, "my Rock and my Redeemer". Why not meditate on this verse a while? Is God my Rock? Is Christ my Redeemer?

"But"

Psalm 13

For the director of music. A psalm of David.
1 How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts 

and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.

 Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
4 my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"

 and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.



Ever have those times when everything is going wrong, when it seems like you are stuck in the middle of a storm and can’t see the end?
Do you have those days when it seems everyone is against you? Does God every feel like he’s a million miles away?

I can’t stand those times. And I'm often in them. I get a frustrated, stressed, self-centered when those times comes.. But what I must remember is that’s life! Life is not lived on the mountaintops; life is lived in the valley. Who knows this better than King David? David lived life in the valley. Most of his life was a struggle. Kid stuck with watching the sheep while his brothers went on an adventure. Stood alone before a giant because no one else had the guts or the faith. Spears chucked at him by the king while playing his harp for the king. Was pursued by a jealous king who wanted to snuff David’s life out. Struggled with sin, adultery, murder, and the pain of life that all of that mess with Bathsheba resulted in. David knew what it meant to live life in the valley.

So when the tough storms of life come, when the world feels like it is squeezing in around me, I must (and usually don't) remember the big “But”. Did you see it?

Verse 5 and 6:“But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.”

Know your position – God loves you.
Check your attitude – Rejoice in salvation and sing to the Lord.

Photography

Focus can drastically change a picture.

The power a photographer has to place one part of a photograph in focus and leave another part dramatically blurred is impressive. The entire look of an image, and the accompanying emotion that is therefore aroused, can shift simply based on what the photographer chooses to focus on when looking through the viewfinder of the camera.

There are almost endless ways a photographer could choose to capture a scene, with the one main limitation being that the real-life scene does not change. Having a background (or foreground) fade into a blur is a deliberate choice by the photographer, depending on the look they are going for.

You may have guessed by now that this post is not actually about photography. I don’t pretend to be an expert on photography, although I do know some basics, such as the ‘rule of thirds’, setting your aperture and utilizing natural lighting. But, that’s aside the point. One thing I do have a fair amount of experience in is Life, and Life as a walk of faith.

Just like how choosing the focus point for a picture sets the mood for a photograph, what and who I choose to focus on in my life will always affect the mood for my emotional well being.

Imagine that. The Word of God seems to be true once again. "Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe." Proverbs 29:25

As an example, the past year has been a time of great struggle as well as vast amounts of healing. However, in the few months or so, things seemed to go downhill for me, and I found myself at the bottom of a dark pit...

My focus was off.

It started with a simple mistake that all of us make now and then. I, unfortunately, tend to do it a lot, but thankfully, God has placed people in my life to hold me accountable... Instead of focusing on what was going well, and how blessed my life is, I did the opposite. I started to really highlight all the bad in my life, and those bad sports became the focus of my attention. Sadly, by choosing to see in crystal clear the things that got me down, I only made matters worse.

In essence, it was a real life example the Pygmalion effect (which I learned about when reading a book a few years back). A self-fulfilling prophesy, in other words. The more I chose to focus on my life struggles, the more struggles were all I could see. The fact that I was obsessing about these struggles made me feel like I was in a hopeless situation, where bad would just follow bad. The thoughts tainted my mind, and it started to change the way I thought about myself.

What a sad, miserable way to life.

And, while I have by no means arrived, my growth curve during the few weeks has been steep. I can look back with a tiny bit of hindsight and see that choosing to focus on only what was going badly in my life actually made the experience drastically less happy, and a lot harder.

How ironic. How misguided. How backwards.

A ginormous lesson that God has been trying to teach me over the course of the past year (and past week) relates to my focus. What an amazing difference it has made already in my life to choose to set my sights only on what is going to uplift me as I navigate through life.

Indeed, it "is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man." Psalm 118:8
How much more amazing in my life, simply when I choose to see those amazing things clearly, not allowing them to be muddled by me focusing on what areas of that are still a bit off. I think of my loved ones, and generally try to think of the for their best intentions and not remembered for their worst moments. Why wouldn't I do the same for my life?

But don't take my word for it. In the Bible, Paul exhorts the believers in Philippi by saying, "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things." Philippians 4:8

What a wonderful mantra I would do well to continue to remember. Taking the high road will not always be easy for me. I fail to keep my focus where it should be more times than I'd like to recount here.

But, even in just a few days of really trying to stay positive, between what I have experienced and what others have told me, I can attest to the fact that striving to have our focus in the right place is most certainly worth it.

The Lovely Bones

One of my favourite books is The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (link to Amazon) This book really hits home for me, and I have read it multiple times since my first read in 2007.

I am very excited to find out tonight that in December, The Lovely Bones will hit theaters.

From IMDB.com:

Based on the best selling book by Alice Sebold... "The Lovely Bones" centers on a young girl who has been murdered and watches over her family - and her killer - from heaven. She must weigh her desire for vengeance against her desire for her family to heal.

I will definitely be seeing this one.