These words stuck in my heart tonight...

Ecclesiastes 5

Approaching God with Care

¹ As you enter the house of God, keep your ears open and your mouth shut. It is evil to make mindless offerings to God. ² Don’t make rash promises, and don’t be hasty in bringing matters before God. After all, God is in heaven, and you are here on earth. So let your words be few.

³ Too much activity gives you restless dreams; too many words make you a fool.

⁴ When you make a promise to God, don’t delay in following through, for God takes no pleasure in fools. Keep all the promises you make to him. ⁵ It is better to say nothing than to make a promise and not keep it. ⁶ Don’t let your mouth make you sin. And don’t defend yourself by telling the Temple messenger that the promise you made was a mistake. That would make God angry, and he might wipe out everything you have achieved.

⁷ Talk is cheap, like daydreams and other useless activities. Fear God instead.

Out of the Darkness

I was at Church today and a thought occured to me during worship. It tied together things that God has been showing me over the past few months, but in a kind of "Ah Hah!" way. I guess it starts with this quote, "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." - Gil Bailie
I realized that the one thing I need to do on this earth is Worship God. That's what He has called me specifically to do. It's my passion, and it encompasses my whole life. If I start to focus on just doing that one thing, God showed me that all the other areas I have been struggling with and failing in will become right. For other people, there may be other things that God has called you to do...Preach the Gospel, Love the Unlovable, Feed the Hungry, Pray without ceasing....We are all called to do these things, but there seems to be always one passion that stands out stronger and brighter and makes the flame within us burn hotter. That is our one thing.

For me, Worshipping God means Singing to Him, all the time. In my home, in the car, with my kids, in my head, and at the grocery store. Having His praise on my lips all the time. Its about having a home where His presence can rest, where there is order, peace and Joy. I know that when worshipping God becomes my focus, when all other things fade away and I just stand there in awe at His Glorious Majesty, all the problems, depression, cranky screaming kids and messes just seem to fade away.

My cry this morning was for God to never let me go back to the dark place I have been recently. It was so scary there. The thoughts, fears, anxiety, doubt, and overpowering depression were so intense. The tears, the hurt, the feelings of inadequacy....I don't want to ever be back there again!! I need to be alive! To do what God has called me to do, in every area of my life. And by His Grace, I will.

All I want for mothers day..

Is to stay home alone most of the day. Sad? Well, here is my reasoning.

1. I need to sleep
2. My house needs my undivided attention
3. If I can focus long enough to get things in order, I could sit and watch movies

And then of course, I would love to be joined by my husband and children while we go out to dinner, and get home and have said husband put the kids to bed all by himself. Then have husband give me a back rub and tell me I'm pretty and I'm the best Mom in the entire world...blah, blah.

I think come Monday morning, I would be feeling pretty darn good about things. :)

In reality, I know that I have 2 year old with a fever, a 9 month old with diarrhea, a house that is messy and I need to go grocery shopping. *sigh* I may not even be able to make it to church tomorrow :( But this is life, at the heart of it. Its the reality that keeps me on my knees asking God for His Grace. It keeps me humbled, broken and close to Him.

Lacy Tickle, Pat, Rock, Scratch and Rub...

I'm forgetting what it means to be a Mom. I am losing myself in layers of dirty laundry and dishes. I've been struggling with Depression, which may or may not be a result of a hormonal imbalance. I'm irritable, tired, weepy and just over all..blah. It came on suddenly, and it will pass. But in the meantime I'm feeling horrible. Stressed and Junk. Money is tight, we are behind...so quickly it happens...Joel is sick for a few days, has to take time off for Drill as well and all of a sudden we are behind...

Emma is sitting in Micah's crib right now, after waking him up early from his nap. She is singing to him. When Emma was little, probably around 2, we started doing this thing for her at bedtime. It started as "Lacy Tickle" (which is named after my very best friend who used to lightly scratch my back while we talked about anything and everything) So we started with that, and over time Emma added more to the routine. Patting her back, then rocking her, then scratching her back and then Rubbing her back. She used to request it all the time, you couldn't but her to bed without doing it at night. So Emma just said to me, that since she doesn't need it anymore, she's going to do it Micah all the time.

I'm missing so much. I just want to be a good Mom. I'm so overwhelmed I can't remember and enjoy the little things my kids are doing every day, living their life.

Starting from Scratch

I feel so down. I feel like if I could just get everything in order, I could keep things up no problem. I have the motivation, yet I'm just finding myself so very tired. I have been going to bed early, rising early and yet, still struggling to make it through the day. I haven't been gaining weight, although haven't been losing much either. I'm at a cross road. I can take the unfamiliar path I know I need to, choose to just start doing. Or take the more familiar one, where I slink back into my comfort zone and say "Next week, or next month..." I'm so tired of forever coming to this cross road. I want to be Present. I want to live bodly and with a purpose. I want to be an overcomer. And I want to worship God with all that I am, my life, my actions, my thoughts and my entire being.

Starting in my mind?

I am in the process of spring cleaning, except I've mostly just begun in my head. I've been hacking away at laundry all week, but I really have been organizing my thoughts, my ideas and trying to come up with a solution to, well, myself. I know that I am:

1. A procrastinator. I feel the energy while I am doing things at the last minute. It is then that special projects really begin to take shape.
2. I have some sort of A.D.D type thing going on. I cannot focus on 1 thing at a time. Its ridiculous how bad I have gotten. If you look at my computer at any given time, I will have 4 windows open and each of those windows will have 3 or 4 tabs.
3. I am a creative genius. Ok, well...maybe just creative. Not sure about the genius part. But I love coming up with new ideas, new purposes for things and love making old things new again.
4. I love to change things around. When I was younger, my room would be so trashed. I had so much stuff in one small room, that the only way I would ever clean it was to put everything on the bed and dressers, move the furniture around and then clean from there. I had to have the inspiration of moving furniture around in order to clean up the mess. I still don't know why I function this way.
5. I put things off. I am lazy...well...I find more value in doing things that I like; such as, sitting on the couch watching my husband play video games or tickling my kids, than I do in cleaning my kitchen. Ok, so we probably all do...but a lot of times I don't do those ever so important things until they are so out of control that I don't know where to begin.
6. I like lists...but not too long of lists. I need things written down in front of me, but not that its so overwhelming. I've opted to try out Sidetracked Home Executives Index Card System to see if I can work from there...

So there you have it. This is me in a nutshell (as it pertains to the care and keeping of my home). So in my mind I can visualize my house cleaned, and I can visualize my new system working, but until I get off Blogger and off my Butt and start to implement it, it will never happen. Off I go!!

My Husband, The Temper Tamer

I am defensive. It is a habit that I learned as a child growing up because of feeling as though I was never good enough. I won't go into those details, but I have realized that to this day, I still can get very defensive and have a bit of a temper. I notice it most when I am perhaps lacking in some very obvious areas, *cough* cleaning *cough*....and I know this and am feeling as though the entire world is stacked against me. And then something very small happens to set off an argument that shouldn't be an argument but because my husband and I don't argue about very serious things (we tend to have more discussions) we always find something so minute to argue over. Like this:

Husband is looking through medicine baskets for a sudafed. He places his vitamin on the shelf while he is looking. He then proceeds to ask me where the sudafed are. I come over, grab a basket down and start rifiling through it, in the process knocking the vitamin off the shelf and onto the floor under the toilet. I immediately put up the defensive walls thinking husband is going to discuss with me the need to be aware of my surroundings. I tell him that He should not have left a vitamin there. He then proceeds to discuss with me the need to be aware of my surroundings. A 10 minute conversation follows about the importance of being aware of ones surroundings and the act of having grace for ones shortcomings. At this point I am in the shower, and of course, what husband is trying to say was that He was not going to say anything at all, that it was no big deal for the vitamin to fall on the ground until I of course through up the defense and opened the can of worms. A few moments later, as I am contemplating my defensiveness...and searching my heart for root problems such as the fact that my house is trashed and I probably could be doing slightly more to make it untrashed, Husband cracks a joke that sends me into a fit of giggles. There it is. The peacemaker: Laughter. My husband, who loves me in spite of all my shortcomings and cluttered nature, who constantly supports me and tries to understand me, who loves for me to take time to play games with him instead of doing the dishes after dinner...this is the man God made for me. He is my soulmate, my perfect match. Notice I did not say he was perfect, but was indeed made perfectly for me. I love him. And all that I do for our home is because I want to show this man how much I love him and our children. Of course its a battle everyday...but the love is still there.

How many times are arguments really the result of circumstances, or are they really a direct result of some deeper issues going on in our hearts?

Spring Cleaning

Ok, this is the week. Spring Cleaning. It is supposed to be gorgeous at least for the first half of this week. I'm talking 75-85 degrees! So before it gets too hot to clean, I think I need to bang out my spring cleaning.

I've started with Laundry today. I've actually made big progress today, as now I can see the floor of my laundry room. The picture is proof, my laundry room floor is linoleum. I've got my bed piled high with folded clothes, baskets patiently waiting their turn, and I am sorting through outgrown clothes at the same time.

If you know me, you know that I am not by any definition of the word a neat freak. If you know my husband, you know that he kind of is...but for the sake of our marriage he does not speak too often of matters of the, well, housekeeping. He quietly goes about his normal routines, and if there is something that isn't working the way it is supposed to he wordlessly gets the point across. Except last night, when walking from the kitchen to the living room. Joel: (casually) "So are you going to be doing some serious house cleaning tomorrow?" Me: (just as casually) "Why yes, Yes I am. How did you know?"

So this kicks off my spring cleaning week.

Rest

I have been tired. So tired. And that is directly affecting my ability to be myself. It seems to me, on the nights when I have the most time to sleep, I get woken up multiple times by children. On the nights where I stay up too late, The kids sleep soundly through the night. Why is that?

Yesterday I woke up after not having good sleep. I was immediately overwhelmed by the thought of being a mom yesterday. I was so tired. My thoughts were immediately negative and bitter. "Why this...If only that..." As I walked through my house and saw all the things I needed to do I became so overwhelmed that I literally went back to hide under the covers. It was there that I worked through a depressive state, and really cried out to God to give me strength. I texted my husband and told him my current mental/emotional/spiritual state and he said that he was praying for me. With the baby taking a nap and the girls occupied by a movie, I laid there and I literally felt a spiritual battle taking place while I just kind of rested. I wasn't fully asleep (As another mom knows that no one can fully fall asleep when there are children not tucked soundly in their beds) but I was in a restful state.

After that, I got out of bed and walked through my house again. I started a load of laundry, did half the dishes, and picked up the living room. I proceeded to vacuum and then just spend naptime doing whatever I wanted.

I've been off with eating and excersize, but as I explained my day yesterday to a very dear friend of mine, she said, "Liz, you will not be perfect all the time...but you will be victrious. Yesterday, you were victorious in overcoming that depression."
That is the key. Don't give up being victorious. I also felt the tides turn yesterday when I caught a vision for my house. I have been wanting to buy a few bakers racks to use for storing things, and since we were going to be able to do that yesterday night, I started focusing on preparing the places they were going to go. Once I had a vision for my day, it was easier to tackle the mess.

This is me being real.

Rebellion

I have struggled with one form or another of Rebellion so often in my life. I think it is in our very nature since the fall of man. To think we know better than God what is the best for us, when we can't even see what will happen tomorrow. My biggest form of rebellion has always been my eating. In my heart, I felt that it was MY choice what food I ate and how much of it. For the first 20 years of my life, it only affected me. So I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, and I was in control of it. I hated diets with a passion...every new diet was a new chance to rebell against that authority. I think that rebellion will try to work itself out in any area of our life that we let it. When I was a teenager, I didn't often rebell against my parents...there was never a need to. For the most part I did what I was supposed to. There were a few occasions, however...but I will not go into detail (that is a whole other post for another time!)

When I got married, I committed before God to honor my husband and become one with him. I committed to submit to him, respect him, love him and cherish him. He committed to love me as Christ loves the church, to honor me, to cherish me and provide for me. On one of the many occasions Joel and I talked before getting married I learned that he indeed found me very attractive and beautiful, and he loved that I was in shape (at size 12) and he wanted me to stay that way. He was understanding of things like being pregnant and day to day life...but He desired to have a beautiful and attractive wife. Men are visual beings. They are attracted physically to us and God made them that way for His purpose. I agreed with him that I wanted to stay healthy and thin as well. I in turn, loved being cherished, pursued by Joel and seen in a way that I was his and his alone. I loved being taken care of and provided for and the safety and security that gave me. These were expectaions we both had for each other for our marriage for the rest of our lives.

Enter Stage Left Rebellion. There it is, the root issue for so many problems in marriage. There were things I did not want to submit to, I am ashamed to admit them. Some of it was early on, when Joel would want to read the bible together as a couple at night, and I...I wanted to do my own thing. At the time, I just didn't want Joel to see how much I had made him my all...and was becoming stagnent in my relationship with God. Joel pursued me, and instead of being caught up in a wonderful time of fellowship with my husband and God...I ran. When I started to think I could eat whatever I want, and as much as I wanted, I over ate. Any helpful, loving comments I got from others were pushed aside. "They don't know me. They don't know that I am in charge of my life." I pushed them away and decided to do whatever I wanted. Because I am not a risk taker, this rebellion worked its way out of me with my eating. For others its drinking or going out partying. Still for others, its shopping or with their relationships. It all boils down to not wanting to submit to God, or the people he has placed in our life that help keep us from going off the deep end. Joel was there to keep me from going off the deep end with my eating and my weight. But instead of realizing this and controling myself with God's strength, I fell further away from God and further into my rebellion.

There were times I would take the car to run errands and splurge on a big meal somewhere. I love food. Love the taste. I love the feeling of not going without. I love the feeling of not having to restrict myself. But I am suffering the consequences of that now. As a result of my root issue of rebellion, I have gained over 50 lbs in the past 7 years. My husband has told me on many occasions that he loves me still, no matter what for the rest of our lives. He is committed to me, and loves who I am with all of his heart. As for the pursuit though..that is lacking. He is attracted to me because I am his wife and he loves me, but I have lost the passion and pursuit in my marriage. I have lost that twinkle of pride in his eye when we are out and I look and feel amazing because I am healthy and confident of who I am. I no longer feel sexy and am embarrassed because of the way I look. I have done this to myself, it is a result of my rebellion and my actions. Many women want to pass the blame, and it would be so easy for me to. But I will not. I choose to accept blame for the things that I have done, for the pain I have caused and I choose to forgive others who have wounded me. I'm not holding onto those things anymore.

The point I am trying to make here, is that Rebellion will ALWAYS try to find a way to work itself into your life. Now that I am taking control of eating, excersize and body I can feel the rebellion creeping into other areas of my life. My housekeeping for example...I am just wanting to be lazy...to do things the way I want to do them. "No one should be telling me what I have to do in my home..." Or with my spending..."I can buy this or that...its my money...I've worked hard for it..." or in my pursuit of God, "Its OUR relationship...I have a say in how it goes...how long I spend reading the bible or how much I am praying." ENOUGH!!!!! I am tired of it!! I am coming against REBELLION in JESUS NAME because He has given me the power and authority when He gave His life for me on the Cross! He has given me the POWER to overcome REBELLION through Him and HIS STRENGTH. I am so tired of being held captive to the very things that seem to be offering me freedom! I CANNOT DO THIS IN MY OWN STRENGTH. I need God's help every step of the way, every morning that I wake up, before I take my next breath. God is in every fiber of my being, causing my heart to beat and my lungs to draw air. I need my husband, his gentle tugging and encouragement, his unfailing love and support. I need my friends and confidants, I need my Mother and her words of wisdom and her prayer for me. I cannot rebel against the very people God has placed in my life so that I can remain the person He has called me to be.

I know this has become long winded, but this was stirring in my heart today...and I needed this revelation from God so that I can continue to walk in Christs authority over my life!

Grocery Shopping

That was rough. I burned a lot of calories though, pushing carts around, hopping from one store to another and the grand finale: Carrying about 15 bags of groceries up 2 flights of stairs. Add that onto my 15 minute workout today...not too shabby. LOL.

As I was looking at calorie content in different foods today, I realized just how horribly I've been eating. I am shocked that I don't way 100 lbs more! As I am being cautious and mindful of everything I put in my mouth, I am realizing that it was no big deal before to consume an extra 1,000-2,000 calories in a day. I had NO self-control! Cookies and milk for breakfast, half bag (big bag) of raisinettes, chips, dip....and OH the ICE CREAM! All because it was easy to grab that stuff and it tasted good. I didn't want to take the time to cook for myself during the day. What a lazy bum I am!!

I am learning that I love healthy food too. And I can eat variety. And I can allow myself to have a treat..but I just have to measure it out first. And if I go overboard...well...then I have some working out to do to make up for it. I'm not perfect...this isnt going to be easy...but I want these changes to last.

So, its the first week of the rest of my life and I've lost my 2 lbs. I'm pretty darn excited :D